How to build an engine

In this episode, we talk about everything you need to know to build your engine. More specifically, you'll understand the different intensity domains, how to train them and how to put it all together into a coherent training week. 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the podcast or welcome if it's your first time tuning in. In the episode today, we're going to be talking about how to build an engine. And if you guys have been following my recent series on nutrition fundamentals, this is not the next episode of the new nutrition fundamental series. So you're going to have to hold out a little longer before we. Talk about nutrient timing. I really felt like sharing with you guys, the secrets to building. The most massive engine possible. Now, what are we talking about when we're talking about engine? Terms that you'll hear repeated over and over are like building a robot capacity, maybe even anaerobic capacity, building your endurance, improving your cardio, your cardiovascular fitness or capacity. Or maybe if we put it in terms of that really matter to you. It's going further. It's going faster. It's keeping up with your training partners or crushing them and workouts or races. That's what we're going to be talking about And, I coach a lot of hybrid athletes, CrossFit athletes. And even for anybody who cares about just their general health understanding, the different ways and methodologies. To improve your engine. I want to use the term engine because it's general, it's a buzzword in the market right now. And we kind of all know what that means. But the stuff I want to share is going to allow you to objectively look at your current training program and see if the things you're doing are going to be productive, are going to get you the best results Are going to help you avoid the guesswork. Of. Trying things and not necessarily getting optimal results. Or even allow you to save time to design or think about how to train your engine in the way that's going to be the most beneficial for you. the stuff we're going to talk about is also the backbone of my training philosophy. When I coach athletes. That want to improve their engine. I was joking about the secrets before, but you'll also get a little bit of an insight on how I think about improving one's capacity. So, if you want to know, what's what, when it comes to becoming fitter and improving your engine. keep listening. And if you do so, and you enjoy the content, or you enjoy the stuff that I've put out in the past. Please like, and subscribe depending on which platform you are on Also consider. Giving me a review, hopefully five star. If you like it. this is going to help the show grow. And if I have a broader reach, I keen. Share the gospel with more people. Which brings me to my last point. And my last ask is that if you know someone that would benefit from this information, please consider sharing it this is probably the best thing you could do to support the show. Let's get right down to business. Guys, let's talk about the secret to building an engine. And I hope that you like my attempt at. doing a clickbait introduction. There is obviously no secret, but I think that there's one thing above all else that you need to do. If you want to on the longterm, improve your. Capacity And that is to have The knowledge around the different intensity domains, which we're going to break down and explain in a second. We're going to talk about what the R What happens to your body when you're training? At a specific intensity. And we're going to talk about how your body adapts to those different intensities and then tie it all up with some practical application. Of the subject so that you can then. Apply. The stuff. But it's really important that we talk about the principles behind doing this, because if I tell you that you need to run. Intervals at your 5k pace. And I tell you nothing more than you're never going to have the knowledge on why that is. And you're always going to be doing 5k pace until the end of your. Life, and that's probably not going to be the most useful way to train, to improve your engine. And so a little bit of theory, a little bit of principles behind. The methods will go a long way so the burning question that you have right now is what then our intensity domains. Intensity domains are essentially physiological states. if we're to look at your body under the hood while you're training, When you train at a specific intensity or in a specific intensity zone or a domain. What's going on in your body is going to be vastly different from one domain to the next. And so during exercise, if we're looking under the hood, it's very noticeable that your body is not producing energy and is not doing work in the same way. And When you are done training and now you need to adapt and get better. the adaptations that you're going to get from training in a specific domain are going to be pretty different from one to the next. There is obviously some overlap that's going to happen, but there are main stuff that happens preferentially when you're training At one intensity versus an other. And therefore knowing that and knowing when to train in what domain. We'll allow you to build yourself up properly. if this wasn't obvious enough yet you're essentially starting from a state of arrest where, the amount of energy required to just. B is very low. And then if you start walking. Jogging and moving at higher, and higher intensities. Then your body is going to have to create more and more energy. And as you increase the intensity, And the amount of energy required to keep increasing the intensity. Then eventually you cross over into a different intensity domain. And to delineate the border between the different domains. There's going to be a, a