Dr. Rena Malik and guest, Andy Galpin, as they dive deep into the world of optimizing workout intensity for maximum results.

the-gear-system-to-measure-exercise-intensity-ft-andy-galpin

The Gear System to Measure Exercise Intensity Ft. Andy Galpin

so in terms of intensity what's the best way for someone to gauge is it heart rate is it someone who's not going into a lab and measuring their V2 Max but you know measuring your heart rate or is it measuring um some calculator online that makes your V2 Max you know what is what is the best you can do you can do any of those things so if you're lifting weights we generally would say in resistance exercise type of stuff it's percentage of your one rep max if you don't know your one rep max that's fine you can think about another idea was called repetitions in reserve it's another way of saying okay you lifted that thing six times how many you think you could have done total I think I could have done eight okay so that means you left two in reserve okay great and so you can say hey uh yeah that exercise over there when I put 50 pounds on it all right I I got about six reps and I have two reps in reserve so that's a rep or Reserve if I put 10 more pounds on it I'd only do it four so you can kind of gauge it that way right so how many left is one way to think about it if you want to just go based on heart rate that's fine too it's not as good as some other stuff but for General person that's fine um I really don't spend much time using either one of those things uh we think about things more like can you do this thing while breathing through your nose only uh this is Brian McKenzie and his uh gear system right so if you can do this thing nasal only that's gear two if you have to go either nose and mouth or mouth the nose it doesn't matter but you're using both gear three if you have to go straight up like mouth in mouth out because you needs so much volume that's that's gear four right that auto regulates a lot of stuff and so I want to know like oh that was gear three okay great so that's a pretty easy way to just say like okay that's my intensity level one to four then that's will program hey you're going to do this workout whatever this is how far you're going to go how long you're going to go or whatever and I want you in gear three which means if you go to gear four you got to slow down you're going too hard right but if you're in gear two not it up for most most people how does that relate to zones right we see a lot of Zone like you know the peleton has zones like all these sorts of things like get into zone two if you're listening to this I want you to hear my eyes rolling on that question if you're watching you saw it already um I just going to be totally honest I don't find a lot of value in zones if you don't know your maximum heart rate if you've never had that accurately tested then those zones mean nothing to you because they're so variable people right imagine I gave you the same thing for lifting weights and I said okay so for you moderate is between 170 and 220 pounds yeah that's not that's not Poss right it's insane right and that changes every time you work out I mean not every time but every few weeks or every few months well it can literally change every day yeah it can right now a little bit factious there because the range of people's strength is much bigger than the range of people's heart rates but you went from nonsensical to like oh okay I see there's problems here so unless we know your actual heart rate and there's no relationship between maximum heart rate and fitness so my pro athletes might have a maximum heart rate of 175 beats a minute we might have some of our least fit people whose max heart rate get 205 there's no relationship there or or the inverse can to happen too so just arbitrarily designing zones in addition like who picked zone two cut off versus zone three I mean I know the answer to these but they're just like they're not why is it four zones instead of five not science based it is science based but it's still arbitrary yeah it is science-based it's not fake yeah what it is is you run giant studies right and then you run statistical modeling and you usually use standard deviations this is also by the way the problem why running any sort of blood work and interpreting where you're at based on reference ranges is a horrific idea yeah right it tells you absolutely nothing for most people because you're working on a bell curve which means we're saying in giant studies a thousand people up to a million people right what what does the world look like okay 97% of people are on this bell curve the last 2 and a half% over here 95% rather last 2 and a half% at the bottom highest 2% on the other side and if you are in the 95% in the middle you're in the normal reference range you're like great so if I'm the third percentile I'm normal that's the same words out for my my doctor as if I'm in the 93rd perc yeah that is still Norm all right so like here this is this is now a giant problem right we don't we're not really interpreting that that's not the same person that's not the same functioning yeah person on those metrics so you want to be really careful when paying attention to things like that and the same thing could go back to our our heart rate zone it's like it's not arbitrary it's not fake yeah but it is just like a giant range of like you're not dead you're not like you're not about to die tomorrow that's your goal yeah so great job you're not dead right and this is all the way back to where you started this whole conversation was like we want to be preventative a little bit right Med medicine wants to be preventative we don't do prevention we further down that R which is like I don't care about prevention you guys can handle prevention I care about performing better how do you perform with your absolute best right that's is what we spend our time on so those numbers aren't good enough for me so I don't care about someone decided there's three zones or four zones or five zones or six I call it 16 I don't care that doesn't mean anything to me I'm going to coach you based on your physiology I don't care about a madeup Zone like I just don't so say you're new to exercise and you start exercising and you choose a goal or so you did mention you know what is sort of the traits of a healthy person what what would you define as traits of a healthy person in terms of when they're trying to just be healthy what are things that you want to see in their exercise regimen outside of the stressors that we've talked about sort of reducing those so if we look at in order to stay alive what do we need to be able to do and we'll work backwards from there we talked about balance that's on my list right yep don't want to fall and we don't want to lose balance and all the other problems associated with that all right great I need to have speed and power we talked about that I need to have strength okay like I need to be able to go up um not only fly the stairs but you hate hiking you want to go to like any number of things right now we talked a little bit about having some adequate amount of muscle I don't need you to be giant or even close I just can't have you insufficient or losing all that muscle and that's the problem right you might be sufficient and we deal with this a lot you're 55 and you are sufficient now but we know you're going to just continue to lose muscle rest of your life so I can't have you at average I have to have you at above average then I need to have some sort of metric of cardiovascular health right look at V2 Max as daunting as it is to have poor muscle mass with age strength is probably a bigger predictor of all cause mortality V2 Max would be the closest equivalent to that

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