Oxygen Debt

In 180 Degree Metabolism I recently added some new content about the importance of stressing exercise intensity more than duration for achieving metabolic adaptations that help with achieving a better ratio of body fat to lean body mass. Strictly from a body composition point of view that’s neato and all, but there’s strong evidence that doing short bursts of hard exercise has very unique, and potentially unmatched health benefits.
The first time I ever paid attention to the term “oxygen debt” was during my review of some of Scott Abel’s stuff. I didn’t count, but I’m pretty sure in his 5-Day MET DVD series he says “oxygen debt” while gasping for air in between sets at least 372 times. It seems kind of important to the guy, who I consider to be perhaps the world’s leading expert on exercise physiology due to his blend of personal experience, training experience, and extensive academic pursuits of the subject.

Another thing that jumped out at me was hearing some of the verbiage used by Vince DelMonte, including the term “oxygen debt.” DelMonte claims to have had minimal success with building muscle on various programs in the past, mentioning that he was referred to in his youth as “Skinny Vinny,” but that he finally found what works. And lo and behold DelMonte does a blend of functional training and weightlifting at maximum intensity to create an “oxygen debt.”

The theme is there again in Jon Gabriel’s work – the idea of doing very high bursts of exercise as if something is chasing you – and its striking ability to change the body’s metabolism to become less “thrifty,” making your body “want to be thin,” and lowering the weight set point for automatic, hunger and craving-free weight loss.

Clarence Bass, Rachel and Alwyn Cosgrove, Dr. Richard Bernstein, Sisson, DeVany, Big Chief – the list goes on and on. And now I’m talking about it too, as I have had substantial improvements in body composition since adopting Abel’s concept of doing what could only be called, confusingly, “functional, high-intensity, interval strength training.”

But my interest in the potential health benefits far exceeds my interest in using it as a tool to look like a man-beast when speaking on Metabolism at the 2011 Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions Conference in Dallas this coming November (yes, you read that correctly). Perusing through the general concept of oxygen indebtedness is pretty exciting as it pertains to improving cardiovascular health, increasing functionality in old age, improving the stress response and adrenal health, lowering inflammation, improving asthma, and raising the metabolism overall.

I used to look at exercise like researcher Ray Peat looks at exercise – through a narrow and short-sighted mirror. Exercise = Stress = Bad, therefore, enjoy some nice walks and a little stretching and eat the food (ETF). While it’s true that in today’s day and age most exercise pursuits end in tragic failure due to poor information, poor accompanying nutrition, and extreme efforts in pursuit of unrealistic and more importantly, unnatural goals – that doesn’t mean that the right kind of exercise, done intelligently as part of a much broader set of healthy practices, attitudes, and nutrition, can’t be a powerful tool. It very well may be, and the oxygen debt, although it’s just one narrow element of the overall picture, could be the most important tool there is.

To begin with, let’s talk about ol’ Ray Peat since I brought him up. One of Peat’s primary platforms is the belief that maintaining the proper level of cellular respiration and oxygenation is one of the most important and vital elements of aging well and avoiding degenerative disease. This is done, according to Ray Peat’s research, by keeping thyroid activity up (this, in turn, makes sure there is adequate production of hormones like testosterone and progesterone which oppose estrogen, the ultimate anti-respiratory hormone in his view). To this I would agree.

But an interesting connection is that thyroid activity and oxygen consumption exist in tandem. As we age, thyroid activity usually falls and oxygen consumption falls with it. Interestingly, one reason this may take place is due to falling lung capacity. As we age, our lung capacity diminishes, and oxygen uptake falls substantially. The end result is reduced mitochondrial activity/cellular energy production and a much higher chance of getting cancer, stroke, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and all our disease faves.

This general process can be reversed, and while a whole foods overfeeding attempt like RRARF may very well force the body to adapt by increasing cellular energy production and oxygenation via thyroid encouragement, there’s no doubt that the right kind of exercise can do it too.

As Al Sears writes in his 2010 book P.A.C.E.:

“Manfred von Ardenne discovered that your cells produce more energy when you practice short bursts of intense exertion – a capacity you build with my PACE program. This improves the way your organs use oxygen, keeping them younger longer. By keeping your routine focused on short, intense bursts… you send waves of life-giving oxygen through every cell in your body.”

