Podcast Summary

**EP318: Interview With Jason Curtis - Strength and Conditioning Coach (Part 2)** **Dr. Auric Bishop:** Welcome, my name's Dr. Auric Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, I'm an author, and a keynote speaker. I'm the CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes, someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand blood pressure, weight, cholesterol, for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love. Hi, my name's Dr. Warwick Bishop, and welcome to my podcast and videocast. Today, I have the opportunity to interview again Coach Jason Curtis, all the way from the UK. Hi, how are you, Jason? **Jason Curtis:** Yeah, not too bad. Well, thank you. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Look, for anyone who missed the first podcast with Jason, go back and have a listen to it. It was really well worth listening to. It gives us a bit of background on where Jason's health coaching journey started through the army, how he deals with the public these days, and his particular interests. He talked about nutrition as well as the psychology of exercise. He also touched on what it's like to be an author. For this particular podcast, I'm pretty keen to talk about some of the physiology behind strength and conditioning. What I'd like to do, Jason, is tease you out on a very simple sort of example of how you might approach, say, a 50-year-old male who came to you having not a great deal of exercise background and said, "Look, Jason, I just want to get fit." What sort of, how would you approach that individual, and how would you put together a strength, conditioning, and fitness package for that person? A 50-year-old bloke, Mr. Joe Blow average. **Jason Curtis:** So the first thing is I'd question him on what he means by fit. You know, whether he—fitness is quite a broad term. People often think, you know, is it getting aerobically fit or is it getting stronger? You know, so I'd delve into his goals of what he wants to achieve, which is always helpful. Most likely, he probably wants both. So he'd want the strengthening and then the conditioning to improve aerobic fitness and whatnot. In the gym setting, when it comes to strength, it's all about strength training, as I've mentioned in our previous podcast, which is the progressive development of movement. Sometimes strength training gets a bad name because people imagine, you know, big meatheads or steroid users that are sort of throwing metal barbells around. However, all strength training is, is applying, adding external loads or adding resistance to fundamental human movements, like hinge bending at the hips, squatting movements, single-leg movements like lunging. So, squatting movements are getting up and out of a chair, pushing movements, and pulling movements—things that we do on a daily basis. All we do in a gym is extend the range of motion of that movement that you do. So getting up and out of a chair or sitting into a chair would just do a squat where we might go a little bit deeper than what the chair may be. The key principle of strength training and building muscle and increasing bone density is progressive overload. So things have to get progressively harder, and the easiest way to do that is to add load, whether it be holding a kettlebell, a dumbbell, or having a barbell. The reason why the barbell's so commonly used is because it can be progressively loaded with plates, and you can squat it, you can press it, you can pull it, you can deadlift it. So it's the most versatile piece of equipment. Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with someone coming in and working on machines. Machines work brilliantly. However, free weight training has added benefits of stability, developing more skill like coordination and balance and stuff like that. So what I would do is initially, during a warm-up, I wouldn't do a full movement screening. My movement screenings occur while they're moving, while they're doing the warm-up. So I would warm them up on whether it be a bike, skier, or rower. From there, I would go into doing like a bodyweight squat to any depth, doing lunges, and see where they're at. Some people will, at 50, 60, even 70 years old, have exceptional squats. They'll lunge really well and they'll run up and down perfectly. Others will be almost incapable of performing a half-decent squat. So that's where any decent trainer can regress and progress. If they can't perform a bodyweight squat, they might perform a box squat or they might perform an assisted squat with a suspension trainer or a climb-down squat where they're just holding on to, you know, the rig, for example. But the key components of the fitness program will be working on fundamental movements like squatting, single-leg movements, hinge movements like deadlifts or bending at the hips—picking objects off the floor, essentially—and then pushing movements with the upper body and pulling movements with the upper body. They would be centered around dumbbell work, kettlebell work, and barbell work in my environment because I think that provides by far the most bang for the buck. From there, what we usually do is have the strength training towards the start of the session. So we're working the muscles. We're not really getting ourselves working metabolically too hard. We're not, you know, getting too much out of breath. From there, I'd finish the session with starting with steady-state exercise—sort of longer duration, not too long, but longer duration, just holding a steady state. Over the weeks, I'd progress into high-intensity exercise just because we're getting more bang for our buck. We're getting a lot out of short bouts of high-intensity work, but we have to progress steadily towards that. If you were to do high-intensity exercise straight away, if someone's not been training much, we call it pulling away. What you'll get is they'll feel quite sick. You know, they'll feel horrendous. So that conditioning has got to be built progressively. But that's an overview of the approach I take. