Fight or Flight Fitness

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Big changes coming to Fight or Flight Fitness.

In real life survival situations you do not know 6 months, 1 week, or even 1 day ahead of time when you might need to travel by foot 10, 30 or 50 miles (see this introduction post). So in true survival of the fittest fashion you have to ask yourself what is the most useful fitness program (see this post of the best survival of the fittest programs).  At other times you might have to sprint for your life, and again you are not going to know ahead of time when you need to do this. Sprint training is important and that is why I have written about science behind sprint intervals, and 4 minute a day of sprint training. Now the reality is you need to include shorter interval training with longer slower endurance tasks as outlined in this post.

Now you might call this type of training for survival caveman training for they had to actually exists in a living condition where there physical fitness did determine their survival. Not that cavemen trained for survival fitness it was just that their lifestyle would be what we call training. They would have to sprint, they would have to take long treks as part of their daily or weekly life.

But now days we do live the life of the caveman. We do not sprint, we do not travel for long distances on foot. But maybe we should be. If you want to lose fat try combining sprinting with occasional long distance treks. It will melt away the pounds, give you a slimmer belly. If you want to be fitter than any other time in your life try this type of training (but read on for the added real life wrinkles).

However, one big problem is timing. I can’t go into the research right now (but I will soon) is you don’t want your training to be predictable. You need randomness in your training. The caveman did not know when they might have to sprint: if they came across game to hunt, or had to escape a predator. They didn’t have time to stretch their legs and do a 15 minute warm-up program, they had to go now. And the same thing with their long distance treks. Sure sometimes they knew when the tribe might be migrating to a new location, but it wasn’t like they had full control on how much food they ate before these trips. You rarely knew when or where you next meal was coming from. They sure didn’t have much opportunity to carbo load like almost every person running a marathon in our current times.

And in our modern times if we are talking about survival fitness you don’t know when you might have to sprint, or when you might have to run/walk say 20-100 miles.

Adding in the growing science behind the number of benefits that are found with a more random based training approach and the one obvious answer is to make this paradigm a cornerstone of your training. And this is exactly what Fight or Flight Fitness will be offering. Does this sound interesting to you? Do you want a better prepared body, in a faster time frame that traditional training, and that is far more functional than any other system out there? Then sign up for the newsletter on the right hand side of this blog.

Sure I am adding in some hype here, but just at a common sense level I think you can tell this makes sense. The best way to prepare your body for random life events is by a random training method. Say you get an email that says go sprinting (also in the near future we can enable this to occur in a more real time fashion via mobile messaging). Then two days later you are told to run/walk a long distance (based on your current fitness level). The thing is you won’t know ahead of time of what is going to happen, and your body won’t know. And that is where some of the big adaptive changes will be found.

Sounds interesting to you? Sign up for the newsletter to find out more in the near future.

I have only been able to give you the briefest outline of this new training paradigm, and haven’t even touched all the science behind it but I will hash out the details in coming posts. But the newsletter will contain additional details that really make the program come to life.

Are you prepared?

happy training

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Alex Hutchinson, over at Sweat Science, when discussing the article that came out (and covered by many blogs) about the optimal running pace, asked a question I have found interesting for a while:

Well, I’ve often pondered the scenario where you’re stranded in the desert with no food, 100 miles from the nearest aid, and you have to decide what your strategy is. Do you run? Walk? How fast? Seems like if you know your optimal pace, you can maximize your odds…

This same question is part of the impetus for this blog. Can a human travel by food 100 miles without food, without food and water? And since biking is 4-6 times more efficient what about traveling 500 or so miles by bike without food (and/or water)?

I have searched around and haven’t come across any mention of anyone having accomplished or even tried these tasks. No doubt our ancient (maybe not so ancient) relatives were faced with having to travel a 100 or so miles without food.

Now maybe most people would think it is impossible to travel 100 miles without consuming any calories – but I guess we won’t know until somebody is willing to try.

We do have enough energy in our fat stores for 11 days of walking or 3 days of running (on average).

Are you up to the challenge?

(H/T to Andrew)

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When you think about survival fitness, or just the ability to complete a marathon or an ironman you need to become aware of how much energy storage you have and of what type. And maybe more importantly how far these energy stores could take you if you are performing a low level task such as walking or a higher energy task such as running.

I won’t discuss the energy system that are the main contributors to events that last less than 1 or 2 minutes, but instead concentrate on the ‘endurance’ energy systems.

glucose and glycogen stores:

——————————————————————–Provides energy for:

—————————————————————————-walking                     running

blood glucose:                            20 g                 15 min                       4 min

liver glycogen:                             80 g                 1 hour                      18 min

muscle glycogen:                    350-700 g         5 – 10 hours             2 – 3 hours

Adipose tissue (fat)           9,000 – 15,000 g        11 days                     3 days

So you can see even if you add up all the glucose/glycogen stores that come from consuming carbs you don’t have enough for completing a marathon in a time that most people are capable of. Most people will complete a marathon in  2.5 to 5 hours and a major part of ‘hitting the wall’ is when you run out of glycogen muscle storage. And obviously any longer events such as ultramarathons, hiking, or ironman events you require fat burning – and you better be good at it.

Despite this fact there are not many of the sport trainers telling you about the importance of the ability to use fat or that this can be trained. If you want to be able to perform well in long endurance events, do a long hike (be it for pleasure or to survive) you want to become an efficient fat burner. Additionally, this might help you lose fat, which is of prime importance for many people.