What do What do Hands, Thresholds, Fat, and ACL's Have in Common? They're all mentioned in this month's newsletter 😉

High performers!

We've got a stacked update for you this week. From Norwegian Double-Threshold Training, to new research and position stands that will matter to you, to a critique of the FIFA 11 warm up, and a sneak peek at a program we've been quietly building behind the scenes. Too long & no time? Skimmable highlights in yellow below.

COMING SUMMER 2026 & LOGO REVEAL: HAND & WRIST FOUNDATIONS

We've been building something new behind the scenes - and if you've ever dealt with grip fatigue, wrist pain, carpal tunnel, tennis elbow, golfer's elbow, or just noticed your hands aren't as strong as they used to be, this one's for you.

Hand & Wrist Foundations is a structured training program designed to rebuild grip strength, wrist mobility, and hand resilience - whether you're a hockey player who needs stick control, a desk worker with chronic carpal tunnel wrist issues, a climber battling forearm pump, a new parent dealing with "trigger finger," or someone who just wants to open jars without wincing.

Here's why this matters beyond sport: grip strength is one of the strongest biomarkers of biological aging and all-cause mortality. A 5 kg decrease in grip strength is associated with a 16–17% increased risk of death from any cause (BMJ, 2018). It also predicts cardiovascular events, cognitive decline, and functional disability in older adults.

We're not quite ready to launch yet - but we are building a waitlist. If you want to be first to know when it drops (and potentially get early access), sign up here:

​Join the Hand & Wrist Foundations Waitlist​

And if this stuff interests you, you might want to get your hands on April's twin therapy and training blog posts:

• "Tennis Elbow Isn’t a Tennis Problem: A Chiropractor’s Perspective"
• "Golfer’s Elbow Isn’t a Golfer’s Problem: Perspective of an Exercise Physiologist"

NORWEGIAN DOUBLE-THRESHOLD TRAINING: IS TWICE A DAY THE SECRET?

If you follow endurance sports at all (COUGH COUGH NEW WORLD RECORD), you've probably heard the buzz around the "Norwegian method." It's the training philosophy behind Jakob Ingebrigtsen's world records, and it's been filtering into recreational running, cycling, triathlon, and even rowing communities over the past couple of years. But what actually is it - and does it apply to you?

What is double-threshold training?

The core idea is deceptively simple: instead of one hard workout per day, you do two moderate-intensity sessions on the same day - typically both at or near your lactate threshold - twice per week. The rest of the week stays easy.

The experts seem to use a slightly lower blood lactate goal in the morning and a slightly higher blood lactate goal in the afternoon session, ranging between 2–4.5 mmol/L. Not a full-send interval session. Not a chill jog. It's that disciplined, controlled, "comfortably hard" zone that most recreational athletes either skip entirely or blow past on their way to going too hard.

Marius Bakken, a former Norwegian 5000m record holder and one of the originators of this concept, has argued that microintervals (45–60 seconds at a faster pace, with short recoveries... rather than big blocks of intervals) allow athletes to accumulate more work at race-relevant speeds than steady-state training in the same zone - without the fatigue bomb that comes from true high-intensity intervals.

What does the research say?

​A landmark 2024 paper in Sports Medicine interviewed 12 of Norway's most successful endurance coaches - the people behind athletes who've collectively won over 370 international championship medals across biathlon, cross-country skiing, distance running, road cycling, rowing, speed skating, swimming, and triathlon.

Here's what they found in common across all of these sports:The base is massive. These athletes accumulate enormous volumes of low-intensity work (Zone 1-2). The double-threshold sessions are layered on top of that aerobic foundation, not instead of it. Think of it as a pyramid: 80% of training is easy, and the threshold work is precise, measured, and strategic.
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Lactate is a compass, not a ceiling. Every session is guided by real-time lactate monitoring. They're not guessing whether they're in the right zone - they're testing. If lactate drifts above 4.5, they pull back. If it's below 2.0, they push slightly harder. This is how they stay in the productive zone without crossing into territory that requires 48+ hours of recovery.

Consistency beats intensity. The Norwegian coaches emphasize that the single biggest predictor of improvement is the ability to train consistently without getting hurt or overtrained. By keeping individual session intensities moderate, athletes can maintain higher weekly training loads without breaking down.

But I'm not an Olympic athlete - does this apply to me?