noticeable change of state inside of your physiology. Like we said, And these borders between the domains are called thresholds. And they are a specific. Amount of work, which we could measure and power we can measure in speed, And these thresholds are clear borders at which when you go slower than them. You're in a specific domain, your body responds a specific way. And then when you go above that threshold, your body is now in a different domain and responds in a very different way. And one of the biggest concepts that you need to understand from this discussion too, is that there is a point. Below which exercises. Pretty much sustainable and you can endure for a very long time. And there's a point at which stuff becomes predictably unsustainable. And when you go above that point, then there is. An imminent failure point that is going to happen in the next while so you're either going to have to slow down or you're going to have to completely stop and understanding where these thresholds sit is really going to help you when you're choosing an intensity inside of a training session. Because you want to be able to train sometimes in sustainable intensities. And when appropriate, you want to go in unsustainable intensities. If you don't really understand that concept and you're continually training at. Too high of intensities, you are potentially. Hindering your progress entering your ability to recover. Potentially putting yourself at more risk of overdoing it or risking injury and so on. And then if you always train in domains that are. To sustainable then you're probably never going to peak to maximum performance. Obviously, depending on your sport. Now there are four intensity domains. There's the moderate intensity domain. Then the heavy intensity domain. And Then the third one is called the severe intensity domain And the final one is called the extreme intensity domain Like we said the boundaries between these domains are threshold they're observable changes that happen Within your body in terms of how your body produces work and now i want to break down each of these domains give you a bit more details about each of them and then we're going to talk about how to train them specifically. actually they may bring up one last point and that is if you, have an endurance background or hang out in endurance training circles, you're probably familiar with The concept of training zones. zone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, maybe even six and seven, depending on the model that you're using. And you're probably wondering how this compares and contrast to the concept of intensity domain. They kind of stack up one on top of the other, and we can talk about that further. Maybe eventually I'll do another episode on, on zone based training. But the zones. Of training from the, the zone model. Are essentially. Stacked on top of the concept of intensity domain. And the reason is that. Intensity domains are clearly defined. Physiological states that are separated by thresholds. Whereas training zones are different ways that you can train your body, but going from one zone to the next is not necessarily as obvious as. If we're looking at your body under the hood as a, when you're looking at different intensity domains. And so, Intensity domains are descriptive. They really explain what's going on. And then you can use the, the training zones as a, as a S a model to simplify how you're or going to organize training. Now drum roll. Let's introduce the first intensity domain, the moderate intensity domain, which is, interestingly enough, right now in the market, probably the most of Vogue intensity domain. I feel like a decade ago, Dr. Kelly Starrett made stretching popular, and then nobody was doing mobility work. And now everybody's doing. Some form of mobility and stretching. if the care about their performance and then. the same thing happened with the energy system training where. It seems that everyone is talking about low intensity training and the benefits of low intensity training. You probably I've seen. Clips on YouTube or Instagram talking about the benefits of zone two work or easy work, which are all, descriptors that would explain exercise in the moderate intensity domain. And like I said, this is very cool because. especially coming from across the it background where, I mean, I've been doing it for over a decade and I can remember back in the days, all of the training pieces that we were doing were at maximal intensity although this gets you. Uh, fit to a certain extent you eventually. Cap out in terms of the progress that you can make. If you're not building a good foundation of endurance, which is going to come from training at lower intensities. Which is something that I've been doing with my clients for years. And sometimes it's difficult to explain to them the benefits of going that easy. And now with the growing popularity of moderate intensity training, people are a little bit more bought into the concept and are less reluctant to doing lower intensity training. If you're not there yet, then hopefully this. Uh, podcast is going to peak your interest. And you're going to start to include more of that training because it is extremely beneficial. When people talk about training in the moderate intensity domain. They use terms like LSD so long, slow distance lists, low intensity, steady state base buildings zone two. Easy miles and so on. And so if you've heard those terms They're all describing a rate of work that is inside the moderate intensity domain. you can pretty much understand that training. At that pace will allow you to go most likely for hours. think about how intense that actually is. And we'll get back to that in a second. But when you're training in the moderate intensity domain. You're