I loved the video! It was very interesting! I learned a lot!
I'm not doing this for pay, hahaha, so I'm just basing my summary on one viewing, but here is what I get from Dr. Kay:
- Long steady state cardio training is bad for your health, in fact VERY bad for your health in the long term. Humans are not designed nor evolved for this.
- Humans are designed for short, intense bursts.
- Humans are designed to almost always have their hearts in a non-challenged state, not an elevated state. Thus, sitting at the computer all week is actually the healthy thing to do, with the exception of three 40 minute sessions, one every second day, of 5 sets of very hard busts of exercise.
- Humans get fitter and healthier (in the ways that are related to exercise, obviously not speaking about diet or sleep here, just exercise) through working the hardest possible with the heaviest weight at the highest possible heart rate for brief spurts, i.e. by challenging ourselves.
- Long "easy distance" steady-state cardio training will make muscles smaller and weaker, and basically weaken you overall - not a good thing!
- Getting your heart rate up with heavy weight lifting is perfectly fine. What counts is the heart is pumping hard. So, whether it's by lifting a heavy weight slowly or sprinting as fast as possible, it doesn't matter as far as the heart is concerned. There are not "different types of cardio" - a hard pumping heart from exercise is a hard pumping heart, period.
- Isometrics are BAD for you. "Do not plank" etc... I suppose then that the TGU would not be favoured by Dr. Kay as it is semi-isometric.
- You can still get stronger over time with sub-maximal effort, but it will "take a long time".
The most effective way to train for overall health, and sport-specifically is:
- THREE sessions a week (every second day).
- The in-between day is critical for your body to build itself up stronger; you MUST REST every second day. He says. the "real training happens" on this resting day, so to speak, as your body rebuilds itself stronger in response to the challenge of the day before.
- Your training session should be no longer than 40 minutes.
- You should have FIVE short-ish bursts of full effort - if training for an event, then exactly specific to your event. (So, for judo, this would be 5 really hard judo matches!)
- Do NOT give your body time to fully recover before going onto the next set.
- Thus, the last set should feel like you can barely do it at all - I get the impression he is suggesting you won't be able to do as many reps or something like that. He seems almost dismissive of the last set, so this is why I interpret it like this.
He says all the talk of lactic acid is irrelevant, and that the burn we feel when exercising hard is just a signal to the brain of overall fatigue in the muscle.
My own reaction:
Dr. Kay,
Where are you getting that elevating your heart rate for long-ish periods of time exercising is a bad thing? This would mean going for a hike or long walk every day or two is terrible for me in the long term. I'm doomed then? Is not going for long walks something natural for humans and our animal ancestors over millions of years? So, walking around all day is going to kill us younger in life? This is a scary thought, and I don't quite understand if you are really telling us this. You might mean something a bit more nuanced, or maybe I'm just "slow" and am not getting what you are saying, sorry.
Maybe you are just saying that even if we _can_ walk for long periods of time, that we do not need to do it for our health, or that since it does not really count as real exercise, we are thus not actually getting proper exercise and thus we are not keeping healthy. Okay. Interesting. You certainly look fit to me, haha! You seem credible at least in this sense! Pavel has written me personally that S&S is perfectly decent "cardio", so Pavel would seem to agree with you here. (I hope I am not misconstruing Pavel's comments here. I think this is what he meant.)
My judo sessions are fairly intense but the actual "very hard work" is probably no more than 40 minutes of a class on average, I suppose. Kendo is a lot more demanding cardio-wise, I've found. But, my heart is kept elevated for hours at both. This is bad for me?
S&S (Pavel's "main programme") is all about reducing rest times to an appropriate amount before the next set, not by getting completely back to a "rested state". Pavel is not saying to start each next set totally fresh. Pavel's "talk test" is a simple way without using some kind of gadget to determine when would be a good time to start the next set _without_ getting too comfortable! Maybe a sports scientist would be able to calculate exact timings between sets or something, but who wants to recalculate some math every single time? Yikes! Pavel's research has determined that the talk test "does the trick". Although, maybe... just maybe this "talk test" method is indeed less efficient (and "too long" an interval) which might be why we do TEN sets instead of 5 in S&S. I definitely feel pretty "worked out" after an S&S session, but with something "left in the tank" for sure! Maybe it's more efficient to totally wipe yourself out for the sake of building strength faster. Maybe S&S is a slower, easier way of building strength. It being easier may be a good thing for a lot of us though! So it takes longer - so what? If it's done with less stress, less potential for injury, and therefore "so what?"
You never said why isometrics is bad. Seems too rigid to me generally, but sometimes having that rigidity is a good thing. I'd like more detail here.
"Calling out" Pavel for saying that such and such a Russian scientist "invented" plyometrics, because actually humans and other animals have been doing plyometrics naturally forever strikes me as a bit of a language trick. This Russian scientist presumably was the first to study it in some scientific way and maybe to give it a name. It's like calling out someone for saying that Bell "discovered" the telephone. But, I'm not going to base my assessment of your assessment of Pavel on the tone or on little slip-ups like this but on what can help me to arrive closer to the truth about exercise. I can get carried away too and mix in silly things with good things in my own arguments. We aren't all perfect creatures.
Conclusion:
Dr. Kay takes issue especially with Pavel's understanding of the chemistry involved in exercise. He seems very confident in his criticisms and gives an appearance of someone well versed in the science. I am ignorant of this science. Pavel has empirical evidence to prove his claims work. The empirical evidence is the only solid evidence we can have. The scientific evidence is certainly helpful, but it is always evolving, and at the end of the day it is the results that count. Whether I rest between sets of S&S because in my own mind it is to let my "lactic acid buildup" reduce down, or whether it's for some other chemical process that has nothing to do with lactic acid but in the end I get my desired results, materially speaking it mattereth not. The science of course matters too, but empirical evidence can be trusted more. In fact, the scientific method must end with empirical evidence and not left with suppositions only. I _do not_ get the impression that Dr. Kay knows much about Pavel's work outside of this one interview, and so his critique is limited to very little of Pavel's work and thought.
If I tried to explain the chemical reason for certain judo drills making you better at judo, I would fail miserably... but the drills would still make you better at judo. I know this from training and fighting in judo since 1988.
