Podcast #1,099: Strong, Conditioned, and Ready for Anything — How to Become a Hybrid Athlete - The Art of Manliness.

January 6Jan 6

For decades, fitness culture has tended to break people into two categories: you’re either a strength guy or an endurance guy. You lift heavy or run far — but not both.

But my guest today says you don’t have to choose; you can excel at both modalities and be ready for anything.

Alex Viada is a coach, a physiologist, and the author of The Hybrid Athlete. He’s a powerlifter who’s also completed Ironman triathlons, and he’s deadlifted 700 pounds and run an ultramarathon in the same week. Even if your goals are much more modest — you’d like to, say, set some weightlifting PRs in the gym and be able to run a decent 5k — Alex’s training philosophy can help you combine lifting and endurance in a smart, sustainable way that builds true all-around fitness.

In our conversation, Alex explains how to combine training for strength with distance sports like running or cycling, how to test your progress, how to recognize and avoid the two kinds of fatigue, and why becoming a hybrid athlete will help you live more adventurously — and more capably.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Connect With Alex Viada

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. For decades, fitness culture has tended to break people into two categories. You’re either a strength guy or an endurance guy. You lift heavy or run far, but not both. But my guest today says you don’t have to choose. You can excel at both modalities and be ready for anything. Alex Viada is a coach, a physiologist, and the author of The Ultimate Hybrid Athlete. He’s a powerlifter who’s also completed Ironman triathlons and he’s deadlifted 700 pounds and run an ultra marathon in the same week. Even if your goals are much more modest, you’d like to say set some weightlifting PRs in the gym and be able to run a decent 5K. Alex’s training philosophy can help you combine lifting and endurance in a smart and sustainable way that builds true all around fitness. In our conversation, Alex explains how to combine training for strength with distance sports like running, how to test your progress, how to recognize and avoid the two kinds of fatigue, and why becoming a hybrid athlete will help you live more adventurously and more capably. After show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/hybridathlete. All right, Alex Viada, welcome back to the show,

Alex Viada:

Thank you very much.

Brett McKay:

So we had you on the podcast in 2023. We talked all about zone two cardio, right? And I wanted to bring you back on because you’ve got a book out. You’ve written the book on a fitness approach called hybrid training, and this combines strength training with endurance training. So this is if you want to be a power lifter and run ultra-marathons at the same time, I think to better understand hybrid training, I think it would be useful to talk about your own fitness background. How has your approach to strength and fitness evolved over the years and how did it eventually lead to hybrid training?

Alex Viada:

Sure. Yes. So my first fitness started, I was actually back in, oh gosh, even pre elementary school days, always really active kid. Did a lot of different sports all through elementary school, middle school, high school, everything I could get thrown into everything from football, boxing tracks, swimming, tennis, whatever. And went to college, went to a D1 school and was clearly not good enough to play on any team. So for the first couple of years of college, I lost the ability to do anything except I still ate like a 17-year-old who was playing six different sports. So got really out of shape finally by my senior year, dialed it back in, got back into shape, got back into shape primarily through lifting, got really into lifting heavy, got really into power lifting, got a lot of enjoyment out of it. And after a couple of years I was just chatting with some friends and long story short, got challenged to run a 5K with them.

The training for that, the first session was probably one of the most eyeopening slash embarrassing slash I just realized all my fitness that I had for most of my youth was gone. I was a one trick pony and I hated it. So I kind of resolved. I said, all right, I’m a power lifter. In talking to runners, none of them know how to still run while respecting my lifting. All of them say, well yeah, I don’t know how you do both. So I made it this personal experiment and for the next couple of years I tried and failed magnificently to combine them all. And after a couple more years, I finally got better at it and started branching out. I kept progressing into lifting, really got into long distance cycling, got into more long distance running events, and really the whole practice at that point just became, alright, let’s come up with a methodology. Let’s talk about the system that I actually used to be able to train for all these things without crashing and burning in any of them.

Brett McKay:

So you’re doing cycling, you’re doing running, have you done marathons?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, I’ve done a couple of marathons, done a couple of ultras, done a few Ironman triathlons and on the endurance side of things, I was far from elite. I had some decent performances here and there, but the events, I like doing the ultra long distance ones. I’ve just always been a little too heavy to do them really fast and efficiently. But I enjoyed them, enjoyed ’em a lot, really liked doing things like long mountain hikes, big summits, things like that. Yeah, so really just kind of tried to do a little bit of everything. Like I said, I think what I enjoy and what I’ve always maintained is that this is all about developing the capability to go do fun things.

Brett McKay:

So what are the benefits of hybrid training? Why would someone want to do it? Let’s say they’re a powerlifter and they’re like, this is just my thing, I’ll just focus on that. Or let’s say they’re just a runner. Why would I want to start powerlifting? What are the benefits you think?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, it’s funny because it’s very easy to stay with one sport and say, Hey man, this is everything I want. Why would I start doing any sort of hybrid training? I mean, the first is, and this is kind of the most cliche slash boring one is honestly health, single-minded pursuit of any one sport does not typically lead to the best health outcomes. And we can see that for people who do nothing but run, there’s kind of this almost dose dependent, inverted U curve in terms of running and health where a little bit of it to a good bit of it is quite good for you, but when you really become all into it, it leads to all sorts of other problems. Same with lifting. To be healthy when you get older is all about good cardiovascular health. It’s about maintaining muscle size, bone density coordination, all those things and training for all that training to keep all that requires some sort of hybrid approach.

But again, that’s kind of that quote boring one. The second one would be simply because you want to try new things, and I think a lot of people, they think, okay, yeah, I’m a gym rat. I love lifting heavy or I’m a runner. A lot of times people might have some level of interest in what is the draw behind this? You’re a powerlifter, you love spending time in the gym. You might very well say, yeah, I wish I could just go hike that mountain and go camping or go hiking with the kids or go backwards hunting or anything else. And you might feel like that path is shut off to you because you’ve never trained for it. You think I’m a big strong guy, but if I have to walk five miles, I’m done. And I think it’s allowing yourself as an individual to say, well, there’s some exciting stuff out there. I want to try that. I want to feel like I can dip my toe in any activity and at least give a credible shot.

Brett McKay:

I was going to say I can see the appeal of that. So I’m a strength guy. I just do power lifting. The major barbell lifts. In this past Thanksgiving, I did a Turkey trot. It was a 5K, a little shorter than a 5K. And man, I’ll tell you I got winded. I mean I was kind of proud of myself. I kind of stuck with it for maybe the first mile and a half and then eventually I had my hands on my head huffing and puffing walking.

