Bratha

Part 1.0 — What Athleticism Actually Is

21 min read

This is Part 1 of 5 in the Athletic Series — the companion track to the main Fitness Series's Aesthetic & Strength path. If that series built the chassis, this one builds the engine. The full path:

Table of Contents

What this series is, and isn't

The Aesthetic & Strength series is about how you look and how much force you can produce. This series is about everything else the body can do: sustain effort, repeat it, change direction, and recover between bouts. If you only ever lift, you build a powerful chassis bolted to a weak engine — a car that looks fast in the driveway and overheats on the first lap. This is the engine.

Where this series picks up

Back in Part 1.1, I made a deliberate cut. I said there were four ways to be fit — Aesthetic, Strength, Agility, and Endurance — and then I argued that two of them, Agility and Endurance, actually belong to a different category entirely: Athleticism. I set them aside, because for the average gym-goer chasing a better physique, they aren’t the metrics driving the daily workout.

This series is that set-aside category, fully built out.

The split is worth restating as a metaphor, because it organizes everything that follows. ==Aesthetic and Strength build the chassis: how the machine looks and how much it can push. Athleticism builds the engine: how well the machine actually runs.== A 2× bodyweight deadlift is a chassis number. Whether you can sprint to the corner, change direction, sprint back, and not have your heart rate pinned for the next ten minutes — that’s an engine number. They are different systems, trained differently, and most lifters are wildly imbalanced between them.

The good news is that the philosophy doesn’t change. Everything that made the first series work — measurable benchmarks, tracking the rate of progress, using deviations as a diagnostic — carries over wholesale. We’re just pointing it at a new set of numbers.

Fit vs. Healthy — and why Athletic is the bridge

In Part 1.1 I drew a hard line between two ideas that people constantly conflate:

  • Healthy — measured by biomarkers: blood panels, resting heart rate, HRV, lipids, fasting insulin, HbA1c, and VO2 max. The stuff a doctor cares about.
  • Fit — measured by performance KPIs: how you look, how much you lift, how fast you move.

Aesthetic and Strength sit squarely on the Fit side. A bigger bench makes you no healthier; a leaner waist is a performance/appearance metric, not a longevity one.

Athleticism is the exception. ==It is the one domain of training that sits in both columns at once.== The engine you build for performance — your aerobic capacity, your VO2 max — is simultaneously the single strongest modifiable predictor of how long you’ll live.

This isn’t a motivational flourish. In 2018, Mandsager and colleagues published a cohort of 122,007 patients who underwent treadmill VO2 testing at the Cleveland Clinic. Cardiorespiratory fitness was inversely associated with all-cause mortality with no observed upper limit of benefit — the fittest group (≥2 standard deviations above the age-and-sex mean) had the lowest mortality of everyone, and the gap between “low fitness” and “elite fitness” rivaled the mortality risk of smoking or diabetes.1

The two-dividend investment

Training the engine is the only work you do that pays a performance dividend and a longevity dividend from the same rep. A bigger squat does not extend your life. A bigger VO2 max almost certainly does. This is why the "I just lift, cardio is for people who can't lift" attitude is the single most expensive mistake in the gym.

The six athletic qualities

When people say “athletic,” they’re gesturing at a bundle of distinct, separately-trainable capacities. Here’s the full bundle, with above-average / athletic-level benchmarks. These are aspirational targets — roughly the top ~15–20% of recreational trainees, not elite-sport numbers.2

QualityDefinitionAbove-average / athletic benchmark
1. StrengthMax force productionMen: 1.5× BW bench, 2× BW deadlift; Women: 1× BW bench, 1.5× BW deadlift
2. EnduranceSustained effort (cardiac + muscular)1.5-mile run: <10:30 (men), <12:00 (women); 60+ push-ups in 2 min
3. MobilityUsable joint ROM + stabilitySit-and-reach >15 cm past toes; single-leg balance >60 s eyes closed
4. AgilityRapid direction change + reaction5-10-5 shuttle: <4.5 s (men), <5.0 s (women); ruler-drop reaction <15 cm
5. CoordinationSkillful movement integration50+ consecutive tennis wall rallies; clean 10 m precision dribble (soccer)
6. PowerExplosive force (speed × strength)Vertical jump: 24”+ (men), 18”+ (women); broad jump >8’ (men), >6.5’ (women)

Two things to flag before we go further.

