Emergence by Evan Peikon

After three years of working behind the scenes, I’m proud to announce the NNOXX One platform launch 🚀! The NNOXX platform is a revolutionizing fitness and performance technology with the world’s first non-invasive measurement of active nitric oxide, the body’s regulator of blood flow and oxygen delivery to tissues. Additionally, NNOXX’s platform comes packed with a variety of measurements for holistic performance enhancements, including Personal Nitric Oxide (PNO), Muscle...

On average physiological responses to exercise are relatively predictable. For example, resistance training increases strength and muscle hypertrophy, energy system training improves endurance, and so forth. However, modern exercise science still lacks the precision to determine the optimal volume, intensity, duration, frequency, and timing of exercise stimuli to optimally enhance a specific individual's health, fitness, and performance.

Exercise is a potent stimulus with a profound ability to alter our bodies over time. For example, intense endurance exercise leads to meaningful adaptations in the various systems that contribute to oxygen transport and utilization. Thus, for every incremental improvement in VO2max we should expect to see increases in hemoglobin mass, improved peripheral circulation, increased left ventricular volumes, or increased muscle mitochondrial density.

This article is a companion piece to my previous articles titled, Hypertrophy: Adaptation Mechanisms & Training Guidelines and Individualizing Volume & Intensity For Hypertrophy Training. Collectively, these two articles discuss the mechanistic basis of muscle hypertrophy, general training guidelines for eliciting hypertrophy, as well as best practices for individualizing training. After publishing these articles I was sent the following question: The last sentence in this question is key.

You can speculate all you want about what makes an elite Crossfit athlete elite, but it’s all theoretical until you actually check under the hood. After-all, it’s easy to pontificate about what you believe to be happening in a workout when you’re sitting in your office chair writing workouts, but it’s a whole different story when you see the data unfold in front of your eyes.

An individual’s VO2max represents the maximum integrated capacity of the pulmonary, cardiovascular, and muscular system to uptake, transport, and utilize oxygen respectively.

Hard training days should be hard and easy training days should be easy. You can call this approach 80/20 training, polarized training, or even just a basic strategy for load management. We've all heard this saying in one form or another. Unfortunately, however, few individuals in the Crossfit community do this well.

In the picture above i’ve displayed muscle oxygen saturation (SmO2) workout data from one of my athletes performing the same exact workout on two different days, separated from one another by three weeks.

The cardiovascular system has a profound ability to adapt and change when it is repeatedly exposed to moderate to high intensity exercise loads for long durations. In simple terms, it undergoes conditioning. Traditionally VO2max measurements have been used to quantify the effects of conditioning on the cardiovascular system. Before discussing how VO2max increases, it's important to form a distinction between improvements in functional criteria and performance criteria.

Exercise, as a research tool, allows scientists to investigate human physiology when pushed to its limits, providing us with insights that we couldn’t otherwise discover. One reason for this is that it’s exceptionally difficult to record uniform and consistent measurements of an individual’s physiology at rest.