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Old Forum heart rate question-again

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elli

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Hi all,
just to make sure, I would like to ask again:
If my goal is 100 swings in 5 minutes (every fourth week testing, doing "from simple to sinister"), should my heart rate stay within the 180-age and 160-age limits? And is the mission 100 in 5 only then accomplished, if the heart rate keeps that low?
Doing 100 in 5 is not a problem right now, but my heart rate is higher.
Thanks again in advanced:)
 
The S+S programme goals as written do not specify heart rate.

I think you would nearly have to be superhuman to swing any kind of bell 100x in 5 minutes and maintain aerobic heart rate.

I have been training keeping my heart rate nice and low (<138 for me) (long active rests 90-120 seconds between sets). However when I want to test myself against the clock I don't worry about heart rate, just form and power. When I can hit 100 in 5 minutes and 10 get-ups in 10 minutes with good form and power on any given day then it is time to start mixing in a heavier bell :eek:)
 
I am pretty new to the concept, but as I understand it, you want to keep your HR at or below 180-age for your regular training, but when you test yourself you don't worry about HR. The goal is to be able to do 10x10 swings in 5 minutes on any day you choose to, but you don't try to do that every day. Except for the times you test yourself, keep HR below 180-age.
 
Okay, thank you for answering!
I did the 10x10 this morning. It took me 9min18, I always started a new set when my heart rate was down to 126 (160-age) again after 10 swings. So it was pretty close to on the minute.
My average heart rate was 135. I am working with 16kg -left the 12kg just behind.
So I will not care about heart rate when doing the 5min test :)
My goal is to do my favorite workout (20,21,22,23,24,25 and back down to 20) with 16kg. Hope I can be there in 5-6 weeks?!
 
The spike in HR after a set of swings shouldn't exceed 180-age. You should be below 180-age the entire time. Is that what you meant?
 
Just train without excessive lactic acid buildup. Buffering lactic acid is itself an improveable training adaptation. Important to remember is that as exercise intensity and energy demand increases to the point where glycolysis - using "sugar" (glycogen) for energy - is needed, there's not some "switch" that flips that causes you to now be burning glucose instead of the fat you were burning earlier when your aerobic system was capable of fully meeting the energy demand. It's not "either/or". It is "both/and". But once you start burning glucose, a process called "glycolysis" that yields lots of ATP for a few minutes, there are some by-products like pyruvate and lactic acid. Lactic acid buildup gets blamed for "the burn" and your inability to continue to produce force at some point. Think about when your sprint turns into an increasingly uncomfortable run, then jog, then walk, then stop and barf. If you've ever run any "wind sprints" in preseason sports, you are familiar with this. You also know that Week 2 of that is much less horrible than Week 1, with less tendency to jump rapidly into lactic acid build up. You have "conditioned" your metabolic system to better meet the energy demands your activity places upon it. Also interesting is the role of the aerobic system during such repeated bouts of pretty intense effort. As you stand there huffing and puffing, it is a function of the aerobic system (and remember it is also ramped up to contribute all it can to the ATP pool this whole time) to clear out those lactic acid and pyruvate byproducts and actually re-cycle them back through a horribly complex chemical millworks called the "Krebs Cycle" - into more ATP. In other words, your aerobic system is being trained simultaneously. Well enough to be a competitive distance runner? No. But how many of us are here to learn about distance running? So ideally for sports prep, or other goals that require repeated near max efforts, we want to get really good at raising and lowering our heart rate (a proxy for intensity that nicely overlays the metabolic milieu), clearing lactic acid out of the system and reusing it, and efficiently melding all of God's energy systems in order to continue to repeat high efforts demanded by our sport or specific challenge like a snatch test. We can do this by visiting glycolysis in a manner that ramps it up, allows it to produce some lactic acid, does NOT allow lactic acid to build up like a lab mouse forced to sprint for 90 continuous minutes in a wheel causing overwhelming amounts of lactic acid resulting in physical damage, but rather allows recovery adequate to clear it via the aerobic system, then repeats the effort. As a side benefit, the energy demands of such training are astronomical, both during and for quite a while afterwards if for no other reason than the need to replace all the stored glycogen you just ripped outta your liver and muscles.
 
