What does aerobic fitness really mean — and how can personal training help you improve it?? Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher break down VO₂ max, heart rate, and the science behind combining strength training with interval workouts. 

From boosting cardiovascular health to reducing fatigue and disease risk, they explain how targeted personal training can transform your conditioning and overall well-being.

• Amy Hudson and Dr. James Fisher look at the benefits of having increased aerobic capacity, how to increase it and the role of both strength training and brief interval training in aerobic capacity.
• One of the most common terms used in scientific literature is VO₂ max which represents the maximum volume of oxygen our body can take up and use.
• Dr. Fisher explains that whenever we talk about cardiovascular fitness or cardiorespiratory fitness, it’s about how well oxygen can move around our body.
• Dr. Fisher and Amy talk about why VO₂ max and CO2 (carbon dioxide) are important in terms of their fitness.
• Did you know that your conditioning level, to some extent, can determine what exercise level or exercise intensity you can work at to maintain working aerobically?
• Not only daily fatigue but also your sleep, risk of depression and anxiety, risk of coronary artery disease and hypertension, and the risk of diabetes are all positively impacted by an improved aerobic conditioning.
• Dr. Fisher approaches the audience question: Does knowing one’s resting heart rate indicate anything to that person about their current state of cardiovascular health or aerobic capacity?
• As you improve your fitness, you improve what’s called cardiac output and stroke volume.
• If you’re curious about your maximum heart rate, you can calculate it by taking the number 220 and deducting your age from it…
• Amy brings interval training and glycogen into the conversation.
• Dr. Fisher explains that the importance of having a strength training workout and then doing concentrated cardio at the end is actually great because it serves as this glycogen dump.
• Dr. Fisher goes into EPOC – Excess-Post Exercise Oxygen Consumption – and the specificity of an action and, specifically, a sport itself.

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SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Fitness, and especially strength, really, really is the factor at play in how hard your heart has to work to keep up with your daily activities.

It’s really about this efficiency. We’re moving good things in, we’re helping to move bad things away and bad things out.

Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and wellbeing. I’m Amy Hudson.

I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode.

Welcome back to the podcast, everybody. Today we are talking about heart rate. We’re talking about aerobic capacity. We’re talking about what it means to be conditioned. There are a lot of terms out there that people talk about in terms of being fit. VO2 max, aerobic capacity, you know, having that conditioning, all of these things. So, we’re going to talk about what these are. We’re going to talk about what benefits come out of having increased aerobic capacity, how to increase your aerobic capacity, and the role of strength training in that, and then also a little bit about the role of brief interval training in that. If you are a client at the exercise coach, something that is a part of workouts is we call concentrated cardio. So we’re going to talk about why we do that and the benefit of doing that brief interval training in conjunction with strength as a part of workouts is we call concentrated cardio. So we’re gonna talk about why we do that and the benefit of doing that brief interval training in conjunction with strength training to give you guys the benefits that we’re trying to give you. So Dr. Fisher is with me today. How are you doing, Dr. Fisher?

I’m doing fantastic, Amy. How are you doing today?

I’m doing well, I’m doing well. But I’m very confused about all of the terms out there when it comes to heart health, when it comes to what it means to be conditioned and aerobic conditioning particularly. So can you help me understand?

Yeah, absolutely. So there is a lot of different terminology, excuse me, that’s used when we talk about conditioning and especially when we talk about aerobic conditioning and so forth in cardio. And one of the most common terms that’s used in the scientific literature is VO2max. And that simply means V is volume, O2 is oxygen, and max is the maximum.

So it simply means the maximum amount or the maximum volume of oxygen that our body can take up and use. So everything when we talk about cardiovascular fitness or cardiorespiratory fitness is about how well we can move oxygen around our body, how well we can take oxygen through our mouth, through our lungs, transfer it through our heart, in our blood, and send it to our active muscles for them to use in energy production to allow us to continue exercising. So when we measure VO2 max we’re measuring our body’s capacity to take in oxygen and utilize it, right?

Yeah, 100% that’s exactly correct. And the next thing, if I add on to that, is it’s also a product of how well we can dispose of carbon dioxide, so CO2. So obviously we take in oxygen to use and we get rid of CO2. And the only reason that I clarify that is because at the higher end of exercise, we can only take in so much oxygen and then our intensity of exercise will actually go that bit higher, even though we’re not taking and using any more, but it’s to get rid of carbon dioxide. So that’s really important, that carbon dioxide is obviously a byproduct, it’s a waste product of energy production at a cellular level and we need to get that out of our body.