effectively building the foundation of your performance pyramid. And if you want peak performance, you need to build a really wide base to use the analogy of a house. If you don't have a good. Base of endurance. It's essentially the equivalent of building walls and a roof. Without having a proper foundation underneath. And so it is extremely important for performance to build your capacity with. Work in the moderate intensity domain. Endurance athletes know this and. Use this. Concept very effectively. hybrid athletes, team sport athletes, And CrossFitters haven't caught on. As much yet to the benefits of this type of training. And yeah, even if you're not an endurable, even if your sport is at intensities that are considered way above the intensity of the moderate intensity domain training in that domain. Is still hugely beneficial. very briefly what's happening. When you're training at a moderate intensity is that you are primarily using fat for fuel and You're putting the stress on the slow Twitch fibers. The other thing that you're doing is that your in simple terms, improving the ability of your body to deliver oxygen to the working muscle. And so if those are important characteristics of the moderate intensity domain, when you train there, you're going to improve them. And what's going to happen over time as well, is that you are going to. Delay the point at which. Exercise is going to be unsustainable because if we want to increase performance, one of the biggest things that we want to do is that we want to be working in realms that are sustainable for as long. As possible. it. If you could push your. Ability to sustain two extremely high intensities. Then most of the work that you're doing is below your threshold, which means that you're able to push at very fast rate and not get tired. And so that would be The ideal goal here. How can we define this in a way that we can. No, if we're training they're properly. So, like we said, if you're training in the modern testing domain, you're going at a pace that you can last for hours, your heart rate is steady. at the beginning of the onset of work, it's going to climb up and then you're going to hit a steady state. And you're going to stay there. And that steady state is going to be in the, in the realm of 60 to 75% of your max heart rate. And you're able to speak full sentences. Like some people use the 12 to 15 word range. And if you're describing the difficulty that you feel from going at this intensity, it's probably going to be below five out of 10. And so with all of these descriptors, try to gauge, first of all, if you're doing easy training and if you are doing easy training, because that's one of the big mistakes of people training, the modern testy domain is that they think they're going easy, but they're not actually going that easy. try to see if you're actually training in that realm if not, then you're going to have to learn to slow down because trust me, this is probably the most important thing that you can do. For your performance over time. And you're not going to get benefits from training there on the really short term, but if you stack up weeks, months, and even years of training here, You are going to get very fit. Trust me. Now as work gets more intense. You're going to eventually hit the first threshold, which is the boundary between the moderate and the heavy intensity domain. And that threshold is called the lactate threshold. I'm going to skip the full lesson on lactate threshold here, but what you need to understand is that when you cross the lactate threshold, Stuff is going to become much less sustainable in you're going to go from being able to train for hours on end to being able to train for somewhere between probably 40 minutes. And. Two hours as you enter the heavy intensity domain. At that point, your body starts to use more carbs for fuel lactate. As we were seeing is going to start accumulating a little bit more in the blood because they can't be recycled as fast as by your muscles. we talked about slow Twitch muscle fibers before now you're starting to use more fast Twitch muscle fibers. And so you're clearly moving away from the. Almost indefinitely, sustainable levels of intensity towards stuff that will eventually become to an end. If you keep going at that pace. And that's where we're going to enter the heavy intensity domain. Now if you never post anything you do in the moderate intensity domain on Instagram, because it's too slow and boring. You probably spent a lot of time training in the heavy intensity domain. It's harder, you know, you're doing work. And so it makes you feel like you're doing something productive and you definitely feel the burn. So just by that description, you can probably understand what kind of training we're talking about here. It's stuff. That's tough. that you can hang on to for a little bit, like we said, think about 40 minutes to somewhere around two hours, give or take, depending on your fitness level on both ends. If you think about that in terms of running. It's probably somewhere between your 10 K PR pace and like your half marathon. PRP is type of deal or in the vicinity of that. Now, before we go a little bit deeper into what's happening in the heavy intensity domain, let's just zoom out a bit and talk about the two borders. Like we said. At the beginning or when you enter the heavy intensity domain. You're crossing the lactate threshold. And then as you increase intensity towards the top and border of the heavy intensity domain, you are now in the territory of a threshold that we call. The critical power, the critical power and the maximal lactate steady states. They're kind of two ways. That we can measure it but. Inside that band of work. Between those two. threshold critical power and maximal