Two new studies challenge common assumptions: intensity may matter more than volume for healthy aging, and triathlete injury patterns aren’t what most coaches would predict. We unpack what this means for training prescription, and why neuromuscular and strength work belong in every plan.
Episode Transcript
Introduction: Injury Prevalence and Longevity Myths
Chris Case 00:01
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Fast Chats. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m Chris with Griffin and Trevor. Today we’re talking about two studies, and it’s really interesting. Both found that what we might have thought previously might be wrong about two big subject matters, the first being injury in various sports and the prevalence of injury in various sports, and we’ll get to it. The second one being about longevity and what promotes it, intensity or volume. Before we dive into those studies, we’re excited to talk up a little bit about experience Fayetteville and Fayetteville, the city sponsors of this episode.
Trevor Connor 00:46
Yeah, Chris, I know you’ve been there a couple times. I’ve been there once for a coaching retreat, but tell us a little bit about it.
Chris Case 00:54
Yeah, it’s an incredible place, especially for cyclists. It’s the only UCI designated bike city in the US. That’s a huge accolade. The League of American Bicyclists sees it as a gold level bike friendly city. It’s got something like 120 miles of trails right within city limits, and some of the best gravel cycling right out the backdoor.
Trevor Connor 01:13
Yeah, and I know you’re a bikepacker. I am not, but I’ve heard really good things about the bike packing there.
Chris Case 01:19
Yeah, I am a board member for Bikepacking Roots, a non profit that advocates for the expansion of bikepacking and their founder, Kurt Refsnider, bike packing legend, helped experience Fayetteville create a whole suite of bike packing routes, short overnighters, super long, 265 mile mega loops that go out into The Ozarks. It’s an incredible network of bikepacking trails.
Trevor Connor 01:43
Yeah, in my one experience there is, when we were taking a break from that retreat, we went outside to watch the junior mountain bike program that they coach, and first of all, incredibly embarrassed watching these 11 year olds do things on mountain bikes that I couldn’t even dream of doing. But was just blown away by in the middle of this class, there were a bunch of other mountain bikers on these trails, and this one top pro just came over, started talking with the kids, started talking with us, did a little teaching, and then left. And somebody from Boulder, and I looked at this and went, wow. Biking here is pretty spectacular.
Chris Case 02:14
Awesome. Yeah. And speaking of pros, and speaking of spectacular racing, there’s a big event coming up.
Trevor Connor 02:25
December 10th to 14th. They’ve got the cyclocross nationals there, which I’m still trying to convince you to go and race.
Chris Case 02:32
Well, I have been to the course before. It hosted Worlds in 2022 so I got to see Tom Pidcock and Marianne Vos win their titles that year. It’s incredible to be able to ride that course.
Trevor Connor 02:45
And what’s really cool is that is a permanent course. So if you want to go and ride a world champion caliber cyclocross course, head to Fayetteville. Give it a try. You can ride it any day.
Chris Case 02:57
Absolutely, we’ve talked a lot about bikes. There’s more to the city than just riding bikes.
Trevor Connor 03:01
Yeah, I was surprised when I was there, because, I admit, I went there expecting kind of the small town nothing to do, and I rented an Airbnb and just went, okay, I’ll just hang out and watch TV at night. But it had a really cool downtown area, lots of restaurants, they’re saying, over 360 restaurants, which I believe, there were craft breweries. There were coffee shops, one that I went and did some reading in and absolutely loved. Went to a restaurant that was having some live music. I mean, it really kind of had that New Orleans or, you know, one of those kind of hip music town type feels to it. I was really impressed
Chris Case 03:35
Excellent. Fayetteville, your new favorite Ville. Head to favoriteville.com to explore one of America’s top rated bike cities, where world class cycling is just the beginning. So I know, Trevor, that you were pretty giddy, as you sometimes get, when we talk about studies, about this first one, when it comes to injuries in various athlete types, because this runs so counter to what we’ve thought for so long.
The Injury Study: Do Volume and Cross-Training Really Prevent Injury?
Trevor Connor 04:01
I love studies like this. I love when you have something that you take for granted, you just go, yeah, we’ve been reading the research on this for a while, and this is just what we know to be true. And you always get in trouble when you say that, because that is the nature of science. There is no truth in science. There is only hypothesis. And when you hear a really good researcher, a really good scientist, get interviewed, they’ll never say absolute, this is true.
Chris Case 04:29
We’ve proven.