Okay, so then in practical terms, why is that important? Why is one’s ability to take in oxygen and remove carbon dioxide important in terms of their fitness?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, if we think of anything that we do day to day from the time I get up in the morning and I walk around, my body is having to produce energy for me to do that. So I’m working at what’s called an aerobic level. Aerobic simply means with oxygen. Now, if I’m well conditioned, if I go out for a run, or I go for a swim, or a cycle, or even if I do weight training at a relatively low effort level, then I might be working aerobically.

And that means that my muscles and my cells are producing the energy to do that exercise with oxygen. So, I need to be breathing regularly. I need to have oxygen coming in. I need to have oxygen going through my lungs. I need to have my blood pump, my heart pumping blood through my lungs to collect oxygen and then pumping around my body. And then I need that oxygen to be transferred into muscles, uh, through capillaries. And then I need the CO2 to go back into the blood to come back the other way for me to breathe out. And my conditioning level to some extent can determine what exercise level or what exercise intensity I can work out to maintain working with oxygen, to maintain working aerobically. So we’ll see some people and they go for a light run and they look really, really out of breath and they’ve been working really hard and they maybe aren’t quite as well conditioned. Or we see some people and they are running really fast and they’re talking with a friend and we look at them and think, gosh, how are they able to run so fast and still be having a conversation? And they are probably very, very well conditioned because they’re working aerobically and still able to have a conversation. So yeah, it’s, it’s really about that ability to move oxygen around the body. And, and the key with all of this is, as I said, we wake up in the morning and everything we do is effectively aerobic. Well, if I can’t work aerobically, then my fatigue levels will come up very, very quickly. So I might walk up a flight of stairs and I feel really fatigued from doing that. Whereas the better conditioned I am, the lower the amount of fatigue that I will feel, the lower my heart rate will go in trying to move that oxygen around the body, the lower the amount of fatigue that I will feel, the lower my heart rate will go in trying to move that oxygen around the body, the lower my breathing rate will be in my trying to move that oxygen around the body, the less I might be likely to perspire or sweat because I haven’t had to work hard, because my heart rate stayed low and so forth. So our daily fatigue can be a really key factor. But there’s also other variables in all of this that are improved. So the better our aerobic conditioning, the better our sleep, the better or the lower our risk of depression and anxiety, the lower our risk of coronary artery disease and hypertension, the lower our risk of diabetes is a really important one as well. So aerobic conditioning can be really important for our long-term health.

CMH I can see that being connected in terms of other areas of health. Is that because somebody who is more active and more fit is less likely to develop those kind of conditions because they’re more active to begin with? Or is that because the aerobic capacity is there and something about the aerobic capacity is decreasing somebody’s risk?

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so it’s a product of the exercise that they’re doing to have that aerobic capacity. If we took somebody who had all these comorbidities and we suddenly gave them an incredibly high VO2 max, then it wouldn’t reduce their risk with those comorbidities. It’s really a product of the exercise that somebody’s done to achieve that VO2 max, thus reduce their risk of those comorbidities, reduce their risk of depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and so forth. And it’s really, as we think about the importance or the benefits, sorry, of cardiorespiratory fitness or cardiovascular fitness or VO2 max, whatever we want to call it, then we’re thinking about how well we move blood around the body and how well we can get rid of anything that we don’t want in the body. So it’s really about this efficiency. We’re moving good things in or moving good things around and we’re helping to move bad things away and bad things out and that of course is what’s helping us. Now there are other benefits to exercise and there are other benefits to VO2 max, but effectively it’s the training process that has given us a high VO2 max or a high level of conditioning that has given us all those health benefits as well.

So here’s an interesting question. Does knowing one’s resting heart rate indicate anything to that person about their current state of cardiovascular health or aerobic capacity?

Yeah, actually resting heart rate can be a really good indicator. So long as it’s not impacted by any medication. So if somebody has had a cardiac condition of any kind and they’ve been put on any medication such as beta blockers, which will naturally reduce their heart rate even when they exercise, as long as somebody’s not been given any medication like that, then knowing your resting heart rate can be, well for one, quite interesting, but could also be a good indicator of fitness and health.