First, Strength is the bridge quality. It appears on this list, but we already built it in the Aesthetic & Strength series — the full relative-strength standards table lives there. ==I’m not going to re-teach it; I’m going to use it.== Strength is the substrate that Power, Agility, and even Endurance are built on top of. You can’t be explosive without first being strong, because power is just strength expressed quickly. So whenever this series leans on a strength number, assume the home for it is Part 1.1.

Second, women’s benchmarks run roughly 60–80% of men’s across these qualities, owing to differences in muscle mass, limb length, and hormonal profile — the same adjustment logic from Part 1.1’s strength standards.2 The lower-body and endurance gaps are smaller than the upper-body and power gaps.

That leaves five athletic-specific qualities this series owns outright: Endurance, Mobility, Agility, Coordination, and Power. But here’s the thing — all five are outputs. They’re what comes out the tailpipe. To train them intelligently, you have to understand the engine producing them.

Qualities are outputs — the engine underneath is three energy systems

Every one of those six qualities is powered by the same fuel molecule: ATP (adenosine triphosphate). The body can’t store much of it, so it has to regenerate ATP continuously, and it has three different systems for doing that. Which system dominates depends entirely on how hard and how long the effort is.3

This is the athletic-training equivalent of “how muscle actually grows” from Part 1.1 — the mechanistic floor everything else rests on.

The three energy systems

1. Phosphagen (ATP-PC) system — the sprinter. Regenerates ATP from stored creatine phosphate. Enormous power, tiny tank: it’s fully tapped in ~8–10 seconds of maximal effort and needs 3–5 minutes to fully recharge. This is the system behind a vertical jump, a 5-10-5 shuttle, a heavy triple, a tennis serve. Fuels: Power, Agility, max Strength.

2. Glycolytic system — the middle-distance grinder. Breaks down carbohydrate (glucose/glycogen) without oxygen. Covers efforts from roughly 10 seconds to ~2 minutes, after which lactate accumulation forces you to slow. This is “the burn” — a 400 m run, a hard set of 20 reps, a grappling scramble. Fuels: muscular Endurance, repeated power.

3. Oxidative (aerobic) system — the diesel. Uses oxygen to burn carbohydrate, fat, and even protein. Low power, effectively unlimited tank: it powers everything beyond ~2 minutes, and — crucially — it’s the system that recovers the other two between bouts. Fuels: Endurance, and recovery from everything else.

Here’s the insight that reorganizes how you should train. All three systems are always running; what changes is the mix. A footballer sprinting, jogging, and sprinting again is cycling between all three every few seconds. And the oxidative system is the quiet hero — even in a “pure power” sport, it’s what clears the lactate and rebuilds the phosphagens so you can produce the next explosive effort. A weak aerobic base means you have one good rep and then you’re cooked.

This is why this series spends its first real chapter (Part 2.0) on the aerobic base before it ever touches sprint work. The diesel engine is the foundation that makes the sprint engine usable more than once.

VO2 max: the master metric

If you only track one athletic number, track this one.

VO2 max is the maximum rate at which your body can take in, deliver, and use oxygen, measured in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of bodyweight per minute (mL/kg/min). It’s the ceiling on your oxidative system — the size of the diesel engine. And because, as we just saw, the oxidative system underwrites every other quality, VO2 max effectively caps your entire engine.

It’s also, per the Mandsager data, the metric most tightly bound to how long you live. Master metric on both sides of the Fit/Healthy line.

Here are the bands for adults roughly 20–39, the core audience for this blog. Add the decade decline below for older readers.4

BandMen (mL/kg/min)Women (mL/kg/min)
Poor< 38< 30
Average38–4430–37
Good45–5138–44
Excellent52–6045–52
Athletic / Elite60+ (elite endurance athletes hit 75–85+)52+ (elite women hit 65–75+)

VO2 max declines with age — but the decline is negotiable

Untrained, VO2 max falls roughly 8–10% per decade after your late 20s. Trained, you can hold the line for decades — a fit 50-year-old can easily out-score a sedentary 25-year-old. The age-graded number matters more than the raw one: aim to keep your VO2 max in the “Good”-or-better band for your age.

How to actually measure it (cheapest to most accurate):

  1. Estimate from a field test — free. The Cooper test (max distance in 12 minutes) or a 1.5-mile time trial both feed validated formulas that estimate VO2 max from pace.5 Rough, but directional, and it costs nothing but a track and a stopwatch.
  2. Wearable estimate — RM you already spent. A Garmin, Apple Watch, or Whoop estimates VO2 max from the relationship between your heart rate and your running pace. The absolute number can be off by several points, but ==the trend is reliable== — which, exactly as with the body-fat scale in Part 1.1, is what you actually use it for.
  3. Lab spirometry — the gold standard. A graded treadmill or bike test wearing a metabolic mask that measures expired gas directly. In Malaysia this is available at sports-science labs such as the National Sports Institute (ISN) in Bukit Jalil and some university exercise-physiology labs (UM, UPM) and private sports-medicine clinics. Get one if you want a true anchor; otherwise the wearable trend is enough for most people.