Trevor Connor 04:30
Right. And unfortunately, that gets used often in the media to kind of, you know, say, oh, there’s no science behind this. Because when you listen to the researchers, they won’t say that this is absolutely true. And it’s a flip, because a good researcher will never say anything is true. I always love to say, you know, they disprove gravity.
Griffin McMath 04:50
I mean, the media in the last five years also just looks for truth with a capital T.
Chris Case 04:54
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 04:54
And it’s science. It doesn’t exist. So I love when you get these studies that you read it, and this first one we’re going to talk about even love the fact that they had their three hypotheses, which are the exact same three hypotheses I would have had, and they just proved all three of their hypotheses and their results.
Chris Case 05:11
What are those three hypotheses? Ooh, look at that.
Trevor Connor 05:13
You think I wasn’t ready, don’t you.
Chris Case 05:15
Serving it up for our family.
Trevor Connor 05:17
We hypothesize that a greater number of completed events would increase injury incidents. Two, cross trainers would report fewer overuse injuries than non cross trainers, and three, specific training modalities would be associated with overuse injury occurrence. That third one kind of was proved.
Chris Case 05:38
So what they’re saying is that their hypotheses where the more activity you do, the more likely you will to get injured.
Trevor Connor 05:44
Yeah.
Chris Case 05:45
The more you cross train, i.e, the more variety you add to your exercise regime, the less you’d be injured. And then the third one is the difference sports will- have different rates-
Trevor Connor 05:58
Which is true, but it wasn’t the ones that we thought.
Chris Case 06:00
Correct. Yes.
Trevor Connor 06:01
So, yeah. Basically what they did is they did a study where they took triathletes, so they took high level athletes, but they took a group of triathletes, and then a group of marathon runners, and then basically looked at their injury rates. Also looked at how much cross training do they do, and things like that. But taking their hypotheses, they basically show what a lot of us who train athletes in these sports thought, which is, you’re going to see lower rates of injury in triathletes because they do a mix of sports, which helps them. But a lot of coaches, when they train triathletes, will really say, we want to spend the bulk of time in the pool and on the bike, because those are less injury prone. If you do a lot of running, you’re going to be going to be more injured, because just running is prone to injury.
Chris Case 06:46
Right.
Trevor Connor 06:47
So you also would believe that triathletes would have less injury rates than marathon runners, because marathon runners tend to just do a huge volume of running, and that makes you more prone to injury. Plus, as coaches, we often tell our athletes cross train in the offseason, or do cross training through the season, because it prevents injury. Everything I just explained to you.
Chris Case 07:09
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 07:09
What they saw in the study was the exact opposite.
Chris Case 07:11
I know it’s crazy, crazy science.
Griffin McMath 07:15
It’s wild.
Surprising Findings: More Running, Fewer Injuries
Trevor Connor 07:17
Going through the results, running volume did correlate with injury. The more running you did, the less injury.
Chris Case 07:24
Crazy.
Trevor Connor 07:25
One that was expected. Swimming was associated with reduced injury.
Chris Case 07:28
Yes, good old swimming.
Trevor Connor 07:30
So that was expected. Here was the other one that I’m like, what? Cycling volume was associated with both greater upper body and lower body injury. So when I work with triathletes, I’m always like, do your volume on the bike. It’s less injury prone. And this is the opposite, is what it’s showing. And then cross training was associated with more upper extremity injuries.
Chris Case 07:52
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 07:52
So yeah, this one kind of threw me for a loop, which I love. I love getting challenged by stuff like this.
Griffin McMath 07:58
I think one thing we need you to define real quick, though, when we say injuries, are we talking about acute only or chronic? Because overuse can’t necessarily be measured instantaneously like an acute injury would.
Trevor Connor 08:09
Yeah, they didn’t address that in the study, at least I didn’t see it.
Griffin McMath 08:11
Yeah, that would be something as a follow up that would be interesting to me. When you talk about volume, overuse injury is going to appear differently.
Chris Case 08:19
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 08:19
And I will admit, because we’re talking about a specific study, I even read the methodology for this one. Little known secret most scientists kind of get to that methodology section and just kind of skip over it, which is why some journals, I’ve started putting the methodology at the end a much smaller text that nobody can read, because they know nobody’s gonna-
Griffin McMath 08:38
One of the most important parts.
Trevor Connor 08:40
It is really important.
Chris Case 08:41
Would you say that their methods were sound for this study, since you did read it?
