Steady-state cardio is when heart, lungs and muscles operate in synchronous balance.
Like everything else in the world of fitness, aerobic exercise has been made way more complex than necessary. The human innards, our guts, our internal organs, need exercise as surely as our muscles. What’s the best way to exercise, strengthen and build our internal mechanisms? Systematically increase the heart rate and hold it there for a specific and protracted period of time. That’s pretty damned simple. Aerobic exercise done consistently strengthens the muscles involved in respiration and actually enlarges the heart muscle. That’s a good thing.
A stronger, larger heart has a radically increased pumping ability and far greater stroke efficiency. The arterial pathways are cleared of plaque and sludge as the elevated heart rate forcibly pumps torrents of enriched blood through the arterial highways at an accelerated rate. The resting heart rate decreases; circulation improves and blood pressure is reduced. Consistent cardio increases the total number of red blood cells in the body which helps the body become more efficient at the transport of oxygen. Aerobics also improves the ability of muscles to mobilize body fat during exercise and builds endurance. Improved endurance means we are able to work harder, longer, more often and recover quicker.
Over time the storage capacity of energy molecules (fats and carbohydrates) within the muscles is increased. Over time when subjected to specific cardio training protocols, the muscles actually reconfigure their composition, increasing mitochondrial density. More mitochondria (cellular blast furnaces) means improved energy processing ability: nutritents are utilized with far greater efficiency. After a torrid aerobic session, the basal metabolism is dramatically stimulated and remains elevated for hours afterward. Incredible physiological benefits are bestowed on the conscientious trainee if cardiovascular exercise is performed on a regularly reoccurring basis.
My wife calls me “Mr. Analogous” and in keeping with that title I describe the body’s cardiovascular component parts as analogous to engine parts: imagine that the human body is a supercharged racing engine…perhaps a 426 Chrysler Hemi with two four barrel 650 cm Holley carburetors set atop a 6-71 GMC supercharger. The carburetors are the equivalent of the lungs and take in oxygen from the atmosphere. The oxygen is mixed with fuel in the carburetors and sent to the supercharger that serves the same purpose as the human heart: both supercharger and heart muscle are pumps that push fuel/nutrients to the engine/muscles. The supercharger/heart muscle pumps oxygenated fuel, oxygenated, nutrient-laden blood, to the cylinders that are analogous to muscles.
The cylinders/muscle cells are where the actual work is done. In both cases energy fusion occurs and waste products are created as a result of violent acts of combustion. Within the cylinders in the engine and within the mitochondrial cells of the muscles, energy is produced and waste products must be efficiently eliminated through an exhaust procedure. Optimally the lungs, heart and muscles work in close synchronization during cardiovascular exercise. If the balance is thrown off the body shuts down. Often during cardiovascular exercise we purposefully seek to put the body off balance by zeroing in on the heart, lungs or muscles exclusively. We seek to impose cardio stress using different methods in order to elicit differing cardio responses. The purposeful creation of cardio imbalance creates differing cardio effects.
Steady-state cardio is when heart, lungs and muscles operate in synchronous balance.
Interval cardio purposefully disturbs the balance in order to spike the heart rate.
Hybrid cardio adds an element of muscular intensity to aerobics and creates new mitochondria.
The Purposefully Primitive cardio adherent utilizes a periodized cardio game plan that lasts for 4 to 12 weeks. During the designated time period the individual stair-steps their way upward into ever-improving degrees of cardio condition. Using creeping incrementalism we start off slightly below capacity and over the 4 to 12 week timeframe ease our way into ever better physical condition. We are able to go longer, faster and more often; we reduce body fat as our endurance and vitality improves weekly.
Close coordination of cardio exercise with a solid diet plan creates continual “windows of opportunity” that result in stored body fat being mobilized and preferentially burned as energy. We create these windows through the expert use of exercise and dietary timing. Over time the cardio exercise effort gains more and more traction. The more cardio you perform the better your endurance becomes, the better an individual’s endurance the longer, faster and more we can train. More training equates to more progress. All these factors combine to create momentum.
There are three separate and distinct cardio types and periodic rotation of the three types within the training template is required. Variety keeps cardio fresh, vital and fun. Human nature seeks to repeat pleasurable experiences and avoid unpleasant ones; so we make cardio both effective and enjoyable. Cardiovascular creativity enables us to develop a deep love for aerobic activity. As pointed out earlier, you can see a lot further and a lot clearer standing on the shoulders of a true giant. You can see over the vision-obscuring fog of conventional thinking that rolls along at ground level. While standing atop the shoulders of a giant you are able to see over the product pushing pygmies, the charlatans, hucksters and hordes of fitness frauds frantically waving their puny arms to attract your attention. Fitness frauds continually obscure clear viewing at ground level.
