6 min
If you’ve spent any time looking for fitness or nutrition advice online, you know the feeling. One expert says this is the only way to train. Another says everything that guy just said is wrong. By the end of the week you’ve seen five different opinions and have no idea what you’re supposed to do. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce, bouncing between protocols without ever landing on one that actually works.
Nutrition alone has a million and one protocols for burning fat, improving health, and everything in between. Workouts are the same story. Upper lower, full body, push pull, you name it. For cardio, there’s 4×4, low intensity steady state, high intensity intervals, and on and on. In every camp there’s at least one person insisting their way is the only way and everything else is a waste of time. That leaves most people confused, second guessing what they thought they had figured out the week before.
The fix is to lead with the outcome instead of the protocol. Start with the goal. Whatever it is, burning body fat, gaining muscle, building strength, improving heart health, name that thing first. Don’t pick a method just because it’s “good for you” without knowing why. Doing that tends to lead to trying to catch two rabbits and going home hungry every time. It just doesn’t work out. Start with a goal, then ask what’s actually required to get there. That’s when a clear map starts to form, with steps that get you to what you actually want.
Here’s how that plays out across three common goals.
VO2 max is the body’s ability to utilize oxygen efficiently, and it’s been linked to better health and longevity. As people age, improving this matters for staying active and capable for the long haul.
Improving VO2 max requires forcing the heart to operate near its maximum capacity, zone four or zone five if you’re going by heart rate zones, or the red zone if you’re using a Morpheus device, which is what I recommend for FIT40 clients.
The research comparing high intensity interval training to steady state cardio for VO2 max gains is genuinely mixed, and the right takeaway depends on who’s being studied. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of university-aged adults found that HIIT produced significantly greater VO2 max improvements than moderate intensity continuous training. But a separate meta-analysis focused specifically on women found no meaningful difference between the two, with both training styles producing similar gains from baseline, and that gap closing further with age. The honest summary is that HIIT isn’t a guaranteed shortcut, both approaches can improve VO2 max, and which one works best often comes down to the individual and what they’ll actually do consistently.
That’s part of why Zone 2 training is still worth considering. Zone 2 work can also produce solid benefits. The caveat is that most of the available data on Zone 2 comes from highly trained individuals, so it’s still a bit unclear exactly how much Zone 2 the average person needs to see real results.
For high intensity interval training, the minimum effective dose for improving VO2 max is 10 to 12 minutes a week in zone four or five, pushing the upper threshold of effort. The optimal range is closer to 20 to 30 minutes a week in that same zone.
What matters most, though, is picking a version that’s actually enjoyable. Nobody sustains 10 to 12 minutes, let alone 20 to 30, of something they absolutely loathe. If it’s miserable, it won’t get done, and the whole point falls apart. High intensity interval training leaves a lot of room for variety here. Circuit training with different exercises, a rower, a bike, a sled, really any modality works, as long as heart rate is being driven into that zone and held there. As long as the effort lands in that range and gives the body what it needs, the goal gets met.
Building muscle comes down to two core principles: progressive overload and mechanical tension. Weight and reps need to increase over time, and the effort needs to be hard enough to reach mechanical tension, that point where the muscle is working at full capacity and reps start to involuntarily slow down on the last couple of attempts. Those final reps are the ones where it’s unclear whether they’ll actually happen, but they get pushed through anyway. The bare minimum for results is four sets per week.
How that volume gets accumulated can look very different depending on the person. CrossFit is one route, and it’s an effective way to rack up mechanical tension and progressive overload quickly since it tends to generate a lot of volume (which also aids in building more strength over time). Powerlifting is another, with a wide range of training styles within it, like conjugate, 5/3/1, the cube method, linear periodization, and undulating periodization. The FIT40 approach typically uses three sets, sometimes four per session for those moving quickly through their exercises, structured to hit the bare minimum needed without piling on extra volume that could be counterproductive.
The right approach is whatever fits a person’s schedule, enjoyment, and recovery capacity. The FIT40 style intentionally keeps volume low, doing the bare minimum needed so recovery stays manageable, especially for people who have demanding schedules and struggle with sleep.
CrossFit, on the other hand, can be rough on someone untrained, leading to days of soreness, fatigue, and increased hunger that can work against other goals like fat loss. That spike in hunger after an extremely hard workout is worth paying attention to, since it can quietly undo progress on a fat loss goal even when the workout itself felt productive.
Recoverability also becomes a bigger factor with age. Recovery in your 40s and beyond isn’t the same as it was in your twenties, which is worth weighing when choosing between something higher volume like CrossFit and something more controlled like the FIT40 style.
Burning body fat is the most straightforward of the three in terms of mechanism. It requires a calorie deficit, plain and simple. Creating that deficit means the body pulls the energy it needs from stored fat instead of food. That being said, many factors affect the right calorie number person to person. Things like medical conditions, medications, hormonal changes, sleep quality, activity levels, environmental factors and many others play big roles.
Once you know your calorie target there are countless ways to get there. Flexible dieting, keto, one meal a day, Whole30, carnivore, even things like the cabbage soup diet, the wine diet, or the pizza diet, can all technically create a deficit if followed consistently. For anyone curious, the Twinkie diet experiment by a professor at Kansas State is a fun rabbit hole that makes this point well: almost any approach can produce weight loss if it creates a deficit.
But losing weight by any means necessary isn’t the same as actually improving health. The better goal is finding an approach that supports health while still creating that deficit. Hardcore carnivore, hardcore keto, or something like the Twinkie diet might technically work, but they’re not necessarily the healthiest path there. The better move is avoiding the trade-off of robbing Peter to pay Paul, getting solid health outcomes from an approach that’s also genuinely enjoyable enough to stick with. Consistency, more than any specific diet, is what actually produces results over time. The method that gets followed for months is always going to outperform the “perfect” method that gets abandoned after two weeks.
The throughline across all three examples is the same: stop getting pulled in a hundred directions by every protocol or headline making the rounds online. Start with the outcome. Know the goal, whether that’s VO2 max, muscle, fat loss, or something else, and let that goal determine the approach. There isn’t one universal right way to do any of this. There’s a right way for a given goal, schedule, recovery capacity, and what someone will actually enjoy enough to stick with. That’s the difference between staying stuck in shiny object syndrome and actually getting somewhere.
Chat with Coach Bryan to discover how our programs can fit into your lifestyle and help you achieve your goals. Let’s get you started on your fitness journey today!