So for example, if we look at some of the most well-trained athletes in the world, Tour de France cyclists or world-class endurance athletes, marathon runners, swimmers, they might have a resting heart rate down into, potentially into the high 30s, mid to high 30s, certainly, definitely in the low forties. Um, typically we would say that most people have a resting heart rate between 60 and 90 beats per minute. And what that means is that 60 times a minute.

So effectively once every second, the heart is having to pump, is having to contract with that contraction, it’s sending oxygenated blood around the body where that oxygen is serving a role for our brain, for our organs, for our muscles, and so forth. And it’s removing CO2. Now as we improve our fitness, we also improve what’s called our cardiac output and our stroke volume. And that’s the volume of blood that’s being pumped per minute. So we can actually reduce our heart rate and still have the same amount of blood pumped and or we can reduce our heart rate and pump a little bit less blood but it can be more oxygenated or the oxygen that’s within it can transfer into the muscles and the organs more efficiently through what’s called increased capillarization. So effectively, a muscle has all these kind of valves in it and the more exercise that we do and the more of the right type of exercise that we do, the more valves it has so that as blood goes through, it can give away more oxygen that it’s carrying and hence that it’s all about efficiency. So the more efficient our body is working, the lower our heart rate has to be. Our heart simply doesn’t have to work very hard to have the same outcome. And so if we’re very well conditioned, we can have a resting heart rate that’s lower. Or if we do the same relative intensity of exercise, then our heart rate might actually decrease for the same effort level. So for example, if I went and I ran a 5k right now, a five kilometer run right now, and I ran it in 25 minutes and I have an average heart rate of 150 beats per minute. Well, if after six months training I go and I run a 25 minute 5k again, now my average heart rate might be 130 beats per minute. So now it’s working that much more efficiently to help me to, to work at that same effort level, I’m still, I’m still running at the same pace to run a 25 minute 5k.

Now, the other thing I could do is I could choose to run faster and maintain that 150 beats per minute. But now I might run a 22 minute, five kilometer race or a 22 minute 5k run. It’s all about our ability to move oxygen around the body. And certainly our heart rate plays a key role in that. And yes, our resting heart rate can be a key indicator.

Now I’m sure you’ve got a question cause I’m going on, but, um, one of the things that we can think about in terms of this is if I fall ill, if my resting heart rate is an average of somewhere around 42, 43 beats per minute overnight, if I get sick, the demands on my body at rest are much higher. My body’s fighting illness, so it has to use more energy. So my resting heart rate might now go up to 46 or 48 or even 50. And if I wake up in the morning, I might feel fine, but my resting heart rate was high. That might be an indicator that maybe I’ve done a hard workout and I haven’t recovered very well from it, or maybe I’m getting sick. And that might be an indicator to say, just be a bit careful with how much exercise we do because my body has got some other demands going on internally that I should be aware of.

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s helpful to know because as you’re speaking, I’m thinking about all kinds of things, questions related to what contributes to my baseline resting heart rate. I think there’s some genetics that are at play, how fit I am, but then also you’re saying if I’m sick or not and that number can vary. So the other question I have, many many years ago when I was very young, we had this treadmill, a running treadmill, and you would type in your height and you would before you would run on it, your height and I think think your weight and then it would give you a heart rate range to shoot for. A certain range that meant fat burning or cardio or whatever. And as you were describing the different peaks of heart rates you may get and as you get more fit and more conditioned, that peak heart rate may be lower because it’s costing your heart less effort to get to the same level of output because you’re more fit. What would you say those, is there any validity to choosing a heart rate to shoot for for various reasons for an individual.

I think if somebody is doing cardiovascular training over a period where they’re looking at their watch and they’re monitoring their heart rate. So for example, if somebody is going for a run or they’re on a treadmill and they’re looking at their watch and saying, I want to be within a certain heart rate zone or my treadmill is telling me I should be within a certain heart rate zone.

I think that there’s a large margin of flexibility around this. minus your age.