Bill, well said. Mild acidosis—slight local muscular fatigue—stimulates mitochondrial adaption. Heavy acidosis kills mitochondria as they blow up with water trying to buffer all the H+.
 
Pavel,

Where does the idea of keeping HR at or below 180-age fit into all of this?
 
Is it my imagination that I sometimes see an edit function and sometimes I do not?

Bill,

How does one know if they are going into glycolysis to a productive amount but not beyond?
 
You read that Wall Of Text?!!?

As we discussed a bit in the "Heart Rate Monitor" thread, there are some roughly-coincident heart rate "zones" available to guide us. Much like the Maffetone Running derived 180 minus Age formula for staying solidly aerobic dominant, they'll be close for most people most of the time which I say despite my recent experience indicating my wife and my daughter both have heart rates seemingly more closely related to field mice than any of these "zones". The "scare quote" quotation marks around the word "zones" is to reiterate the fact that all energy systems operate all the time, just to widely variable degrees. I am guessing that in the Maffetone running session there is a tiny bit of glycolysis going on, and there's lactic acid being produced, but it's far, far below the production that would overwhelm your ability to clear it. That's just for clarification: there is no "fat-burning aerobic zone". Okay, so we've decided to train at a higher intensity because the intermittent, repeated, very high force production nature of our sport require it or because we want to kick butt on our snatch test and be able to recover to kick it again during the Grad Workout. How do we visit this "alactic, glycolytic" training intensity wherein we produce significant lactic acid, but through repeated exposure become much better at processing it thereby keeping it from degrading performance? We can use heart rate as a proxy for intensity, backed-up by what we actually feel going on in our bodies.

I'm referencing a piece by Matt Reynolds, owner of Strong Gym in MO, called "Death By Prowler". It's available here: http://startingstrength.com/articles/death_by_prowler_reynolds.pdf
The programming late in the article is obviously specific to the Prowler, but earlier in the piece there's the best layman's description I've yet seen of cell energetics and what we're actually trying to accomplish with "conditioning" or "MetCons" and how to tune them to meet your goals. The various heart rate zones described therein would be widely applicable to your chosen activity, be it swings, hill sprints, crawling dragging a chain, rowing, whatever. Matt and the rest of the coaches over there clearly believe in the efficacy of sled pushes , but the principles are clearly applicable across them all.
For the record, I consider it somewhat bad form for me to have linked an article from another site, but I think cutting and pasting the content would have been even poorer form. I go kinda ballistic about protecting intellectual property and want to make sure authors get due credit and an accurate presentation of their material.
 
Bill,

I have heard it stated enough times that each energy pathway is active all of the time, but in varying degrees, that I GET it! I over generalize in order to save the trouble of stating that each and every time.

I agree with you that each of the pathways are by God. I appreciate you saying so. But, after the fall, and then after the flood, things might have changed a bit and we might need to accommodate the changes.
 
Allright, thanks for the elaborated post.
Do not get angry...did I get it right: you have a maximum and minimum limit of heart rate. Let's say 146 and 126. You set the timer for 10 minutes. You do swings. Every time you hit the upper limit, you stop swinging and rest until you are at the lower limit again, then you start the next set. The better you get, the more sets you will be able to do within the 10 minutes.

Two question remain:
1. No more HIIT,like the Tabata protocol, which should "burn more fat".
2. More rest between sets for gaining strength?
 
Yes you've accurately described one of the more advanced or "aggressive" approaches. "Aggressive" because those will be very short rests.

1. Tabatas are a particular format of HIIT. With such short rests, they're clearly going to lead to lactic acid buildup, which from my limited understanding has its place in areas like wrestling and BJJ where the high-intensity effort has no built-in pauses like football, basketball, even soccer and rugby. In fact, if memory serves Tabata the coach developed them for all-out sprint speed skating athletes.