Interestingly, Sears hints at what many of us have experienced firsthand, that endurance exercise has the opposite effect – giving up lung capacity and fast-twitch musculature for doing maximal effort work, and instead slowing down the metabolism as much as possible so that less oxygen is used performing the endurance task. These are horrible and highly unwanted adaptations akin to starving yourself. More from Weird Al Sears:

“Aerobics, jogging and marathon running are low-intensity, long-duration exercises. The Harvard study clearly shows that this kind of exercise increases your risk of heart disease and death.


And here’s why: When you exercise for long periods at a low to medium intensity, you train your heart and lungs to get smaller in order to conserve energy and increase efficiency at low intensity.”

So it’s kind of ironic that one could improve the oxygenation of their cells by striving to do exercise that’s hard enough to incur an oxygen debt (using more than you’re taking in and having to compensate for it later by panting hard or as Scott Abel says, “sucking in the room”), and lower overall stress hormone exposure by subjecting oneself to something that mimics a life-threatening emergency event and spikes stress hormones to the stratosphere.

But hey, just like forcing the body to adapt to burn more calories and expend less energy by stuffing your cakehole, short bursts of hard exercise (lasting 15 seconds to 4 minutes followed by recovery before you repeat) enough to make you really winded appears to induce some highly beneficial metabolic adaptations as well – with a huge cardiopulmonary bonus. It requires no equipment unless you want it to, workouts contain 7-20 minutes of total expenditure (not including rest time) in Sears’s program for example (done 3 times per week), and it’s much easier on your joints, tendons, and cardiovascular system than endurance exercise or weight training (although I do believe that weight training with lighter loads like that used by Scott Abel can easily be incorporated into the oxygen debt theme without too much collateral damage).

“Oxygen is the basic fuel your cells need to keep moving. When you’re jogging, your body can inhale enough oxygen to keep that activity going for quite a while. But when you’re sprinting fast, the demand for oxygen is so intense you can’t go for even a minute. As you approach maximal exertion, the amount of oxygen required to keep you going will exceed the amount you’re taking in – that’s the point when you begin accumulating an oxygen debt.


You may wonder why an oxygen debt is important. You might even think that pushing your body to that point is counter-intuitive. After all, why would you want to starve your body of oxygen?


The answer lies in your body’s ‘adaptive response.’


Think about what those words mean for a moment… an adaptive response is a change your body makes after confronting a challenge. If you don’t give your body new challenges, it won’t make these changes. In other words, you won’t grow or progress.


That’s one of the reasons why aerobics, cardio and long-distance running are not the best options for your long-term health. No progress will be made to build back lung capacity because you are not challenging your current lung capacity. In fact, because you are ‘preprogrammed’ to lose capacity with age, if you don’t train your body to make changes in response to challenges, you’ll actually start sliding backwards.


But when you give up these long, boring workouts, you can change your body’s experience with exertion.


When you achieve oxygen debt, your body responds. Plateaus are broken. Changes are made. First and foremost, your body reacts by increasing your lung volume and boosting your heart’s output.


By doing those kind of activities you actually ‘ask’ your body to make those changes. And in response, it does. You can train your body to make any kind of change you want. If you want small, tight lungs and decreased cardiac output, then keep jogging.”

To find out more about Sears and PACE, go the 180 Metabolism Blog and see a post and video on an experiment he did with two female identical twins. In the experiment one twin ran 50-yard sprints for 16 weeks and the other ran 10 miles for 16 weeks. Neither were asked to alter their diets. His experiment, as well as all the extensive data he’s compiled with his patients, thoroughly disproves all of the following myths:

1) You can’t build muscle and burn fat at the same time
2) You must lift weights to gain substantial amounts of muscle
3) Women can’t gain muscle easily
4) Women can’t achieve 10% body fat levels without counting calories
5) You must overeat to gain substantial amounts of muscle
6) You must restrict calories to lose substantial amounts of body fat
7) You must exercise more than 30 minutes per week to burn substantial amounts of body fat

Marathon? More like Moron-athon. Smarter Ways to Exercise

In the last post we discussed the “not so fast” exercise. Not so fast as in endurance exercise and not so fast as in be careful about believing that endurance exercise will enhance metabolism, help you lose weight, improve your health, improve your insulin sensitivity, and so on. For the vast majority of people, it won’t – particularly if taken to extremes of intensity and duration – like marathon running.