You take the number 220, you take away your age, and that should give you your maximum heart rate. So I’m 46 years old, so 220 minus my age puts my maximum heart rate at about 174 beats per minute. Now that’s not strictly accurate. I’m relatively well-conditioned. I can comfortably get my heart rate up into the high 170s, probably into the 180s with the right kind of workout. So there’s a large margin around that. Somebody that’s less well conditioned but the same age might really struggle to get their heart rate into the 170s because they’re less well conditioned. So this is the other thing that conditioning can do, is it can actually add or range of heart rate. We decrease our resting heart rate down, so if I have a resting heart rate of 50 and I improve my fitness and my cardiovascular fitness and my VO2 max, my resting heart rate might come down to 45. My maximum heart rate might actually go up and it allows me to work that bit harder as well.

Now that would be for very, very high-end exercise and it wouldn’t be about efficiency at that point. It’s really just about how far I can push my body if I really want to. But yeah, we can certainly increase that range. Now as far as the ranges within heart rate zones, we often talk about zone one, zone two, up to zone five, cardio.

So let’s say for example, somebody with a resting heart rate of 60 beats per minute, if they exercise between 80 and 100 beats, they might be in zone one cardio. If they exercise between 100 and 120 or 100 and 130, they might be in zone two cardio or zone three cardio. So there are certainly these ranges that people can work within. And of course, the key is the higher the zone that you’re working in certainly the lower the time you want to be working in that zone for or the lower the time you’re going to be able to work in that zone for. Okay that makes sense that makes sense. So I think it’s I think it’s beneficial for people to understand that and pay attention to some extent to their heart rate and what their resting heart rate is and what they’re capable of doing in terms of understanding at a very basic level how hard their heart is working on a daily basis. And especially if they have history in their family of maybe hypertension or cardiovascular disease or things like that, you know, it’s worth taking a look at some of those factors and paying attention, would you say? Yeah, absolutely. I think that certainly if somebody has a medical history or a family history of subcardiac conditions, it’s worth being aware of. But the evidence is relatively clear that certainly strength training can improve things like risk of coronary artery disease, it can reduce blood pressure, it can reduce cardiovascular disease risk factors such as insulin resistance or combat obesity and things like that.

So I think that we talk about resistance training in this podcast all the time and that’s the key. Strength changes everything or strength training changes everything. And of course, I think that when managed or when coached accordingly, that’s a great way to sort of combat that family history.

CMH Yes, absolutely. And the point is, if you didn’t catch before, is that fitness, and especially strength, really, really is the factor at play in how hard your heart has to work to keep up with your daily activities, such as sprinting up a staircase or whatever it may be. The stronger your muscles and your legs are, the less hard your heart has to work to get you up that staircase, right? And so this is where it all boils back down at the end of the day to your strength and to your fitness. So yes, absolutely. There’s another benefit too, on top of improving your body’s capacity.

Well, let’s talk a little bit too, I know you were talking to me before we hit record too, about how to know what it feels like when you improve your aerobic capacity. How do I know that I’m improving my aerobic capacity?

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think for most people, it starts to show when we have, when we perform the same day-to-day tasks that we always do, but they become easier. So for example, I used to work at university and I worked on the fifth floor of a building and I have a policy where I don’t take a lift. Certainly in the UK, I never get in an elevator when I’m in the UK. So a little different in the U S because buildings are quite often a lot bigger. Um, but I worked on the fifth floor and I would always take the stairs and I knew that my conditioning wasn’t very good when I started to get out of breath at the top of the stairs or when I was at the top, when I was on the floor of my office and I could feel that I was hot, I was maybe a bit hotter. And, or I felt like I was a bit more out of breath or I felt like I’d worked that bit harder going up the stairs. Now of course there are other variables. Temperature might be a product of the temperature in the summer or in the winter or the conditioning of the building, or maybe the coat that I’m wearing or bag that I’m carrying or so forth.

But ultimately, it’s about when we have a task that we repeatedly do, that just starts to get easier and easier. So for some people that might be that at this time of year in the UK, the weather’s fantastic, people are going outside and they’re mowing their lawn, people are going outside and they’re doing, you know, two or three hours gardening. And maybe they are bending down to do gardening at the end of a Sunday afternoon, they think, gosh, I feel really good. Normally I would be exhausted at this time, or maybe they feel exhausted and they suddenly realize they’re not as fit as they used to be. So a lot of the time it’s the tasks that we just perform with a degree of frequency that can be a good gauge of our level of fitness.