The practical play (sound familiar?)

Use your wearable for the continuous trend, and a field test (or a lab test) every few months for an honest anchor. It’s the same “continuous data + periodic ground-truth” pattern from the body-fat scanner tiers — because it’s the same problem.

Mitochondria: the master adaptation

VO2 max is the ceiling. Mitochondria are the floor — and the thing you actually grow.

Mitochondria are the cellular organelles where oxygen actually gets turned into ATP. Train the aerobic system consistently and two things happen: you build more of them (mitochondrial biogenesis, driven largely by the PGC-1α signalling pathway), and the ones you have get better at burning fat for fuel. More factories, and better factories.6

This is the single most important mechanism in the series, because it tells you how to train the engine — and the answer is counter-intuitive:

Floor vs. ceiling — two different stimuli

Zone 2 (easy, conversational pace) builds the floor. Sustained low-intensity work is the most potent stimulus for mitochondrial density and fat oxidation. It raises your lactate threshold — the pace you can hold before “the burn” sets in — so a bigger fraction of your VO2 max becomes usable for longer.

Intervals / HIIT build the ceiling. Maximally taxing the heart and lungs is the direct stimulus that pushes the absolute VO2 max number up.6

You need both. Zone 2 raises the floor; intervals raise the roof; the usable space between them is your real-world endurance.

The practical upshot, which surprises every lifter: most of your engine work should be easy. The endless huffing-and-puffing “medium-hard” cardio that most people grind out lives in a no-man’s-land — too hard to accumulate the volume that builds mitochondria, too easy to push the ceiling. The polarized approach — lots of genuinely easy, a little genuinely hard, almost nothing in between — is what Part 2.0 and Part 2.1 are built around.

And notice the through-line back to the chassis series. In Part 1.1, the lever that drove everything was myofibrillar hypertrophy backed by satellite cells. Here, ==the lever that drives everything is mitochondrial biogenesis backed by a high lactate threshold.== Same logic, different tissue. Find the adaptation that compounds, then point the whole program at it.

Measuring athleticism: the field-test battery

The measurement philosophy from Part 1.1 transfers directly: every quality here is quantifiable, the numbers come in relative and absolute flavours, and the rate of progress is itself a signal. What changes is the test list. Run these to establish your baseline:

QualityField testAthletic target (men / women)
Aerobic enduranceVO2 max (lab or wearable)52+ / 45+ mL/kg/min
Aerobic endurance1.5-mile run<10:30 / <12:00
Muscular endurancePush-ups in 2 min60+ / 40+
Power (vertical)Vertical jump24”+ / 18”+
Power (horizontal)Standing broad jump>8’ / >6.5’
Agility5-10-5 pro-agility shuttle<4.5 s / <5.0 s
ReactionRuler-drop test<15 cm catch distance
MobilitySit-and-reach>15 cm past toes
Balance/stabilitySingle-leg stand, eyes closed>60 s
CoordinationTennis wall rally (consecutive)50+

Know what your test actually measures

The 5-10-5 shuttle is universally called an “agility” test, but the movements are pre-planned — it’s really a measure of change-of-direction speed, not true reactive agility, because you’re not responding to an unpredictable stimulus.7 That’s why the ruler-drop reaction test sits next to it: it isolates the reaction component the shuttle leaves out. Don't conflate "I'm fast in a known drill" with "I'm reactive in chaos." This honesty about what a number does and doesn’t capture is the whole point of benchmarking.

How benchmarking is used (the athletic diagnostic tree)

This is the part that turns numbers into decisions — the athletic mirror of Part 1.1’s diagnostic decision tree. When a quality stalls, the pattern of which numbers move and which don’t tells you the cause.

Branch 1: The engine (endurance stalls)

GOAL

A rising lactate threshold and a rising VO2 max over months.

