What follows is a brief summary of the metabolic events relevant to Q&D. The times are approximate, as there is a lot of variation among individuals, loads, and exercises.
Approximate timeline of the metabolic events most relevant to mitochondrial biogenesis in fast twitch fibers in brief, all-out dynamic exercise: power (P)—synonymous with the rate of ATP turnover, CP concentration, lactic acid concentration, AMP concentration.
Under Five Seconds
Max power is sustained, as the CP system with its pedal to the metal is keeping up with the replacement of the used-up ATP.
Acid concentration stays around resting levels.
Five to Ten Seconds
Power dips slightly. With the creatine phosphate half depleted, the governor built into the muscles starts throttling down the burn of the remaining CP.
ATP deficit starts accumulating. The “emergency system,” myokinase, comes to the rescue and starts disassembling ADP to make ATP and AMP.
Glycolysis rears its ugly reptilian head.
Ten Seconds
CP is depleted by about two-thirds. This is its critical capacity, below which it can no longer burn hot.
Glycolysis keeps spreading its leathery wings. It has not resynthesized much ATP yet, but it has already managed to double the acid concentration.
Power noticeably drops, as the used-up ATP is not being fully replenished. The situation becomes desperate and the “emergency system” goes nuclear.
Ten to Twenty Seconds
AMP rapidly accumulates.
Between 10 and 20 seconds, the acid concentration doubles again, reaching its highest acceptable levels.
It is in this 10-to 20-second window that magic takes place, between the instant power noticeably declines and the time glycolysis gains its full steam and starts really gumming up the works with acid.
You are giving your finest effort to sustain max output while your heavyweight energy pathway is fading, but before the acid levels become high enough to ruin everything. The “fourth musketeer” steps into the breach and takes apart ADP to make more ATP, with AMP as a desirable byproduct.
Timing is everything.
Twenty Seconds
The CP system keeps fading. Glycolysis finally gains its feeble full power. It is unable to fill CP’s big shoes, being one-and-a-half to two times weaker.
Twenty to Thirty Seconds
Between 20 and 30 seconds, the lactate levels double once more. Desperate to buffer the acid, the body resorts to the highly unfavorable deamination reaction. Some of the hard-won AMP is wiped out.
Thirty Seconds
It is all downhill.
As the power output is halved, ATP use tanks with it. The glycolytic and aerobic systems are now able to keep up with its replenishment; with the ATP supply and demand equivalized, AMP is no longer produced.
Acid keeps climbing, to double again between 30 seconds and 60 seconds. Toxic ammonia and free radicals are accumulating.
The bottom line, based on today’s research, is that for most athletes, 15 seconds, plus or minus five seconds, hit the sweet spot, at least for lower body exercises. It takes just as long to stimulate our mitochondria as it took the power cat to catch her dinner.
Within that range, women should stay closer to 20 seconds as they tend to produce less acid and less ammonia than men. This is the same for the less-powerful athletes of both sexes.
Fast-twitch athletes should lean toward 10 seconds, and the fastest drop all the way down to seven or eight seconds.
The more explosive the athlete, the more condensed in time are the described metabolic events within the muscles. ATP and CP burn hotter and deplete faster, the “emergency reaction” comes to the rescue sooner and runs with a greater intensity; deamination also goes live earlier.
German scientists measured the ammonia concentration in up-and-coming young sprinters and middle-distance runners after various distances. After about a 10-second sprint, the former produced noticeable amounts and the latter much less. Thus, it appears that a very powerful athlete will maximize AMP accumulation after just seven or eight seconds. This time window gives the “emergency reaction” two or three seconds to do its job after the power starts fading at about the five-second mark.
Fast 10s—an Explosive Equal of Heavy Fives
Working with reps instead of seconds eliminates the headache of customizing the load for individual athletes and for different muscle groups for a given athlete—the upper body tends to be faster twitch than the lower body. The more explosive the athlete, the sooner he or she will complete a given number of reps and vice versa.
In our experiments, we have arrived at the “magic number” of reps that works for most.
That number is 10.
In addition to upping mitochondria’s quantity, fast 10s upgrade their quality as well through mechanisms similar to those in classic Soviet anti-glycolytic training. I will explain the nuts and bolts some other time.
Muscle hypertrophy is a collateral benefit of explosive sets of 10. Although there is supposed to be a conflict between myofibrillar and mitochondrial growth, fast 10s deliver both.
The topic of the muscle growth mechanisms is too broad and interesting to breach here; it deserves a book dedicated to it alone. Today it will suffice to say that, while the exact works remain a mystery, one combination that opens the safe is known:
✓ A high rate of ATP use and CP depletion
✓ A high magnitude of CP depletion
✓ Some acidosis
Fabio Zonin, Master SFG and the author teaching a Strong Endurance™ seminar.