Let’s get straight on our cardio facts. We start by absorbing some unvarnished truths spoken by a true cardio giant. Cardio is not an option and the key to conquering cardio is learning to love it.
Fitness product makers compete for market share in the never-ending quest to persuade consumers to purchase their particular product. “Hey look at me! I’ve got a revolutionary new device that will melt fat off you faster than you can say abracadabra! You’ll lose ten inches off your waistline in two weeks!” This type of outright fraud is commonplace in fitness. Product makers continually make outrageous claims for products that can’t possibly deliver 1/10 of what they promise. Their claims are physiological impossibilities. The product pushers feel the only way they can attract attention or differentiate their mode, device or method from other vendors is to make ludicrous claims. Adolf Hitler defined this sales strategy in Mein Kampf “A big lie is easier to get the public to believe than a little lie.” Fraud merchants promise quick and easy physical transformation using whatever it is they are selling.
Meanwhile I have the unenviable task of convincing you that you need to get back to the cardio ultra basics that you likely never learned to begin with.
Aerobic activity is indispensable for health and wellbeing. Cardiovascular results are the quickest to appear and the quickest to disappear. Whereas resistance training gains are slow to appear, they are slow to disappear. Strength gains stay with the trainee long after he ceases training. Aerobic activity bestows its numerous benefits almost immediately, yet the downside is that benefits flee as quickly as they appeared once the trainee stops training. We use this phenomenon to our advantage. We generate immediate momentum and infuse enthusiasm into the process by performing cardio every day. Quick cardio progress jump-starts the transformational process; we feel great, both physically and psychologically, in a matter of days.
In order to engage in a sensible and result producing cardiovascular program you need to purchase a heart rate monitor. This is the lone hi-tech device we Purposeful Primitives endorse wholeheartedly. We will show you how to use this incredible tool in a manner even the makers didn’t envision.
The heart rate monitor allows us to assess cardiovascular intensity and cross-compare exercise modes. We use the monitor to determine which modes are effective and those modes that are a complete waste of training time. The systematic rotation of modes and methods is mandatory. The body will neutralize the beneficial effects of any exercise protocol to which it is continually subjected. By varying the kind and type of cardio exercise we engage in, we keep the body off balance and that is a good thing when the name of the game is steady physical progress.
Integrate aerobics with resistance training and underpin the training with a rock solid nutrition program. Our goal is to ignite physical synergy: a unique physiological state that elite athletes are intimately familiar with. How do we start? First establish and identify realistic goals. Then set these goals into a timeframe. Break the goal into weekly performance benchmarks. Systematically set about achieving the weekly goals. It is a relatively easy task to design a customized cardiovascular plan, one that melds with your lifestyle and available training time.
Establish a realistic goal
Set the goal within a specific timeframe
Reverse engineer results: work backwards establishing weekly performance benchmarks
Weekly goals are established. Weekly goals are achieved in three cardio benchmarks: frequency, duration and intensity. Other sub-categories can also be periodized.
Each week we inch ahead, using the theory of creeping incrementalism. Log results and continually refer back to predetermined goals: where are you in relation to where should you be? How is ever-unfolding reality comparing to the predetermined game plan? If a systematic cardiovascular regimen is sensibly coordinated with precision nutrition, body fat is mobilized and oxidized. We expropriate elite bodybuilder nutritional tactics and meld them with specific cardio protocols; the goal is to systematically “trick” the body into mobilizing and melting stored body fat.
Unfortunately most fitness experts have a collective cardio blindspot: they are ignorant of, or refuse to acknowledge altogether, one critical aspect of cardiovascular exercise: aerobic intensity, i.e. how fast does the heart beat in relation to exercise-induced physical stress. Fitness experts and personal trainers have become needlessly entangled in a spider web of cardio confusion wherein exercise mode is confused with cardio goal. Most experts champion a particular mode or device and lose sight of the goal: as mentor Bill Pearl once said, “The human heart doesn’t care how it gets elevated, just as long as it gets elevated.” That is a profound and liberating aerobic insight. Does the mode selected successfully elevate the heart rate to the predetermined target? If the answer is yes than that mode is deemed effective. This all presupposes you actually have a predetermined target heart rate and the ability to monitor it.
While anal-retentive personal trainers make nuanced distinctions about miniscule aspects of resistance training and split infinitesimal hairs over the science of nutrient selection— most remain stridently, defiantly, belligerently ignorant or downright dismissive about a critical element of the cardio report card: the trainee’s heart rate during the actual exercise. An obese trainee forced to jog could be operating way past the safety redline, perhaps at 110% of their age-related heart rate maximum. Blind-spot personal trainers ignorant of this critical piece of data exhort the obese to, “Go faster! Pick up those knees!” and put at-risk clients in real danger. Most personal trainers do not monitor the heart rate during cardiovascular exercise.
