Book Review: Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights?
Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights? is by Alex Hutchinson. The subtitle is "Fitness Myths, Training Truths, and Other Surprising Discoveries from the Science of Exercise".
Which Comes First is a book about the science of exercise, and tries to answer the question, what does the science really say about how we should workout to achieve our exercise goals? The layout of the book jumps around from topic to topic, never getting too deep into any one question.
(Don't) Trust the (Bad) Science
Which Comes First was published in 2011, before everyone knew about the replicability crisis, and there are a few topics where that shows: there are a few topics where he's a bit too willing to take a study at face value. For example, on the subject of eating after a workout in order to recover more quickly, he says:
The key factors to consider are when and what you eat. For the first half-hour after exercise, the body is processing nutrients to repair itself at a dramatically elevated rate. After about two hours, this “window” is closed and the opportunity for any accelerated recovery is lost.
On the other hand, Good To Go reports:
In 2013... a meta-analysis look[ed] into the evidence behind the idea of the “post-exercise anabolic window.”...They concluded that the evidence didn’t suggest the existence of a narrow window...
There’s surely a period where your body needs protein to repair and build after a muscle-straining workout, particularly something like a max session in the weight room, a CrossFit WOD (workout of the day), or a high-intensity interval session. But it’s not so much an anabolic window, Schoenfeld says, “it’s an anabolic barn door.” As long as you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it’s almost impossible not to get through.
Similarly, the science behind icing injuries has taken a clear turn since Which Comes First was written. Hutchinson says:
...before you start mobilizing [an] injured muscle, you have to give it a chance to form scar tissue strong enough to prevent re-tearing. During this period, which for mild injuries may last three to seven days, the “RICE” protocol of rest, ice, compression, and elevation helps speed recovery.
But according to Good To Go and other sources I've come across, the idea of icing an injury to prevent swelling is on the way out:
That icing might suppress inflammation was originally a selling point. But in recent years, Mirkin, popularizer of the RICE method, has come to think of this as a bug, not a feature. In a complete turnabout, he now denounces the icing methods he once championed. There’s no question that icing can reduce pain, at least temporarily, he told me, but it comes at a cost. “Anything that reduces your immune response will also delay muscle healing,” Mirkin says. “The message is that the cytokines of inflammation are blocked by icing—that’s been shown in several studies.” He now believes that instead of promoting healing and recovery, icing might actually impair it....
Finally, while his conclusions about massage are mixed, he takes a slightly more favorable view than Good To Go does. He starts with some discussion of how people like massage, but the scientific evidence is mixed, and then brings up this hilarious study:
To find out how massage does work, researchers at Ohio State University enlisted the aid of rabbits, which aren’t susceptible to the placebo effect. They first exercised the sedated rabbits by triggering a nerve impulse that causes contractions of a leg muscle. They then used a machine to deliver “cyclic compression forces” that simulated 30 minutes a day of Swedish massage (the most common type of sports massage). The results were clear: massaged muscles regained 59 percent of their lost strength after four days, whereas rested muscles regained only 14 percent...Interestingly, the results were much less pronounced if the first massage was delayed for a day after exercise, suggesting that the sooner you get your massage, the better.
And ends with a generally favorable conclusion:
...these quantifiable outcomes should help scientists begin to figure out the duration, frequency, and strength of the massage stimulus that produces the best results... finding a good therapist with expertise in sports massage (not aromatherapy and executive stress backrubs) is essential.
The conclusion in Good To Go is actually pretty similar, but comes off as a bit less credulous to me. The two books agree that if there is some benefit to massage, it's likely best to do massage shortly after exercise. Anyways, why is everyone massaging these animals? I found this quote in Good to Go:
Butterfield’s studies on massage have turned up intriguing evidence that massage performed shortly after exercise may increase protein synthesis in the muscle, at least in rats.
From Which Comes First to Endure
One of the most interesting things about Which Comes First was that Hutchinson is also the author of Endure, one of my favorite books I've read this year. Which Comes First was published in 2011, and Endure in 2018. They both deal with similar topics: the science of exercise. While Which Comes First jumps around discussing just about everything related to science and exercise, Endure is more focused on the limits of human endurance.
Although they are somewhat different, there are clear similarities. And that's so interesting to me: Hutchinson wrote a book (this one) that wasn't all that great, and then, 7 years later, wrote a much better book about pretty much the same topic. I love the way he iterated to make something OK into something great — instead of saying "I've written a book about that", and moving on and finding the next subject, he tried again and wrote an even better book. I wish we had more of that. I often read a few books about a subject and find that they each have their weak points and strong points; I think it's great that someone who was already an expert on the subject would learn more and then go back and re-write a better book a few years later.
Other tips from Which Comes First
There wasn't that much in this book that was completely new to me. Here are a few passages I highlighted with some quick comments:
Some of the memorable notes were just common-sense, but put in a way that clicked for me. Like this from the intro:
When the body is subjected to stresses and overloads of varying intensities, it will gradually adapt over time to overcome whatever demands are placed on it...