lactate, steady state. This is where you move from the heavy to the severe intensity domain. And when you cross over. Into the severe intensity domain. Then stuff is imminently unsustainable. So at that point, you have minutes now, not hours or potentially hours before you reached the point of task failure. Before you have to slow down significantly or stop exercising. before we hit that point, we are still in the heavy intensity domain. So, let me briefly explain what's going on when you're training here. first thing is your heart rates going to be much higher than in the. At moderate intensity domain, it's going to rise. depending on the rate of work that you're, doing. you can still hit a steady state this kind of is an indication. Of the fact that, you know, you can go for, let's say your, your half marathon in that domain. but you're, you're starting to use more. fast Twitch muscle fibers, which they're going to use more glycogen. So carbohydrates for fuel. And you have a finite amount of that in your system. And burning cars for fuel is also more costly and also comes with, metabolic byproducts. That are going to trigger your body to sense fatigue. all of these things combined together, Make it so that you're not able to go for as long and you're going to inevitably get tired when you're training in that intensity domain. to put it in simple terms if those are the things that you're, that are happening when you're training there, then. you're going to adapt to get better at all of this stuff associated with that too, from training in that zone. There's a lot of good benefits and there's, there's a lot of performance gains that can happen from training here. But the higher you go inside of the heavy intensity domain. The downside is that there's also a much bigger cost of doing work here. Meaning the recovery demand of training that you do here is going to be much greater than anything that you do below the lactate threshold. So there's a limit have training volume that you can do here, that you can recover from properly. And there's an upper boundary of work you can do here, which means that if you want to get more fit in, you hit that, that boundary. Then you inevitably have to do work at a lesser intensity. If you want to accumulate training volume. And by the way, More training volume is very highly correlated to better performances. And so you have no choice, but to do some of your training volume in the moderate intensity domain, if you want to get all the gains. So, how do I know if I'm still training in the heavy intensity domain, or if I'm getting out of it, then you have to know where your thresholds are. And so we've talked about how to determine where your lactate threshold is. Now on the flip side, we have. the maximal lactate steady state or critical power. So what you need to do is you need to test yourself. You need to figure out what is that rate of work? That is the border of what is unsustainable. And then, you know that this is your upper limit for training in the heavy domain. I do critical power testing with my athletes. And you can kind of do a speed preservation curve where if you do like a few different tests, of different, Duration. Then you can have different pieces for all of them. And you can, you can calculate where that's going to sit. We could talk about, critical power and other time. But you can, you can. Use a method like this. You could, like we said, that 40 ish minutes of work, like 40 to 60, like depending on who you are. Is going to give you a rough estimate of where that boundary is. So you could have a time trial of roughly that, duration that would give you ballpark of where you sit here and then as you train in that area, you're also going to know, okay. Like this feels like I could go on for a little bit. Okay. This feels like now that I go a bit faster. I can clearly know that this is not going to be something I'm going to hold forever. And obviously if you train that on running or a different, like a bike or concept to ERGs. You can associate a very specific piece. Or a very specific. What edge or, training split. To that base. So you could see okay. If I'm, if I'm going at a. two minutes per 500 meter on the row as an example, that is roughly something I feel like I could go at for a while, but then when I go, what like one 50 or 1 55, then. Stuff really starts to feel a lot harder. And then you can kind of guess the made there where that, where that threshold is going to be. And you're also in the realm of now describing training As an eight out of 10, And so that's another way that you can, use RPE to figure out. where that threshold is going to be. And so if you guesstimate what that is, and then as you train around there, you'll, you'll, be able to pinpoint it more accurately. Then, you know where your heavy intensity domain starts and where it finishes. And now that you're crossing critical power, you are entering the severe intensity domain, and now stuff starts to get very, very, very spicy. And you are now at a rate where you only have a few minutes before. You got to stop. You are heart rate is not going to hit a steady state. It is going to keep rising. Until you hit. Your VO two max, which I'm sure you guys are all very familiar with. And then when you hit VO two max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can consume to produce work, then it's pretty much game over after that. More specifically, people consider that as 90 to 100% of your max heart rate. So your body is trying to deliver the maximum amount of oxygen possible to your working muscles so that they can get the job done. And so you're really training in that sense, the ability of your muscles to utilize oxygen. To create work and you're improving everything that is associated with that within