Is Walking the Key to Running Faster? MAF Tests and Base Training Explained

But how slow is too slow?

Nothing's too slow. Walking's great.

That's

the complaint I often hear. I have to walk to keep my heart rate that low.

If you have to walk to do, to, keep your heart rate below your MAF heart rate, you know, 180 minus your age,

is unfortunately the situation, you gotta go slow before you can go fast. So, and your body can do it.

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. We have two listener questions today that seem at first blush seem unrelated. MAF tests for runners and Fat Max workouts, but they're a lot more related than you might think. The first question about MAF or MAF tests comes up on the

that AI platform for runners that was easy for me to say but before we get to the question What is the MAF test? What does it stand for and why should runners do it?

the is it stands for maximal aerobic function. And it was founded by my colleague, Dr. Phil Mafetone who I'm actually doing, you know, more more work with these days. We're collaborating on a bunch of tasks, even, and we even talking about doing some more stuff within Athletica. So I'm excited about that. But

So yeah, so he founded the MAF test and the whole, really the concept, but it's ultimately, it's like the story kind of comes back to his work that he did with the famous triathlete, Mark Allen, six time winner, dominator of the Iron Man in the 90s. ⁓ And actually like the story kind of goes where,

Mark would continue to kind of show up in Kona and then, ⁓ you know, and this was like five, five different times and Dave Scott would always beat him in the end. Right. And he's just going to have one failed race after the next. And, ⁓ so, then Mark met Phil and Phil said, no, you're doing things all wrong. You're, you're not building, you're training too hard and you're, ⁓ you know, you're, you're unhealthy ultimately at the end of the day.

And so yeah, he nurtured him back to health and he got him to slow down before he went fast. So he got him to basically just perform at this very low heart rate. And you can calculate this yourself as 180 minus your age. That's the ballpark. There's limitations. We're going to get into that in one sec. But yeah, that's kind of the story. let's say he was a 30 year old athlete, right?

So 180, let's just call it 150, right? So no mark. All you're going to do now is run and ride at no higher than 150 beats a minute. And that's what he did. He did like six month block of that to recover and revive himself. And the rest is history, right? As he went on to become the most dominant triathlete in that era, right? So yeah, that's what the formula is all about.

You'll see that in your athletic training plans, the MAF tests for both cycling and for running. There's the various different tests that are in there and that's what it is. You're ultimately working towards optimizing your fat burning level. If you were to actually go into a laboratory, you could actually get insights into how much fat carbohydrate you're actually burning.

You want to be at low exercise intensities. You want to be burning a whole lot of fat. And what we find when we actually analyze is, ⁓ you know, when people wear the metabolic carts, the VO2 max carts, we find that the majority of people have compromised fat burning ability and they wind up their heart rate actually shoots way up high, really, really quick. And that's because they don't have any basement layer. They don't have a base, that base training to facilitate.

the development of their overall training. Like everything needs to cut, like recovery, performance, it all needs to be supported by this basement base layer of fat burning. So yeah, you kind of have to, often for many people, you got to go slow down before you can ⁓ go faster. And I'm looking at one person here across from me, MJ, who's experienced this before.

And she knows exactly what I'm talking about. Right?

you

Yes, sir. And I had to go slow. But how slow is too slow?

Nothing's too slow. Walking's great.

There we go people. That's

the complaint I often hear. I have to walk to keep my heart rate that low.

And that is like when you, you, that's you and a listener, like you just, that's the biggest tick box that you need to do this. If you have to walk to do, to, keep your heart rate below your MAF heart rate, you know, 180 minus your age, you've you're in, you're in this camp, you're in this boat. You got to go through this, this process. It's a, it's it's unfortunate, but that's the sort of the situation.

and your body can do this, right? So it's like, know, I can't, know, countless people have gone through this whole process with me. And it's just, it's hard because none of us, we're not patient creatures naturally, but you have to be. This is unfortunately the situation, you gotta go slow before you can go fast. So, and your body can do it. It really can.

It's the complete opposite what we want to be doing. imagine Mark Allen, six months of base training, keeping heart rate. Six months people. Do you even pick up your training phase for the next race six months before? A lot of people don't. So six months of base training, Mark Allen, the fittest guy in the world. So stop complaining and start walking.