The key is balancing the size of the stress: too small and your body won’t see any need to adapt; too large, and it won’t have a chance to adapt due to injury or exhaustion. Much of the research described in this book aims to help you find this delicate balance.
Or this one from the conclusion:
Think carefully about what you hope to achieve in six months, a year, five years—bearing in mind the aphorism that most people overestimate what they can achieve in the short term and underestimate what they can achieve over the long term.
One thing that's come up in various books I've read this year about training is that bones are not as hard and unchanging as we imagine: “Over the past decade, people have realized that bone is more dynamic than we thought. It’s actually a pretty responsive tissue..."
Perhaps too much running on flat surfaces can lead to more injuries than having uneven surfaces (I run mostly on flat surfaces):
Flat, paved surfaces will result in every stride being almost identical, so your muscles, joints, and bones are stressed repeatedly in exactly the same way throughout the run. That sets the stage for overuse injuries like shin splints... On unpaved surfaces, no two steps are the same, which provides slight variations in the impacts on your body.
One thing I've been thinking a bit about lately is whether I need to do more slow workouts. This line in the book brought that question back to the forefront of my mind:
...a good general guideline for how to allocate your workout time over a typical week is to aim for 70 percent aerobic, 20 percent threshold, and 10 percent anaerobic. These ratios are based on studies of elite endurance athletes, who attempt to balance the hard training that brings the largest and swiftest gains in fitness with easier efforts that allow them to recover while continuing to improve.
I think the important point here is to remember that this is time based. It's not saying that 30 percent of your workouts should be intense, and 70 percent relatively easy, but that 70 percent of the total time should be relatively easy. A 30 minute track workout in the morning can be paired with a 70 minute moderate bike ride or slow jog in the afternoon. (Elsewhere in the book, he used the example of "If you’re running or biking along at a slow pace and you’re reasonably fit, you should feel like you could continue for hours" as an example of that aerobic zone.) On a per-workout basis, it's 50% hard workouts and 50% easy workouts, but on a per-minute basis it's 70 percent easy workouts. This makes sense to me, and as Hutchinson say in the quote above, it's all about pushing yourself as much as possible to engage in "active recovery".
A second point to keep in mind is that this is "based on studies of elite endurance athletes". So, if I'm more interested in explosiveness than endurance, do these results still apply? I think the general concept of "do more active recovery" probably still applies to me, but perhaps I should adapt the 70-20-10 ratio for my specific goals (which are not just endurance).
He notes that athletic performance is generally at a daily maximum around 6PM, which I very much believe is true for myself as well:
Other studies have made similar findings about tests of back muscles, arm muscles, vertical and broad jumping, and anaerobic power, with the peaks always within a few hours of 6 p.m.
If you need to cut back on the training, it's usually possible to do so without losing all of your gains, but be intentional about it:
Let’s start with the good news: researchers have consistently found that it takes less work to maintain your level of fitness than it did to get there in the first place...
...subjects who were used to training six times a week were able to maintain key fitness indicators such as heart size and oxygen uptake by doing just two high-intensity workouts a week.
I thought this study on the differences between HIIT and endurance training was pretty interesting:
After six weeks of training three times a week, both groups made identical gains in endurance and lost similar amounts of fat. In the “long runs” group, the endurance gains came from increases in the amount of blood pumped by the heart; in the HIT group, almost all the gains came from the muscles themselves, which improved their ability to extract oxygen from circulating blood.
Of course, the ultimate goal is to improve both factors and get extra benefits!
He discusses an inhaler-like device that strengthens your breathing muscles, the idea being that:
There are several plausible theories of why this form of training should work, the simplest being that stronger breathing muscles allow you to pump in more oxygen when you’re tired.
I'd never heard of it before, but he gives it mixed reviews, so I don't think it seems like something worth trying (besides, I don't want to spend $200 on workout equipment!).
Finally, in the discussion of running and running form, he mentions this factoid that I believe I've read in another one of the exercise books I read this year:
elite runners tend to take about 180 steps a minute regardless of how fast they’re running, while less experienced runners take fewer steps.
This is just...a bit hard for me to believe. He does specifically say that this is "regardless of how fast they're running", but does that fully account for the fact that, for an elite runner, even "slow" is fast? Do they still take that many steps when they're running a 9 1/2 minute mile? Or does that just account for "fast" days running a 4-minute mile and "slow" days running a 5:30 mile?
I have this same question about foot strikes — I always read a mid- or front- foot strike is what the elite runners do, but is that just because they're going so fast that they're essentially sprinting? Obviously (for me at least) I get up on my toes when I sprint. And elite runners are "jogging" as fast as I'm "sprinting", so of course a front foot-strike is best for them at that speed?
Overall, I wasn't a huge fan of this book — if you're wanting to read about the science of exercise, I suggest Good to Go and Endure.