Trevor Connor 08:45
Yeah. I mean, in a scientific study, you always put the limitations at the end, potential issues, and they brought up the one limitation, which is very valid, which is a self report. They had a very large number of participants. It was 384 athletes that participated. There’s no way they would have the ability to sit there and have a medical doctor constantly reviewing these athletes and looking at the injuries. So it was self reported injuries, and it was also self reported on their training. No hope is most athletes, why would they lie about that stuff? That are going to tell you the truth.
Chris Case 09:13
Right.
Trevor Connor 09:16
But, yeah, that is a limitation, that is an issue, and it could be they just didn’t get down to that level of detail since it was self report, they were just asking injury rates.
Chris Case 09:26
Can I ask a big question, why? Why is this study running counter to what has come before? Well, that’s not totally true, but in large part, this is saying something very different from what you believed and a lot of most people believe about what causes injuries, volume, etc.
Trevor Connor 09:46
Yeah, I bet this is where I was a little disappointed in the study. Because, you know, when I read the abstract, I’m like, oh, there’s gonna be a fun study, because it basically countered everything that is generally believed. So I’m like, I can’t wait to get into this and see what their explanation is. When you read the actual study, the written part’s only three pages. It’s really short.
Chris Case 10:06
Yep.
Why Cross-Training May Increase Injury Risk
Trevor Connor 10:06
So they don’t go into that much detail, but they have a couple theories. One is with the running volume. They did bring up a chicken or the egg thing, is it the increased running volume that’s somehow causing adaptations, that’s causing these athletes to have less injury. And they certainly showed that you see less injury in more experienced runners than less experienced runners. So there is some evidence of that. But the other possibility here is people who are just naturally resistant to injury are the only ones who can do that big running volume.
Chris Case 10:39
Yeah, right.
Trevor Connor 10:40
So is it the running volume that’s reducing the injury rate, or is the resistance to injury that’s causing the higher running volume?
Chris Case 10:47
Right. And then, of course, there’s the technique aspects here, that better, quote and quote, better runners, or more elite runners, or more experienced runners, might have better form, better technique, and therefore be less injury prone, right?
Trevor Connor 10:59
And they brought that up in the cross training that they tried to explain, why is it, when we’ve always said cross training reduces injury, you’re actually seeing higher rates. And they brought up the whole idea of unfamiliarity. The athletes aren’t familiar with the particular sport, so they might not do it with good form. Their body isn’t adapted to it, so it can actually initially increase injury. And I’m experiencing that right now. I’m a cyclist. We’re in the fall. I’ve started running. Three weeks ago, I had two weeks of great running, and now I’m limping around because my calves and achilles tendons are killing me.
Griffin McMath 11:29
I was wondering why you’re walking weird.
Trevor Connor 11:32
I am walking very weird now.
Chris Case 11:33
At least it’s not you back, right?
Trevor Connor 11:34
Back is great.
Chris Case 11:36
That’s good. So have you ever had a gait analysis?
Trevor Connor 11:38
Of my running?
Chris Case 11:39
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 11:39
Yeah. People laugh at me as they run by me. So that’s-
Griffin McMath 11:44
That was a loaded question the way you asked that. That was leading, you were like, by the way.
Trevor Connor 11:45
I went out for a run last night, and the best I could do because of the pain was, like, 11 minute miles.
Chris Case 11:52
The pain.
Trevor Connor 11:53
Like people were running by me, and you could tell they’re just like, what is with this guy?
Chris Case 11:57
Did you happen to use any adaptive strategies to cope with that pain.
Trevor Connor 12:00
Yes.
Chris Case 12:01
Did you-
Griffin McMath 12:02
Please see episode.
Chris Case 12:03
Please see our last Fast Chats.
Trevor Connor 12:05
I had a point where I could have gone the long way and then another three miles, or go the short way and do a mile and a half. And I did the mile and a half.
Griffin McMath 12:13
You did- you adapted.
Trevor Connor 12:15
That was my adaptation. I went home and got on the couch.
Chris Case 12:18
Okay, very good.
Griffin McMath 12:19
I think what’s important, though, going back to the cross turning aspect, is that when we talk about this, we’re not saying you shouldn’t.
Trevor Connor 12:26
Right.
Griffin McMath 12:27
Do cross training?
Trevor Connor 12:28
No, I’m still gonna recommend it to athletes.
Griffin McMath 12:30
So what would be the caveat? What’s the nuance you would deliver that recommendation with, then?