Alex Viada:

But it’s cool though, right? You’re like, Hey man, I’m out here. I’m with family, I’m doing this, and it doesn’t even have to be about saying, all right, next year I’m going to be top 10% of my age group, I’m going to be up. Nah, sometimes it’s just saying, Hey, you know what? Maybe if I find a way to just incorporate a little bit of intelligent running into my program, I can keep going out and doing these things and say, Hey man, yeah, I gave it a shot. Yeah, I felt good about it. And I think that’s really, it doesn’t have to be about pursuing elite performance in these other things sometimes just saying, yeah, I want to go out with the family and do this. That sounds cool.

Brett McKay:

I’m curious, whenever you are dealing with clients who come from, let’s say just a strength background, what are the biggest challenges that they have in starting like, okay, I’m going to start running 5Ks or a marathon?

Alex Viada:

I think sometimes one of the biggest challenges of course is body type because typically a lot of lifters, not only do they tend to be a little bit bigger than the average runner or a lot bit bigger than the average runner, but a lot of lifters over time, you’ve got a lot of what I would call functional tightness and different functional ranges of motion. As much as I hate that term, a lot of lifters can be a little bit tighter in the hip. Sometimes ankle mobility may not be. Sometimes things like running efficiency, like quick rebound, a lot of things that are developed through plyometrics, some lifters may not have, some do, certainly there are some lifters out there who take great paints to do this, but there are a lot of things in your running mechanics that may be slightly off because you spent so long in your career training in certain body positions, training certain muscles, training for maximum strength.

So I think a lot of lifters who go to running find running just extremely uncomfortable at first. The gait doesn’t feel natural, everything gets sore really, really quickly. So one of the biggest things is just getting lifters kind of loose, limber and feeling good about running. And one of the great things is things like plyometrics are great for runners of all levels. They will just make you a faster, more efficient runner, whatever you do, and a lot of lifters take really well to plyometrics just because you’re like, Hey, this is explosive power. I can kind of vibe with this. And getting a lot of lifters just into running and having them start doing some plyometrics, they go, oh wow, this is a good challenge. I feel uncoordinated, but I don’t feel wildly out of my element. And sure enough, they immediately start becoming better rudders on top of it.

Brett McKay:

What about endurance athletes transferring over to strength training, like power lifting or something like that, or even power building, combining hypertrophy training with it?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, I think one of the toughest things there is I think lifting and inherently, it’s not that it requires a greater pain tolerance by far. I mean endurance sports actually do require a greater pain tolerance slash threshold than lifting, but lifting is very much about momentary discomfort and second to second aggression, being able to attack a lift, being able to get that level of dial digression and also to deal with that level of full body strain, the increase in interabdominal pressure, the sudden axial loading, things like that. A lot of endurance athletes, it’s not that they’re worse at that than the average person. I think it’s very much a surprise. It’s a very different way of approaching exercise. It’s a completely different mindset. Running is very much about managing discomfort, running is about breathing and getting in the zone and everything else, and for a lot of lifting is an inherently straining activity. And I think getting into that mindset and saying, all right, this is going to require a different way of thinking about exercise and a different way of thinking about effort, that’s one of the hardest things.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a different kind of hurt.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Like you said, it’s a different type of exertion. When you lift weights,

Alex Viada:

That’s kind of it. You’re under a heavy squat, you feel the bar in your back pushing on your neck, you’ve got that intraabdominal pressure, you’ve got a lure to that strain in your knees and hips. It’s a very different sort of thing and you have to be the mindset for it.

Brett McKay:

So I imagine a lot of people who have a focus on one fitness modality, so if they’re strength training doing hypertrophy, they probably are the mindset I want to see progress. I want to be able to test myself to see if I’m making progress. And so for a strength athlete that’s going to be every once in a while you’re going to do a one rep max lift all exertion to see, okay, how am I doing with my strength with an endurance athlete, I imagine it’s the same thing. They had this focus, I want to get better. I want to be able to run longer, faster, and so they’re going to do a marathon or a 5K and try to beat their best time with hybrid training, you’re training both of these things at the same time, strength and endurance. How do you test to see how you’re doing? Are there challenges you set up for yourself like, okay, I’m going to deadlift 600 pounds and then immediately afterwards go run a marathon or what does that look like for you?

Alex Viada:

See, that’s actually a really, really good question because there is a whole subset of hybrid athletes are all about the challenges and there are all these numbered challenges and combinations of events and everything else. And to me, my view of hybrid training has always been, yes, you’re training for different sports, but you want to train to be capable at any moment. And one of the ways that I personally do a lot of my endurance training, a lot of my lifting training when I first put together my programmer first start a new client or start a training cycle, I have a pretty good idea of what my one rep maxes are and kind of what my running threshold is, that lactate threshold slash a little bit like the 5K slash 10K pace, somewhere in between there and I know what those numbers are and as I put together my program, my workouts for the week or for the month, I’m thinking, okay, this week I’m lifting 90% for X number on the bench press and then 85% on my max for x number of repetition, so on and so forth on the running and going, okay, this week this workout is three by 10 minutes at 97% of my threshold.

Okay, great. And so what I’ll do is I’ll run those for a couple of weeks, then what I do is I take that one rep max or threshold number and say, okay, these workouts are getting easy. Let me recalculate all this based on a five pound increase in my one rep max or a five second per mile improvement in my threshold pace. The next week or next two weeks I run these new numbers, everything seems good, I’m still getting them done. I’ll increase it again. So what happens when you do this, you’re not actually retesting your one red max. What you’re doing is you’re estimating your peak performance and seeing how all of this max training matches up to it. And this doesn’t sound very exciting, but it’s sort of like the thing you realize when, hey, I’m doing my old max for a triple now my max is clearly better, or yeah, I’m doing 10 minute intervals at a pace where I could barely run three minutes a couple months ago.

