Individualizing Exercise with Rest-Based Training – Ep. 209

In this episode, Dr. Jade covers the basics of rest-based training. This type of training is slightly different from CrossFit and significantly different from strength training. It allows for the person to rest as much as needed and to come back to the exercise with more energy, performing the sets and reps with more intensity. The basic concept of this type of training is “more rest, more power”. Focusing on rest allows the exerciser to have a customized workout based on their fitness level. It also allows the muscle to recover properly. During a longer rest period, the tissue has more time to heal and grow. In addition, for some people, rest-based training can be a good option because it usually doesn’t last too long. Tune in to learn more about this topic and how you can implement it into your routine! Check out the Next Level Human sponsors! Visit timelinenutrition.com/nextlevel to know more about Mitopure and how you can improve your cellular health! Connect with Dr. Jade Teta Website: www.jadeteta.com Instagram: @jadeteta Subscribe to the Next Level Human Podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/next-level-human-with-dr-jade-teta/id1333722346 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1d7xtbC8Q2qBnQRjlu7Tj0 Other platforms: https://nextlevelhuman.libsyn.com/

TRANSCRIPTION:

Podcast Intro: [00:14] welcome to the Next Level Human Podcast. As a human, you have a job to do. In fact, you have four jobs; to earn and manage money, to attain and maintain health and fitness, to build and sustain personal relationships, to find meaning and make a difference. None of these jobs are taught in school and that is what this podcast is designed to do. To educate us all on living our most fulfilled lives through the mastery of these four jobs. I'm your host, Dr. Jade Teta and I believe we are here living this life for three reasons and three reasons only; to learn, to teach and to love. In this podcast, I will be learning, teaching, and loving right along with you. I'm grateful to have your company; here is to our next level.

Jade 1:18 

Okay, what's going on everyone, welcome to today's show. Today's show is going to be on exercise. And I'm going to start this podcast out with a question. few questions for you. Question number one would be why is it that you think what would be your hypothesis of why people don't work out? What would be the number one reason why you think people don't work out? So that's, that's question one. Is it? Because they don't have time? Is it because they don't have? No How is it because it's too difficult. All of these things have been shown in research to be reasons. One of the major reasons though, is quoted is time, I would argue that, you know, time is definitely a big one. But really, we all have plenty of time, right leisure time. So there must be another aspect to that. And if exercise was fun for people, they would probably make the time for it. Right. So I oftentimes think there's something about exercise and perhaps the way it's practiced by many people, that makes them not want to do it. It's sort of like putting your hand on a hot stove. No one does that. voluntarily, do they? So the question is, why don't you know people exercise? The next question I want to ask you is, why is it that you think when people do exercise, that they don't get the results they want? Is it because the type of exercise they're doing is the wrong type? We hear an awful lot about, you know, cardiovascular exercise, maybe not being the best thing for people who want to lose weight despite it being healthy. Is it because they don't train hard enough? They don't train frequently enough. They don't train long enough. Well, these two questions are really what we're going to be talking about today, we're going to be talking about the idea of REST based training. Now REST based training is a concept that I developed all the way back in 2004. And it is a concept that I have written books about I have lectured, you know, to many different health and fitness organizations, you know, idea, and others too. I've lectured on it for continuing education units for doctors, personal trainers, you name it. I have been teaching about risk based training for quite some time, although, in the last five to seven years, I've been relatively quiet about it as I had my company metabolic effect, basically join, join with metabolic living, which is now becoming metabolic.com. And it really speaks to REST based training it speaks to and it was developed. I came up with it to answer the questions that I just asked you. One of the things that I saw very early on and just I'll give you a start out this podcast with just giving you a little bit of history in case those of you who listened to this podcast haven't heard this before, but it's surprising for people to know that I got started in health and fitness at the age of 15 years old. I consider 15 Being my start date because that is the date and the time that I made my first money personal training. I was basically playing high school football JV A time I started to write programs for people on my football team in the offseason to stay in shape for football. And that turned into writing programs for some of their mothers and fathers and family members. And I started to make money off of personal training as early as 15 years old. And so when I say I've been in the health and fitness industry since 15, this is what I'm referring to. And it started out with an interest in fitness. Now, I had two older brothers who got me into training very early on, and were instrumental in teaching me the basics. In fact, when I was 10 years old, I was begging my father to let me start weight training with my older brothers. At that time, it was believed that starting weight training that young would would stunt your growth. And so he basically said, No, you can't do it. And I had been begging him since the age of probably seven or eight. And he had basically told me Look, you know, you can do sit ups and push ups all you want. So I used to do 1000s of sit ups and push ups. But by the time I was 11 years old, I started getting heavy into weight training. By the time I was in junior high school. And by the time I was 15, I was actually pretty advanced in weightlifting, as a matter of fact, my freshman year of high school, I was the fourth strongest kid in my school and my sophomore year, I was the strongest kid in my school, when I was a freshman. I was benching 225 for multiple repetitions, I was able to squat, over 300 pounds, I was doing things that you normally wouldn't associate with, you know, somebody, I wasn't necessarily a very tall kid, I was about 510. But I started. I started high school at 510, and about 180 pounds, and was very lean. And that had to do with this training, all the training that I was doing. And one of the things that happened to me along that path is as I started personal training, I fell madly in love with exercise, basically all types to be honest, I never was a cardio person. But if I couldn't wait train, I would have done cardio, I would have run I would have done something. So I fell in love with this for very, very early on. And it has always been something that I didn't quite understand why other people didn't love it or gravitate towards it until I started getting into undergrad. I studied biochemistry and paid my way through undergrad through personal training. And then I got into medical school and still did personal training and bartending as a way to pay my way through school. And I started to see pretty early on as I started to take exercise and fitness more seriously and see it as a career. And one of the things about me that I think many of you may know many of you may not know is that as I was finishing up my naturopathic medical degree, I started to see very clearly that I never wanted to stop personal training, I started to see how powerful it was exercise and I started realizing that even then I was prescribing exercise and making it a key part of my interventions, and recommendations and prescriptions for my patients in clinic and medical school. And I didn't want that to end. So I started to see very clearly that I wasn't going to be your traditional primary care doctor just doing you know, natural medicine but that exercise and nutrition and psychology started out mostly as exercise from a young age though was going to be where I wanted to be.