the muscles. You are definitely. Relying heavily on your fast Twitch muscle fibers. And you're creating work at a rate that is really unsustainable, which means that there's a lot of, we could call them like metabolic byproducts. So when your body creates energy, There's going to be, waste products. As these accumulate. the environment around the cell is becoming acidic and these are going to be. as far as I know that the primary mechanisms of fatigue or the reasons why you're going to end up failing it's going to vary from person to person and obviously how fast you're going inside of the severe intensity domain. But you can imagine that we're talking about. few minutes up to, maybe the 40 minutes that would be characterized with, the boundary with the heavy intensity domain. So somewhere in there is the timeframe that you have If you were training here in the severe intensity domain, and I ask you to rate how hard the exercise feels you will, without a doubt. respond by a nine or a 10, or most likely you wouldn't respond at all because you wouldn't be in the mood of talking. If we use the talk test at this point, you're not really talking anymore. Your head is down and you're getting the job done. So to give you a few examples. If you're doing. Uh, test inside of that intensity domain. If you're as an example, running a mile or maybe a 5k or the 10 K biker time trial that I did today, as an example. Are all going to fit inside of this category. If you're a, CrossFitter if you're doing Fran or if you're doing. One of the open testers that is in the, in some sort of a 12 minute range, or maybe like a really, capacity heavy 20 minute AMRAP, then you may be, also in that intensity domain. So a lot of the, tests that you're going to do when it comes to your capacity, unless you do purely endurance training. And you don't really run stuff shorter than 10 K or a half marathon. Is going to happen. Inside of that intensity domain, but it doesn't mean that you're going to train there exclusively. If you want to get better. If you come back to the analogy of the pyramid, a lot of the work that needs to be done is outside of the severe intensity domain. If you want to perform well and have longevity in your training career. Inside of the severe intensity domain. And then obviously you'll need to practice and train in here as well. If you want to get better at it, that's obvious. And one quick thing to mention, because we've been following That trend for the entire podcast here is what happens also with blood lactate. So we've been following the, the process of lactate throughout the different intensity domains. And when you cross the. that threshold of critical power slash maximal lactate steady state. As you can understand by the name. Lactate is now starting to rise. Inside of the blood. At a very uncontrollable rate. And the accumulation of lactate at the end. of exercise and the severe intensity domain is going to peak at the highest levels that you're going to see them. Now, this is not directly associated with fatigue. It's correlated with fatigue, but that's not the thing that gets you tired. But now, your metabolic machinery is, is in the realm of something that is very unsustainable. We see that trend with blood lactate levels as well. And then eventually you just hit the failure point. I think this is important to mention simply because if you do some research and you want to understand more about training, There is a lot of talk about, um, the relationship with the different efforts that you're doing in lactate. And lactate testing is also a popular mode of figuring out for elite athletes where, their capacities lie and where their, where their. exercise thresholds are. And so at the very least. This is a concept that you guys are probably all aware of. And so I wanted to mention the dynamics of that. As we cross over into the different intensity domains. And then finally. We have the final intensity domain, which is the extreme intensity domain. And. The, um, the difference here. Between the severe and the extreme is that you're going at such a high power output. That your body is going to give out. Before you reach VO two max. in the severe intensity domain, you could hit your maximum oxygen consumption. And then in the extreme, you're not even getting to the, you're not getting the opportunity to even use the maximum amount of oxygen or deliver it for your muscles to use it. You get tired before that. And so that's everything that is of extremely short duration and is probably more associated with really short-term. High power output work. So think of like, a track athlete running a hundred meter sprint, or think of doing a ten second all out. On the assault bike as an example. So those would be two examples of where you would train in the extreme intensity domain. There is some carry over in training here, in improving your. VO two max or your severe intensity domain. But really here, we're not talking about endurance work in any way, shape or form. This is pure power training. So now we've looked at all of the different intensity domains. And their inner workings. And now we need to answer the question. How do I train them? How do I create a training program around this? Give me the secret. first. Let's talk about the moderate intensity domain. If you're not training. Clearly in the moderate intensity domain, meaning that there's no doubt that the intensity is, are going out are easy enough to be considered moderate. Then. The best thing you can do for your training is to include one or two hours of that work per week. This is a starting point. And this is again, I'll repeat it. This is the number one thing that you should be thinking about right now for improving your engine. there's a lot of ways that you could do