Although, in marathon-running’s defense, it is a great way to achieve infertility, risk sudden heart attack, damage joints, suffer from chronic inflammation, raise cortisol, suppress your immune system, suffer from frequent colds and infections, develop arthritis, asthma, and autoimmune disease, lose sex drive, get rid of pesky muscle tissue, and age much more quickly including developing raisin skin. That’s of course if you keep doing it. If you suddenly stop, you’ll probably get extremely ill and fall into a deep depression for a while.

Ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes summed it up best when asked “What’s the longest you’ve gone without running?” His reply…

“The longest I’ve gone without running in the past ten years has been three days. It wasn’t pretty. By day two, I was grumpy and depressed. On the third day, all I wanted to do was lie in bed all morning. This may sound peaceful to some, but relaxing to me is really stressful. By day four, I couldn’t take it any longer and went for a run, even though I had the flu and a 103-degree fever.”

Basically, with the brutality of endurance exercise you enter into the same hormonal state as a spawning salmon, which have been found to have astronomical cortisol levels prior to their quick death following spawning. Shawn Talbott, in THIS INTERESTING ARTICLE which couldn’t be more on topic writes:

“If you took a close look at these just-spawned salmon, you'd notice one striking feature--they're a mess! These fish suffer from immune system breakdown, infections, open sores, muscle loss and brain destruction. Why is this important? Because the same hormonal stress response and elevated cortisol levels may occur in your body when you exercise. In many ways, the salmon are a perfect example of the dangers of overtraining and cortisol overexposure.”

For an almost foolproof way to lower cortisol and avoid its negative complications, read THIS FREE EBOOK.

Now it’s time to peer into another form of exercise, one that is gaining popularity due to various exercise fads rapidly on the rise such as High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), circuit training, Tabata’s, Plyometrics, Sprints, and other forms of exercise that are more or less the antithesis of steady-state cardio and aerobic workouts that have dominated the fitness industry since its recent birth (very few people actively sought out a workout until a half century ago).

The commonality between all these types of exercise is that instead of being moderate in intensity – like a level of activity that you can continue for hours on end without collapsing, they are extremely high in intensity and cannot be performed for more than a few minutes at a time.

Sprinting obviously represents the most high-intensity exercise on earth. I don’t think a single human on earth can even perform 40 seconds of sprinting at 100% maximum effort. If Michael Johnson, the current 400-meter world record holder could have, his time in the 400m would have been nearly 5 seconds faster based on his 200-meter time.

Sprinting more or less involves every single muscle in the human body in full-out effort. The involvement of all muscle groups also has a metabolic advantage which I won’t quite get into yet, but we’ll definitely be discussing that over the coming posts on our continuing conversation on exercise.

But sprinting is not really all that practical for a lot of people. It’s simply too damn hard, and the risk of injury with sprinting is very high. Sprinters are always hurt, and it’s not uncommon when watching races to actually see one of the competitors come up limping. Note, this is usually not chronic joint pain like with endurance athletes, but actual muscle strain from the intensity of the exercise itself. At the very least, you can minimize the impact and risk of injury by sprinting up steep hills instead of on flat ground, or running at 80-90% intensity instead of full throttle.

The most practical is Tabata training, or a modified version of Tabata exercises until you have achieved the level of fitness required to perform a full round of Tabata. Tabata was created by a Tokyo scientist based on a 1996 study in which subjects had greater improvements in both anaerobic and aerobic capacity than control subjects doing steady-state aerobic workouts. This video is a good example of a true Tabata session. Don’t be intimidated though if you are out of shape, overweight, incredibly unfit, or just an old fart. You could turn something as simple as jumping jacks into a Tabata session starting out, and go at your own pace. Take longer breaks in between, or whatever you need to do to make it work.