Jade  8:29 

And I started to really go deep into this and one of the things I saw is that most doctors had no idea about exercise. In fact, when I was looking at going to medical school, one of the reasons I went to Baseer University and did a naturopathic medical degree is because when I looked at the curriculum for the, you know, conventional medical school, I saw that they had no training in nutrition. I had a little bit but very little and no exercise at all. at Bastyr University naturopathic medical school actually had a ton of nutrition but still no exercise. And so one of the things that I just couldn't believe it, you know, doctors were being trained on both the natural medicine side and the conventional medicine side and none of them were getting any training in exercise prescription. And then also, one of the things I saw very clearly is that the way most people were personal training, including myself and as a matter of fact, this came to me working with a client named Claudia Claudia if you're listening to this, I love you and you know she is someone who I worked with in Seattle we haven't talked in years, but Claudia really helped me develop recipes training and it came about like this we were in the gym. And Claudia, if you live listening to this, hopefully you'll you'll laugh about this. But one of the things about Claudia was that she would push really hard but then rest a lot. You should be resting a ton in the exercise session and it used to bother me because I was like, at that time I was like Come on, push push, like what are you doing? Why are you resting everyone else would sort of go go go We'll go and keep going. One of one of the things I discovered though is, I started to put heartrate monitors on my clients, my personal training clients as part of what I did, and what I began to see is that claudia versus all my other clients, her heart rate was, on average way higher than everyone else. I also saw that Claudia seemed to be getting much better results than everyone else in the gym. And this began to kind of make me ask a question. And the question was, okay, like, Claudia seems to be more consistent. Even though she didn't love to exercise necessarily, she seems to be pushing much harder. And she also seems to be resting more than anybody. And one of the things about Claudia as well is that, you know, I would be Come on Go, go, go, go go. And most everyone else would listen to me. But Claudia was pretty much like, I'm gonna go when I'm ready. And I started to realize that there was something about the way that she was approaching exercise that was different than everybody else, she took control. That made her more consistent, she also was taking more rest, and that allowed her to push harder. And so I saw this clinically, first, this idea of her focusing on rest, rather than work. And actually, ironically, working harder as a result of focusing on rest instead of work. And this began to make some sense to me when I started to look at certain things. For example, if you look at sprinters versus marathon runners, now, this is a not a fair sort of comparison, because many of these people are just built differently in they're built differently genetically. However, if you look at a sprinter, sprinters are very muscular, they tend to be tight to dominated in their muscle fibers, marathon runners tend to be type one dominated. But the two exercises couldn't be more different is when you when you look at these people practice not during events. But when you look at them practice, sprinters run as fast as they can take three four minute breaks, then run as fast as they can, again, it looks a lot like resistance training, at least the kind of resistance training I did coming up. Whereas marathoners basically would just run and plot and just keep going in on stuff. So one was all out effort interspersed with rest, and the other one was a pacing strategy, a slower, longer continuous run. And if you notice, if you look at sprinters, they tend to be much leaner. Now, the muscle mass, it has to do with the muscle fibers. But I used to run body compositions on all these people, athletes and others throughout my career. And I always noticed that sprinters happen to be leaner. Now, it's not a true comparison, because there's a lot of genetic factors. And some would argue that that's mostly genetic. But it's interesting nonetheless. And it got me interested in looking into this idea of resting now at this time interval training began to become all the rage, high intensity interval training, which was really you know, about a very defined prescriptive shortly, short duration, high intensity thing. So you would push hard for a minute, and then rest for two. But that minute you had to push. And what I realized is that for people like Claudia, she would take you know, of that minute, she would do maybe 