this. Ideally you'd pick as an example, like one hour block an hour continuous. You could, incorporate it in the middle of skill work or with skill work and be creative with the way that you ride the design. You could consider sneaking it in before and after a lifting session. You could try to accumulate it across the week. If you have time here and there, and don't really have additional hours to dedicate to the training process, but again, depending on how much you work out and what your goals are, I would argue that you should try to find a way to make it fit. And then unless you're a seasoned runner and you're pretty decent at it, then I would definitely recommend that you choose, uh, a lower impact modality to get your mileage in when it comes to moderate intensity. it's going to be easier to recover from, and you're going to ensure that you actually stay in the moderate intensity domain. As an example, when I work with people that, initially get into running, if they want to stay in the moderate intensity domain with their running and they're, don't have a lot of running experience, the only way that they can do it is by doing run-walk intervals. And if not, And that's the thing that running is that you have to be decently fit and for it to be easy, if not, it's, it's always a little bit tougher on the body then. Then you could, Then with other modalities. And if you're already accumulating moderate intensity domain volume. Or you have a good amount of it under your belt. Excellent. Keep going, keep doing it. And if it's possible, look at increasing the amount that you do on a weekly basis. More volume of it. If you're able to tolerate and you have time. It means a more adaptation. Think about. Elite level athletes, either endurance, or even if you think about CrossFitters, we're talking about hours upon hours of work per week. That can be done. In that intensity domain. And the great thing about it is that the recovery demand is not that great. And so you can always, Do more. So to say, and you're going to get more benefit from doing more, but you're not going to get too tired. Now, if you have a limited amount of time and we'll look at it more like managing the entire training program in a sec. But if you have a limited amount of time to dedicate to your training and you're getting closer to a competition, then you probably have two periods. It in a way where further away from competition, which would be more in the off season, your allocating more of your training hours towards you are moderate intensity domain work. And as you get closer to competition, Then maybe this becomes a bit more support work and you're spending a little bit more of your time on higher intensity stuff. And then you repeat the process. But you get the gist. You find out how much time in your schedule, you can actually do moderate intensity work. You do it as often as possible. And then you plug in the rest of your training. Around that, if not, you need to cut out from it a little bit and add the other intensities. So that's for the moderate intensity domain and that's for building the base of our pyramid. And so if you picture a pyramid in your mind right now, you can definitely see that the base is the widest part of the pyramid. And therefore the part that occupies the most amount of volume. The rest of it is going to vary based on the time of the year, your sport. the type of athletes you are. So your strength in your, limitations. But any training program. As a starting point, we'll have moderate intensity domain as the biggest portion of the training volume and then a smaller amount. Which means in most cases, less than. And 50% is going to be dedicated to the other training intensities. And so we're talking about the heavy. The severe end and the extreme intensity domain. this is not a hard, fast rule, but it's going to be relevant for most people at most times. And then you can tweak that. Obviously there's an argument that can be made. if you have a very low training volume, like how much of each can you do? And you're probably going to have to cycle this over the course of the year, but the bulk a good amount as moderate. And then for the rest of the training volume, you're going to split it between the heavy and the severe intensity domain. How are you going to train in the heavy and the severe intensity domain? you're probably, you're going to do one of two things. You're either going to do intervals. And so a certain amount of work followed by a period of rest going at an effort that is within that intensity domain. if we take the heavy intensity domain as an example, You remember your, between your lactate threshold and your critical power. Fastest intensity you're going to sustain here is somewhere that you can hold for. Like maybe say 40 minutes. And so if you are training in that domain, and a good way to start thinking about that is to think of a distance as a starting point. I think of a distance that you. That you have completed and the pace that you go out and do intervals at that specific piece with a specific amount of rest in between. Or another way that you could think about it is. Using our RPE chart. Like, you know, that you're now in the realm of like six to eight on 10 effort. And so it's figuring out what kind of pace feels like a six on 10 and using your actual testing data to correlate that with, and then build intervals that are going to match that level of intensity. And if you're going in the severe intensity domain, this is the type of work that people often refer to as view two max training. So we said it's the most stimulative. It's the most. demanding on your system, the amount of time that you can spend there is, is quite low. You're maybe talking about maybe at the most like a total of like 20 minutes. per