It was strange. I had just been hired as an editor for Triathlete magazine in the spring of 1994, and as I leafed through a decade of back issues I noticed that triathlon superstar Mark Allen seemed to begrowing more muscular as he aged. What was happening?
"I was lifting weights," replied the then-soon-to-be six-time winner of the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii. "It seemed like all this relentless swim/bike/run was wearing down my muscles and fatiguing me by the end of the season--just when I needed to peak for Kana [Ironman]. So a few years ago, I started weightlifting in season. Now Ifeel much stronger all year long."
Although that wouldn't raise the eyebrows of any regular reader ofMUSCLE & FITNESS, it was a revelation to me at the time. It was gospel back then that hours upon hours of cardio workouts were the key tolongevity, vitality and a fitter physique. You mean excessive aerobic activity can actually wear you down? It didn't occur to me that getting enough calories to prevent catabolism is a real issue among ultra-distance athletes, as are hormonal imbalances from the freakishly long hours of physical stress.
Back then, two-time Ironman winner Scott Tinley was telling everyone that a decade of running 100 miles and cycling 300 miles every week had blown his adrenal glands. He hadn't been competitive in years. Some superfit tri-women looked gaunt and wasted; many, it turned out,were no longer menstruating. Tales of heart arrhythmias and sicknessabounded. Yes, aerobic activity is good for you, burning calories and strengthening the heart and cardiovascular system. But while the American College of Sports Medicine (Indianapolis) recommends 30 minutes of it six days a week, elite endurance athletes were going hard for25-30 hours a week.
At some point--with the number of athletes experiencing shrivelingmuscle mass, illnesses and scrambled hormones growing--I had to wonder: Can there be too much of a good thing? Yes, says Kenneth Cooper, MD, the Air Force physician who watched his 1968 best seller Aerobics(Bantam Books) launch a fitness revolution.
"In that book I said, 'The more exercise, the better.' But by 1982, after too many telephone calls from distraught widows whose 55-year-old, overweight, smoker husbands had died jogging, I realized I had made a mistake," Cooper says. "Exercise wasn't a panacea that could fix everything, and it had risks."
Cooper became concerned about what he calls the Lance Armstrong Syndrome, when endurance athletes contract odd diseases: Sub-four-minute miler Steve Scott and Armstrong were both diagnosed with testicularcancer; ice skater Scott Hamilton had cystic fibrosis; and legendaryrunners John Walker and Marty Liquori suffered from Parkinson's and lymphatic cancer, respectively.
Citing German studies that showed DNA damage to cells after exercise to exhaustion, and reports of declines in testosterone, increases in cortisol (a muscle-wasting hormone), hemolysis (destruction of redblood cells) and amenorrhea (failure to menstruate) in overtrained athletes, Cooper concedes, "There may be a point of diminishing returns" with aerobic exercise. He now warns against overtraining, promotesantioxidants--his 1994 best seller Antioxidant Revolution (World Publications Inc.) introduced the term--and recommends that patients at his famous Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas limit aerobic exercise to30 minutes, four days a week and add weightlifting as they age.
While M&F readers may nod knowingly, you might not know that a newschool of thought says any moderately difficult steady-state cardio--the kind most active people do--is too much.
According to Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint (Primal Nutrition Inc., 2009) and the popular health site marksdailyapple.com,aerobic activities should replicate actions that are preprogrammed into our genes by our hunter-gatherer ancestors: sprinting (to catch or escape from animals) and striding (tracking game or gathering food), which would include fast walking, hiking, light jogging, moderate cycling and other relatively unchallenging activities.
"I wanted to get the strongest, leanest and healthiest body with the least amount of work, so I looked to our ancestors," Sisson says. "They certainly didn't run at 70% of their [VO.sub.2] maxes for 30-45minutes a day. That kind of activity can wear you out, lower your testosterone and increase the Cortisol pumped by your adrenal glands because they think you're infight-or-flight mode. Doing it once in a while is no big deal, but every day is a problem."
That's why Sisson--a former competitive runner who once ran a 2:20marathon and finished fourth in the 1982 Hawaii Ironman before descending into a classic overtraining spiral that left him osteoarthriticand his muscles drenched in Cortisol--does one day of sprints a week: 5-6 40-second, all-out intervals with 2-3 minutes of rest in between.
His rejection of steady-state cardio in favor of sprints and low-exertion aerobics is supported by Carl Foster, PhD, a sport scientist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, who has conducted many performance studies on runners and speedskaters. He says moderately hardsteady-state cardio hurts running performance and should be avoided.He even has a name for it: the Black Hole.
"The Black Hole--dubbed by my colleague Stephen Seiler, PhD, of Agdar University (Kristiansand, Norway)--is a training pace that isn't hard enough for you to improve nor easy enough for you to recover," Foster says. He describes it as the routine most cardio proponents follow day after day: a somewhat hard speed for 30-60 minutes that gets their feel-good endorphins flowing. In fact, Cooper calls this zone the Endorphin Trap because it tricks you into running too much, leading to repetitive-motion injuries. In a 2007 study in The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, Foster and Seiler found that runners who spent less time in the Black Hole (technically, the narrow heart-rate zone in which blood lactate sharply increases) ran faster than those who stayed in that zone longer. They accomplished this by doing hard intervals one day and slow recovery runs the next.
Don't be surprised that this go-hard/go-easy cardio strategy sounds a lot like weightlifting with its typical rest days between hard training sessions. Your body works the same whether the activity you choose is musculoskeletal or cardiovascular.
What's the take-home lesson here? Excessive cardio can wear you down if you don't eat enough and vary your training, but done correctly, running and other forms of cardio are great complements to strengthtraining and help expand the cardiovascular highway that helps fuel muscles. Regular cardio shouldn't burn up hard-earned muscle if you follow a sprint/recovery plan, re-supply nutrients and avoid slipping into the Black Hole.
The proper cardio plan requires some scheduling. Steer clear of stacking a high-intensity interval training (HUT) session and a hard weight workout, as one won't allow recovery from the other if you use the same bodyparts. Instead, follow a hard upper-body weight session with a HIIT-run or HIIT-bike workout, or pair a hard lower-body routine with a swim. In both cases, you'd rest the next day to heal and recharge. M&F
At age 56 Mark Sisson, former elite marathoner and triathlete, is far more ripped than in the prime of his athletic career. He didn't get shredded just because he eschewed moderately hard, steady-state aerobic workouts; he also dropped the grain-based carbs and sugars he consumed for fuel. Carbs from corn, rice and wheat cause a lot of problems, he says: everything from obesity to cancer, diabetes and more.
If you're training for an Ironman triathlon or a marathon, carbs are necessary to replenish glycogen supplies. In fact, eating as many carbs as you want can be one attraction of the endurance lifestyle. Yet the carbs needed to fuel your muscles and help them recover dump ahuge amount of insulin into your system, and chronically elevated insulin levels promote inflammation and fat storage. Scientists will tell you that in a non-diabetic population, insulin is one of the best markers of longevity: The less you produce, the longer you live. The wake-up call for the long-distance set is that just because the carbsdon't appear around the midsection doesn't mean they don't have a deleterious effect.
While Sisson didn't grow obese from the carb overload, it did cause a "continuous systemic inflammation that severely suppressed my immune system. The constant aerobics left me soaking in my own internal stress-hormone bath, and tore apart my joint and muscle tissue," he says.
Sisson stopped his steady-state running and started eating more animal protein, colorful vegetables and fruits (mainly berries), and healthy fats, as well as less sugar, and fewer refined and whole-grain carbs.
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