Trevor Connor 12:35
In terms of the cross training, it is, be careful. There is a familiarity phase, and you might want to ease into it. And it might be if you’re going to do that cross training, something that you want to do consistently, or be ready for the fact that you might have short term injury. So for me, for example, you know, I run for three months of the year, and then I have nine months where I don’t run at all. And if I’m going to keep doing this, perhaps I should be just making sure I’m running through the year so I don’t lose that familiarity.
Chris Case 13:05
And that’s what I’ve done for the last probably five years. Is primarily in the summer months, the warmer months. I am a cyclist, but I still try to run once a week just to have that in the legs.
Trevor Connor 13:19
Yep.
Chris Case 13:20
The other thing that I would say here, and I don’t know that this goes to the study itself. It’s just a general caution for cyclists out there who may have quite a big engine, and then they might want to run a little bit, and they have the aerobic capacity to go fast. But their musculature, their bodies, the chassis, is not ready to go at the speeds that their engine wants to take them on a bike, because they don’t want to run slow. They don’t want to do 12 minute miles. That’s not running to them. That’s just not enough for them. So they go out and they start running immediately, faster than they should, faster than their body’s ready to, and that’s what will lead to a lot of injuries.
Griffin McMath 14:05
I think picking almost like a menu of cross training methods that you want to rely on throughout the year, like pick three, that you and your coach can align on, that you can really gain that, as Trevor said, familiarity with, and a little bit of an expertise in so that you can select from that menu at any time, and it’s not novel, and maybe that’s the way to approach this. Is that your cross training menu should be steady, reliable, not a novel cross training approach.
Neuromuscular Work and the Case for Strength Training
Trevor Connor 14:33
The other thing I’m going to bring up, they said that you basically saw no difference in injury rates between triathletes and runners. And again, the common wisdom here would be, running is high impact. People who are doing a high volume of running should be more prone to injury and imbalances. Where triathletes, because they’re doing the mix of sports, so one potential explanation for this is they’re not saying both groups have no injuries. It could be that we’re right, that runners, because of the high impact, the high volume, and the imbalances, are getting a fair amount of injury, but triathletes aren’t getting the benefits from doing a mix of sports that we thought they were getting, and they’re also getting high rates of injury.
Chris Case 15:18
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 15:18
And if that is the case, then what you are seeing is runners might be countering some of the injury by that familiarity. They get better neuromuscular recruitment. They’re really making sure that they’re running with good form and doing everything possible to reduce the potential for injury, which they can do because they’re so focused on the one sport. But I go back to that great study where they looked at the difference between triathletes and cyclists in terms of the co-activation of muscles in their legs, which is a bad thing. And what you saw was very low levels of co-activation in elite cyclists, where in triathletes, the level of co-activation was the same as recreational cyclists, people just getting on a bike because they weren’t doing that neuromuscular training. So what you might see with triathletes is, even though swimming is reducing their injury risk because they aren’t doing the same sort of form work and neuromuscular work that a cyclist would do on a bike, or a runner would do running, they’re actually seeing higher rates of injury. And so to me, this would be an argument that you need to be doing neuromuscular work, whatever sport you’re doing. And again, one of the best ways to do neuromuscular work is in the gym. And I would have loved if they had in this study, differentiate the people who are spending time in the weight room and who aren’t, because I think that would probably have been very informative.
Griffin McMath 16:41
I will die on this hill that, Chris, I will die on this hill, that neuromuscular aspect you cannot neglect for anyone, I would even say non athletes as well. It has to be a part of your daily regimen or weekly regimen.
Chris Case 16:41
Yeah. Yep.
Trevor Connor 16:56
Which kind of leads to the next study, even though this specific one we’re going to talk about, we’re going to get into aging, doesn’t go into strength work. I have other studies on aging that really show, you want to age well, you need to be in the gym. You need to lift weights, whether you’re an endurance athlete or whatever type of athlete you are. That strength training component is just critical.
Chris Case 17:16
So what’s our next study, Chris? Do you want to get the title, or should I? Well before we move on, let me just give you the title of that journal article that we were just discussing. It’s called, An Exploratory, Retrospective Study on Injury Occurrence in Triathletes and Marathon Runners. It came out this year, 2025 and that’s in the International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy. I’ll read it.
Transition to Longevity: Intensity vs Volume
Trevor Connor 17:21
Wait, I get to read it, you can give the author. Because Chris is excited about this. I didn’t even notice this, and Chris was like, instantly, look at that! Intensity or Volume: The Role of Physical Activity in Longevity. This is also a just published study from the European Journal of Preventative Cardiology. First author, Schwendinger.