Remember, your exercise program must be YOURS, created by you, owned by you, making sense for you, working for you, catering to former injury or personal limitation, and so on.

Tabata training involves doing 20 seconds at full capacity followed by 10 seconds of rest repeated 8 times in succession. Tabata training requires no equipment, can work the entire body, and requires as little as 2:40 of actual exercise just a few times per week (although many people do several sets of Tabata in succession for a more comprehensive full-body workout – common in the ever-popular “Crossfit”). This type of exercise is so practical that it is worth an entire post, coming to 180 soon I hope.

The Little Method, which is a similar form of exercise using max capacity exercise (for 60 seconds) punctuated by brief rest periods (75 seconds), for a total of 8-12 cycles was developed due to a similar study which yielded similar results in fitness increase and metabolic enhancement (increased mitochondrial biogenesis).

Both of these methods fall under the broader category of “high-intensity interval training” or HIIT. Typical HIIT is done on a treadmill or exercise bike by simply going hard for a minute or two, going easy for a minute or two, going hard for a minute or two, and so on repeated for 10-20 minutes. Most agree that it makes steady-state and long-duration cardio obsolete in terms of fitness, health enhancement, improved stress response, physique enhancement, and even endurance (to an extent) – all while minimizing the risk of overtraining and potentially lowering cortisol and raising testosterone (opposite of long-duration cardio). This is, no doubt, a great secret to achieving greater muscle mass to body fat ratios and much better aging and longevity.

Circuit training is similar in that rest periods are minimized, the intensity level is high, and the exercise routine is typically short in duration – lasting 30-45 minutes. Circuit training is typically performed at a gym with weights and machines, but gym circuit training has many limitations (they are often crowded and having to wait to use a machine doesn’t fit into true circuit-style training, which is HARD), and circuit training does not require weights per se. Certainly not a whole gym.

In fact, at home, with only 1 set of cheap dumbbells or kettlebells, you could easily do 5 simple exercises as a circuit repeated several times to near-failure with each set emphasizing big movements that incorporate several muscle groups. That could be:

Burpees with dumbbell press – like that shown in the Tabata video but without jumping at the end – instead extending the dumbbells straight overhead when you come to a standing position

Squats Curls – Do squats, while doing dumbbell bicep curls each time you come up from the squatted position

Pushups or dips – With all kinds of variations including asymmetrical hand positions, raising one leg, etc.

Abs/core – Any exercise or combination you choose, from Pilates moves to using those cheap little ab wheels to more complicated stuff

Dead lift rows – Bend over and lift both dumbbells like you are starting a pull-cord engine, slowly let them down, and then stand up tall with arms extended, legs straight, and back flat before lowering the weight and repeating the 2-part sequence

You could try to do a full circuit in 10 minutes for a total of 3 rounds and a 30-minute total workout, for example.

Anyway, that’s all for this post. Think short, fast, challenging, and variety when it comes to exercise vs. long, slow, moderate, and repetitive. Craft your own exercise routine, and be more cautious about making it TOO HARD and TOO GRUELING than not hard enough.

Ultimately, for any form of exercise to provide benefit, it has the be the kind that you can realistically do and enjoy several times per week (minimum) consistently almost every week from now until you go to the old folk’s home and rely solely on Checkers for your workouts (unless of course you are an old male, in which case inappropriate ass-grabbing will by your standby). If you fear and dread your workouts, or keep getting injured, or steadily notice declines in fitness and well-being instead of improvements – you are not working out correctly for you, and you need to modify your program.

Stay tuned for the next blog posts on this topic. We still have a TON to cover on the topic of exercise, including weight training or “resistance” exercise, ultimate forms of metabolic enhancement exercise such as Scott Abel’s MET training, plyometrics (which I mentioned briefly here, and can certainly be incorporated into quick interval-style training), and why dance, gymnastics, martial arts, many sports, and other highly-athletic disciplines seem to be so beneficial for creating a body that takes ingested energy and turns it into muscle, heat, and energy instead of fat.

Once again, I give thee the famous pictures of fitness icon Rachel Cosgrove on invisible ab triathlon training (boo!) vs. a combination of weights and intervals (yea!)...