1015 seconds hard, and then arrest everyone else of that minute, would be pacing the entire time just so they can make it through the minute. So Claudia would be doing 15 seconds, and resting two minutes and 45 seconds. And she was turning the interval training into something that was geared towards her. And so I began to look at this, and then began to study it. And I began to come across some interesting sort of things. First of all, let's go through some of the exercise psychology, I mentioned the hot stove. And I think this is a good analogy for us to use with this idea of REST based training. Obviously, you see a hot stove, you are not going to be able to put your hand on that stove without getting burned. So you're going to use two strategies either you're going to put your hand over the stove far enough away from it, so that you can feel some warmth but not get hot, but you won't be able to touch it, you'll be able to just hold your hand above it. And this to me is analogous to sort of marathon or pacing, just traditional type of cardio. But also we know that if we touch the stove very quickly and pull our hand off, we also won't get burned. That's another strategy. But only one of those strategies allows us to touch the hot stove without getting burned. The other one means We have to pace. Think about this with interval training, sprinting, where you go hard touch the hot stove, very quick pull your hand off and rest versus marathon running where you hold your hand over the stove, just get it warm and are able to keep it there. From my perspective, what Claudia was doing with this REST based approach, that was different than traditional cardio and different than interval training, was that she was touching the stove, leaving her hand there for as long as she could before she got burned and pulling her hand off. Most people when they're doing interval training, never touch the stove at all, they just get close enough. And if they feel like getting too hot, they start to pace themselves, they back off. And this made the difference because one of the things that we find is that when you are able to breach the anaerobic threshold, a lot of magic begins to happen in that space. Now, a lot of people misunderstand the anaerobic threshold because they think that anaerobic metabolism only sort of kicks in separate from aerobic metabolism. But the truth is, is that anaerobic metabolism kicks in once aerobic metabolism is maxed out. And so anaerobic metabolism, the body goes in aerobic when it maxes out or can't go fast enough to maintain the aerobic capacity. And so oftentimes, when you are anaerobic, and doing something like high intensity interval training in an anaerobic fashion, you are also aerobic, but the other is not true. If you're aerobic, you're not anaerobic, but oftentimes when you're anaerobic, you are also aerobic. And so what we found over the last year is now this is going on 20 years now. 2004 was when I first developed, REST based training and started to lecture on it and design programs around it. So now it's you know, 2023, we are almost 20 years from that time, one of the things that I began to look at is that how can I take interval training, and really get people to breach that anaerobic threshold, rather than have them pace because the whole magic in the interval training research was the ability to breach the anaerobic threshold. But many people were not doing that, because they were pacing themselves in the same way, they would pace themselves in traditional cardiovascular exercise, except for people like Claudia, she was touching the stove, pulling her hand off, touching the stove, again, pulling her hand off, and she was breaching the anaerobic threshold. And as a result of that, she was able to get some of the hormonal benefits of exercise, what are those hormonal benefits that you get, when you go anaerobic? Well, you're more likely to get a testosterone kick from your exercise session, you're more likely to get a big boost in human growth hormone, you are more likely to get some of these muscle molecules, Myo kinds, like il six, and il eight, and il 15, and others when you go to a higher intensity. So the idea behind interval training was, hey, you should go to the higher intensity because you get these other benefits. Plus, you still get the aerobic capacity. In fact, for many people, you can build aerobic capacity faster if you do the interval training. But most people were not able to do it. This is where this idea of is there a way to use this resting strategy to make sure that we hit the air, the anaerobic threshold, make sure we get the benefits that stimulate all the magic, the afterburn effect of exercise in a way that allows us to get aerobic and anaerobic and get all these hormones, this chemical soup of magic that can happen when we go really hard, and do it safely.