Chris Case 18:00
Fabian Schwendinger, Denis Infanger, Eric Lichtenstein, Timo Hinrichs, Raphael Knaier, Alex Rowlands, Arno Schmidt-Trucksäss.
Trevor Connor 18:13
So this study is a more complex study, and it’s a really interesting study. We do need to address the methodology a little bit from the start, because it is important. It is an epidemiological study, which means they are looking for correlations. They can’t say cause. So when you do that, you have what are called hazard ratios, which, again, I’m just going to simplify all this. They’re basically saying, if you do X, your potential risk of Y is this, and they state whether that risk is beyond chance or not. And most of what they’re showing here is yes, the risk is beyond chance. So what they use is NHANES data. So think of this as researchers that just collect data, so that other researchers can analyze the data. So they do these giant studies where they have 10s of 1000s of people that participate, and they just collect huge amounts of health, and nutrition, and exercise data on these people for years, and years, and years. So the whole thing about cholesterol came out of the Framingham study, which was done in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, where basically everybody who lived there participated, and they tracked the people for 20 years. And that data was used for a lot of purposes. NHANES is another set of data, there’s actually multiple sets of NHANES data, where there’s just a whole group that collects all this data. They don’t do anything with it, but researchers can come in and say, we would like to use this particular subset of data within the end hands. Can you please give it to us and then we’ll analyze it?
Chris Case 19:52
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 19:52
So that’s what happened here. And they use, I think, about 7,518 participants. So it was a large number. What’s important here is they used a subset of the NHANES data from 2011 to 2014, where all the participants use activity monitors, 24 hour monitors. But here’s what’s really important, these people were tracked for over a decade, but they only wore those monitors for seven days. So you could see what their activity level was like for those seven days. But you are making an assumption that for those next 10 years, their activity level remained consistent, which is really hard to make.
Chris Case 20:34
Yeah.
Griffin McMath 20:35
Yeah, this is the biggest flaw I find with this study.
Chris Case 20:38
Yep.
Trevor Connor 20:38
The other issue here is it’s not like these people were unaware that they were wearing activity monitors. And this will become important later. You could see a scenario where people who were completely sedentary went, oh, there’s an activity monitor on me. I don’t want them to see that I spend my whole day on the couch, so I should go out and get some walks in. And a lot of those people who are completely inactive probably don’t want to go out and do really intense work.
Chris Case 21:00
Yeah, they’re just gonna walk around.
Trevor Connor 21:03
They’re just gonna go out, walk around. But that might not actually be their typical behavior. So that’s important to factor in here, because we’re looking at the difference between intensity versus volume of low intensity exercise. And again, they aren’t looking at elite athletes. So when they’re talking about intensity, they’re talking about really brisk walk or slow jog. I mean, there might be some people who are racing in here, but it’s mostly looking at your average population.
Chris Case 21:30
Right.
Trevor Connor 21:31
So where do we want to start?
Chris Case 21:32
Well, I mean, this one also runs counter to what we’ve seen before in other research.
Trevor Connor 21:38
It does, you know, not as much as some of the others. The very first Fast Chats episode, we looked at a study which I actually grabbed that was Sprint and Endurance Training in Relationship to Redox Balance, Inflammatory Status and Biomarkers of Aging in Master Athletes and the short version of this. So they’re looking at telomere length, which is a major predictor of aging, how long you’re going to live and how healthy you’re going to live. It showed that sprint athletes saw a lot better indicators than endurance athletes, which I hate. Hate seeing that. Because I hate sprinting. But this is just the way it is.
Chris Case 22:16
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 22:16
So this is different. It’s not quite as, oh my God, that’s exact opposite of what we thought.
Chris Case 22:22
Yeah. But still, this is cardiovascular disease that they’re kind of looking at.
Trevor Connor 22:27
So they’re looking at all cause mortality.
Chris Case 22:29
Yep.
Trevor Connor 22:30
And they’re also looking at cardiovascular disease. And look, we raised the issues. They didn’t even collect the data. They’re using the NHANES data, so they’re stuck with that. But they did do some good things, like they eliminated anybody from the study that already had cardiovascular disease, and this is a little morbid, but they eliminated anybody from the study who died within the first 12 months, because there would be mitigating factors there.
Chris Case 22:53
Sure.