Yeah.

I've gone through it and it was so frustrating. Like, I don't know, I can't remember exactly, but it was like five minutes of running and then I had to walk. And by the way, walk run is a great way to build your base if you can't like go straight running and keep your heart rate down.

Mm-hmm.

Yep, you got it.

So

more part of the question and MJ just kind of answered this, know, the heart rate level for the MAF test is quite low for a runner. Does this mean I need to walk up hills to keep my heart rate low?

Yeah, that's part of it. Um, so second part of the question, Athletica scheduled a MAF run per the guidance. I should run at 129 beats per minute. Um, however, my watch programmed the run at 138 to 158 in the future. Should I run the 138 or 158 or manually adjust the heart rate zones?

That's a good question a little bit of splitting hairs on this I mean 120 was at 128 versus 138

129 and then it was programmed to 138 to 158.

Yeah, so I mean, you're in the ballpark, right? Like again, we need to kind of, probably the 138 is probably gonna be fine. ⁓ You know what I mean? Like it's, you're still, because I'm guessing, like what, it's calibrated based on your critical heart rate. So your critical heart rate is the heart rate that you would get on that 5K run test. So 5K all out.

So basically it's grabbing the mean heart rate of the last 10 minutes of that 5k all out. ⁓ Or if you're in the context of cycling, it would be looking at the last 10 minutes of say, your all out, what is it, 20 minutes for FTP test. it's like, yeah, in either context, it's grabbing that and then it's taking ⁓

a fraction of that that's associated with the zone two. So it's the boundary between zone two and zone three. And so there's a little bit of a difference. I think your 138 is probably fine. I'd kind of err a little bit lower. I'd probably go more towards the 135, ⁓ small little nuance, of cut it down between the two and really work on nose breathing in that area.

and work ⁓ on trying to do your aerobic development sessions below that key marker. And you should see, if you're doing this right, you should see progression week to week on going faster at that same heart rate. And look to try to do this on the same training routes as well so you can actually feel that improvement.

He's saying my watch programmed to run 138 to 158. Yeah, so that's too high. But if he's 51, he can aim at 130 and then plus minus 5, so 125 to 135 and program his watch for those MAF runs to peep if it goes over 135. That's what I would do.

I missed that to 158. That's too high. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

But have to make sure that your Garmin, if you're using Garmin watch, I'm assuming you're using Garmin watch. Your Garmin watch zones are the same as Thletica's. And...

Yeah.

haha

Yeah. Last one.

No, what I

would say also with this individual, now I understand the question more. he's got the 138 to 158 is the range, and that's the range likely of the aerobic development one. So he's probably got a very high critical heart rate. So I would just make sure you check that critical heart rate. Does it look right? ⁓ And make sure it's not an error. Remember, we've talked before of gigo garbage in equals garbage out. If there's all of a sudden like,

Mm.

a heart rate that's been, that's an error, you know, say you're using like a wrist based heart rate as opposed to a chest strap. That's a often happens, right? And then that all of a sudden might be too high of a heart rate, right? So really have a look at your, the heart rate that's been used to set that critical heart rate, because that's what's sort of anchoring that first data, right? So there's, we are seeing sort of a discrepancy here between the 129 and that, that high,

that high zone, you know, to aerobic development kind of zone that you're sort of showing there. So just, yeah, kind of check that out. But you could be an individual, even if you're 51, you know, because we know the 220 minus your age or the 180 minus your age, they're just formulas and they're not physiology. They're they're ballpark for the average human. But you might be an individual with a very high maximal heart rate.

I'm kind of in that ballpark. That would be a little high for me, but ⁓ it definitely would be a little high for me in the 138 to 158. That's more in my zone three. ⁓ But you you might, no reason you couldn't be, ⁓ have a higher range than me, but I would just double check that one. And then once you find that, ⁓ know, find some sort of a middle road, but typically you'd probably be more towards like I was talking about before the 138.

So yeah, that would be my advice.

you

How often should runners use the MAF test to monitor their training progress? Is it a worthwhile tool?

Yeah. Over to you MJ, because you monitor yours, you're a runner and you check yours out every once in a while. know Cindy Maloney is ⁓ someone also, she always checks hers as well every time she's starting a new program. Do you get any insight from it?