Absolutely. So I want to just you know, talk briefly now about interval training and the benefits of that. So at the end of an exercise coach workout, of strength workout, a lot of times we will have a client participate in concentrated cardio. So interval training on a bike or on another piece of equipment. And something we explained to them, you know, on top of getting that oxygenated blood pumping throughout the body, which is an incredible benefit in the moment itself, and the post-workout effects of that as well.

There’s something we call a glycogen dump, and we’re going to talk about what that is because it’s extremely beneficial, metabolically speaking, for blood sugars. Your muscles, and Dr. Fisher, you just tell me if I’m incorrect on anything I’m saying, but your muscles carry around energy in the form of glycogen. So that’s the term for the stored energy that’s in your muscles. When we ingest food, it goes into our bloodstream, it’s glucose. Once it gets stored into our muscles eventually, our muscles are like a storage tank. They can store so much energy, and that’s called glycogen. And many people never deplete that stored energy in their muscles because they don’t participate in challenging enough exercise, they don’t strength train, and it’s not good for us. When we don’t deplete that that energy in our muscles and we consume more and more carbohydrates and and have higher levels of basically blood sugar in our body, if the blood sugar cannot get stored in our muscles because they’re already full, it has nowhere else to go but to become stored as fat eventually, right?

And there’s other implications with our insulin levels and diabetes risk when that happens. So how do we deplete that glycogen quickly? Concentrated cardio where we have bursts of effort and it is really, really challenging. For brief amounts of time, it only takes two minutes. What that does is it depletes a whole bunch of energy out of our muscles quickly. After that strength training workout, which is also doing that, anything we may have left in our muscles is really going to get emptied out and we feel that. We feel that instant fatigue. We feel our muscles, that empty feeling in our muscles when we truly deplete our muscles of all of that stored energy in them. And then what happens is that our muscles say to themselves, ah I’m empty. I have no energy. If, if a, if a bear comes in the parking lot and chases me, I have no way to get away. Right. And they, I need to fix this. And so they will pull energy quickly out of your bloodstream to kind of get something back in there. And it instantly basically regulates, you know, those blood sugar levels. They’re pulling that’re pulling that energy from other places in your body to kind of repair and rebuild at a very simplified level which is so good for us right it’s such a good process for our body to go through and it kind of sparks all of the other repairs that happen. But it’s very beneficial because for those people that are concerned about blood sugar or concerned with fat loss, we don’t want to. That depletion of that glycogen is huge, and it’s key. And it’s super beneficial for that reason, as well as the cardiovascular conditioning that it’s creating and the way it’s making our life activities easier. So that is kind of how we explain that.

Anything in there not make sense to you, Dr. Fisher?

Amy, that was a wonderful explanation. I thought that was fantastic and I agree with it completely. It’s actually a little bit more interesting than that as well. So we typically, we can often store glycogen in our liver as well. And when our body is really depleted of, our muscles are really depleted of glycogen, we can actually draw that glycogen back from our liver to our muscles to use. So if for example, we do a resistance training workout, we’re also depleting our muscles to use. So, if for example we do a resistance training workout, we’re also depleting our muscles of glycogen through that process. And that’s really key. Like you said, we want to deplete that glycogen, we want to empty that tank so that the next time we’re taking glucose, that glucose stimulates the release of insulin, we have a process called glucogenesis, and that puts the glycogen back into our muscles and it’s stored there ready to use again. But actually, if we can start drawing it from our liver as well, we improve our efficiency, our body’s ability and our efficiency to use that glycogen from our liver, to transfer glycogen from our liver to our muscles to be used, and vice versa. So we now take in that food again, and we can fill our muscles, and we can fill our liver again far more efficiently than if we hadn’t done it. So the importance of having a strength training workout and then doing concentrated cardio at the end is actually great, because like you said, it serves as this glycogen dump. I think was the phrase you used, I love that phrase, it’s fantastic. Now it’s interesting to think about this because we can talk about this as this is the health benefit of concentrated cardio But the reality is it’s also still cardio and in fact strength training in itself is still cardio. About 15 years ago we wrote a research paper where we questioned the idea of what is cardio. Everybody said that strength training is not cardio and that you have to go for a run that’s prolonged you know 30, 40, 50 minutes or a swim or a bike ride for it to be cardio. And one of the things that we sort of said is that’s not the case. Strength training is cardio. And we, you know, when I do a strength training workout and any listener can think about their last strength training workout and answer these questions in your head, did your heart rate go up? Did your breathing rate go up? Did your breathing rate go up? In that case, you were moving blood around your body and you were looking for oxygen transference into the muscles. That acts as cardio. When you do concentrated cardio, you’re doing exactly the same thing. And in fact, it’s not just the two minutes that you’re working at. If you’re working at a high enough level, you’ll feel like you’re out of breath beyond that. And it takes a bit longer to recover.

