Kevin answers the latest round of listener e-mail.
Kevin answers the latest round of listener e-mail.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hi and welcome back to Get-Fit Guy, I’m your host Kevin Don and this week, I am very pleased to say I received more emails than I know what to do with! I will reply to them all in due course, but I have selected a few to answer here on the show. They were selected at random. These weren’t the questions that I was absolutely dying to answer or that are about to change the shape of the fitness industry.
Let’s just get to it.
First up is an email from Astrid in Massachusetts. As y’all may recall, I love it when you let me know where you are in the world. So, Astrid, I have been to Massachusetts many times and have so many great memories, from witnessing a stabbing in a bar in Peabody to getting my rental car searched for drugs by the Highway Patrol in Springfield. I have actually been all over Mass. I taught 12 seminars there and have been in Agawam, Salem, Leominster and out to the Cape. Beautiful state.
Astrid writes:
Thank you for attempting to slow my descent into entropy. I love your dark sense of humor and your impatience for poorly reasoned arguments. Your accent is the cherry on top.
Here's my question - How much time doing an indoor bike workout and how many times a week is the right amount? I'm not a cyclist. So this isn't sports specific training. It is my attempt to keep up cardiovascular fitness as I turn fifty soon. Using a Peloton bike is one of the few ways I've found to really get my heart rate up that I enjoy. I also do resistance training three times a week, postural work, and hike with my dog.
Hi Astrid,
Thank you. So, the right amount is the intercept point of the amount that you enjoy, the amount that drives adaptation and the amount you can recover from.
I had an email when I first started as the Get-Fit Guy, which came from Brazil, where I was asked what martial art was best for a listener’s son. My answer was: the one he enjoys. Apart from the masochist that emailed me in to object to me saying that things have to be enjoyable and should be hard and painful, I think most people tend to stick with things that they find to be fun. So it’s great to hear that you enjoy your Peloton. That’s definitely a great way to stay motivated! In terms of the right amount, I have touched on it before and it’s simply ensuring that you are above the minimum effective dose and below maximum recoverable dose. Which is pretty simple to monitor. If you only use the Peloton let’s say once every 10 days and every time, you feel in pain afterwards and find yourself exhausted, you are probably below the minimum effective dose. You need to do an activity of any kind, even an intellectual one, often. This ensures adaptation occurs. It cannot happen randomly. The next is maximum recoverable dose and the symptoms are the same: always in pain, fatigued, low energy. The way you ill tell the difference is comparing frequency. If you are hitting the Peloton everyday and this is happening, it’s more likely you are overtraining than under training, the reverse also being the case. For me, the only thing to monitor is the movement patterns there, because that’s all single leg alternate pushing. Accomplished cyclists will use the opposite leg eccentrically, but most untrained cyclists use a single leg concentric contraction. You did say you do resistance training, which is great, so make sure you are hitting push, pull, bend and core in there!
Next up is an email from Jack. Jack doesn’t say where he is from so I’ll make up my own narrative here. Jack lives in a Brownstone in New York and works in finance. He loves walking his dog round Central Park and wears a Burberry trench coat while sipping on some single origin coffee.
Jack writes:
I heard you say your email has been a little sparse and I've been wanting to get your thoughts on a topic. This is a long question, so I apologize in advance!
Can we talk about rest while lifting? If my goal is to be efficient and also maximize gains in hypertrophy and strength, what kind of rest should I be giving myself? An example of part of a strength day might look like this: 6-10 reps of a heavy chest press followed immediately by 8-10 lawnmower rows on the right and 8-10 lawnmower rows on the left, then a 30 second rest, and repeat 3 more times. So I have lots of questions about this:
1) What are your thoughts on consecutively working two muscle groups that are not complementary in a consecutive manner? Is there any advantage to doing so over doing, for example, 4 sets of chest, followed by 4 sets of back?
2) This routine might be 90 seconds of consecutive muscle work (pecs, lats right, lats left), followed by 30 seconds of rest. Is that enough time for the heart rate to come down to maximize gains in the next set?
3) If I'm doing a split workout routine, does it matter if I combine push and pull as I typically do with chest & back, or should I be working complementary muscles (chest & tri, back & bi, etc)?
Hi Jack. Thank you for the email. Definitely wasn’t a long one. I have had emails before I needed to stop for a nap halfway through.o don’t worry about that. Rest period will be very nuanced. For example, someone with great aerobic capacity might be able to do more reps and sets with less rest at sub maximal loads. But at maximal loads, they may struggle. Someone really strong may be fine doing strength work at low reps and then blow out on higher rep sets. It really depends on their training background and to some extent genetics and whether they are better at burning carbs for fuel or have better aerobic capacity and so on.
You noted that you want to maximise gains in strength and hypertrophy. I would say you need to split training in a session into an ‘A’ component and then B and C will be accessories. A being low rep and heavy and B and C being sub maximal and high reps. I don’t think 10 reps chest press will make you strong. It will make you strong at 10 reps of chest press but not at one rep bench press. But this may be because we are defining strength differently. But if we use the definition of maximum force being expressed against an external resistance, then we need to look at exactly that. So a barbell back squat for one rep would be strength and 10 reps leg extension wouldn’t be. That being said, the biggest predictor we have of POTENTIAL for force production is the cross-sectional diameter of a muscle. So, hypertrophy has a role to play, but ONLY if we are also providing the neurological stimulus heavy sets of low reps provide us.
In terms of complementary and non-complementary movements, I tend to think differently here. For example, I don’t consider, let’s say goblet squats to be complementary to squats or brush ups to be complementary to the bench press. This is because it’s the same thing. I don’t consider overworking a muscle group or pattern to be complementary. So, in your case, where you are working antagonistic pairings (opposite muscle groups), then I do consider that to be complementary. A push complements a pull. So keep that up, love it.
In terms of the 90s rest question and it bringing heart rate down enough to do another good set, I don’t normally consider heart rate to be the limiting factor in strength reps. It MAY be a limiter in some individuals, but usually the limiter is ATP, which is the fuel that powers muscle contractions. After 90s you may only have 70% of ATP replenished. So, if you want to get stronger, having 70% of ATP for set 2 and then 70% of that for set 3, means you may have only 49% of ATP available compared to set 1. The most important thing in getting stronger is doing the reps. So if you find you aren’t able to due to lack of ATP, that’s a problem. You can only adapt to the reps you perform. If you can’t do a rep, you can’t adapt to it. I have that with clients sometimes that send me a sob story about how the load I prescribed was ‘too heavy’ and yet when I check the app, they were able to perform the first set just fine. If something is too heavy, you can’t perform a full set. If you can and you found you were unable to complete subsequent sets, that’s not lack of strength, it’s lack of intra-set rest. Watch the strongest guys at the gym, sometimes 5-8 mins between sets because it takes them that long to replenish enough ATP. So, I would scratch the 90s rest idea, up the weights and rest as needed for success. If you turn your strength training into conditioning training, you won’t get strong.
Hope that helps! If I didn’t get to your email this week, be sure to check in next week and as usual:
If you have a question or just want to say hi, then email me at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com and you too can be featured on the show. Don’t forget to share the podcast with your friends!
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, Kamryn Lacey, and our new Director of Podcasts, Brennan Goetschius. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at
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