A lot of this type of continuous reevaluation, I’ll tell people set benchmarks for yourself, a specific run, a specific run course, a circuit, a workout, same thing with the lifting. Know kind of how a triple feels and how five reps feels and as you progress, as things get easier, continue to challenge yourself by upping those. You don’t ever have to test your max. So that way when you’re finally ready for an event, you can say, cool, alright, well my threshold is now this. Let me test it. There should be no question in your mind which you can hit. Now I know a lot of people like to say, oh, well I like getting benchmarks every couple of weeks, every couple of months. But my thing with benchmarks is they always disrupt the training and my whole thing is just keep doing quality work as long as you can until you actually need to test it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, going for a benchmark does disrupt your training. I’ve seen that in my own strength training. Whenever I do go for a one rep PR, I’m out for a couple days. The amount of fatigue that you build up in just that one single exertion, it fries you.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, and the thing is it can also be mentally tough because especially in a hybrid program, and one of the reasons I use this method is because fatigue always masks fitness. The lifting you’re doing might make some of your fast runs feel a little bit harder and the running you’re doing might make your lifting feel a little bit more challenging. So I’m like, hey, if you are really going to take a test, a benchmark and you’ve really got to peak for it or you’ve got to taper for it, you got to pretty much take a whole week off of training for both to let yourself recover so you can really test an honest benchmark and that gets disruptive. So I’m like, hey, always just have an ongoing sense of what your performance is, check your current performance against benchmark workouts, ones that are sub max, but you know how you perform and you’ll always be able to tell where you stand and I mean using this method, I’ve got some marathon runs. I’ve got one person I work with on marathons, just as a recent example, her running threshold went up by 45 seconds per mile over the course of eight months, and just by tracking her threshold and telling her to run at a certain percentage of that threshold, I was able to get her marathon time. Her final marathon time was within I think 45 seconds of what we predicted and we hadn’t had to test anything in that whole time period.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, so it sounds like your approach to hybrid training, I mean you can do the challenges that are out there like, Hey, I’m one red at max, the big barbell list, then go run a marathon. It sounds like your approach is I’m just going to do this continuously so I’m ready for anything.

Alex Viada:

Exactly. Exactly. Because the challenges are cool, they capture the imagination and all that, but at the end of the day, if you’re just training for two specific things like that, why do ’em both in one day, that’s not the best way to get the best performance of each one. Do ’em a couple weeks apart, go register for a marathon and sign up for a power lifting meet three or four weeks later if you really want to test them. I’m like, do something real with it because I think a lot of these challenges, you’re intentionally making it harder than it has to be by kind of creating something arbitrary. Just be the best lifter you can be and be the best runner you could be. See where that ends up.

Brett McKay:

Well, do you do that every year? Do you kind of plan out, okay, I’m going to run these events and then I also want to do one or two meets a year? Do you schedule that out for yourself?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, I actually haven’t done the last couple years, I’ve just been dealing with a lot of moving a couple times and the last few years and all that, haven’t really had the intent to doing it, but this next year I’ve definitely got probably planning a power lifting meet sometime in the late summer, probably do an event in March running event. So yeah, just planning out ones. And for me, the most important thing is my whole thought with training for events, unless there’s one event you really wanted to do for years and years and years, my whole thing is if you need to decide, if you think, okay, what should I train for this year? Think about the kind of person and the kind of athlete and the kind of individual that you’ll become while training for it. If that’s what you want to be, then it’s a good event.

If I’m thinking, alright, I’m going to go train for this Ironman or whatever, what this is going to mean is lot long weekends of this, here’s how my body’s going to feel. Here’s how my schedule’s going to feel. Here’s what I’m going to get good at. If I like the way that looks, then it’s a good event to sign up for. If I just want something to test myself and I don’t like how that training is going to look, then I just should keep training for fun until something comes along that’s going to force me to be more of the person that I want to be.

Brett McKay:

I imagine another benefit of doing hybrid training is that doing strength training will probably improve your endurance training and endurance training will improve your strength training.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, that was a huge thing. That was actually going to be the third thing that I mentioned earlier. If you’re a lifter, your recovery between lifts and honestly the amount of density and the amount of productive volume you could do in a training session does have an aerobic component to it. Better aerobic engine, you’re going to recover faster between sets. The work later on in a session is going to be higher quality. You could do more dense work, which means you can benefit from more productive work. I tell the story a million times, and I might even have told you the story before, but I’ve always got the example of that one power lifter I worked with who I mean strong guy, like 400 kilo deadlift, strong guy, and he was commenting that since he started doing more cardio, he hadn’t done cardio before, he was like, you know what, man, I realized today that when I wrapped my knees for squats, I’m not winded afterwards.

And I think what really drove that home was here was a lifter who was a great power lifter and something as simple as wrapping his knees or even loading plates and all that was creating so much fatigue that he wasn’t able to lift at his potential. You give him a little bit more condition, a little bit cardiovascular endurance, and suddenly his training sessions were more productive. He could do 10 to 15% more productive work by the time he stood on that platform than he could before. That’s just going to make him a better lifter. Same thing on the running side, like talking to one of my colleagues, he’s a ultra marathon runner, and he said, you know what, the craziest thing about starting to do more serious strength training was he said, at mile 96 on the downhills, I still felt like I was racing and not just holding on my quads didn’t get torn up. I felt like I still had power in my legs. I felt like I could actually still accelerate and be a fast runner when I would normally just be shattered.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ve noticed that since our last conversation about zone two cardio. I started implementing zone two cardio into my programming, so I get two hour long sessions in a week and I definitely noticed an improvement in my strength training sessions. I’m not winded. I could get stuff done, I didn’t have to rest as long between sets and it was just a lot more productive.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, that’s huge.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s huge. So let’s talk about hybrid training, but I think to do that, let’s talk about each component first. So the strength and the endurance separately, and then we’ll look at how you program the two. What does strength training look like for a hybrid athlete and the way you do it?

Alex Viada:

So a lot of it is very, very dependent and my main thing with training, especially hybrid training is training with intent and realizing that you need to know exactly what you want to stimulate during a session in order to put the session together. So strength training, specifically training to get stronger. I always say strength is a skill. Strength training is all about getting stronger at a specific movement. So strength training can be more than one thing. Strength training, I use a lot of conjugate cues before. I’ve talked about using max effort and dynamic efforts and what I also now term skill effort. So a strength training program for hybrid athlete, if their goal is to get stronger in a specific movement, isn’t just going in and doing three sets of eight or three sets of 10 or anything else, usually it’s saying, okay, what aspect of strength in this movement do I want to train today?

