by Michael Plank
Two weeks ago, I posted an impassioned plea to not do high-intensity training every day and nothing else. (You can read it HERE).
As is usually the case with my impassioned pleas, I should expand on this a little.
High-intensity training is not bad. In fact, it’s great. I think everyone should do it. The problem that I wrote about is when it gets excessive. This happens with many kinds of training: you can do too much running, too much yoga, and too much hiking.
So, if you would, please let me talk about the same thing in a slightly different way.
Imagine your fitness like a building. Training with high intensity is how you make that building tall. High-intensity looks like CrossFit, HIIT, sprints, and anything that jacks your heart rate way up, makes your muscles burn, and leaves you gasping for air. High-intensity training typically comes with a massive endorphin release and with an incredible increase in work capacity (how much stuff you can do). Focusing your training on purely high-intensity effort will give you a building that is very tall, but will look a little bit like a tower of children’s stacking blocks. I made a tower like that with my son when he was little that was almost 7 feet tall.
But here’s the problem with towers like that: they’re very unstable. The one my son and I made stood for all of 8 seconds before it fell over and collapsed. If we keep this analogy going, “tower collapse” looks like things we associate with overtraining: decreased sleep quality, injury, stalled results, etc.
If we’re trying to build a big building (i.e. build a lot of fitness), height is important. But it’s not the only thing that’s important. Think about the pyramids. The Great Pyramid in Giza is an incredible 45-stories high. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that it’s not tall. But it obviously doesn’t look like a block tower at all. And it’s stood for a lot longer than 8 seconds. It’s creeping up on 5,000 years.
You probably see where I’m going here…
The pyramids around the world have stood for so long because they aren’t just tall, they also have massive bases. Their foundations are every bit as broad as their peaks are high. Broader, even. Their foundations are so solid that the pyramids can reach staggering heights with no danger of falling over.
So if high-intensity training is how you build height, how do you build that foundation?
With lower-intensity training. This can look like a lot of things, but it certainly includes extended, low-level cardio efforts (like walking). It might include joint training, skill work, or sub-max-effort strength training.
Competitive endurance athletes will do an astonishing 80-90% of their total training volume in the low-intensity realm, with a mere 10-20% of their training being the high-intensity stuff that we associate with “good” workouts.
If you’re beat up from all your high-intensity training, that’s a sign of overtraining, for sure. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that much high-intensity work is bad for you. It just means that your tower is falling over. It means that you don’t have a big enough foundation to support the building you’ve made.
I heard someone say once that if you’re overtrained, it just means that you haven’t trained enough to train that hard.
You don’t have to stop high-intensity training. After all, high-intensity training can be super fun, and it’s very effective for getting a whole lot of results that we look for from fitness. But if you’re running into overtraining issues, it might be worth taking some of those blocks on top of your tower and shoring up your base a little bit.
A 4:1 ratio of low intensity to high intensity (like the pros) is amazing, but it’s such a dramatic shift that it’s probably unrealistic for most people reading this. A more realistic goal might be closer to 1:1 or maybe even 1:2.
If you’re doing CrossFit 4 days a week, that’s great. But if the rest of your life is spent at a desk job, then before you add a 5th day of CrossFit, try adding 2-4 hours of walking or yoga (or both!) per week to balance things out.
Low-intensity stuff isn’t sexy. It’s not what all the influencers post about. It’s not the stuff in competitions. It’s not the stuff that makes you feel like you whipped your body into submission. Nobody writes home about the widest-based buildings they saw on vacation.
But those tower blocks always fall over. And I’m no structural engineer, but the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing is a pyramid.
What we’re always trying to do is to take the long view, to see the big picture, because the best training for optimal health is the training that you can do for your whole life. And though we’ve built so much of our business on high-intensity training, we’ve come to realize just how important that foundation is.
Make a tall building. It’s fun and it’s helpful. But don’t ever underestimate just how good for you going for a long walk is.