Yeah.

I do get insights. And because I train for long distance triathlons and marathons, I think it's a really worthwhile tool for me to kind of check how things are going. Do I need more base? Do I need to slow down or am I good? And it is pretty incredible from my own experience to see how when things are going good.

Yeah.

that heart rate is like keeping that heart rate and seeing faster pace, it's quite empowering. And then vice versa, when you're going through a stressful period, how that pace just drops like a rock.

Yeah, totally. So remember, back to the Mark Allen example that we let off with, the story with him, he started at, with his 150 heart rate, he started, I believe it was about a 410 pace, thereabouts. So that's what he was kind of running his 150 at. By the time he finished and was, you know, with the multiple championships that he was winning in Kona, he was doing his, he was moving at 320 pace for that same 150.

you

So, yeah.

Right, so that's pretty massive difference, right? Like if you know 320 pace, like you're moving, right? Imagine doing that aerobically, just where it's easy, right? So that's crazy. But that's the story. So is it worthwhile? Absolutely, yeah. And it will be directly correlated in line with your improvements in performance. Because it's like, yeah, the more you can...

Whoa.

Mm-hmm.

fuel your performance aerobically with that, the easier it is, the faster you'll be going.

Is the test something that you use just to monitor your progress and your capacity to run at that level or can you use it to adjust your training zones?

Yeah, it's a good question, Paul. Kind of like we were talking with the last example, you're kind of looking at it to almost know, are my training zones in line? You should be kind of finding, and you can adjust, you can manually adjust these. You can manually adjust your heart rate that's associated, your critical heart rate. So sometimes if your critical heart rate is too high or too low,

You should, you can manually adjust that, fine tune that. Not everyone will know how to do that, but as you become a more experienced user, you certainly can ⁓ just kind of curb that. Or if you have a coach, an astute coach will do that for you as well. ⁓ So, and of course we're going to get better and better at doing this in the future. But again, we'll only be as good as the data that's coming in. So try to use a heart rate strap as well, if you potentially can, because the heart rate straps.

are going to always be superior than the wrist-based methods. We're talking a lot here in this podcast about MAF heart rate, but if we're gathering that data from wrist-based PPG sensors, it's only so good. So a really important point that I hope we take is to use a chest strap, a reliable chest strap, because it's going to be a lot more superior. There's other ⁓ ones as well that are on the...

you know, can actually be around the brachial artery as well in the arm. I think it's called polar variety sense and these sorts of things. There's other good ones like that too, but you get a good sensor so that it's monitoring that correctly for you.

So let's switch gears for just a moment for our next listener question. And this listener asked, is there such a thing as Fat Max for endurance training? Is Fat Max training a thing just for cycling? And Fat Max is in capital letters, you know, as a thing.

Yeah. So yeah, it's definitely a thing. It's where you get what's called your crossover point in a progressive exercise test. We've spoken a little bit about that. If you go to a laboratory and you can do this cycling or running or rowing, or you could even do it swimming if you did it in a swim flume, any exercise mode is valid. But it's ultimately the point where fat oxidation calculated on a metabolic cart

becomes maximal and typically we'll see that number fall down. This is what the laboratories show, the current and unfortunately there's a bunch of literature on this that just isn't accurate for various different reasons. We're actually doing research on this.

as we speak with using comparing tracer data with, so radioactive tracer data of the fuel being burnt versus actual measuring this in the lungs. We think it will show something different, but regardless, it's a thing for cycling and running. what you will find is the...

Hmm.

The Mark Allen's of the world, those that go do the MAF training, they have higher fat maxes. We see this from the Jeff Fullick faster study where he brought in and he looked at longitudinal keto athletes and he compared them with high carb athletes. And as you would expect the keto athletes that were on the keto diet for six months to two years, they showed superior fat max basically so that they were almost perfect. They had their fat.

level, you know, burning like 1.5 grams per minute or higher at like 90 % of VO2 max. So they're very, very high fat max level compared to the high carb athletes. So we're kind of sitting more around the, you know, the 50%, 50 to 60 % range, which is more, more typical. So yeah, your diet matters, your base, your level of base training, the

the period of adaptation that we just discussed, it all kind of overlaps and corresponds. How well you're sleeping, your stress level, your level of homeostasis, it all goes towards optimizing your fat level. So it is a thing for all exercise, all athletes, and it's super important.

