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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Sisson
Started reading
January 16, 2020
You must balance stress and rest and be intuitive about your workout decisions and scheduling.
Endurance athletes on the whole carry too much body fat—a consequence of carbohydrate dependency eating and overly stressful training patterns. 2. The fundamental elements of the Primal Endurance approach are to slow down and emphasize aerobic workouts, balance stress and rest, and adopt an intuitive, flexible approach to training. 3. The conventional approach to endurance training is deeply flawed, resulting in widespread burnout and excess body fat among even the most dedicated athletes. 4. The flawed conventional approach can be characterized as “chronic cardio”—too many
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running ten-minute miles for a total of 1–2.5 hours per week)
Improvement in MAF test results means training is working—you are more efficient at burning fat at aerobic heart rates. Regression in MAF test results suggests you are overtraining and/or overstressed. 15. High-intensity workouts are not advised until a strong aerobic base is built, as evidenced by steady improvement in MAF test results. 16. Even a slight stimulation of anaerobic metabolism during a workout can accelerate sugar burning for up to seventy-two hours after the workout, compromising fat reduction efforts. 17. Besides exceeding aerobic maximum heart rate with chronic cardio,
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Nose breathing during exercise ensures the most efficient exchange of oxygen on each breath, and helps you maintain an aerobic pace.
Consistency in the context of endurance training is ill advised. You are better off being intuitive, varied, and flexible in your workout patterns. The process of fitness progress is dynamic and unpredictable, not linear.
Weight loss through portion control and devoted calorie burning is ineffective. Calories burned through exercise stimulate a corresponding increase in appetite. The secret to weight loss is hormone optimization, primarily through moderating excess insulin production.
A suggested entry strategy for Intermittent Fasting is to wait until you experience hunger before eating in the morning. This enhances appreciation for food and provides feedback on your progress with fat adaptation.
Ketones burn cleaner than carbohydrates, minimizing free radical damage and delivering
going primal is to ditch sugars, grains, and industrial vegetable/seed oils for twenty-one days. Step 2 is to emphasize highly nutritious primal foods, such as meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds, and supplemental carbs like sweet potatoes—the natural plant and animal foods that fueled human evolution.
One hundred grams per day or less promotes fat loss;
Sprinting, like strength training, delivers a potent anti-aging effect by flooding the bloodstream with adaptive hormones and actualizing the anti-aging maxim of “use it or lose it.”
One of the most important benefits of sprinting is how it “cuts you up” like nothing else. Primal-adapted eaters who experience stalled weight loss progress can send an intense message to the brain to ramp up fat metabolism as an adaptive response to sprinting—an effect that continues for up to twenty-four hours after the workout. Ever seen a fat sprinter? Nope!
Sprinting in a pre-fatigued state is not only harmful for muscles, but also the central nervous system. Athletes should only sprint
when 100 percent rested and energized to deliver a peak performance. Extensive warmup and technique drills should be performed before delivering maximum efforts.
Feeling less than perky in the morning suggests you must minimize artificial light and digital stimulation in the evenings.
An ideal sleeping environment is quiet, clutter-free, cool (68°F or less), and completely dark. Even tiny light emissions (LED devices, etc.) can disturb the highly sensitive release of melatonin into the bloodstream.
Taking frequent movement breaks throughout the day improves insulin sensitivity/fat metabolism, improves muscular balance, flexibility and bone density, and enhances cognitive function through improved circulation.
Brain science confirms that humans are incapable of focusing for longer than twenty minutes without a break. Taking a five-minute break for every twenty minutes of peak cognitive focus, and longer breaks every few hours, will improve metabolic health and cognitive performance.
Neglecting complementary movement and mobility practices can compromise athletic performance by allowing inefficiencies and imbalances to occur from narrowly focused training patterns, leading to accelerated fatigue, diminished power output, and increased injury risk.
Cold therapy can help speed recovery by delivering a refreshing psychological sensation and recalibrating the central nervous system and muscle metabolic activity back to calm, cool resting levels.
Full body immersion into water at 50°F to 60°F (10°C to 15°C), for five to ten minutes, is believed to be the optimal strategy for post-exercise cold therapy.
(Elevate, Compress, Move).
Compression wraps or garments act like pumps to squeeze blood vessels open with force, allowing more blood and oxygen into the area and improving removal of waste and excess fluid. Studies suggest reduced muscle soreness and improved performance using compression garments.
Training ten, fifteen, or even more hours per week while still carrying a spare tire or junk in the trunk is a major disconnect, don’t ya think?