Say I’m going into bench press, do I want to do some heavy near max effort bench press? Do I want to do some heavy near max effort and then do some speed work velocity work repetitions where I’m focused on high bar speed, full recovery in between or skill work where I’m focused on nothing but bracing and proper form and all that. The reason why I do that is because a workout like that may be very minimally fatiguing. If somebody does dynamic effort slash skill work and they’re lifting, they’re not exhausting themselves, they’re not exhausting their arms, they’re not reaching muscular failure. So strength training is very much about movement specific and working on maximum force production rate of force production and skill in the movement. So if you say, alright, I’m putting together a strength program, I’m a hybrid athlete, I want to get a really strong bench press and squat, you’re thinking, okay, do I need to do endless sets of chest press and endless sets of leg press and no, let me start with my strength day or two days for the week here I’m starting out with some max effort bench. I’m doing a couple of dynamic effort dropdown sets and that’s it for the strength side of things. Maybe I’ll then do some hypertrophy work after that, which is a little bit different. That’s picking more isolation movements or externally brace movements, things like machines of the like, and then doing a couple of sets. I abide by the effective reps model and staying well shy of failure on that.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So basically it sounds like what you’re saying is that we shouldn’t just go into the gym and lift until we’re dead tired. So if your goal as a hybrid athlete is to get stronger on the main barbell lift, for example, you need to treat strength as a specific skill, almost like practicing it as a sport. So for the main lifts you might have one workout where you’re doing max effort on a lift. Let’s say for example the deadlift, you might do a heavy set of three and then the next workout where you deadlift, you’re going to do that dynamic effort stuff where the focus on velocity and the bar speed so you can practice the movement in an efficient way and the weight’s going to be lower so you’re not overly fatiguing yourself so that it interferes with your endurance training.

And even if you’re primary focus of strength, you can always end the strength workout with some hypertrophy, work with some machines and dumbbells if you want. But then you talk about in the book if strength isn’t your primary goal as a hybrid athlete and you just want to be a jacked runner, you don’t have to do the barbell lifts and you can just focus on workouts using machines and dumbbells at higher volume to stimulate hypertrophy. So with that strategy in mind, whenever you are, let’s say programming a hybrid athlete for strength training, what’s the split looking like? Are you doing upper, lower, split full body? What does that look like typically?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, I do typically do upper lower. I think really it comes down to frequency and for both strength and hypertrophy, stimulating a muscle every three days or so is pretty close to ideal. So that’s anywhere between two or three workouts per week. I find with full body it’s a little bit harder to do because with that frequency you have to do way too much in every single session to hit everything kind of optimally. So I find that two upper, two lower, and as a general, I try to make the emphasis of each one of the upper and each one of the lower a little bit different. So they could be the same basic things like your upper could be a push pull, but on one day if this is just a generic athlete who just wants to get better at everything, one day may be more strength focused. So what we’re doing is we’re potentially doing heavier weight, fewer reps, and then we’re doing comparatively lightweight and velocity emphasis, and then the next day might be hypertrophy focused where instead of the bench press, we’re going to do a machine chest press or something similar and rather than heavyweight or lightweight quickly, we’re going to do moderate weight and aim for one to two reps in reserve. Something like that.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. How do you go about driving progressive overload in a hybrid strength program?

Alex Viada:

My perspective on progressive overload is that, and I’m sure you’re probably heard this a million times already, but it’s that progressive overload is typically misinterpreted by people as thinking you have to add load every week. My contention has always been with progressive overload. That overload refers to the general physical principle that if a stimulus exceeds the body’s current capacity, the body will adapt to that stimulus. That’s the overload principle. And progressive overload principle just means that as the body gets stronger and fitter and better adapted, that stimulus needs to eventually increase in order to remain adequate to trigger that adaptation. My whole thing with progressive overload is let’s just say the limits of my potential are right now I can bench 2 25 for 10 and that to me is kind of the limit of what I could do. So I bench 2 25 for 10 for three sets or whatever this week, next week do I have to change that?

There is almost a 0% chance I am now so strong one week later that 2 25 for 10 for three sets doesn’t still represent a great stimulus. So when I’m talking about progressive overload for strength athletes on a hybrid program, remember how I said before, I kind of predict, go back and predict what their one max would be. Let’s just say I’m an athlete and I predict my max at 300 pounds and I say, okay, and I can do 2 25 for 10, I’m just making up numbers right now. And let’s just say, alright, now I’ve done that for a couple of weeks, this still is feeling easy. Let me set my one rep max to 3 0 5 and recalculate my percentages based on that. And I’m going to say, okay, well this week I’ve got two 30 for 10, let me try that because that’s the same percentage, two 30 for 10 still feels easy, still feels good.

There should be no question. So that’s what I’ll typically do is say as long as you’re increasing that metric that you’re basing your workout percentages on, if you’re increasing it steadily like month to month, you’re making progress. It’s a little bit the same thing with running, and we can talk about that a little bit later, but again, my main thing is as long as those underlying one rep max or underlying peak performance metrics that you’re calculating your percentages go on, as long as that’s improving, you are improving. It doesn’t even have to be at a quick rate. I mean, heck, a lot of lifters would be happy to add 5% to one of their big three over the course of six months. So in doing that, I make sure that every week you might rotate number of repetitions and percentages and all that, but you’re sort of circled around this benchmark that you’re increasing every couple of weeks.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I thought that was interesting. You mentioned that just now, and you talked about this in the book, but with progressive overload with strength training, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to increase the weight or the rep every single week

I’ve fallen into that trap where it’s like, okay, I got to get, if I did 225 on the bench this week at five reps, then next week I got to do 230. I had this problem earlier this year for about the past, I would say from September through November, I was on this tear. I was doing 5-3-1 with my strength training and I was making awesome progress. And I remember it got to the point where towards the end of November I was getting pretty high with the weight on the big lifts and I did my max lifts for the one rep thing on of the 5-3-1, and it wasted me. I had a deload for two or three weeks. It just destroyed me every week. I was trying to push further and further and further. I mean, I’ll admit I enjoyed it, it was great, but the aftermath of it, it’s disrupted my training. I’m finally getting back to where, okay, I’m feeling better now. I’m starting to build myself back up again. And I imagine as a hybrid athlete where you’re combining endurance training and all this, you don’t want that to happen. It’ll just not only disrupt your strength training, but it’s going to disrupt your endurance training as well.

Alex Viada:

Exactly. Because one of the things I’ve always maintained is let’s say on any given day, you’re operating at 94% of your peak potential. For example, okay, I’m going in, I’m doing a pretty hard workout. I think, okay, that’s a tough workout. It’s probably not the hardest I could have pushed. It’s hard. It’s hard, don’t get me wrong, but if I was, this was the last workout of my life, I probably could have pushed harder. Now if I’m hell bent on making progress and I’m like, I’m going to add five pounds to everything next week, I probably could. There’s probably enough buffer in there that I could probably push a little bit harder next week even if my fitness didn’t improve. And I see this a lot with newer runners like, all right, every week I’m just going to try to go a little bit faster on this one course that I do.