To be clear, the rate describes how quickly the tank empties; the magnitude how close to “empty” it gets.
Analyze any proven myofibrillar hypertrophy protocol and you will see that, while it may be biased toward one of the above conditions, it checks off all three boxes.
For example, this is how it plays out with heavy reps or grinds.
Singles and doubles build strength faster than any other rep counts, but these gains are unstable and not supported by muscle growth.
Tens rule for pure hypertrophy. Unfortunately, the muscles built with them are not as strong as they look. In addition, 10s make athletes very sore, interfering with other types of training.
While heavy fives do not build mass as quickly as bodybuilding 10s, the quality of this meat is much higher. We are talking about the finest steak versus a mystery meat.
On the strength side, although fives do not build strength as quickly as ultra-low reps, they keep building it year after year, while the progress from singles and doubles fizzles out in weeks.
And soreness, while present, is nowhere close to that resulting from higher reps.
The same dynamics play out with explosive lifts—with double the repetitions. When reps are quick, it takes more of them to reach the same metabolic conditions. For instance, for fast fiber hypertrophy, sets of fast 20s cannot be beat: The rate of CP depletion is high during the first half of the set; by the end, the magnitude of CP depletion is maximal and acidosis is high.
But there is a price to pay. Westside Barbell’s mastermind Louie Simmons, an early adopter of hard style kettlebell training for powerlifting assistance, found out that fast 20s made him too sore and tired, so he chose to stick with fast 10s. Listen to Louie.
10x10, Reloaded
For the fast 10s to work as promised, you must take enough rest between them.
Brett Jones, StrongFirst’s Director of Education, has observed that almost universally, gireviks rest less than they ought to. They may not realize that both CP and pH must recover, the former to fuel another intense bout and the latter to avoid a whole lot of the problems discussed earlier.
CP recovers rapidly, but pH takes forever. It takes our bodies about 30 minutes to clear all the lactic acid produced by a single 100-meter sprint! Full recovery is obviously out of the question; a reasonable compromise must be found. And Prof. Nikolay Volkov found it for us when stud
ying circa 15-second sprints for other reasons: It is two-and-a-half to three minutes.
Thus, programming becomes very straightforward: a set of 10 every three minutes.
And do not dare to take less rest, no matter how highly you think of your conditioning! If the super athlete I am about to introduce takes the full three minutes, so should you.
The US military special operator I will call “Victor” is an extraordinary athlete. On the wrong side of 40, he is a good decade past the expiration date in this line of duty where, even if one does not get shot, he gets worn down. Victor not only remains healthy against all odds, but bests young guns in feats like multiple one-arm chins and 100-mile ultra races. He wrote to me:
Your Strong Endurance research has validated many of the training methods I have been using intuitively for the past 15 years, and you have provided a great framework for me to continue to program healthy progress…
Back in 2009, I added 12-to 15-second sprints in the form of stadium stair sprints, and I did them on a 3:00 interval. I usually did 10 explosive pushups at the top of the stairs. This is very similar to what you described in Strong Endurance. Even back then, I felt intuitively that these short, intense intervals were much easier on the body than traditional 400-to 800-meter intervals. I continue to use this type of training today.
I will interrupt Victor to express my admiration for the rare blend of intuition and intelligence that enabled him to arrive at these load parameters. It took me four years of dusty biochem texts to get here.
Another great side effect of this type of training is that I never experienced any major training injuries or the exercise burnout many of my peers experienced in the Special Operations community. Many of my peers in SOF are very fit and are able to perform; however, they suffer from high cortisol, low testosterone, and many have sleep problems. When you add the sleep and emotional stressors on a deployment, many of these guys are setting themselves up for serious long-term health problems.
I would love to see more of this type of education and training in SOF. Most guys I worked with do a good job of training for performance, but at the expense of their long-term health. I believe this approach is very shortsighted. Alactic training would allow them to maintain their performance goals in a way that does not compromise long-term health and function.
Three minutes is a perfect compromise between effectiveness and efficiency, the point of diminishing returns. Within that time frame, CP is rapidly refueled; after that mark, it gets replenished drip by drip.
How many sets of 10?
10.
No, it is not just another nice round number. Prof. Volkov’s research also teaches us that a maximum of 10 sets of circa 15-second all-out repeats may be done with the above rest periods if we insist on negligible power decline and minimal glycolytic involvement. Go beyond, and you will be training something else as your CP stores progressively shrink while your pH keeps falling. So, do not go there.
Ten sets also neatly meet the compromise between the metabolic demands optimal for building mitochondria and myofibrils—enough for the latter and not too many for the former.