Jade  18:53 

Perhaps I thought, REST based training, focusing on rest, rather than work could be the trick here. And the other thing that I found is that this also potentially could be a way to individualize exercise for people, because let's face it, if you're unfit, you'll reach the anaerobic threshold faster, because you're not in shape. If you're more fit, you might need to go harder. This would mean that for an elite athlete, you know, they could do a full minute all out and take a two minute rest. But for somebody who's not that good of shape, maybe they only need 10 seconds, and they can rest for two minutes and 50 seconds, similar to what Claudia was doing. And so this set me to looking at the research in two different directions. One I wanted to know if animals and more specifically humans were able to use rest and actually push harder than they normally would. I also wanted to know that it was it possible psychologically, that if I gave control over to the exerciser, instead of me being the trainer and yelling and screaming at them and trying to motivate them and push them harder, would they push harder or as hard as if they were in control. And so let's go through some of this research because what I found was, and I'll just give you the punch line right now, what I found was that, indeed, animals, evolutionarily speaking, naturally adapt to a rest work cycle. Secondly, I found when I started digging into the research that humans are able to basically measure their own responses and know intuitively when to push and when to rest so that they don't necessarily need they can be safe, and protect themselves and also get the workout perfectly suited to them simply by tapping into their own recovery and exertion scale. So let's get into this really quickly because it becomes really, really interesting. First of all, I'll tell you a story I used to when I was in undergrad, I worked in a lab, biochemistry lab, exercising mice. And if you've never done this, what this looks like is a big huge table that has a plexiglass, clear plexiglass on top that lifts off the table like a door. And basically, underneath that is all these little columns separated by a divider. And on each of those columns is a treadmill. And so imagine this big table that has a top on top of it, and then dividers and treadmills, little tiny rat treadmills. So that was one way you could exercise the mice as you just put them in these treadmills put the top down on top of them. And then they would run and by the way, it's kind of cruel, because you might say, well, Jade, how did you get them to run? Well, at the back of the treadmill was a little shock plate. And so if they stopped running, what would end up happening is they the treadmill would slide them they would stop running the treadmill would push them back and onto the shock plate, they would hit the shock plate and then it would shock them and that would force them to jump back on the treadmill and run. So kind of cruel, but this is how we would exercise those mice. This was one way to do it. The other way to do it was they would sometimes exercise spontaneously or we would have wheels in their cages. If you ever had a gerbil or hamster. You know how this works. And you'll you'll understand that if you force extra mice to exercise on these treadmills by by shocking them, you'll see that they can keep running and you can kind of get an idea of you know, some aerobic benefits and you know measure how they're responding to aerobic exercise. However, they naturally don't do that what they naturally do in the wild is they sprint, they stopped, they look around a spring again, they stop they look around, and they do this in their cages to have you ever a gerbil or hamster, they'll get on their running wheel, they'll run for a second, they'll stop, they'll run they'll stop, they use a sporadic rest, recover process. And some research actually, as I went to dig into this, basically saw this as an evolutionary advantage. In other words, if a rat runs continuously versus more slowly, but continuously versus faster, with shorter with short periods of rest, they can cover more ground in a shorter amount of time. So this push rests strategy that many animals use is an evolutionary strategy to allow them to cover more ground faster, so they're less likely to be prey. So animals, almost all of them do not go out and just run what they do is they run rest run rest run rest, so they can cover more distance than they would be able to otherwise. So animals are obviously able to tap into this. Now from the perspective of humans, I found a study Edwards at owl June 2010 issue of psychophysiology if you want to look this particular study up, I believe the title was self-pacing and interval training, self-pacing and interval training a look and see if I can find is just in case any of you want to look this up. Okay, so itself pacing in interval training, an anticipatory approach, June 2010, issue of psychophysiology. And what this study looked at is it basically looked at two different strategies. First, they took humans, and they basically said, what we want you to do is we're going to put you in different interval strategies, and we want to see the optimal rest period where you can, you know, basically recover, you know, basically recover your creatine phosphate, you know, recover from the bout of exercise, so you could push at an equal intensity again, and what they did is after several different rounds of this, they determined that these athletes needed about two minutes to recover completely from a variant hence bout of exercise before they can exert the same intensity again. Now the follow up to this was essentially they said, alright, what we want you to do now is do the same bout push hard.

Jade  25:14 

But then we just want you to go ahead and start when you're ready, we're not going to tell you when to go, we're not going to try to tell you just when you feel ready, like you can exert the same intensity again, go ahead and do that. And they measure how long it took. So these are basically people running hard and then resting for as long as they needed to what they found was, the self-regulated rest was about 118 seconds, essentially, the exact same as the two minutes they determined were the optimal rest periods to recover. So what this study showed is that humans, not just animals, but humans are able to self-regulate their rest, they were not taking sandbagging and working less hard. They were working just as hard. They knew when they it was time for them to recover. Now, if this is the case, now these were in athletes. Now imagine you have a population, as I did when I was doing the metabolic effect workouts, these were group exercises, programs, in boot camps and in gyms. So you have all kinds of different people, you might have a 65 year old, overweight man, a 