Now I’m going to try to shave a couple seconds off this loop around my neighborhood. Chances are the main reason they’re able to do that so consistently is because they’re pushing themselves closer and closer and closer to their limit every single week they’re improving, but they’re probably improving at a slower rate than the numbers seem to be going up. And eventually they hit that limit, they hit that ragged edge, and then they realize they’re either not making progress or they start doing things like on the lifting side, they change their form, they cut depth a little bit, their bench gets a little bit messier so they can maybe make progress another week or two in the numbers, and then they’ve really hit a wall. Every workout is a herculean effort. Everything has gotten worse, but they’re like, alright, alright, well I’ve hit some maxes. I’m not saying that’s what you did, but I’m saying this definitely happens.

Brett McKay:

Alright, Well’s shift more into endurance. Talk about it specifically. You train people who are running, biking, they’re swimming all sorts of different events, but with endurance, there’s different philosophies on how you train for endurance events, a lot of competing theories. One is most of your stuff just be low intensity, then maybe a bit is high intensity or no, that’s not right, it needs to be medium intensity. What’s your approach to endurance training?

Alex Viada:

Do you mind if I ramble a little bit on this one because I think it’s kind of okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because it’s all over the place. I read about it, I’m like, oh man, I don’t know if I want to run because this sounds complicated

Alex Viada:

And that’s honestly one of the most fascinating things is how much of this stuff has been almost misrepresented over the years. So if you look at silo’s, old research in 80/20 and all of that and how elite athletes do 80% easy work and 20% hard work, all of that stuff was coming out of the same time as a lot of these coaches and researchers were still trying to define what these zones meant. How do we define zone two? Is it a percentage of heart rate? Is it a percentage of output? Is it that first ventilatory threshold where your rate of breathing picks up and you can’t breathe through your nose anymore? What is that line? And there are so many different definitions. Same thing with the zone three to zone four, like your lactate threshold onset of blood lactate, accumulation…

There are so many different definitions for all these delineations that you’re kind of like, okay, how do we all even know what we’re talking about here? Because when we analyze elite athlete programs, one of the things that really happened in I would say the two thousands is there was this idea among a lot of American trainers, especially that higher intensity stuff was king, and just going for slow easy jogs was not the way to get your best results. Personally, I found a lot of discussions at the time stem from the fact that if you are a trainer or you are training in a gym, telling somebody to go run for two hours is probably not the best way to control their progress. Being able to sit with them through a 15 minute high intensity interval session is a lot easier. So there’s a certain element of, I would say a little bit of bias from some of these governing bodies, at least in the west on what kind of training we have our athletes do or certainly our gym goers.

The other thing is, if we get away from this idea that I think the most important thing is high intensity stuff has its place and high intensity doesn’t always mean sprinting. High intensity in a lot of these programs means what we would consider like high zone three slash low zone four, all this work around threshold. What it comes down to at the end of the day is I consider high intensity and low intensity work the way I consider protein and carbs in a diet high intensity work. Elite athletes do high intensity work until they reach a limit and then everything else becomes zone two. And that’s because they’re training 14, 15, 16 hours a week and they can probably only handle two to three hours of high intensity work before they start breaking down. So to get in all the work that their body can actually adapt to low intensity work is volume dependent.

You can do lots of it. It still has positive heart benefits. They’re putting in 10 hours of zone two work per week just because they’ve hit the limit on how much high intensity work they can do. It’s like saying, okay, if I’m only going to eat 2000 calories a day, I need to make sure I get at least 150 grams of protein. If I eat 7,000 calories a day, I probably don’t need to eat 500 grams a day of protein. I’m going to make up all the difference in carbs. That’s my approach to high intensity versus low intensity training. If you only have 45, 50, 60 minutes a week to do conditioning work, it can probably all be higher intensity, and that means close to your threshold. That means repeats at your 5K pace, not like spritz, but you can probably do 45 minutes to an hour of that.

If you’re doing two hours, two hours of high intensity work per week is probably a lot for somebody who is not a huge runner. So maybe stick with that hour of high intensity and do an hour of zone two. If you’ve got six hours a week to train and you’re like, Hey, I’m also a lifter, but I really, really want to train for this marathon or whatever else you say, okay, an hour of high intensity work you can do when you get it two hours of high intensity work, your lifting sessions start to suffer as well because that’s just too much high intensity work on top of the lifting. So you as a hybrid athlete may do an hour of high intensity and five hours of zone two. So my thing is that all of these have their place, you get more bang for your buck with the high intensity, but you also hit a limit on what you can do pretty quickly. So think about what you could do in terms of high intensity, what’s the maximum amount you can do and feel good about doing and have all the recipe zone two.

Brett McKay:

So what does sort of a generic typical week look like of endurance training for a generic hybrid athlete?

Alex Viada:

Sure. So let’s just take a generic hybrid athlete who says, look, I’m in the gym three, four days a week, let’s say four days a week, and I’ve got another 150 to 180 minutes, like three hours or less, two to three hours to do some additional cardio. I’ll typically say, alright, you know what, then you’ve got three or four hour days of training, let’s just condense your conditioning into three workouts. You can do, let’s say 45 minute high intensity intervals on Monday. You can maybe do a slightly shorter session on Wednesday. That could be 30 minutes of high intensity with a long zone two cool down, and then on the weekend you just do another hour and a half of zone two. That’s it. I’ll typically say one speed workout if you can handle it, one Perry threshold workout and one easy workout. If you’re not into the speed workout, you do one threshold workout and two zone two or two threshold workouts and one zone two

Brett McKay:

Really simple. That doesn’t seem too bad.

Alex Viada:

Yeah. The thing is, those threshold workouts for people will say, okay, they say, well, what’s a threshold workout? I say, well, what’s your 5K pace? Add 30 seconds to that pace. Consider that your threshold pace. Now just do three by eight minutes at that pace and jog or walk for two minutes in between. Okay, that’s pretty easy. Great. There you go. There’s your threshold workout. That’s all you have to do. That’s 24 minutes of threshold work right there. Boom, done.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve learned that high intensity doesn’t have to be as hard as you think it is. So I started doing the Norwegian four by four.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, there you go.

Brett McKay:

After a strength training session on the bike. And when I first started doing it, I was just doing an all out sprint on this thing, just going as hard as I can. And then I was like, oh my gosh, four minutes. I can’t even do this for a minute. This is crazy and I have to do this four more times. This is insane. And then I started reading up on it, I was like, no, you dummy. It’s not an all out sprint on these things. You’re going hard, but it’s like 90% of your heart rate, which is not that hard. I mean, it’s hard, but not as hard as you think it would be. And once I started doing it like that, I thought, okay, I could do this for four minutes.