I've been waiting the whole podcast for you to mention stress sleep and how that plays into fat max or fat burning capacity. Let's go in there.

I mentioned it. There you go. It's key because yeah, it's back to the, yeah, it will. So at the end of the day, we're interesting little creatures and we've got this stress system in our body that's kind of all wired, starts right in the mind, in the pituitary of the brain, which links basically the, you know, the...

Yeah, tell us more.

It's the integration between the hormonal system and the nervous system, right? So it sits in your brain. Yeah, hypothalamus, pituitary. And if you're too stressed, all, you know, think all of the senses are kind of integrated with this. So all of sudden you're so stressed, then the, basically there's this interrelationship between the nervous system, which you could measure with heart rate variability as one example, and.

all of the hormonal systems that are all interrelated in there as well. And one of the key ones we've probably heard of before is called cortisol. So cortisol is a glucocorticoid in terms of its classification. So it spills out. You can actually also see this in continuous glucose monitors if you're wearing one of those too. So basically the key correlate that you'll see is a reduction in heart rate variability corresponding with

a heightened level of glycemia. So you're all of sudden have really high levels of glucose. And that's not necessarily due to the diet per se. can also just be due to stress. But you can imagine, like if you've got high glycemia, ⁓ that's not going to be good for burning fat, right? Because you're just, yeah, it's the opposite that you want. You don't want to be in this stressed out situation. That's probably the case that we, where you were talking about MJ where

No.

You know, the heart rate is just going skyward right to the roof. As soon as you start doing your, you're running. So that's, yes, that's where you need to slow down, ⁓ walk before you run, get that all in balance. And then, you know, everything kicks into place. know, glycemia is reduced, cortisol levels reduced. ⁓ and yeah, and sleep is the key thing that will kick that off. And you, the listener might be saying.

but I can't sleep, I'm trying to sleep and I can't. And we hear you, I know, it's just, it's not easy. But this is where sometimes exercise is also very good. Aerobic development sessions in the afternoon can be really good to banking fatigue, sleep debt, which you need before you go to sleep. So don't take a...

If you have a hard time sleeping at night, don't take a nap during the afternoon. Do instead, try to get outdoors and do some like prolonged walking, aerobic development sessions, go ride your bike. Push that into towards the afternoon or the evening. ⁓ And then try to stay off your screens and work towards building that sleep debt and then having a, yeah, trying to get a good night's sleep, all the various different sleep. ⁓

behavior stuff that we know, clean sheets, dark room, cold, ventilated, all these sorts of things are really helpful for having a good sleep. And that helps to kick in all these other things that we're talking about in terms of developing your Fat Max. So there you go.

So people who know they are going to have a stressful period in their life, maybe they have a lot of work that they need to do or need to take care of sick kids or whatever. Highly stressful period coming up. What should they do with their training in related to like, oops, like, ⁓

preserving Fat Max and their aerobic base instead of like pushing for, you know, VO2 max sessions, race pace, because those are pretty tough and hard. They opt out of those and do aerobic work instead.

Yeah, I would prioritize the aerobic work. Absolutely. It sounds like that's what, you know, that might be missing, right? Because you've described a situation where we've got a lot of stress. ⁓ so yeah, whenever, whenever I'm under a lot of stress, then I'm going to kind of prioritize the, aerobic development sort of stuff. So just, just get out the door and whatever you can do. So just see if you can go do some easy riding.

Or a light walk even can, can really be great to reset the central nervous system and control the spillover of cortisol and, ⁓ you know, high sympathetic stress, factors. That would, that would be my advice. I know an easy swim. ⁓ that's what I'm going to be doing this afternoon after this series of podcasts and whatnot that we're doing. it's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You too. Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

me too.

Thank

Yeah.

So how do

we determine how to exercise at our Fat Max?

How do we know where that is?