Trevor Connor 22:54
And that is important, I’ve talked about this before. I think we’ve mentioned on the show, there’s a study that used similar sort of data and showed that the more salt you consume, the less risk of cardiovascular disease. But they didn’t remove people that had cardiovascular disease at the start of the study. And the issue is, when you are diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, your doctor tells you get salt out of your diet. So basically, the study showed that a low salt diet had a very high risk for heart disease. But it wasn’t that the low salt diet was causing heart disease. It was heart disease was causing the low salt diet.
Chris Case 23:30
Right.
The Big Finding: Intensity Stronger Than Volume for Risk Reduction
Trevor Connor 23:30
And when somebody corrected that and fixed the data, yeah, you saw a straight line relationship of the more salt you consume, the higher the risk of heart disease. So they did a good job of controlling for some of those factors here, but yeah, the short of it is, certainly they showed inactivity is your highest risk for heart disease and all cause mortality. So if you’re just sitting on the couch, you’re right from the start at high risk.
Chris Case 23:53
Why does the couch always get the bad rap?
Trevor Connor 23:56
Okay, when you’re sitting on the bed.
Griffin McMath 23:58
I don’t know.
Trevor Connor 23:59
I don’t know.
Griffin McMath 24:00
He prefers the chase lounge.
Chris Case 24:02
The chase lounge, if you’re just a chase lounge, potato. Lazy, the lazy, that is where you should take it, the Lazy Boy, because it’s right there in the name.
Trevor Connor 24:12
The first team I ever raced for was Lazy Boy Cycling.
Chris Case 24:14
Really?
Trevor Connor 24:15
We were sponsored by Lazy Boy.
Chris Case 24:16
Wow, that’s amazing.
Trevor Connor 24:18
And they used to have us come in front of the Lazy Boy store and sit on our trainers. They’d have half the team sit on the trainers riding half the team sit on Lazy Boys out on the lawn.
Chris Case 24:29
Wow.
Trevor Connor 24:29
In front of the Lazy Boy store.
Chris Case 24:31
Do you have a team photo?
Trevor Connor 24:32
Just encourage people to come in. Those photos are somewhere I did not keep a single one.
Chris Case 24:36
That’s too bad. That’s a great sponsor.
Griffin McMath 24:39
Lazy Boy, if you hear this, please resurface those photos.
Trevor Connor 24:41
The best part of it is when I was in a race and sitting at the back of a group and not taking polls, and people would yell at me, point at my shirt.
Chris Case 24:47
Lazy Boy.
Griffin McMath 24:48
I’m doing my job.
Trevor Connor 24:51
Going back to the study, inactivity, absolutely, you’re at the highest risk. So increasing volume of activity is going to produce improvements, but it only reduced all cause mortality. I shouldn’t say only, you generally don’t want to die, so that’s a good thing, but intensity reduced the risk more, or the correlation. See, I got to be careful, because it isn’t causal. So the correlation was less, and also intensity was the only one that correlated with lower heart disease.
Chris Case 25:24
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 25:25
And what they say through the study is, well, volume is important. What is more important is the intensity that you are doing during that volume of training. So again, it comes back to just going out and getting activity is certainly beneficial. But if you are really trying to live a long healthy life, intensity is important. And again, let’s be aware of the audience of our show. This is athletes.
Chris Case 25:49
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 25:50
When they talk about intensity, they’re probably talking about zone three, maybe some zone four. They’re not talking about tons of sprint work and super high intensity.
Chris Case 26:00
Right and we obviously are not recommending that anybody that is training for an event just go out and- because these things are, we’re talking about completely different things, performance versus health.
Griffin McMath 26:10
That’s where I struggle the most when we bring in public health research on this podcast, because I always want to highlight all the asterisk you can’t just cleanly transcribe this data over to an athlete population.
Chris Case 26:22
Yeah, yeah.
Why Continuous Exercise Beats Accumulated Minutes
Trevor Connor 26:22
So I think anybody listening to this, you’re fine. You’re getting enough intensity. We’re not saying you have to stop going out for long rides and just go and do sprints. This is the exact opposite. As matter of fact, another really important thing that they researched here was whether continuous versus just getting the intensity through the day was important. Now that was sparked by the fact that the World Health Organization has changed their recommendations. They used to say you need to get at least 10 minutes of continuous exercise most days. World Health Organization has now changed that to every minute counts, meaning it doesn’t matter. Accumulate minutes of exercise. It could be, you do a minute here, you do a minute there, you do a minute later, and you never do your 10, 15, or whatever, minutes of continuous exercise. So they did look at that in this study, and they’ve said, we’re not going to counter the World Health Organization recommendations, if you can get exercise, get exercise. But when they compared people who are getting a similar volume of intensity and volume of exercise, but one group was doing it in short bursts through the day, another group was getting continuous exercise of at least five minutes, not talking hours and hours, yeah. But continuous exercise, you saw a 72% reduced risk in the people that got the continuous exercise. So it was substantial, it was significant. So they didn’t want to say, throw the recommendations out, but they are saying they probably should have kept the recommendation of, you need continuous exercise.