Here's where it gets interesting. The principles scale down beautifully. You don't need to train twice a day to benefit from this philosophy. Here's what you can steal:

1. Stop going too hard on your hard days. Most recreational runners and cyclists make their "hard" sessions too intense and their "easy" sessions too fast. The Norwegian approach says your threshold work should be controlled - think 6-7/10 effort, not 9/10. If you can't hold a few words of conversation, you're probably too hot.
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2. Actually go easy on your easy days. This is the part most people can't stomach. Your Zone 1-2 work should feel genuinely easy. Like, embarrassingly slow. That's the foundation the threshold work builds on.
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3. Know your numbers. This is the part that separates guessing from training. A lactate test tells you exactly where your thresholds are - your body's response to exercise intensity. Without it, you're estimating, and most people estimate poorly (usually too high). We do lactate testing at Vital and it's one of the most eye-opening tests for endurance athletes.
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4. Prioritize frequency over fury. Instead of one weekly suffer-fest, consider two moderate-intensity threshold sessions per week. Your body adapts to what it practices, and practicing controlled threshold work builds a bigger aerobic engine without the breakdown.

Golden Nugget: Here's a simple litmus test for whether your training might benefit from the Norwegian philosophy. Look at your last 4 weeks of training and sort your sessions into three buckets: easy (conversational), moderate/threshold (comfortably hard, could say a sentence), and hard (race-pace or above, can barely talk). If more than 20% of your sessions land in the "hard" bucket, you're probably doing too much high-intensity work and not enough controlled threshold training. The Norwegian model suggests roughly 80/15/5 - with most of your "quality" coming from that middle threshold zone, not the red zone.

Want your thresholds tested? We run lactate testing right here at Vital Performance Care - and if you're remote, we can help you find a facility near you. Reply to this email to get help with this.

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IF YOU MISSED IT (and are in Calgary), ROUND 3 IS COMING

Our Food Foundations Fat Loss seminar series has officially become a thing. Rounds 1+2 sold out completely (within 48h), and we immediately created a waitlist for a potential 3rd round. These intimate, hands-on seminars are led by Liam McVarnock - one of our trainers, a Level 2 Certified Precision Nutrition Coach - and they cover the nutrition fundamentals that actually move the needle for body composition, energy, and performance.

If you attended either round - thank you. The energy in the room was incredible both times, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. HERE's a recap from the first one and HERE was some footage from the second!

Reserve your spot for round 3 HERE. *We expect it to sell out again*

A WARM-UP IS NOT A WORKOUT: THE FIFA 11+ DEBATE

A new article published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine is making the rounds in the sports science world, and it's one we think you should know about. Titled "Warm-up is not a workout," the authors (Nimphius & Kadlec, 2026) present a principles-based critique of the continued use of warm-up programmes like the FIFA 11+ as primary ACL injury prevention tools.

Here's the gist:

The FIFA 11+ warm-up was designed to prevent football injuries and explicitly aims to improve strength, balance, and jumping/landing ability. But the article argues that relying on bodyweight strength exercises, running, balancing, and jumping during a warm-up inherently restricts progressive overload - the very thing required for long-term musculoskeletal adaptation. Without progressively increasing load over time, the strength, balance, and landing improvements these programmes claim to deliver are unlikely to develop meaningfully, especially in athletes with greater training experience.

The authors also point out that the evidence behind these programmes is drawn largely from youth and amateur female populations, and that extrapolating those results broadly - to all athletes, all sports, all levels - overstates what the data actually supports. In women, only 30% of the assessed warm-up programmes met strength training guidelines and 67% met plyometric/power training guidelines. The authors argue that strength and conditioning training, done separately and with proper programming, is essential for real injury risk reduction - and that warm-ups can't replace that.

This is exactly the philosophy we build on at Vital: warm-ups matter, but a warm-up alone is not a substitute for structured, progressive strength training. If your "injury prevention" plan is just a 15-minute warm-up, it's probably time to rethink the strategy. Read the full article here.​

THE NEW ACSM POSITION STAND ON STRENGTH TRAINING

Speaking of strength training - the American College of Sports Medicine just dropped their first update to resistance training guidelines in 17 years, and the message is refreshingly simple: consistency beats complexity.

The new Position Stand synthesized 137 systematic reviews covering over 30,000 participants, and found that:
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1. The single most meaningful shift is going from no resistance training to any resistance training. That's where the biggest health gains live - not in optimizing your rep scheme.
2. Train all major muscle groups at least twice per week. Whether it's barbells, bands, or bodyweight, the modality matters less than the habit.
3. Hypertrophy (muscle growth) happens across a wide range of loads - not just in a narrow "muscle-building zone." As long as effort is sufficient, both lighter and heavier loads drive meaningful muscle growth. This is a big change from the old "8–12 reps for hypertrophy" dogma. We talked about this a long time ago on THIS post.
4. Programs should be individualized based on goals, enjoyment, and safety - not a one-size-fits-all prescription.

Why this matters for you: if you've been putting off strength training because you feel like you need the "perfect" program, this is your permission slip. Start. Be consistent. The rest is details. And if you want help building a plan that's specific to your goals - that's literally what our team does. Reply to this email or book a session.

If you've got questions about today's stacked newsletter, please reply to this email. I reply 100% of the time.

Yours in physiology,

Carla & the Vital Performance Care Team