Well,

I think it kind of came back to the, you know, the example that you gave before, Paul, with the individual that was talking about the, you know, the programmed run heart rate and then the, you know, with that age. it's, kind of comes back to the MAF heart rate where that is for that individual. Is it sitting around your zone two heart rate as prescribed? Or is it, you know, is it sitting around your age predicted MAF heart rate? Again, 180 minus your age.

Where does that kind of line up? And then how does that also drift into what feels right as well? Like you want to, nose breathing is another big one, right? So talk test, nose breathing, all these things. Can you speak full sentences when you're exercising? Can you breathe through your nose, not your mouth during that exercising? Those should kind of all align with that MAF heart rate, right? So it should be sitting at the cusp between zone two and zone three.

should be somewhere around that age minus, ⁓ or 180 minus age, and then all the physiological sort of things as well. And then we've spoken at length about feel and developing your feel. Is that sort of feeling right? Am I working steady? That's, yeah, and steady and easy. It's your all day pace.

So for very fit athlete whose fat max is high, then that is something totally different than MAF intensity, right?

No, it's not. This is the crazy thing that's hard to kind of understand. So again, Mark Allen got to the level where he was just everything was easy for him. And you look at him, you look at the pictures of, if you look at the Iron War where he's beating Dave Scott, it's remarkable actually. Go watch that footage back and look at how calm his face is and the look at Dave's face. And Dave starts to really fatigue and see stress.

And at that point, you know what Mark does? He smiles. He just smiles because he knows how easy this is. So yeah, even at 320 pace, that's what he created in himself. And that's what all of our heroes that we watch in any sport, they've created this ability to do things easy. A lot of it revolves around the ability to burn fat at very high rates.

Mm-hmm.

I'm not sure that that's clear for everybody. So why do we want to have high fat max?

because the high fat max is the fuel. whenever you are, yeah, you're right, it's really important to know. when you are burning a lot of fat, we've spoken about this before in terms of the analogy of the sauna that I use where I've got like a wood fire sauna and I put my wood into the...

into the wood fire and I light that and I've got to have both heat, I've got to have a fuel source and I've got to have oxygen. So we're sort of the same except we're more at the local level. So we've got to have the oxygen coming in, we've got to oxidize that fuel and the fuel is the fat which sits all around us, right? We've got to access that fat which is the wood, right? Burn that and oxygen kind of does that and you want to do it real, real easy like and when you

do it real easy like you burn it super hot and you convert that chemical energy into mechanical energy and movement. the more you, and the more of that fat that you can just naturally access without, you just basically it throws, you don't have to rely on any muscle glycogen, carbohydrate that's stored, you're just fully burning the fat and the fat source,

Remember, it's almost like infinite energy. If I had a gun to your head, could basically make you move and exercise. If your life depended on it, from Texas where you're at, MJ, and you could walk, don't have to take the plane, you just walk all the way to Revelstoke. You could do that. That's how much fat you have on your body. And likewise for me too, I have that much fat on my body. And we're both fairly lean individuals, but that's how much is actually stored.

in the leanest of individuals. So does that make sense?

So I wouldn't need to take 28 gels during my Ironman bike ride like Kemfer Werf did in Ironman Texas.

Nope.

No, no, don't. The only, again, this is not well known, but this is, you know, the data is quite clear. And there's a landmark review that's coming out in physiology reviews in terms of, it's like one of the highest impact factor publications in the world. And it's coming out right now by my colleague, Tim Noakes, Phil Prinz, Andrew Kucnick.

And they're showing ultimately it's just the but you all you the only thing you need to maintain is your level of blood glucose So as long as you're not hypoglycemic, you're no problem that basically everything you know, there's this small glucose pool large glucose pool and ultimately if you preserve the small glucose pool blood glucose and liver and liver glycogen and just by you know a drop of Sugar drop of carbohydrate

you

10 grams an hour, that's all you need generally to go run forever, ride forever at your MAF heart rate.

So.

So with my butchered English and very oversimplified way to say, tell me if I'm wrong. So if you slow down and walk if you have to, just work on that MAF intensity to build your ability to burn fat. ⁓

you will see your pace because we all care about the pace. We don't want to be walking forever. We want to start running and then we want to start running really fast. If we're just patient enough and work on that low intensity, we will start and we don't fuel ourselves with gels while we do that. We will start seeing the drop of pace so we become faster and then we can really tap into our

fat storage and ⁓ compete at a better level, whatever the level is, because we're not that reliant on muscle glycogen or the external fluid or fuel, I mean, sorry. Okay.