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Presumably also you increase some of that intensity to reduce the risk of injury, I guess, which would be pretty important to be mindful of. **Jason Curtis:** Yeah, so the key variable, which I always educate everyone on, is mechanical strength. So how much force can a tissue tolerate before it breaks? The way in which we increase mechanical strength is through adding load, increasing the stress. So someone might say to me, "I can't deadlift; it hurts my back." And I'll say, "Well, can you deadlift a five-kilo barbell?" And they'll say, "Yeah, that's fine." But I can't deadlift a hundred-kilo barbell. So the deadlift's not bad for your back. The load tolerance—you've not got the load tolerance to accommodate a hundred kilos. That stress that's being placed on your back, your tissues can't tolerate that load. It's all about load tolerance. What can your tissues tolerate? So I actually find most people are not intolerant of movement; they're load intolerant to a certain load. The key to training is to go easier than you think. Pull it right back. Because at the end of the day, if someone finds an exercise too easy, all that's going to do is motivate them that my coach thought I, you know, assigned me this way and I'm finding it really easy. If you assign them a weight that they struggle with, not only do you risk an injury, but also it's going to demotivate them because they're going to think, "Well, my coach thought that I could lift this and I can't," you know, so therefore I'm weaker than what he expected or she expected or weaker than average. So always when I get a new client, I throw it right back to basics. They're working with tiny dumbbells, and then we just build it really slowly because slow and steady wins the race. Where we go wrong is we see everything in the short term. It's all like over, you know, a few weeks of four, six-week programs. We want to be seeing it long-term because strength training and fitness is a lifelong pursuit. I call it the lifelong sport. You know, it's the one physical thing that we should be doing for our whole life. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Look, I was going to ask you exactly around that. And I can see if you've taken a 50-year-old bloke, you've established some strengthening, you've established a program that starts with some strengthening, then some cardiovascular, and you progress into high intensity. It all makes perfect sense. With that individual, how much time are you looking for them to commit per week? How would you structure those sessions? And this is just for someone listening who might think, "Oh, I'd love to get a bit fitter, but I don't have the time." Well, what's the minimum? What's your recommended in terms of the investment in time that people bring to a program such as what you're talking about? **Jason Curtis:** So if they—what I would say is average for people that actually seek out a coach and work with, say, myself, and they're in their 50s, 60s, or 70s, or even older, is generally they tend to commit to twice a week, an hour each time, and that's one-on-one training with myself. That is more than enough. If you're strength training twice a week with what we call metabolic conditioning at the end of the session, you know, so not a long—there's no point coming to me and then doing long-duration cardio. Long, low-intensity cardio is exceptional for your health, but it's best off done outside of paying me, you know, so going on a walk, a cycle, a slow run. If you can develop the capacity to go on long-duration slow runs up to an hour, that's brilliant. But in the gym, twice a week strength training for around 45 minutes, you are going to get incredibly stronger, especially if you follow a program that works off, like I mentioned previously, free weight activities that center around big movements like squats, deadlifts, and bench presses and stuff like that. So twice a week, you're going to get a lot fitter and you're going to get a lot stronger. And it's more than enough for anyone. Obviously, where we can ramp it up, you can go three, four times a week. Brilliant. You know, the more, the better. If we have a good program, if you can get more in, yes, you can train five, six days a week, a couple of times a day. So that's fine as well, you know, as long as the program's right. It's all about load management, managing the training. You can train multiple times. I would say the minimum would be, you know, one hour a week where you can have a single session of strength training. You are going to see improvements. You're always going to see improvements if you are incorporating these bigger lifts and progressively overloading them, even just once a week. But I would definitely say twice is optimal. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Look, I think this is a great overview for someone listening and trying to get a handle around how they might approach their own health journey and engage a coach. But it leads into a question that I was pretty keen to discuss with you or have a conversation with you about. I've been reading some physiology papers around the spectrum of muscle response, if you like. It talks about if we imagine on that spectrum, at one end, one repetition but at a maximal load for building strength, at the other end, multiple repetitions for building endurance, and somewhere in between, reps between 8 and 12 at a modest or fairly high load to build hypertrophy. The thing that's interesting to me about that is there seem to be different or very specific physiological triggers that we can be aware of if we're looking to improve strength, endurance, or get bigger muscles. Do you bring that into your training, or do you want to speak to those three different sort of responses of muscle, for example? **Jason Curtis:** Yeah. So it is a little bit more nuanced than that. So that's very much what is portrayed, but what's well established in the scientific data is that you can promote hypertrophy to the development of lean muscle mass with any rep range, as long as there's progressive overload. So if someone's just performing