Griffin McMath 28:01
And thankfully, that’s less of a concern with this population. No one’s going on 32nd bike rides out there, so.
Chris Case 28:08
Runs, yeah.
Griffin McMath 28:08
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 28:08
Yep.
Chris Case 28:09
Well, let’s turn our attention to the aging aspect here. Do they see any difference between intensity versus volume when it came to that?
Aging Curves: Volume Isn’t Enough Over Time
Trevor Connor 28:16
Yeah. So the whole purpose of the study is looking at healthy aging, and they did point out the fact that, unfortunately, as you age, the risk of heart disease, the risk of obviously, all cause mortality, increases with age. And that’s just part of the aging experience, but they did show real interesting differences between volume and intensity. And there’s this great graph in there that’s color coded, and had to spend a lot of time trying to get and understand this graph. But let’s start with the volume side. And they separated men and women, and they then separated both groups into percentiles. So for example, people who are in the 95th percentile of volume, getting the most volume, versus people that are in the fifth percentile of volume, they’re doing almost no exercise. And what you saw, both men and women, people that were down in that 5th or 10th percentile, even at the age of 20, are at high risk. You just see them stay there. It declines a little bit, but they’re basically at high risk their whole life. It’s not a good place to be. What you see with the people who are doing a lot of volume, they’re in the green. They’re very low risk when they’re young, but if all they’re doing is volume, and not getting in that intensity, even the people in the highest percentile of volume end up going into moderate to high risk as they age. By the time you’re 80, you’re in that moderate to high risk.
Chris Case 29:40
I know this doesn’t necessarily apply to our audience here, but what do they define as high volume in these people?
Trevor Connor 29:47
So they’re doing it as percentile. So I think when you’re getting into this 95th percentile, you’re probably talking about people that are like us, getting 10 plus hours a week that are doing high volume.
Chris Case 29:57
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 29:57
So, you know, those lower percentiles, it’s more sedentary, three, four, like even the 50th percentile. You’re probably talking about somebody that’s getting three, four hours a week, but my guess 95th percentile, that’s where we-
Chris Case 30:10
10 plus 12. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 30:11
So that does apply to us. It does apply to our audience listening to this. If all you are doing is volume, you’re still going to be, as you age, at higher risk of heart disease and other conditions. The shape of the intensity graph is very different. It’s the same thing, broken into percentiles from people that are getting a lot of intensity, to people that are getting very little intensity. And what you see there is, everybody starts in the green, but people who are getting very little intensity, they really plummet as they age. They go very high risk. Even at younger ages, like even in their 50s, you’re getting into high risk, where people that are getting a lot of intensity. So the people in that 90th, 95th percentile, it’s almost a straight line, a horizontal line, they start green, even 80, 90, years old. And this is hypothetical, I don’t think they had anybody in the study who was actually 90 by the end of the study, but they stay in the green. And more importantly, this is true both men and women. Though, in women, you see a greater increase in risk. In the people that get very little intensity, but the people are getting a lot of intensity. It’s kind of a flat line. And even at the age of 80, their risk of all cause mortality is lower than 20 year olds that are doing very little intensity or no intensity. So basically, what this is showing is you need the volume. If you don’t get the volume, you’re at high risk. But that’s not enough if you want to age well, you need the intensity.
Griffin McMath 31:41
This paper was incredibly visual, the number of graphs and even the tombstone graphic that was included. I don’t know why we’re assuming all are Christian. I’d appreciate like a Star of David tombstone and a couple others. But when we link to the study, I think this paper is full of a lot of graphics that if usually papers are hard for you to get through this definitely has some helpful graphics.
Chris Case 32:02
Obviously, we will include links to these articles so that people can check them out themselves, because that was a good explanation. But words can’t do all these graphics justice. So it helps to see them and understand the arc or the lack of an arc on some of these graphs that you were talking about.