session there. If you're doing intervals At that intensity, those intervals could be in the realm of 30 seconds all the way up to four or five minutes at the most. And your, giving yourself a decent amount of, recovery here the other way that you could approach it is by doing more of a testing scenario, which would be to do just one block of time in that intensity domain. So as an example, a 20 minute AMRAP test for the severe intensity domain, or maybe even like a 20 to 30 minute test in the, in the heavy intensity domain, or even longer, like if you're going out for. a temple run like that could fit inside of your. Heavy intensity domain training session. So it's not extremely hard, but it's faster than easy and you do it once and you're calling it there for the day. And that's how I would incorporate. That kind of work. Now how many days a week, can you do that stuff? the moderate intensity means that easy to recover from, particularly if you have the right modality, so you could do it. Even five times a week, if, that made sense for your training program in your goals. And then when you're training. Heavy and severe, then this is going to fit once or twice per week at the most, depending on the person, depending on the time of the year. when you're closer to a competition that requires you to be really good. At thresholds type stuff, then you have to increase your amount of training that you do in the heavy intensity domain. but we're talking about once or twice per week, or even maybe depending on how hard a training session is. Like it could even be something that you do every other week, your view to max work could even be done. every other week, I know some of you guys are maybe thinking, okay, this is not enough information for me to write a training program. But think about it. If you're, if you're training 60% of your training volume in the moderate intensity domain. And then there's a leftover amount of training minutes that you have in your week to exercise. So if you allocate something like another. 30% to your heavy intensity domain work. And let's say 10% to your, to your severe intensity domain work. You can kind of reverse engineer how much. Training time. That's going to give you and create a training session based off of that, or create some training intervals based off of that. And then the extreme intensity domain. The amount of time per work interval is very short. So it's a very small amount of the total training volume that's going to be there. so if we're talking about, developing endurance and that's primarily the goal of the, of the podcast with billing and engine, then. the total amount of work there is is, is a negligible relative to the overall big picture. You know, like if you're performing three to 10 sets of a very short bout. Per week split over one or two training sessions, then that's, that's a very small amount of total. work volume relative to everything else. we have now I think enough tools to start putting this stuff together into a training program. And hopefully this gives you a little bit of insights on how I think when I'm writing training programs for my people. And then what you need to do is evaluate your current capacity, what you've done in the past. What are your weaknesses where you need to spend more time on, which is a little bit my process again. What writing programs. And if you can do that for yourself, then you can start to create a training program that will be effective. Always think about erring on the side of, being conservative. So you could start with the program that has a less total recovery demand. See how you respond and then increase the training volume from there. And so that's an easy way to put it. You can start with primarily moderate intensity stuff. Sneak in some of the other intensity domains in there. See. How you respond. And then from there increasing it a little bit on a week to week basis, that would be the best way to approach the. Program design process. Which, in my opinion, it makes everything a little bit easier because then you're almost working off of a minimum. So you can't really make a mistake. And then you just add a little bit on a weekly basis. Especially, if you are also pairing your endurance training with lifting, and then you have to figure out how lifting is going to affect your endurance training, and then how endurance training is going to affect your lifting. You always start with a conservative amount of training volume and then you build it out from there Oh, man. I think that is. Enough for today. there's a lot of stuff that we unpacked in the last. Shit 40 minutes of this. I'm gonna stop sharing. I'm going to let this simmer for you. I know what the beginning of the episode I talked about, How you guys can help out by rating the podcast, sharing the podcast, but again, one of the big things that I hope would come out of that is if you listen to this and you have followup questions, or there's more stuff that you need to know. Sharing that information with me is super valuable because then when we can create conversation around it, but two, then it can give me, inspiration or topic ideas for further pieces of content. And then I can give you even more. Valuable information. on that note, thank you again for listening to this whole thing. According to that. podcast was really cool. And I hold that you have some practical tools. To improve your current training process. let's keep the conversation going if you need anything. And I will talk to you on the next one, which may or may not be about. Nutrient timing. I don't know. Are we going to do one on nutrition? Are we going to keep going with the, training stuff? I guess maybe you, you let me know what you think. If not i'll go with how i feel next week talk to you guys soon