Would you lift weights without knowing the poundage?
Of course not! So why would you perform cardio exercise without knowing the impact the exercise was having on the heart rate in real time? It’s a classical example of arrogance cubed with wilful ignorance.
Leonard Schwartz is a medical doctor, psychiatrist, exercise researcher and inventor of Heavyhands. We have all seen joggers running along carrying little red hand weights. Those are Heavyhands and Len Schwartz invented these devices as adjuncts to his unique cardiovascular exercise system.
If you were to watch the Heavyhand jogger, invariably they use the hand weights incorrectly. The hand weights weren’t meant to be Carry Hands, the hand weights were meant to be raised to different levels on each and every stride-stroke. The hand weights have behind them a system that is both radical and revolutionary. Len became interested in cardiovascular exercise in his fifties. An overweight smoker with high blood pressure and chronic back problems, Dr. Len was decidedly unfit and decided to do something about his own health and fitness. He became a jogger and found that wanting. He then immersed himself in the various fitness theories and strategies of the day and came away decidedly unimpressed. Being a medical doctor, he began accessing available research.
One day the proverbial light bulb went off over his head as he was investigating athletic VO2 maximums. The highest VO2 maximums ever recorded by a group of athletes were not registered by endurance runners, which is what he had logically presupposed before his investigations, but rather by Russian and Norwegian cross-country skiers. Why was this? He wondered. It didn’t take long for him to come up with the answer: the skiers generated propulsion using all four limbs. The runners used only their legs.
The cross-country skiers were registering Maximal Oxygen Consumption rates, per kilogram of bodyweight per minute, of 94. The long distance runners were topping out at 85. Rowers came in a 75, bicyclists 70 and speed skaters 65. Everyone registered substantially below the skiers. The skiers propelled their bodies across the landscape using the legs and the arms on every single stride. While the majority of the aerobic world used two limbs, the legs, in their respective modes, the skiers were using four limbs to power locomotion. A cursory examination of the other sports and cardio activities revealed that most disciplines required only two limbs to generate propulsive movement.
Len wondered how he could recreate the quad-limb exercise form and reap the amazing cardiovascular benefits and endurance capacity of a cross-country skier. He began experimenting, imitating cross-country skiers “double pole action” by pumping small dumbbells while walking. The aerobic apple fell on the cardio Newton’s head: Len was amazed at the aerobic effect of double-ski poling with dumbbells and soon envisioned a whole series of moves and patterns where he lifted light dumbbells to varying heights while walking, jogging, duck-walking, hopping or squatting.
The key was to force four limbs to “share” the aerobic workload. When legs alone were used to elevate the heart rate, the legs had to work considerably harder to attain, retain and sustain the target heart rate. How much easier it was to hit the same target heart rate when legs and arms were used in conjunction with one another. The athlete could generate an elevated heart rate quicker and maintain it longer when the workload was spread among four limbs. The work didn’t seem as hard. While it might take considerable physical effort to reach a heart rate of 150 beats per minute running, it took far less effort to achieve the same heart rate jogging while simultaneously pumping light hand weights.
Len took his suspicions and suppositions to the University of Pittsburg sport laboratory where he was able to confirm scientifically everything he had suspected intellectually. He then went into the woodshed and developed a system—using hand weights in a series of freestyle movement patterns—that would replicate the huge VO2 maximums that crosscountry skiers were attaining. He codified and birthed an entirely new exercise system. This system would be efficient and deliver a multiplicity of results. It would teach Heavyhanders how to use varied movement patterns; these patterns done with certain poundage would have radically different results using increased or decreased poundage. Results would also be impacted by the session duration and frequency. The freestyle movement pattern possibilities were limitless. The poundage possibilities were limitless. A person moving a pair of 20 pound dumbbells short distances for 10 minutes would net far different results than a jogger throwing 2 pound hand weights head high for 60 minutes. Old and young, beginner and elite, fit and unfit, all could tailor custom routines that suited their needs, goals, capacity and degree of fitness. The possible combinations were limitless and the advanced user, once they understood the fundamentals of the system, would be able to devise their own workouts.
Heavyhands required no machine or device that locked the user into a specific motor pathway. The type of motion used could be altered in every single workout. Sessions could be conducted indoors standing in place, outdoors traveling over sidewalks or trails. You might use a short session with heavy weights, long sessions with light weights, short motions, exaggerated motions…the endless variety would eliminate boredom and the chance for repetitive motion injury. Heavyhands could inject a psychological aspect into exercise: Fun! After all, Leonard Schwartz was not only a medical doctor, but also a clinical psychiatrist.