Correct. Yep.

You nailed it. Absolutely. Remember when you're taking in all those gels, if you're following that mainstream message, that is causing for insulin levels to rise even when you exercise. And that will ultimately blunt your ability to access your fat stores. What it actually does when you're hyperglycemic, in other words, taking in the gels, creating a really high glycemia level, ⁓

what you actually wind up doing, ⁓ and the studies support this, is you actually burn, ⁓ cause yourself to burn glycogen faster. And we say, well, why is that? Why am I, that's not what we've been taught, but that's what the data is sort of showing. And the reason is, is because in the hyperglycemic situation, the body's trying to protect that. It's probably, it's trying to reduce that level of glycemia, because it's not healthy to be in that situation.

So it's burning glycogen actually faster in the muscle in the hopes of actually drawing it out of the bloodstream. So ⁓ yeah, it reduces that level. So you need only have a small amount, just enough to prevent like hypoglycemia, whatever that level is in each individual. That's all you need.

So if gels are like gas on your wood stove, if you put lots of gas, it just requires more and more gas to be burning.

Yeah, it's not optimal that way. yeah, just, ⁓ you need a level. I think you're distracting from the actual performance. Remember that when you have a bunch of sugar, you're also throwing that situation into the gut, the GI tract, and it has to process it and digest it. And how it does that is through the process of fermentation.

So fermentation is the only way you can actually get that ⁓ into the bloodstream, right? And that creates gas and bloating and often debilitating levels, which cause athletes to stop exercising. The more you can take the burden away from the GI track, the more that's going to lessen its impact on your performance.

The other thing too, don't forget, if you're taking in a whole lot of food, that's got to be digested and processed somehow as well, right? So that actually takes blood away from the muscles that are doing the work because it has to, right? It has to go to the gut to do all that work, to actually bring that fuel source in to the rest of the body. So minimizing the amount of work that's actually required in your GI tract.

is a worthwhile strategy to really consider. Of course, this won't happen overnight, but this is a whole big sort of process that you might have to kind of go through. But it all comes back to where we started in this and that slowing down first to move faster. Later.

Thank

Yeah, I was gonna go back there, so I'm glad that you did. So I think one way that you can experiment with yourself is to do this MAF test and then repeat it after a bass season or a build season to see what the effect is on your MAF intensity.

Yeah, that's fantastic. I couldn't agree more.

So the MAF

test essentially measures, well, this is what it sounds like, essentially measures Fatmax for running. Is that accurate? Yeah.

Well, yeah, yeah, it started with running for sure, for sure. But we

do a cycling MAF test as well.

Okay, what is that test?

Well, actually Dan Plews and I came up with this, but basically we just mimicked Phil's test. And we just did like, okay, well let's do same methods. So let's take 180 minus age and then ride for 30 minutes at that and look at the power drift. So just take your power ⁓ outside of it and don't look at your power, but just look at your heart rate.

build up to start and then let power drop throughout the 30 minutes and sort of see what that is, but just try to find that. And then take the average power in that 30 minute segment and following, like, so take like a 10 minute break and then do like, and then just kind of confirm that level after a 10 minute break to do right at the mean power output that you had during.

So the more fit you are, the better your fat burning, the less that fall in power should be. In other words, you should just be able to kind of, at the end, right, in the Mark Allen 320 pace kind of phenomena that we talked about, when you're at the end of it, you should almost be able to, know, that heart rate should not be, sorry, the power should not be falling. The heart rate should just kind of, power and heart rate should just lock and hold, ultimately.

Right, when this classic durability sort of stuff or classic, you know, aerobic decoupling, right? So very little aerobic decoupling. The concept of durability. So Harrison Dudley wrote us an excellent review on our blog. So check out the blog that he wrote on the concept of durability.

But I believe a lot kind of comes down to your ability to burn fat and all this sort of stuff comes back to that. Durability is a real hallmark. If you've got good durability, less of a fall in pace or power, ⁓ I believe a lot of it comes down to your fat max level.

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