50 year old, you know, prior athlete, female, you have 20 year olds and elite athletes all in the same class. And the rest based training style of pushing till you can't rest until you can, which is essentially what I came to call this, I basically, you know, started to give them the cue list and push as hard as you can. When you need to rest, take your rest rest as long as you need to, and then get back into when you're ready. What happens is this individualizes the workout for every single person. In other words, they are self-regulating their rest in a way that this study showed humans are capable of doing. This is how REST based training came about. This was the original metabolic effect workout as written about in the metabolic effect diet book that ended up coming out in 2010, after close to a decade of running this program, in personal training, and in gyms all around the country, including overseas where we gave lectures in Spain and the United Kingdom and other places. And so this became a phenomena this REST based training style. It's actually also why metabolic.com The current incarnation of the company that I'm involved with now uses this program, if you've ever done Metabolic Prime, Metabolic Aftershock, or metabolic renewal, you are doing REST based training and millions of people now over a million people now have done these workouts. And they work because they allow you to breach that anaerobic threshold in a way that is geared towards your unique fitness level individualizing the workout so that everyone can get the exact intensity needed to breach that anaerobic threshold and trigger all these beneficial mild kinds to deliver the results of both aerobic and anaerobic training all in one go. It is the only system that I'm aware of that allows you to individualize training to people of all different fitness levels and physical abilities. Within one class, it is still the only workout that I'm aware of that does this still after 20 years. And the mantra is push until you can't rest until you can. So now you know where it comes from. And I want to just give you some of the key concepts here. Because you might say to yourself, and a lot of people do nowadays now that CrossFit has become very popular. And they oftentimes say, Well, isn't this just CrossFit, isn't this what people do in CrossFit. And the truth of the matter is, it's slightly different because in CrossFit, I would say CrossFit is a keep more like a keep going workout, what you're doing is you're pushing yourself at very high intensities, but you're trying not to go all out, you're trying to leave some in the tank so you can last longer. It's very different in that regard. It's not focused on rest, it's focused on work. And so it is slightly different. Although you can use REST based training in any workout system, you could use it in CrossFit, you could use it in traditional weight training, you could use it in cardio, you can use it in any way that you like. And so it's one of these things that fits into any workout program so long as you push as hard as you can force yourself to rest rest completely and then get back into the workout. And let's get back to the show. And so what I want to do is teach you the principles of RBT arrest based training and it goes by the acronym rest. Those of you who know me know that I always come up with acronyms. And this is one of the first ones I ever came up with the rest acronym, or ESP essentially tells you exactly how to build these workouts and to individualize the REST based training for you. In particular, now the R stands for rest, which means the focus of the workout is not on work. It's on rest in the way that we've been describing, we want you to focus on the rest. The more you rest, the harder you're going to push. The harder you push, the more you're going to rest. The whole idea is by focusing on rest. Rather than work we inadvertently help you work harder. Now of course, when you work harder, you end up resting more and when you rest more, you end up working harder, which is the opposite of the other approach. The harder is better approach this is a smarter is better approach a better is better approach. Most people will find when they allow themselves to rest and recover and focus on the rest between bouts of exercise, they actually end up pushing harder, they actually end up pushing harder. And so the first principle of REST based training is not to focus on the work, but instead to focus on the rest and then inadvertently, you will almost assuredly end up working harder and get all these benefits. The other thing about this is that it puts you in control. A trainer doesn't tell you when to rest, you rest. You rest when you need to. You take as long as you need to and you get back into the workout when you're ready and The same way Claudia did. This is exactly what she taught me all those years ago. The next principle here, the E stands for extrinsic focus. Now, this one needs a little bit of excellent explanation. Intrinsic feelings are the way you feel inside. So when you are breathing hard when your muscles are burning when your muscles are straining, when you're feeling nauseous, all the discomfort of exercise, those are intrinsic feelings, they're coming from your insides that you're aware of. However, if we focus on extrinsic factors, like reps, and other things that you're doing, we can take some of the focus off those feelings. For example, one of the primary things that we do in REST based training is we use different rep schemes that force you to keep your account the most popular one is with the metabolic 10 system with a 10, down to one rep scheme. So let's say we have three exercises a benchpress, a bent over row and a shoulder press, what you're going to do is you're going to do 10, of the benchpress 10 of the men over row 10, have the shoulder press, then nine, nine, and nine, then eight, eight, and eight, then seven, seven, and seven. And because you have to keep track of where you are in these rounds, and you're counting all the time, and focusing on those extrinsic numbers, or seconds, or reps, rather, you can't be as diligent on focusing on the intrinsic stuff. And so it makes it psychologically easier. And therefore you can push harder. Now, when this is guided by a personal trainer, or a group, exercise instructor, we use other extrinsic factors as well. We use many different exercises, many different motivation techniques, we, you know, use different counting approaches, so that we can try to force you to think less about what you're feeling and more about what you're doing. So IE is extrinsic focus. And when you design your workouts, if you want them to regress to based, you want to design them in a way that forces you to do things like if you were doing this alone, it forces you to keep track of your count. This is why the 10 to