2. This isn't strength training, it's conditioning. Specifically, it's training your ability to produce cellular energy, not your ability to generate muscular force. My heart rate coming out from under a set of 5 barbell back squats is pretty high 84% or so, and after two more sets plus warmups and 3 work sets of presses then warmups plus a heavy set of 5 deadlifts, the HR trace does resemble a prolonged bout of interval exercise. Which may be why we see conditioning travel so well with strength work as we strive to get strong...first. Nonetheless, don't conflate the two. My barbell training has a reasonable conditioning component inherent in it, but hat doesn't mean it's a time-efficient way to condition. Pushing my Prowler around may very well add a bit of force production capability, but that doesn't mean it's an efficient way to get strong. If you're going to work on strength, do so: Rite Of Passage, Kettlebell Strong, Power To The People, Starting Strength, etc. When you want to condition, do that. Trying to focus on everything all at once is "exercise" not "training". "Training" is a focused, measurable, goal oriented, process-driven thing.
 
Jeffrey,
I am truly sorry if you took anything I said as directed at you. It truly was not. I used and explained the "scare quotes" because I was just figuring what I was about to write about would be a bit "counter-cultural" for some folks who've been hearing about the "fat burning aerobic zone" all their lives and I still wanted to use the word.
If any of my famous sarcasm seeped into what I wrote, it is directed at the idea that the glycolytic energy system unavoidably and inevitably raises blood acidity to levels dangerous enough to damage mitochondria and must be avoided. That idea seems to drive the aerobic-only training paradigm that popped up and suddenly had everyone trying to progress Simple & Sinister exclusively in the aerobic energy system.
Such things start to develop a life of their own and can take a long time to die. Look how long it has taken for the "high bridge" hips position in the Get Up to die. Or the idea that leading the backswing with your Pinkie will cause you to arm bar yourself.
 
Bill,

I didn't take offense at anything. I just meant to say that we sometimes speak in generalities because it takes too long to fully articulate every fine point in every sentence. Sometimes you have to understand from the context if a statement is meant to be absolute or general in nature.

To be honest, recent discussions led me to the conclusion that I needed to stay in the aerobic zone during the conditioning phase of S&S. Now I am confused as to what to do. I don't believe there are any contradictions in truth, but sometimes a failure to connect the dots.

I have never cared about the fat burning zone. The way I see it is there are 3,500 kcalories in a pound of fat. Nobody is burning enough calories or fat in a workout to actually matter. The key to body composition is to gain muscle, elevate metabolism, and eat smart.
 
Bill, great posts, thanks!

I agree and am glad you've mentioned the odd idea which has developed a life of its own where you have to stay in the aerobic zone while doing S&S.
My understanding of Maffetone is that it was developed in the context of ultras - and useful in that sort of training.
An interesting aside (for the other heart rate thread) - but people have trained themselves intuitively without heart rate monitors along the lines of Maffetone. And the simplicity of a kettlebell and the Russian style of training is almost anti-HRM.
 
Matt,

It looks to me like Bill and Al are coming at this from two different directions. From the posts and articles both on this site as well as the links to other sites, I get the impression that conditioning the way Bill describes it comes at a longer term cost to health.

About the aside, training intuitively is like training by feelings, and feelings can be so deceptive, and slanted by what you have accustomed yourself to.
 
Knowing that I might be mixing up the content of this thread and the other heart rate one...
1. It is condinitioning, not strength (although I become stronger by swinging?!)
2. Do not overdo it by pushing your heartrate too high too often
3. Try to stay within your limits
4. From time to time go and push the limits...it might be the the swing test (100) every four weeks
5. I do not want to miss my beloved hiit less often than four or three times a month. If I feel like, I will spread it in and keep the other sessions easy.
easier when easy, harder when hard?!
 
Sorry folks, I have been out of pocket with personal issues.

Jeffrey... Bill and I are saying mostly the same thing. He is certainly more focused with prep than I, being more focused on health and wellness, and wiping your own a#@ on that list day. Perhaps I am more conservative than he. As he said, HR is a marker of intensity, which a lot of people "get" without the need for the HR monitor. But, as many are brainwashed into high-intensity, the lack of a HR monitor, and going by feel, causes many to be too intense during their sessions.

Who mentioned, aerobic "zone"?
 
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