sets of two reps, you know, five sets of two at 90% of their one-rep max—so if a hundred kilos is one rep max, 90% of that is 90 kilos—five sets of two, they will build muscle. If someone's doing 30 reps at 40% of their one-rep max, they will build muscle as long as it is providing the stimulus. So the hypertrophy one is the nuanced one where we're well aware that at any rep range, you can promote hypertrophy with sufficient diet. Now, where the other two factors come in is strength, as in the ability for a muscle to exert force, is obviously better trained when working heavier. Therefore, it would be a lower rep range because, of course, we can't—volume and intensity have an inverse relationship where if it's so heavy, you're not going to be able to perform many reps. Our fast-twitch muscle fibers, the ones that are more anabolic, you know, they can produce much more force. They're recruited, and our neuromuscular system is stimulated much harder when we lift heavy loads. So you are working above 90% of your one-rep max, which is going to elicit more improvements in strength. However, that comes with a greater risk of injury. Therefore, it's not something we want to do all the time. People will just get overuse injuries; they'll tear. You know, we see it with our powerlifters where they go hard all the time, and the shoulder starts hurting, the elbow starts hurting. So that's what we've got to factor in there. When it comes to high-rep training, yes, because of the additional metabolic stress within the muscle, you are going to develop more endurance. You're working more of the energy systems. There's more time under tension. So your muscles are under load for longer, and therefore there's more metabolic stress. You're going to develop the energy systems. You're going to develop that ability of the muscle to contract time and time again, i.e., muscular endurance. So just as an overview, yes, lifting heavier is going to make you stronger. Higher reps are going to build muscular endurance. All rep ranges will develop hypertrophy as long as there's enough stimulus to promote muscle growth, which has got to be a high stimulus. And when it comes to what I recommend people do is do the whole spectrum. People are always looking for the golden rep range, but even if you want to develop strength, you will be able to develop greater strength if you build a base of muscular endurance. So you can recover faster, you can get more volume into your training, you know, and vice versa. You will be better at endurance if you have more strength because your muscles can exert more force easily, and therefore it requires less force to do the lighter weights. So then the weights that used to be hard for 20 reps are no longer hard for 20 reps because you're stronger. You want to develop programs that work the whole spectrum of the rep ranges. Don't just go, "Right, I need to do hypertrophy; therefore, I need to do eight to 10 reps," or "I need to be stronger; I need to be working one to five reps." Anyone that's got a good program is working throughout that whole spectrum. And obviously, there's a slight bias depending on what your needs and goals are. So an older adult that is not wanting to be a powerlifter or an elite strength athlete is not going to spend as much time working above a certain percentage of what would be their one-rep max, whereas a powerlifter, a strength athlete is. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** So that, look, I reckon that's a great breakdown of understanding that spectrum of muscle response. Thank you for that. It's informed me as well. Really appreciate it. One of the things I was going to ask you in conjunction with that—and one of the things that I've found interesting—is, are there things you use as supplemental triggers to your exercise? For example, I've read about vibration being used to trigger some of that neuromuscular activity, so maybe to help with preparing the nervous system as well as the musculature for responding. So vibration, for example. I've heard about testosterone levels rising after fasting. So would you talk to people about fasting and then weightlifting? I've come across some stuff on blood flow restriction bands and then having an impact on the way the muscle responds to those exercise triggers. Do you want to touch briefly on each of those, and then we've probably covered so much we may have to wrap it up? **Jason Curtis:** Yeah, so I'll start with the last one, which is blood flow restriction, which is occlusion bands, they often call them. This is essentially where you tourniquet a muscle. What this does is it elicits that end state much faster—that sort of metabolic stress. So you apply a tourniquet. Often these can be sort of regulated by the blood pressure. What they're trying to stop is—they allow the arterial flow into the muscles. So the blood is getting into the muscle, engorging the muscles. So you're getting that pump. People often refer to when you've done an exercise, your biceps get pumped. So they're engorged with blood. From there, the tourniquet is tight enough that it doesn't allow that venous return. So you're not getting the blood staying within the muscle. Therefore, what happens is you've got all the blood with all the various constituents that are key to the growth and the sort of within the muscle, and you're getting that—essentially, you're getting all that metabolic response that is promoting hypertrophy. I think there was a study where it said that there was an increase of IGF-1, so insulin-like growth factor, where the hormones that promote hypertrophy are enhanced when there's that tourniquet that is promoting that metabolic stress, promoting that scenario where the muscle is gouged with blood. I think it's an effective way to train. However, the fact that, you know, people aren't always training with it in a normal gym setting is telling. I think it has more uses in a rehab setting where, in a healthy individual, they can work their muscles to failure; they can get to that point if they want to. They can stimulate the neuromuscular system with