one metabolic 10 system is a very popular system for people who follow my workouts, because what they find, and they oftentimes say to me is that you know, these 10 to one rep schemes, where I'm doing this circuit and counting down from 10 to one and it gets easier. And then as I go along, psychologically, it's getting harder physiologically. And that's exactly what we want, right? We want people to be able to touch the stove, not be afraid to touch the stove, pull their hands off when they want and to be distracted in some regard so that they'll push harder. Now, the s in the rest acronym is self-limited or self-determined. Basically, what that means is self-determination theory. This is a theory of psychology that says when people feel ownership and control over situations, they will be more motivated. And so when you are the one in control, when the workout is self-determined, determined by you, you decide how to alter the workouts, if you need a default or regression or progression, you decide when to rest, how long to rest and when to get back into the workout. All of those things allow you to take into account your fitness level and your physical abilities and you always feel in control. So if I give you a barbell bench press to do and you have a bad shoulder, you can easily do a dumbbell bench press or a push up or some other chest exercise or perhaps no chest exercise at all you are in control of adjusting the parameters of the workout as you see fit based on your physical abilities and your fitness level. And so by making the workout self-determined, putting you in control of the parameters, I can guide you but not force you. And therefore you get to determine whether you go to where I want you to go or not. And that's all by design. And the final aspect of this rest acronym is T or time conscious. And what that means is that when you're resting you push harder. When we're using things like extrinsic focus, it's forcing you to push harder when you can control the workout you'll be more motivated and push harder. In other words, the workout will be more intense than other types of workouts and the more intensive workout is the shorter it needs to be and so rest days training workouts tend to be very intense, but very short. They're very intense because they push everyone no matter your fitness level to that anaerobic threshold. They're very safe because they're self-determined by you. You get to control when you rest how long you rest and What Works you do and how hard you work. But as a result of that these workouts tend to be very, very short. Anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes max, these workouts are short. And of course, the ones that most of you have probably done Metabolic Prime, Metabolic Aftershock metabolic renewal, and any of the metabolic.com workouts, you know that these things are pretty short, usually in the realm of 15 to 20 minutes. And what's usually the the conversation around that is I cannot believe the volume of work that I achieved in a 20 minute workout, it's oftentimes the exact same volume or even more than most people can achieve in an hour. And that's because part of what's happening here is you're lifting weights faster, in a sense, in the same way that these animals can cover a greater distance by pushing and resting, pushing, and resting, pushing and resting. And when I say pushing, or lifting weights faster, or doing the workout faster, I don't mean the exercises, you're not doing the exercise faster, you're taking shorter risks. So you're basically not taking these big, long risks between bouts of exercise, think about it from a traditional weight trainer, they'll do a bout of exercise, and then they'll wait maybe three to five minutes before they go again, for many people, especially fit people that's way too long. For other people, less fit people, that might not be long enough. But the idea is you're lifting weights faster because the rest periods are normally short. When you are able to gauge your own rest periods, most people will rest only about two minutes as we learned from that study. And so what ends up happening is you can get more volume into a workout in less time. And this is the way this REST based acronym, push until you can't rest until you can rest base training completely individualizes workouts to you based on your fitness level, your physical ability and allows you to get the anaerobic breech that anaerobic threshold in a way that is safe and effective. Whereas most people never are able to breach that threshold because they are constantly pacing themselves. Now if this is your first time doing this, I'll teach you a nifty way to do this. We I call this the exertion and recovery scale. Now this scale can be used as a one to four scale. And it's only used for beginners, if you're new to REST based training, you can use this, you know, maybe for three to six workouts. And by the time you get through a handful of workouts, you will not need to use this system ever again. Because intuitively you'll just know. So here's how this works. The exertion scale goes from one to four. One means you're at rest completely, you're not exerting yourself to you're working out. But you can still talk there's no burning in your muscles, the weight is light, three, now you can't talk you're starting to feel burning in your muscles in the weight is getting heavy. And four is the point where you have got to stop, rest and recover. Now, at level four, this is the exertion scale one to four, it also can act as a recovery scale in reverse, because at level four, you cannot exert any effort anymore, you're too spent, you're too burned out, you need to rest at three, you could probably go again, but you're going to be unable to attempt full exertion at two. For most people, they're going to be able to attempt full exertion. And if you go all the way back to rest, you're ready for full exertion. So the idea for beginners is to push themselves up to a three or four that point where they can't talk, there's burning in their muscles, the weight is heavy, and or they must stop, rest and recover and then recover until they get back down to a one or two and repeat that. So the idea is to go to three and four, back to one and two, three and four, back to one and two, three and four, back to one and two. And for most people, the transition happens when you can't talk you start to feel burning and the weight is heavy. Think about that. Most people never get to that point. How many runners Do you see joggers jogging for 3040 6090 minutes and they're talking to each other the whole time. The fact that they can still talk means they have never breached the anaerobic threshold. Research shows us that the talk test the ability to carry on a conversation or talk at all is highly correlated with the anaerobic threshold. So as burning in the muscles