Improving your aerobic capacity is achieved at low intensity, where fat is the predominant fuel choice, ample oxygen is available, and minimal stimulation of your alternative anaerobic (sugar-burning) energy
You’ll have higher highs and lower lows, because this is how your body actually becomes stronger and fitter with less risk of burnout.
While high-intensity strength and sprint workouts can generate fitness breakthroughs faster and more significantly than any other type of exercise (yep, even long, slow overdistance workouts), it’s extremely important to understand that these benefits will only occur if you have established a solid aerobic base.
Good Calories, Bad Calories.
OUR OWN FOOD—AND STUPID ENOUGH TO EAT IT.” —
Excess body fat is 80 percent dependent upon diet, specifically your level of carb intake/insulin production. Increased training volume (especially chronic patterns) simply increases appetite and reduces general daily activity levels. It’s all about calories burned vs. calories stored. Fat loss comes from hormone optimization, not math equations.
180 − age = maximum aerobic heart rate (with some adjustment factors).
The seven habits of highly effective Primal Endurance athletes are: getting adequate sleep, expertly balancing stress and rest (in workout patterns and in life), implementing an intuitive and personalized approach to training, emphasizing aerobic development, carefully structuring high-intensity workouts and training blocks, engaging in complementary movement and mobility practices, and following an annual periodization program.
PATTERNS CAN INFLAME AND SCAR ARTERIES, AND DAMAGE THE VULNERABLE RIGHT VENTRICLE—LEADING TO ARRHYTHMIAS, ATRIAL FIBRILLATION, AND SUDDEN DEATH IN ATHLETES.
“We’re not born to run. We’re born to walk, and to move more in general,”
He goes on to make a specific recommendation that running two to five days per week for a total of ten to fifteen miles, at around a ten-minute-per-mile pace, is ideal for bulletproof cardiovascular health. The vaunted Copenhagen heart study concurs,
“We’re not born to run. We’re born to walk, and to move more in general. For the daily workout, it may be best [for longevity] to have more fun and endure less suffering.” —Dr. James O’Keefe
breathing only through your nose to minimize the stress of a workout.
you’ll know you’re exceeding that aerobic limit if you need to draw air through your mouth.
blurring the lines between training and sitting on our butts all day congratulating ourselves because we have a workout on the books.
Maffetone
are simply not adapted to grind away day after day, calling upon the fight-or-flight response too often for too long until exhaustion ensues.
Sleep: Yes, sleep is number one—the next frontier of performance breakthroughs in all sports, especially endurance sports. Your athletic pursuits require you to sleep significantly more than if you weren’t training. Reject conventional wisdom’s “eight hours” recommendation and individualize your approach, honoring these two maxims: minimize artificial light and digital stimulation after dark; and awaken each morning, without an alarm, refreshed and energized. If you are training more, sleep more. If you can’t honor the aforementioned maxims, stop training until you can. If you fall short of
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2. Stress/Rest Balance: Primal-style endurance training allows you to reach for higher highs (breakthrough workouts) and observe lower
lows (more rest, shorter, easier recovery workouts, and staying below aerobic maximum heart rate at the vast majority of workouts). This appeals to your competitive intensity by focusing on peak performance and recovery, instead of focusing on the flawed notion of “consistency” in this context. Furthermore, realize that virtually all athletes, from novice to elite, do too much training and not enough rest. Consider backing off on both your mileage and your intensity, and adding more sleep, recovery, and complementary practices.
Intuitive and Personalized: Your training schedule is sensible, intuitive, flexible, and even spontaneous instead of regimented and pre-ordained. Respect your daily life circumstances, motivation levels, stress levels, energy levels, immune function, and moods. This means backing off when tired, but also pursuing breakthrough workouts when you feel great!
Experimentation is necessary to dial in the best approach that works for you, and entails some trial and error. Also, what worked for you last year may not work in the future, so be open to flexibility. The top priority is to enjoy your program and feel confident that it works well for you.
Periodization: An annual program always commences with an aerobic base period (minimum eight weeks). With success, high-intensity periods can follow, with a maximum duration of four weeks. Intensity periods are followed by micro periods of rest, followed by aerobic, followed by a return to intensity/competition. The annual program always ends with an extended rest period or off-season, followed by a new macro aerobic base period to commence a new annual program. This overview offers plenty of flexibility, but you have to respect the need to engage in blocks of specific training focus as an
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align the difficulty of your workouts with your daily level of energy, motivation, and health.
DRIFTING OUT OF THE AEROBIC ZONE, EVEN BRIEFLY, DURING A LONG WORKOUT CAN COMPROMISE THE INTENDED BENEFITS OF THE WORKOUT AND PROMOTE SUGAR DEPENDENCY INSTEAD OF FAT ADAPTATION.