Alex Viada:

And that’s exactly it. I always kind of liken it to lifting where, yeah, if you go all out for four minutes, you can do it, but you’re probably not going to be able to do another quality interval like that. On the other hand, if you do it the way you approach lifting, if you go to failure on your first set of lifting, you’re going to get one set done and the next couple sets are going to be garbage. So I consider hard intervals to be one rep in reserve to two reps in reserve. Tough, challenging, you’re pushing yourself, but you’re leaving a little bit in the tank. So that’s why I say that’s the exact same philosophy between the two is you should be running and lifting with one to two reps in reserve on each set.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re just a generic hybrid athlete, you want to strength train and do some endurance training at the same time so that maybe you could do a 5K anytime you want. It’s going to be, what did you say, an hour of low intensity zone two cardio. That could be just a slow jog or maybe a ruck or an incline treadmill. And then you say 30 to 45 minutes of high intensity work.

Alex Viada:

And the way that can here comes the other debate. Does that mean 30 or 40 minutes at high intensity or does that mean a 30 to 40 minute long high intensity workout? If you’re doing three by eight minutes intervals, that’s 24 minutes, but you’ve got a 10 minute warmup, you’ve got two minutes in between, you’ve got a five minute cool down that’s a 45 minute workout. I typically mean 30 to 45 minutes total high intensity. So that could be two workouts. So Monday, do your three by eight minute intervals, Tuesday, mix it up and go crazy. Do four by six minutes at that same pace, both are 24 minutes and have a warm up and a cool down. And then later in the week do your hour and a half of zone two. You could do an incline walk, you could do a ruck, you could do an easy run, whatever that’s going to get you probably 95% of the results you could possibly ask for.

Brett McKay:

And then you mentioned this earlier when we were talking about how do you drive progress with strength training, but what does that look like for endurance training?

Alex Viada:

So my favorite thing to do is just adjust that threshold. My thing is say, okay, if I am predicting that my threshold is let’s say an eight 30 pace and I’m going to be doing three by eight minutes at an eight 30 pace every couple of weeks, I can just drop that by a second or two. That’s all it takes,

Just a second or two. And I can even give myself a range. Usually I give myself a range just to allow, and I say, okay, I’m doing my thresholds between eight 20 and eight 40 and two weeks later I’m going to be doing it between eight 18 and 8 38. And that way I let myself, I give myself a little bit flexibility week to week, but after two months, my slowest allowable pace is going to be the same as my fastest allowable pace was back then. So I’m still going to get that steady improvement. I’m going to give myself room to kind of fluctuate if I find myself continuously really struggling to hit the slowest end, I know something is wrong, but that’s really all it is. And you’re just setting those kind of guardrails on your performance, and that is more than enough to continue to make progress.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that doesn’t sound that complicated.

Alex Viada:

No, no. And it could get really technical. If I’m doing a complicated program with somebody, I’m adjusting their threshold. I’m looking at all their percentages across 14 different types of workouts and all of that. But fundamentally, you can make it really, really simple.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s talk about combining the two – strength and endurance training. And one of the challenges of hybrid training is that you have to be a bit more thoughtful about managing fatigue. Exactly. If you’re training hard with weights, well, you might not have that oomph you need for your endurance work. Or the same goes for endurance. If you’re training hard, you’re running hard and then the weight room and you’re like, oh man, I can’t get this squat. I loved your section on fatigue because you really get into the weeds of it. We don’t have to do that here. But what I thought was interesting is a lot of people when they think about fatigue, they think there’s just one kind of fatigue. But you described there are two main types of fatigue you have to think about as a hybrid athlete. What are those two types of fatigue?

Alex Viada:

I think we’re talking about peripheral versus kind of central

Brett McKay:

Yeah that whole thing.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, so this is really, really interesting. So peripheral fatigue is the fatigue that we all really know about. Sore muscles, you just train legs, you pretty much can’t sit down on the toilet going down the stairs sucks. Like all of that peripheral fatigue we’re pretty familiar with, and we’re pretty familiar I think with how peripheral fatigue is going to affect us work out to work out. I just go hammer legs, my sprint workout or my speed workout is going to be garbage, and if I work legs really hard on Friday and trash them, even my incline ruck on the treadmill is going to feel awful. So we know that’s peripheral fatigue and that’s actually the slightly easier one to manage because you go, all right, all I need to do to manage peripheral fatigue is think if I do this workout today, is this going to hurt my ability not to do the workout tomorrow, but to hit the target objective tomorrow to trigger the appropriate stress?

That’s the big thing. So am I going to be able to do tomorrow’s workout to a level that’s going to still force my body to adapt? And that’s a pretty low bar actually, because if you’re like, okay, yeah, this leg workout’s going to hit me so hard that I’m probably not going to be able to do all my intervals tomorrow, well then probably I should consider rearranging things. If you’re like, yeah, I’m going to do all my intervals, they’re just going to be really tough. That’s fine, leave ’em there. So that’s peripheral fatigue. The harder one to manage is central fatigue. And central fatigue is so much more about understanding the impact that long-term recovery and the adaptation process has on your actual body’s ability to do work.

Brett McKay:

Tell us more about central fatigue. So what is it exactly?

Alex Viada:

Sure. Yeah. So central fatigue is actually much more neurological. So the body has a lot of feedback mechanisms. The body has a lot of protective mechanisms. I dunno if anyone’s ever heard of notes as central governor who’s listening here, I’m sure you have. But that was nos, this whole idea that there’s a portion of the brain that limits performance to keep the body safe. And that’s if you run too hard, if you’re running at your limit, what your brain is doing is telling your muscles, okay, let’s turn down the power a little bit. We’re running out of energy stores. The muscles are accruing too much damage. We can’t sustain this. We’re actually going to turn down the maximum throttle, we’re going to put a brick under the gas pedal here and stop the body from injuring itself. So what’s interesting is there’s actually a good amount of merit to that, even if there’s no central governor, but the nerves, a lot of the sensory nerves and muscles, if they’re overly stimulated, they actually can reduce the amount of force and contractility that the brain can apply to the muscles.

And so this is actually something that is actually really notable When you’re doing things like recovering from injury, if something feels painful, if you feel pain in a muscle or around a joint or anything else, that pain signal itself actually turns down the output from your motor cortex, from your brain. When you’ve just done a hard workout, when you’re recovering and when your body is sending out all those pro-inflammatory compounds to break down old tissue, rebuild new tissue and everything else, those pro-inflammatory coms, even if you don’t feel the discomfort because your brain may not even be registering the discomfort, those nerves are still picking up on the damage on the inflammation. They’re still sending that signal to your brain to reduce its power. And what’s interesting is that, again, you may not even feel it. So you may go for, let’s just say you go for a really long run over the weekend, but it’s all zone two.