In 1982 Len published the best book on aerobic exercise ever written: Heavyhands, The Ultimate Exercise. He began selling customized Heavyhand weights. These were clever and needed: the handles kept the hand weights from slipping out of the user’s grip, the padding kept sweat from messing up the grip and the adjustable weights allowed the user to start off using 1 pound weights and work upward.
For a while Heavyhands was a bona fide exercise craze and swept the country. The problem was subtle: though lots of people bought the hand weights, few read the book. In order to make the Heavyhand system work, the user needed to raise their arms to varying heights in order to elicit the desired cardio result. Len devised three height levels and the trainee was instructed to achieve a target height with every step. What happened was that people would buy the Heavyhands and carry them around. While Heavyhands was an extremely effective exercise system, Carry Hands was lame and ineffectual. People claimed that they weren’t getting results and the craze petered out—which was too bad because a lot of people really needed what Heavyhands offered. It was a classical case of a very effective system dying because people refused to adhere to the ground rules.
Len’s own transformation was mind-blowing and pointed out how effective the studied use of quad-limbed cardio exercise could be…
No cardio weakling, at age 71 I saw Len do 36 pull ups while holding his legs in the V position!
I began conversing regularly with Len in the mid-nineties after I had interviewed him for several magazines. His medical background, the fact that he was a psychiatrist and exercise research scientist, gave us much to talk about. And talk we did, for years, several times a week, sometimes for hours. He was fascinated by my “short strength,” my weightlifting and powerlifting prowess. He was genuinely interested in how my type of power was developed. In turn I quizzed him like a CIA interrogator working on a Guantanamo Detainee. I had cardio questions galore. He spun my head around. He took me to school and I was the willing student.
My motivation was to determine if athletes who did supplemental cardio training would benefit by substituting Heavyhands for classical aerobic modes. He taught me about oxygen pulse and how pulse accurately represents the effectiveness of heart and skeletal muscle working together in consort. METs (an abbreviation for metabolism) would tell us how much work was being done compared to resting. Oxygen pulse would tell us how efficiently oxygen was being transported at a variety of workloads. Cardiac output was one aspect of oxygen pulse—the other aspect was the rate at which muscles were able to consume oxygen.
“The artery that feeds the muscle contains blood richer in oxygen than the vein that leads the same blood away from that muscle. If you measured arterial and venous blood for their respective oxygen content, you arrive at what is called the A-V Oxygen difference. Pump output and the A-VO2 difference determine oxygen pulse.”
He clued me into Heart-Skeletal Muscle Duets: what, he would ask, limits an individual’s oxygen consumption ability, i.e., is the limiting factor the ability of the heart to deliver oxygen? Or is it the ability of the muscles to receive the oxygen? The answer varies person to person: with some individuals the “senders”—the lungs, heart, blood vessel and blood that feed the muscles—might be inadequate. While for other individuals the “receivers” might be deficient and the capacity of the senders would exceed the capacity of the receivers.
“The elite marathoner runs at approximately 75% of his maximum workload capacity. A Heavyhand user can generate 50% of leg capacity, 50% of arm capacity and exceed the marathon runner’s 75% of maximum capacity using legs only. This is why Heavyhands feels easier. Lots of units, each doing less, add up to more.”
Len pointed out that “First and foremost, Heavyhands is a heart conditioner.” He drew attention to heart rate contractions and the effectiveness of those contractions at pumping oxygen-laden blood throughout the body. He also noted that by placing the arms under stress, measured as per unit of muscle weight and volume, arms can “out do” legs. Arms “have greater training potential; while leg endurance might be upped 10 to 25%, arm endurance can be increased by 100% or more through the use of Heavyhands. Arms are freer to move than legs and capable of swifter, more complex and less ‘grooved’ motion.”
Being a psychiatrist he felt Heavyhand training could even improve intelligence. “The hands enjoy a denser network of connections with our brains than do the feet or legs. Hand work thus feeds into human intelligence more than less imaginative leg work.” Len was the first to alert me that prolonged use of Heavyhands could literally reconfigure muscle tissue, morphing the actual composition of the working muscle by infusing it with additional mitochondria.
The trick to muscle fiber transformation was infusing the cardiovascular activity with an element of resistance. What if there was a type of strength, long strength, (he called it) that could develop significant power output and sustain this strength output for an extended period? Would this not, over time, result in the creation of muscle fiber that would have the anaerobic capability of a weightlifter and the aerobic capacity of a long distance runner? Heavyhands could split the difference. Training in this way would reconfigure existing muscle fiber, creating a new type of muscle fiber. Len Schwartz is a cardiovascular exercise genius by any yardstick or measurement you care to apply. Len devised a positively revolutionary system. It died an undeserved death bought on by misuse and misunderstanding.