One hundred reps was a maximal training volume per exercise per training session in the Soviet weightlifting methodology, especially when hypertrophy was emphasized. Prof. Arkady Vorobyev explains:
Under the influence of a load on the muscles, depending on its type, the function of structural elements of the tissue (an anabolic reaction) or energetic economization of structures responsible for expenditure and synthesis of energy and muscular work (endurance training), may be strengthened…It goes without saying that such specialization of structural elements depending on the type of activity is quite relative. Muscle work leads to a simultaneous expenditure of energetic and plastic resources. But the type of activity determines the direction of expenditure and the following restoration of the biological system.
Evidently, this is why weightlifters who double or triple the optimal volume do not experience much strength gain. They “were more enduring but less strong compared to athletes training with lower load volumes, as they primarily activated the processes of energy production rather than protein synthesis,” concludes Vorobyev.
10x10 it is.
Yes, it does look suspiciously similar to Kettlebell Simple & Sinister—except you are not to compress the rest periods: one set every three minutes, no matter what, even if you feel totally recovered. Your feelings do not matter.
The Melody Is in the Rests
Straight 10x10 deliver. But they can be improved upon.
Something remarkable happens when you keep the sets, reps, and total session duration constant—10x10 within 30 minutes—but stagger the sets in a particular manner.
“There’s no music in a ‘rest’…but there’s the making of music in it,” wrote John Ruskin, an artist, writer, and art critic from Victorian England. “And people are always missing that part of the life-melody…People are always talking of perseverance, and courage, and fortitude; but patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude—and the rarest too…For patience lies at the root of all pleasures, as well as of all powers.”
More biochemistry coming right up. Enjoy the pain.
Earlier, out of mercy, I presented a simplified picture of the metabolic conditions needed to pull the AMPK trigger and turn on the mitochondria building machinery: accumulate a lot of AMP.
While scientists are in agreement on that point, some have concluded that there is more to the story. Accumulation of free creatine, the product of CP breakdown, may be even more important.
And it may be the rate rather than the magnitude of fuel depletion that increases AMPK activity. Most likely, both the rate and the magnitude have an effect. And that presents a conflict.
Our bodies have all sorts of built-in governors designed to prevent us from running ourselves dead. As you recall, the enzyme that breaks down the “rocket fuel” of creatine phosphate (creatine kinase) has such a governor built in. The more CP is exhausted, the more its throttle is closed.
“I want it all and I want it now.”
Since the first sub-goal is duration driven and the second is intensity driven, a compromise is unavoidable. This brings us back to our approximately 15 seconds, where neither the rate nor the magnitude of fuel depletion is maximal but both are substantial.
So far nothing has changed in our program design if we stick with the repeat method, as in the above 10x10. However, it changes if we employ the interval-serial method, a powerful weapon in elite athletes’ arsenal.
Prof. Leonid Matveev classified rest intervals between exercise bouts as stress, ordinary, and stimulation.
The stimulation interval is the stuff of “greasing the groove” and is not relevant to this book.
Stress intervals are short enough to progressively accumulate fatigue. This is interval training as you know it.
Ordinary intervals are in between—they allow more or less full recovery but no more. This is the repeat method used in the Q&D 10x10 protocol.
The interval-serial method combines stress and ordinary rest periods. It features multiple series, or groups of several sets. Within each series, sets are done with incomplete rest between them, aiming for a cumulative fuel depletion toward the end of a series. Then a longer rest is taken between series.
Why bother?
Because recovery is not one thing. Multiple functions must recuperate, and each does so at its own pace. As you recall, CP is fast to bounce back and pH is slow.
To a coach, the interval-serial method offers an opportunity to customize the metabolic events in a way that is impossible to achieve with straight intervals or repeats. We can push chosen types of fatigue while restraining others, like a sound engineer at a mixing board boosting select frequencies while cutting others.
I wanted to achieve a rapid and deep depletion of cellular fuels—and suspected that the interval-serial method would be the answer.
A Rugby Lesson
The method did not fail. And the reason lay in training the quality that game coaches call the repeat sprint ability (RSA).
RSA is the ability to perform multiple short sprints (typically less than 10 seconds) with little rest between them (less than 60 seconds) with a minimal performance decline. Metabolically, it is totally different from pop HIIT favorites like 400-meter intervals or “Tabatas.”
Repeat sprint ability studies—especially by Russian Prof. Nikolay Volkov, Australian Dr. Paul Dawson, and Swede Dr. Paul Balsom—were very helpful in identifying the loads that produce the target metabolic state for building mitochondria in fast fibers. RSA researchers did not set out to discover the training load that triggers mitochondrial biogenesis. They were after the parameters that enabled game athletes to sustain near-max sprinting prowess over and over. Fortunately, their goal was closely aligned with mine.
The Quick and the Dead Page 4