and the heavy straining in the muscles. In order to get the exertion you want to touch the hot stove you need to get to the point where you can't talk there's burning in your muscles and the weight is heavy. And then you go all the way back to rest or back down to just where you can exert full exertion again, for beginners It's oftentimes best to push two or three and get back to a one. For very fit people, you can push to a four and get back to a two. So for very fit people, it's four to four to four to two. For beginners, it's three to one, three to one, three to one. And so what ends up happening here is, within a few tries of using this exertion and recovery scale, I just described this one to four scale, you'll easily be able to adjust and you won't need this anymore. You only need it with for a few workouts before you get the idea of REST based training. Now, you might say, okay, Jade, what else do I need to know here, with REST based training, the whole point of this is so that you can push harder in a more efficient way. But most importantly, do so according to your fitness levels and your physical abilities, which means that regressions and progressions are heavily used in REST based training. Now, if you haven't heard these terms before, regression regressions are often also called defaults. But let's use a push up as an example. So a regular push up from your toes, right, let's just talk about that. If I want to regress that I can drop to my knees. If I want to regress it further, I can do it off a wall, I can do wall push-ups, right. So those are regressions, making a difficult exercise, making an exercise easier. So if you're someone who has less physical ability or less fitness, in REST based training, the self-determined aspect allows you to use regressions, you can drop to your knees, you can go to the wall, you can roll over on your back into a light chest press with dumbbells in order to regress the push up to an easier move that you can handle. Now, if you are more fit, what you can do is you can elevate the feet and make that push up harder, you can go to a one arm push up and make it harder you can do plyometric push-ups and make it harder, you could do a push up row and make it harder. And so what you want to think about with recipes training is not just the idea that you rest, when you need to push as hard as you need to push into you can't rest until you can, but that you also pay close attention to regressions and progressions. Now, of course, the easiest way to regress a movement, most movements is to make it lighter in the weights. And the easiest way to progress a movement is to add weight. So for example, once you master a push up, maybe you go to a benchpress and you're progressing up above your body weight, right? Or maybe you can't do a push up, but a bench press works for you, and you go less than your body weight. That's another way to regress a push up. And so REST based training makes judicious use of regressions and progressions. And one of the things also is it when you look at studies on elite athletes, what you'll find is that top runners like if you ran as fast as you can even the most fit people in the world, if they gave all they got and ran as fast as they could. Even the fittest people on the planet probably cannot last over a minute of exertion where they're going all out, very few people will be able to accomplish that. And that is a good rule in REST based training. So you might say, well, Jade, what does it look like oftentimes, you'll see that if people are really pushing hard, they're only going to be able to push for a minute or two, before they have to rest. If you're someone of these people who's going for five minutes, and then taking a rest, rest assured you are pacing yourself. And so with REST based training, what you want to think about is you want to think about all our efforts in your safe zone determined by you according to your physical abilities, and then rest. Now some people will want to do lots of short little rests, other people will take fewer, longer rest. But normally you're going to see the work ratio is going to be somewhere around one to three minutes. And the rest ratio is going to be anywhere from one to 30 seconds. So it's going to be less rest needed by fit people longer, less rest and shorter rest needed by fit people more rest and longer rest, usually for less fit people. And so you can judge it based on this. And so you can see how you can completely make this workout fit you as an individual. The final thing I'll say here with risk based training is if wills questions I asked you in the beginning, do people not exercise because they don't have time? They don't have the know how or is it B and do they not get results because they're not pushing hard enough? Well risk based training addresses those. It's a very short workout. It's very easy to do. It leaves you in control, and it forces you to push harder by allowing you to rest more and so it addresses The major blockades to people not getting results. Now, if you want to try these workouts and you haven't before, then check out metabolic renewal Metabolic Prime, Metabolic Aftershock. Or if you really want to get into an intense REST based training style, you can actually do something like CrossFit or my system of metabolic 10. To essentially, for you very fit people, CrossFit doesn't use REST based training, but you can adapt it to, to REST based training. And so this is a technique that allows you to completely individualized workout according to your fitness level and your physical abilities. And that's the reason it's so popular. That's the reason why it is the major factor that we [email protected]. And I hope I've given you today, the ability to take these principles and design your own workouts using REST based training. So I'm going to stop right there today. And well, actually, before I stop, let me just give you a very quick workout in case you know, some of you saying, okay, Jade, you know, I like this idea, can you give me a workout to do, let's just go through a sample workout, and then we'll end And so here's, here's one sample workout, it's a workout from my 2010 book, the metabolic effects diet. It's a 20 minute workout, and essentially consists of four exercises. So I'll just give you an example here. And we'll use sort of hybrid based movements here. These are exercises that combine two or more movements into one and so we'll do a squat and curl. So you'll squat down, come up and curl. So you hold dumbbells by your side, you squat, you stand you curl, you're gonna hold on to those same dumbbells. And the next movement you're going to do is a lunge going to lunge out, come back standing. And then you're going to at that point, curl again, right, so it's a squat, curl 12 repetitions of the squat curl, and then 12 repetitions of the lunge, curl