lower rep ranges at higher intensities, and then we do what's called back down sets where we add the volume in. We also get what's called PAP, so that's post-activation potentiation. When you lift something heavy, your neuromuscular system is primed, and then when you lift lighter loads, they feel easier than they would have. So we use that a lot. We do heavy loads, we get the potentiation, and then we lift lighter loads, and we get all the volume in after. That volume that would have felt harder actually feels a lot easier. So we can get to that level where we're getting a huge pump anyway; we don't really need to spend time tourniqueting. However, in a rehab setting, if someone's wanting to maximize the blood flow to an area without overstressing the area with high reps or heavy loads, that's where I think there's a massive market for applying a tourniquet to an occlusion band to allow that individual to almost maximize the sort of metabolic response in that area to try and help with rehabilitation of a torn muscle or tendons that are suffering. And vibration or fasting, testosterone levels that might be altered by fasting, do you touch on that at all, or is that just a bit left field? **Jason Curtis:** No, so in all honesty, I don't touch on—I think fasting. I'm a big believer that any sort of stress is good for the human body, as long as it's not predominantly cold, hot, or fasting. So being hungry, being exerted. I think that the key principle for me is getting the heart rate elevated. So no, I've not—I know there's various studies that will show benefits to fasting, this and that, but that's not something I ever utilize. When it comes to, say, vibration, that's not something we utilize. What we do utilize that sort of touches on, you know, like I mentioned with PAP, is what we do is the potentiation where we use explosive activities prior to doing strength training. So if we want the neuromuscular system to be truly stimulated and primed, we do things like jumps prior to squatting. We do things like medicine ball throws. So that's the time. I microdose what is plyometric and ballistic exercises. Plyometric being reactive strength, whereas the fast transition between the eccentric lengthening phase and the concentric shortening phase. So we want that to be rapid. People think when they perform a dumbbell lift fast, that's explosive. That's not explosive. Throwing is explosive, where there's no deceleration before you propel yourself or the object into the air. That's true ballistic explosive training—jumping and throwing. If you do those activities prior to lifting weights, that's going to give you that potentiation. So post-activation potentiation, you're getting the fast-twitch muscle fibers. The motor units that innervate those muscle fibers are essentially just stimulated, and they're good to go. It's like I often explain it: you know when you go to lift something that you perceive to be heavy, and it sort of comes off the floor? That's what we're trying to achieve with that PAP. But no, we don't use any vibration, and I don't sort of promote any fasting in terms of increasing testosterone levels. In actuality, what I found personally is I don't like strength training on an empty stomach, but when it comes to cardio, I prefer to be a bit empty. I feel I perform much better. So it's not about the physiological benefits; it's more how I feel when performing hard cardio, but I can't strength train on an empty stomach. I feel like I'm wasting away. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Jason, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Not only has it been a pleasure, but it's been enlightening. I've really, really valued not only your summary of how you deal with a 50-year-old male, average 50-year-old male—and it could be a 50-year-old female as well; it's not a sexist remark—but I've also really enjoyed how you've drilled down on some of those concepts around muscular strength and physiological responses at different reps and loads. It's been a delight. What I'd like to do is give you a moment to just share your social media links. So if you could share those, that'd be great, and then we'll wrap it up. **Jason Curtis:** Yeah. So the main page, which you can find everything, is if you go on Instagram, it's Coach Jason Curtis, which is the actual name of the strength conditioning course. It's beneficial for people to have a look because I give away multiple free ebooks every week—some are 10 pages, they're all a minimum of 10 pages, and some are as much as 300 pages. They cover all topics from mobility, flexibility, strength training, Olympic weightlifting, anatomy, and physiology. All you have to do is comment on the post, any post from years back, and we'll send you the free ebook. So it's a useful resource. It's not influencing at all; it's got over 100,000 followers just because it's an educational resource, but it's broken down into simple terms. So yeah, you can find everything there. If not through there, I've got a website, jasoncurtis.org, where you can find all my books and the rest of my websites and stuff that I'm getting up to. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** All right. Well, look, thank you again for joining us. I really appreciate your time. For those listening, I also really appreciate you listening in, and I'm sure you will have learned something as I did today. If you have any queries or questions, drop us a note at info@drwarwickbishop.online. Till next time, I wish you the very best and hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now. Join the Healthy Heart Network and become part of our growing community. If you're interested in your heart health and risk of heart attack, then join the Healthy Heart Network for only $5 as a lifetime member. This represents $55 worth of value. We offer and help people understand their present state of heart health, what their current level of risk is, and the positive steps they can take to improve their risk of heart attack in the future. Go to www.healthyheartnetwork.com.au and click the join the family button.