And you’re going, yeah, you know what? My legs are a little bit tight, but I’ve eaten plenty. I feel great. What you’re not feeling is the massive amount of inflammation in your legs at that point and the potent signal that’s sending to your brain for the next 48 hours to not produce maximum force in almost any muscle group. So if you’ve got a large amount of center fatigue from either a very long endurance workout, a very high repetition lifting workouts, a lifting workout with a lot of eccentrics, a running workout with a lot of eccentrics, even like hard sprints or downhill sprints or anything else, you may find that for the next 48 hours, your peak strength is limited. What that can mean is if you’re doing anything on those days that requires a lot of perfect coordination, you’re doing Olympic lifts, you’re doing velocity based work, you’re doing anything like that, you are probably going to suffer and your max effort work is going to suffer too.

So it’s important to consider when you’re looking at central fatigue, you’re thinking, okay, if I have a workout that is just, I know this is just causing a lot of wear and tear for the next 48 hours, make sure that you’re not scheduling anything that requires maximum force output. Like, Hey, okay, cool. If I run long on the weekends, then I’m not going to start out my week with my quote strength training. I’m just going to do a couple of hypertrophy days because hypertrophy days is not as important. I build coordination. No, I’m just doing repetitions. I’m going to do all of my explosive strength skill proficiency work later in the week when I have less central fatigue.

Brett McKay:

And if you did a one rep max a heavy lift session, you wouldn’t want to do sprint work for your cardio the next day possibly.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, exactly. Because there’s also a huge amount of neurological psychological fatigue from that kind of stuff as well. You do a heavy one rep max that is a lot of trauma, that is a lot of resources. Your brain and body are expending at that moment. So it is, it’s very much saying, okay, even if mentally and physically I don’t feel that bad, I have to take into account that there are probably other factors there that are reducing my performance that I can’t see.

Brett McKay:

And this goes back to that idea that you said fatigue masks fitness, right? Absolutely. Yeah. People have experienced that whenever I’ve had this happen to me. In fact, this happened to me about a month ago. So I did a really heavy deadlift, I think it was 585, 575 for a single rep. And then the next week I was scheduled to do five reps at some other weight. I think it was like 475, 485, I can’t remember what it was, but I couldn’t even get the bar off the ground because what had happened is not only had I done a single rep max on that deadlift, but I’d done a bench press and then a shoulder press. And so I imagine I just kind of fried my CNS and my CNS is like, no, you’re not doing this. You need to take a break.

Alex Viada:

And it’s fascinating because one of the things that can happen is when you do a one rep max, I guarantee nobody’s form is perfect, and that doesn’t mean that they’re injuring themselves, but there could be so many microscopic areas where certain muscle groups have just been overtaxed, certain joints have been overtaxed. Your body at that point is probably dealing with a thousand tiny micro injuries at that point, and you may not even feel it. But then the next time you go to lift, as soon as you pick up the bar, all of those little micro injuries and everything else are sending these pain signals to your brain. And what’s happening is that initial spike of power that you’re used to get that bar moving. It’s just not there.

Brett McKay:

I was going to say, that’s what was crazy. So when I did that, when I went in to do that five rep on the deadlift, I was like, I’m feeling good. I’m awesome. I get the bar, I’m like, and I just bent the bar and I’m like, no, it’s not happening.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, it’s crazy how that happens too. And that’s why central fatigue can be so interesting because it’s not peripheral fatigue. You’re like, oh, my legs feel fine, my back feels fine. You go in, you’re hyped up, you’re like, all right, I’m ready to go. And then you start pulling and you go, wow. It’s just like you’re checking for an extra plate. You’re like, is this thing stapled to the floor? You just don’t have that pop, that aggression, that drive. And sometimes you’ll even know subconsciously you’re like, wow, I was actually babying that initial pull a little bit. I wasn’t exploding as fast as I know I could, and it’s all just kind of subconscious and it’s just that lack of central drive and it’s killer and it could be so discouraging and that’s why I’m, the more aware you are of central fatigue, the less likely you are to make really bad training decisions if you have a single bad session.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so knowing this idea of central fatigue and peripheral fatigue tell, I mean we kind of talked about it a little bit. Let’s get more into detail and kind of lay it out clearly for people. How do you program strengthen endurance work so they don’t interfere with the training of the other?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, so the main thing is, like I said, there’s a little bit of this consolidation of stresses approach that I talk about in the book. Consolidation of stressors is basically saying, the way I think about it is a little bit of what I just talked about. If I do this workout today, what training stimuli can I still trigger if I’m still recovering from this workout? So if I do a really long run today, if I’m looking at my program, I go really long run on Sunday, what lifting sessions can I still do on Monday and Tuesday that I know I can benefit from? That’s probably going to be hypertrophy work. And so I’m going, okay, so weekends I have my long run, Monday and Tuesday are my upper and lower body hypertrophy days. Okay, cool. Well, if I do a lower body hypertrophy session, I’m probably not going to be able to do some explosive, explosive running afterwards.

So do I long run Sunday? Do I want to do upper body on Monday and then lower body and run on Tuesday? No, no, no. How about I do run on Sunday. I could even say, Hey, maybe I’ll lift lower body on Monday. Sounds crazy, right? Well, no, my legs are still probably going to be a little bit sore, but I can probably still do three sets of eight to 10 on leg press with sore legs, just that I am not relying on my legs feeling fresh to be able to trigger the target adaptation. Then Tuesday I do my upper body hypertrophy work and maybe even then maybe I could do a little bit of tempo work or even an easy run. Then I do my speed work, my speed session on Wednesday. Then I do now on Thursday like, Hey, you know what? My legs were covered. Central fatigue is nearly gone. I’m going to do my leg strengthen explosive power workout on Thursday. There’s not a lot of central fatigue from that. So Friday I could do upper body strengthen explosive work, and maybe my tempo run take Saturday off Sunday back to the long run. There you go. It seems almost kind of counterintuitive because you’re like, I’m doing legs on the, but that’s the way you think about it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. That’s interesting. With hybrid training, do you have your athletes, do deloads take breaks from the training or are you just kind of No, as long as things are cruising and you’re feeling good, you can keep going.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, usually if I do a deload, it’s because there’s a burning need to do a deload if something is actually really overreached. So one of the things I use to test for central fatigue is I’ll just do a basic broad jump test. So Monday or whatever day starts the week, starts the cycle, have ’em do either five or seven broad jumps, drop the highest and lowest average the rest. That’s a pretty good description of how well their muscular strength and maximum force production is going. Also check their resting heart rate, things like that. All of that seems good, I think. Okay, great. They’re still recovering well if they get pretty poor performance the rest of the week, I tend to reduce everything, reduce the intensity of everything by about 10%. It’s not a full deload, but it’s a little bit of this. If your program is well constructed, you should never be pushing and blowing past the thresholds.