six on each side. Those are the first two Exercises Squat curl for 12. Lunge curl for 12, six on each side. And then you're going to do a push up for 12 repetitions, and a shoulder press for 12 repetitions. And so what's going to happen here is you're going to do squat and curl 12 reps, lunge and curl, 12 reps, push-ups, 12 reps, shoulder press, 12 reps. Now, if you can simply use a dumbbell that you can carry the entire time. And the way to do this is just pick the exercise that is the weakest exercise. So on this particular one, you can curl, you can shoulder press more than you can curl. So choose a weight that allows you to get 12 repetitions of curls on the first round. So you do squat curl, lunge, curl, push up, shoulder press, all using the same dumbbells. Now, when you do the push-ups, just set the dumbbells aside or you can use the dumbbells. If they're those hexagon dumbbells, you can actually use just leave them in your hands and do them, they'll act, they'll be on the floor and you can they'll act as your hands. Now what's going to happen when you do this, what you do is you start your clock, it starts to run, the time starts to go, you do 12 reps of each exercise in circuit fashion. Now what begins to happen is maybe you get through one full round, maybe if you super fit, you get through two full rounds, but at some point, you're either going to lose form and or you're going to be burning, you're going to be too breathless, or the weights gonna get too heavy. At that point in time, you're going to stop and rest. And you're going to rest as long as you need to, until you're ready to go again. Once you're ready to go again, you start right where you left off, and continue the workout. And you push and rest in this fashion throughout the full 20 minutes until time's up. So maybe you do get 12 reps of the squat and curl. Maybe you get 12 reps of the lunge and curl. Maybe you get to six repetitions on the push-ups and then you have to rest what you're going to do is you're going to rest as long as you need to. And then when you're ready to start again, you're going to start at seven on the push-ups. So then you go 7-8-9-10-11-12 On the push-ups and now you're on the shoulder press. And maybe you get nine reps on the shoulder press, you're going to stop and rest. You're going to rest as long as you need to get back into it when you're ready. And now you'll get 10-11-12 on the shoulder press and now you're back to squat and curl and you push rest, push rest like this Throughout the whole 20 minutes, and you keep going now what's going to happen, you're going to start to fatigue more and more, you're going to need more and more rest, your form is going to be challenged more your muscles are going to be burning, which means you're going to need to rest an awful lot to get through this workout, what you'll find is after the 20 minutes is up, you will have done a tremendous volume of work in a very minimal amount of time. do that three times per week, if you're a beginner with walking in a good diet, and you're gonna see magical effects happen. This is why the metabolic effect diet, metabolic renewal Metabolic Prime Metabolic Aftershock, this is why these programs are so popular. This is why millions of people have done these workouts because they can be consistent with them, they are self-determined they are REST based, they are easy to do, and they get you to that anaerobic threshold to get you results. And because they're short and enjoyable, more so than most types of exercise, and you're in control, most of these people continue to do them. So there's no real magic here, except that these workouts are designed for you by you, you're in complete control. And when that happens, you can be consistent. So I hope this is useful for you. It's been a very long time since I've talked about recipes training in this fashion. But these workouts are the most popular thing I do. They're still used by millions of people they sell like crazy. The current one on the market right now designed specifically for women is called metabolic renewal.

Jade  56:35 

You can also go to my website, I have a very advanced program called metabolic 10. That is a completely free program. For anyone who wants it, all you have to do is email support at jadeteta.com. Ask for access to the metabolic 10 system, my team there will give that to you. That's for very advanced individuals, those workouts also are oftentimes put up on my Instagram feed and on my YouTube channel. But these workouts are all over the place. And you'll find many, many people are using them. Just remember that if rest is for if work and rest are forced by the trainer, you're not doing REST based training, if someone tells you to keep going, that's not REST based training, REST based training focuses on rest not work. That's the magic. And you can use it in any type of exercise that you're doing. In fact, traditional weight training, the way it's usually done is REST based training. Most people who go to the gym and do resistance training, don't sit there and look at their clock and go, Okay, I can only take a rest. Here they go. When they feel ready to go again, they push hard, and they go when they ready to go again. And this is why they can use such heavy weights and exert themselves. What I would say is rather than taking an hour to do that traditional weight training workout, basically shrink it all down so that you can go faster, lift weights faster, with less rest. Now the idea is I'm not saying force yourself to take less rest, you take as much rest as you want. What I'm saying is you'll naturally take less rest and work harder simply because you're focusing on rest rather than work. So I hope you enjoy today's podcast, it was fun talking about risk based training again and individualizing exercise in a way that has been powerful. It's one of the most rewarding things that I've done in my life is developing this system. And it's incredibly rewarding to see so many people, millions of people doing this workout. It's kind of crazy to think about that number, but it speaks to the testament of the system. I appreciate everyone. Thank you so much for hanging out with next level human. And I will see you at the next podcast. You have been listening to the next level human podcast with Dr. Jade Teta. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure you subscribe and consider leaving a review. You make the biggest difference when you pass on your lessons and inspire others. That's why reviews like this are so powerful. Your words may be the only ones that resonate for someone else. Please remember the information in this podcast is for educational purposes only. Always consult your personal Physician or Therapist before making any lifestyle changes. And finally, thank you for who you are in the world. And the difference you make.