That’s something called epoch, which is excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. So basically you’ve exercised really, really hard. And now that you’ve stopped, it takes your body a bit longer to recover. That’s okay because that’s your body still working at a high enough cardiovascular level to improve your cardiovascular fitness. So a lot of people historically have thought that cardiovascular fitness or cardio or VO2 max was the most important marker for our health.

And really in the past probably 30 years, more in the last 20 years, and certainly in the last 10 years, that’s been kind of debunked a little bit. And it’s far more important to engage in strength training and or interval training to improve our fitness because we see the benefits, like you said, of our glycogen dump, but we also see our cardiovascular fitness, our cardiorespiratory fitness, our VO2 max increase.

And in fact, there was a study published in about 2015 that was a meta-analytic review of a number of papers, and they showed that in previously untrained people engaging in strength training, a circuit style strength training moving from one exercise to another for about 20 to 30 minutes once or twice per week, they improved their cardio respiratory fitness, they improved their VO2 max by about 10%. So it’s really important that we recognize these benefits of strength training and as you said concentrated cardio.

Yes and if you’re a person out there, there’s plenty of people out there that really don’t like long walks, runs, bikes, swimming. You know it’s just not appealing. It was sweating, breathing heavy for a long period of time. There’s just a lot of people out there that don’t enjoy that. It doesn’t feel good. And again, if you’re deconditioned, it doesn’t feel good because it’s harder to do that, right? But if that person can participate in a strength training, they’re gonna get so much benefit out of that. And that’s actually great news is that it doesn’t necessarily take an hour on a hard run that’s going to, you know, eventually perhaps harm your knees. You can get all these benefits out of strength training. And so if you really don’t enjoy this kind of thing, that’s really wonderful news for somebody like you as well. Great. Well, thank you for breaking all of this down. Is there anything we did not get to that makes sense to address when it comes to this topic?

Yeah, there’s one final thing that might be worth mentioning. We talked about how people can tell when they’re conditioned. But the other thing that’s worth thinking about is the specificity of an action and specifically a sport itself. So for example, nobody would argue that somebody who can run a marathon in two and a half or three hours is well conditioned.

They clearly have very good cardiovascular or cardiorespiratory fitness. They’ve probably got a very high VO2 max. But if you put them in a swimming pool, they suddenly won’t look very well conditioned at all, especially if they’re not a skilled swimmer. If they’re a skilled swimmer, they might still be okay, but if they’ve done all their training on land running and they’ve not practiced the technique, the specificity of swimming itself, then they’re not going to show up in that way. I think that strength training and concentrated cardio can be a great way to improve our conditioning for a sport. It might be racquetball or it might be baseball, it might be basketball, it might be skiing. You know, we can certainly improve our conditioning, but at the end of the day, if you take somebody that’s very well conditioned and you put them on a ski slope, the conditioning isn’t going to make them a great skier. If you take somebody that’s well conditioned and you put them on a ski slope, the conditioning isn’t going to make them a great skier. If you take someone that’s well conditioned and you put them on a basketball court, the conditioning isn’t going to make them a great basketball player, there’s a skill element to, to the sports and to some of the things that we do. So sometimes we can think, oh, I’ve been doing all this training, but I’ve not improved. But actually that’s simply a product of the specificity of the sport or the action that we’re undertaking.

Great point, great point. If you want to learn more about this, in season one of the Strength Changes Everything podcast, we have a series called What About Cardio? with Dr. Fisher. There’s three parts of it where we break it down into various elements of what cardiovascular fitness means and he and Brian discussed that at length. So if you’re wanting to learn more about this topic, please go back there and listen to those three episodes. We will see you next time on the podcast. I hope you remember, strength changes everything. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. You can submit a question or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com.

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