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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

As an anecdote of one, I was doing moderate intensity endurance exercise for a couple years with only modest improvements in basic cardiovascular metrics that kind of flatlined over time.

As an experiment, I switched to high-intensity interval type training for a couple months, which required about half the time to do. All of my cardiovascular metrics immediately changed in a strongly positive way. When I did the old endurance training, performance was much higher than it had been before the high-intensity training.

It is the strongest positive effect I have ever seen from any exercise/gym theory that has been widely promulgated. I never expected to see my cardiovascular metrics change as quickly or as much as they did.

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You probably spent all that time training your cardiovascular base, which takes a long time to do. Then, you capped them off with anaerobic gains that were only possible with that prior work.

For optimum gain you should mix moderate exercise with intense exercise, but the time you put in likely made your later success possible.

To be competitive in the sport, you need the pyramid method with the high volume base of light effort, middle of volume of sold effort (e.g. lactate threshold work) and a peak of intensity (e.g. interval training).

This is about health.

High volume of exercise is damaging via oxidative stress and other ways. Weekly training volume is the most reliable predictor for injuries.

If health and basic fitness is the goal, rather than bringing home the gold, you can add intensity to just a fairly small volume of moderate exercise, or perhaps even none at all, other than a warmup and cooldown.

> Weekly training volume is the most reliable predictor for injuries.

Yep! I tend to do too much (because I like exercising), so I have be deliberate about including light training and recovery days. Absolutely necessary for injury avoidance, and frankly overall health benefits.

Exactly.

I did this on purpose this spring.

I had a shitty winter in terms of endurance and was pretty much starting from the gutter in February. Spring and early summer we're stressful so I did mostly Z1/LSD cycling in the form of extended commuting from work to home. Nothing excessive though as stress was plentiful.

The estimated fitness or the Garmin estimate didn't budge much.

Once vacation started I kept this on for few weeks to recover and after that added few harder sessions in a two week period. Few weeks after this I felt the change and Garmin also estimated 6 mil's of added VO2MAX in a week.

Don't care about the metrics, but the added QOL from this and now I hopefully have a structure for the coming winter not to lose as much of this as the previous.

That sounds exactly like what one should do for, say, couch to 10k: build a solid base in "zone 2" (low aerobic), which also serves not just as a cardio foundation but also builds the body's ability to withstand effort and impact.

Then once the base is built, to make any progress one needs stronger, more focused stimulus, so you introduce interval training at high aerobic (tempo and threshold paces) as well as anaerobic (400-800 "very hard" sustained and all-out sprints) training, combined with a few zone 2 long runs.

And then the cycle repeats: you have to let the body recover so deload, then start a new cycle.

Nicklas Rossner has fantastic resources; there's a video there that explains how to find your current bottleneck: https://m.youtube.com/@NicklasRossnerPT

There's a lot of noise and confusion about what exactly "zone 2" is and why. But definitely longer easier (you're not out of breath) runs build a foundation in more ways than just your cardiovascular system. It's those other components that take a longer time to build. The key is that you are not over-training (watch your sleep and joint pain as an indicator) and can recover and that you are progressively increasing your load by lessay ~10% distance a week. Easy system would be 2 shorter runs and one longer run a week.

There are plenty of online training program generators that are pretty good and will take you from zero to running 10k. I used an online program to run my first 10k somewhere circa 1990.

There a lot of more cutting edge science online (and I follow Nick as well) but if you're not a competitive athlete and are just trying to get in better shape then the answer is mostly just do it. Over some base of running you can throw in some interval training including HIIT.

I was running 10km 3x per week for a few years. When I started swapping some of those runs for HIIT, performance on the remaining 10km runs very noticeably improved in addition to the cardio metrics.

To be clear, performance-maxxing was never the objective. I am in it for the health benefits and conditioning for grueling pursuits. Nonetheless, observable effects of different kinds of training on performance are still interesting to me and helps me optimize the time I spend on it.

Are you able to point out which video explains how to find your current bottleneck? I suspect its something I would find quite useful! Unfortunately most of the videos have quite "clickbaity" titles, which makes it hard to figure out what they are about.

On mobile RN. I'll try to find it once I'm on a desktop.

I had a distinct visual diagram in mind that I can't find again. Maybe my memory is fuzzy and mixed those two:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ElWvS2b0c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd_E_OveCPQ

I don't know which video it is either, but what I've found helpful is checking aerobic decoupling. If your heart rate is drifting upward significantly over the course of an hourlong easy run despite not increasing your pace or power, then the bottleneck is probably your aerobic engine. I don't track it daily because it's a noisy metric, but looking at the overall distribution is useful.

After that it's probably determining your LTHR accurately (don't just accept what your Garmin or Apple Watch says it is). This gives a better sense of how hard to push on your hard days, and it's also useful to see what % of HRmax your threshold lands at.

Anyone starting from the couch just needs to start. I started by just pursuing a goal of "run a mile without stopping", then 2, etc.

I've messed with zone 2 a bit and read a fair amount about it. If it gets you out there moving consistently: great. The best workout plan is the one you do. But otherwise I really think it's more of an optimization strategy for people who are trying to seriously increase their miles per week, and are pairing it with higher-intensity runs and/or weight training.

HIIT can have a pretty quick impact on your VO2MAX but that is going to level off. As others have said you will want a more balanced routine in the long run.

It is also possible you were over-training in your "moderate" intensity or conversely not increasing the load/distance enough. Training over years should result in good improvement even without HIIT. You will need to put a lot more time in.

I have a pretty diverse training load these days. Hiking, mountaineering, running, plus a few sports and some resistance. While I have overtrained in the past on running in particular, it was mostly due to lack of diversity. Nonetheless, none of those things puts the same load on the body as HIIT.

To be clear, I was objectively in good cardiovascular condition before adding HIIT. My resting heart rate has been in the 40s for years. The surprise was that there was so much easy margin left by adding HIIT to my regimen.

If your heart rate has been in the 40s for years your cardiovascular system is at the peak of what’s possible. It’s not “pretty good”. A resting heart rate in the 30s is the kind of thing Olympic distance runners touch on. You are either exaggerating or your assessment of what’s normal is way off. Most very fit people have resting rates in the 50s and 60s.

I never implied my cardio fitness was poor, just that some metrics are relatively better than others. My RHR (currently 47-48 per various fitness trackers) has always been pretty elite. I don’t think about it and it doesn’t change much except in response to stress.

I’m more interested in getting into the 90+ percentile range on the cardio metrics where I’m closer to the average. I don’t obsess over it, it is just interesting to see how different activities that I was going to do anyway move the needle.

Or, like me, who has never been a runner, a heart rate in the 30's can mean that you have heart block, an electrical problem with your heart where beats are gradually spaced further apart and then there is a longish delay before a reset. In a recent 2-week heart monitor test, my longest delay was 3 seconds and I had 4 of these. There are different types of heart block: mine is type 1 Mobitz/Wenckebach. Not really dangerous - I've had it all my life and known about it for ~35 years. It shows up on all of the modern automatic heart/blood pressure machines because the delays cause unusually low readings whereas a nurse checking your pulse may miss it.

My average heart rate on the test was 58, lowest was 21 (for 3 seconds), and highest was 250 (for 6 beats). A few minutes after getting in bed, my heart rate regularly is in the 40s and sometimes low 30s.

Your body gets used to the exercise. You have to constantly change it, otherwise you not gonna get the same thrill.

What metrics were you tracking that moved?

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