You should be just pushing on it and creating a little bit of pressure on their thresholds on what they can recover from. So if you back off 10%, you relieve that pressure, you give ’em a week of a little bit easier and they should be ready again to push the next week. One of the things I try to do, especially by saying be aware of central fatigue and things like that, is so you don’t immediately have to think, oh wow, I’ve smoked. Let me do a deload. If I have a day, and I’ve had those same things where a deadlift session, I come in and I’m warming up and I’m like, alright, still a hundred pounds off my max and I pull this thing and it feels like it’s barely moving, and I’m like, wow, I’m supposed to do a hundred pounds more than this and this thing is 10 out of 10 effort. I know, okay, you know what? I’m not going to quit. I’m not going to give myself a deload. I’m just going to reduce the intensity of my accessories by about 10%. Have the next two or three lifting sessions be about 10% easier. Maybe take one round off my interval, run tomorrow and see how I’m feeling by the weekend and retest, wait for next week. That’s really all you need to do most of the time.

Brett McKay:

Well, going back to that idea of you can’t really rely on your feelings how you feel. I’ve had instances where I felt like complete garbage, I was just tired, didn’t sleep well. I was like, oh man, this gym session is going to suck. And I go down there and I’m like, man, the bar’s fast. I could pull this easily and I hit a PR. But then you have those moments, like I said earlier, it’s like, oh man, I’m feeling good. I’m going to go down there. Bar doesn’t come off the floor. And I think maybe those instances where I was feeling not great, I’m feeling tired. I didn’t have any central nervous fatigue even though it felt like I did, and so I was able to perform well. Yeah, the human body’s weird.

Alex Viada:

It is really weird, man. Like you said, you could do all the tests and be like, wow, physically I’m performing great. I feel like absolute garbage, but physically I’m performing great. And I always say, well, okay, you should probably still consider taking it easy eventually. But it is true that understanding all these things and they do, they stop you from making bad decisions. They stop you from saying, oh, maybe I just need a whole week off.

In reality, yeah, your sleep’s probably not great. Yeah, you’re probably tired. Yeah, getting more sleep is a priority, but you know that already. It’s not the training that’s wearing you down, it’s everything else. And the training is such a small part of everything that’s stressing you out. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, keep the training, maybe reduce it by five or 10% and work on everything else, and by the next week you’ll be right back to it.

Brett McKay:

What does recovery look like for a hybrid athlete? Any special considerations there?

Alex Viada:

Honestly, the main thing, see for hybrid athlete, you’re talking so many different potential stressors that you really want to avoid. A lot of the more aggressive types of recovery, and I talk a lot about how things like ice baths and all that could be potentially maladaptive just because if you’re a hybrid athlete, you’re relying so much on really rapid adaptation and adaptation could be a little bit more subtle. So anything like ice baths or heavy use of NSAIDs or anything like that that could diminish the inflammation response, the pro-inflammatory response is going to make you adapt more slowly. For a lot of individuals who do hybrid programs, I say really the most important thing in recovery is, first of all, compression devices are great. Focus on things like your circulation. Focus on things like not letting your muscles get too tight. I always say the best thing for recovery, if you work a desk job, get up every hour and walk for two to three minutes.

Whatever you’re doing, keep moving a little bit, keep steady. Caloric intakes, I very, very much about if you’re a hybrid athlete, never train starved. And there are a lot of people who are things like advocates of fasted training and so on and so forth. I think you could do that a little bit. I think there’s some positive research, positive adaptations on that. But if you’re training multiple modalities and you’re always dealing with background level of fatigue, avoiding a relative energy deficit is really important. So yeah, little things. Stay moving, keep moving, stay mobile and honestly feed to fuel your workouts. And since you generally have less recovery time between sessions, feeding to fuel your workouts becomes really important.

Brett McKay:

So what’s the general time commitment for hybrid training just for a general athlete? Is it possible for a busy dad to do this?

Alex Viada:

Oh yeah, absolutely. If you’re doing a conventional hybrid program, let’s just say you’re a busy dad. You’re like, you know what, man, I’ve got 45 minutes a day to devote to myself maybe five days a week and weekends. Maybe if I get up early, I could get in a 30 minute run before the family gets going. That’s plenty. You do one upper body workout, you could do an upper body hypertrophy, a lower body hypertrophy, and a full body strength workout that’s going to get you a lot of good results. And then you say, I have three cardio sessions. One day I’m going to do a 40 minute interval session. The next day I’m going to do a 30 minute interval session, and then I’m going to try to do 40 minutes of zone two when I first wake up early on a Saturday, or I’m going to do something like take the family for a walk and I’m going to put 55 pounds on my back and whichever kid wants to be carried at that time. And boom, there we go. That is enough. Because right there, as long as you’re training with intent, as long as you’re like, man, I’m not just doing curls for the sake of doing curls, I’m doing deliberate exercises here. I’m deliberately training to get stronger. I’m focusing on quality of movement. I’ve got this conditioning so I can do more density workouts in my training. You can get it done because that minimum effective dose, as long as it’s targeted, is probably less than you think.

Brett McKay:

And then after that, once you get that going, sign up for a 5K.

Alex Viada:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Challenge the family to want too. It’s even better.

Brett McKay:

Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Alex Viada:

Yeah, so my Instagram account’s usually the best place to find me, it’s just Alex.Viada. The complete human performance is my website and the book, The Ultimate Hybrid Athlete is, I think it’s pretty much everywhere. It’s on Amazon, it’s on Barnes and Noble, there’s a Kindle version. You should be able to find it. So those are probably the best resources.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Alex Viada, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Alex Viada:

Excellent, man. Thank you very much.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Alex Viada. He’s the author of the book, The Ultimate Hybrid Athlete. It’s available on amazon.com. You can learn more information about his work at his website, completehumanperformance.com. Also, check out our show notes at AoM.is/hybridathlete, where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. If you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with your friends or a family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support.

Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

View the full article

Sign In

Podcast #1,099: Strong, Conditioned, and Ready for Anything — How to Become a Hybrid Athlete

Featured Replies

Resources Related to the Podcast

Connect With Alex Viada

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Transcript

Please sign in to comment

Account

Navigation

Search

Configure browser push notifications

Chrome (Android)

Chrome (Desktop)

Safari (iOS 16.4+)

Safari (macOS)

Edge (Android)

Edge (Desktop)

Firefox (Android)

Firefox (Desktop)