What This Means in Practice: Add Intensity and Load Safely
Trevor Connor 32:19
And going back to the example of the influencer with Alina, for women, especially considering osteoporosis and you’re getting to a certain age, or your hormones are having a variety of changes happening between your 40s and 60s. You know there’s studies like the lift more study, to continue your point of not just being on the bike, you need to make sure that your bones have a variety of impact load variation as well. Yep, but I will give you an example. So my girlfriend, Alina, to be expected, because this is the way it is for everybody. I work in the health space. This is what I do for a living. So when I give her recommendations on exercise and nutrition, she ignores everything I say, and instead she listens to influencers on social media. And there’s this one woman who is our age, so mid 50s that she listens to all the time. And this woman has been saying, all you ever need to do is go out and walk, just get long walks, you don’t need to run, you don’t need to do intensity, this is all you need to be healthy. And just recently, this influencer admitted she just got diagnosed with osteoporosis and she has other health issues, and said flat out, I’ve been giving all of you the wrong advice, which is, you know what I had been telling Alina. That, yeah, it’s good you’re going out and walking every day, and she does, like, hour and a half long walks, so I’m like, that is healthy for you, but unless you are running, unless you’re doing intensity, you’re still going to have health issues, and this study is basically saying exactly that. So my girlfriend, she’s not an elite athlete, she is the target of this study. And so anybody listening to this, yeah, that doesn’t really apply to you, but you probably have family members and friends who are more recreational, and this is important for them to know. But going back to again, athletes. So we saw that one that we covered before that sprint athletes seem to see better signs of aging. So I looked at, you know, are there more? And I did find a bunch more studies that continue this intensity, strength work, are more important for healthy aging, even in athletes. And so here’s another one, The Impact of Life-long Strength Versus Endurance Training on Muscle Fiber Morphology and Phenotype Composition in Older Men. And we talked about this on the show before, but what you see as you age is you have in your muscles neuromuscular units. So one nerve will innervate multiple fibers, and one neuromuscular unit will be type one fibers, another will be type two fibers. What you see, particularly in sedentary individuals, is, as they age, fibers will disconnect from a neuromuscular unit and become orphans. If they’re an orphan, they can’t fire. They often will re enervate, but they’ll attach to a different motor unit, and they usually attach to a type one muscle fiber unit, and then, if they were a type two fiber, before they convert to a type one. More importantly, you end up then with fewer and fewer neuromuscular units, which means your ability to control those muscles is reduced. So that’s why you see people, when they’re older, have a harder time walking, and do shuffle walking, and things like that, it’s one of the contributing factors. So one thing you really want to do as you age is avoid this orphaning of muscle fibers. And basically what this study shows is that I’ll go right down to the conclusions, strength trained masters athletes were characterized by similar muscle morphology as young. You just don’t see this in strength training athletes. Which was not the case for recreational, active, or endurance trained old. So this was looking at athletes, endurance athletes who aren’t in the weight room, still see this effect. So these results indicate that strength training may preserve type two fibers with advancing age and older men, likely as a result of chronic use of high contractile force generation. So yet another sign that if we want to age well, just doing slow endurance work ain’t going to cut it.
Griffin McMath 36:03
This is where you have to be careful about the misconceptions, because with Alina, I did convince her to do box jumps a couple times a week, and she seen huge benefits from that. You know, she used to wake up with her knees and ankles being really sore and just struggling to get out of bed. Now, she was like, yeah, it doesn’t affect me at all. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 36:10
But she went to see her doctor and told her doctor she was doing the box jumps. The doctor went, don’t do that. You’re post menopausal. You can’t do anything with impact.
Griffin McMath 36:40
Ah, makes me so uncomfortable. It’s not like she’s doing three foot box jumps.
Trevor Connor 36:46
No, she’s doing a 14 inch.
Griffin McMath 36:47
Yeah. And again, if anyone who hasn’t been doing this, you need to go get expert input on your form and how to do this safely, and learn what you need to do. But this stuff is incredibly important, this impact, this load. Don’t go wild and don’t do it independently.
Trevor Connor 37:04
Right.
Chris Case 37:05
That was another episode of Fast Chats. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Chats are those of the individual. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Hey, don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Go there. Help Us. Subscribe and watch. As always, be sure to leave us a rating and a review. To learn more about the episode, from show notes, to those references, visit us at fasttalklabs.com and to join the conversation on our forum go to forums.fasttalklabs.com. For Griffin and Trevor, I’m Chris. Thanks for listening.