  • Symptom: Your easy Zone 2 pace is improving, but a VO2 max test (or hard 1.5-mile) is flat.
    • Diagnosis: Your floor is rising but your ceiling isn’t. You’re all base, no top end.
    • Action: Add one interval session per week (e.g. 4×4 min hard / 4 min easy). Keep the easy volume; you’re adding a roof stimulus, not replacing the foundation.
  • Symptom: Your VO2 max number is solid, but you gas out holding a sustained moderate effort — you can sprint but you can’t last.
    • Diagnosis: High ceiling, low floor. Big engine, tiny fuel tank, low threshold.
    • Action: Add easy Zone 2 volume and cut the intervals back. You can’t out-interval a missing aerobic base.
  • Symptom: Everything aerobic regresses at once, alongside poor sleep and a stubbornly elevated resting heart rate.
    • Diagnosis: Systemic fatigue / under-recovery — not a programming problem. (Same shape as the strength-stall systemic-fatigue branch in Part 1.1.)
    • Action: Deload the cardio. Drop volume by half for a week and let resting HR and HRV normalize before resuming.

Branch 2: The output (power & speed stalls)

GOAL

Rising vertical/broad jump and shuttle times over a training block.

  • Symptom: Your max strength is climbing (squat/deadlift up) but your jump is flat.
    • Diagnosis: You have the force but not the rate of force development — you’re strong but slow to express it.
    • Action: Add explosive, low-rep, full-intent work (jumps, throws, light speed work) — and revisit the strength base, because power has a strength prerequisite you can’t skip.
  • Symptom: Linear sprint speed is fine, but your 5-10-5 is slow — you bleed all your time at the turns.
    • Diagnosis: A deceleration / eccentric-strength bottleneck. Changing direction is controlled braking, and you can’t brake what you can’t absorb.
    • Action: Train eccentric and single-leg strength (the brakes), plus deliberate change-of-direction technique.

The same principle as always

The number is the boss

You’re not logging these to admire them. ==You’re building a diagnostic system so that when something stalls, the pattern of numbers names the cause and the fix — instead of you guessing.== Track consistently and it becomes difficult not to improve. The only variable left, as ever, is execution.

The catch: the interference effect

There’s a reason you can’t just bolt this series onto the Aesthetic & Strength program and expect both to thrive. They fight at the molecular level.

Resistance training drives growth largely through the mTOR pathway. Endurance training drives mitochondrial adaptation through the AMPK pathway. The problem: ==AMPK actively suppresses mTOR.== When you do hard endurance work, you’re firing the exact signal that tells the body to stop building muscle.8 This is the interference effect, and it’s why the lifter who suddenly adds five hard runs a week watches their bench stall and their arms shrink.

It is real, but it is manageable — through intensity choice (easy Zone 2 interferes far less than all-out intervals), session timing and spacing, sequencing, and fuelling. It is also not symmetric: cardio blunts strength gains more than strength blunts cardio gains.

This is the single most important integration problem in training both engine and chassis, and it gets its own chapter: Part 4.0 — Concurrent Training. For now, just hold the warning: more cardio is not free. It’s bought with some of your gains, and the goal is to pay the smallest possible price.

The tools

Same philosophy as the chassis series’ Hevy / MacroFactor / InBody stack — keep data-collection friction near zero by splitting it across dedicated tools:

  • A GPS + heart-rate wearable (Garmin / Apple Watch / Whoop): your continuous engine dashboard — VO2 max trend, HR zones for Zone 2 discipline, resting HR and HRV for recovery.
  • A track or measured route + a stopwatch: for the field tests that no wearable can fake — the shuttle, the jumps, the time trials.
  • An annual lab VO2 max test (optional): the ground-truth anchor, the way a DEXA anchors body composition.

The 90/10 rule still holds

As in the chassis series: the work is 90% of the result. The wearable is the margin. A RM2,000 watch logging Zone 2 sessions you never actually do is worth less than a RM20 stopwatch and a year of consistent easy runs. Buy the tool to enable the habit, never to substitute for it.

Part 1.0 Takeaways

Key concepts to internalize

  • Chassis vs. engine: Aesthetic & Strength is how the machine looks and pushes; Athleticism is how well it runs. Most lifters are wildly imbalanced toward the chassis.
  • The bridge metric: VO2 max is the one number that lives on both sides of the Fit/Healthy line — it caps your performance engine and is the strongest modifiable predictor of all-cause mortality.
  • Qualities are outputs; energy systems are the engine: Power/agility run on the phosphagen system (<10 s), the “burn” on glycolysis (10 s–2 min), and endurance plus recovery on the oxidative system (>2 min). The aerobic base underwrites everything.
  • Floor vs. ceiling: Zone 2 builds mitochondrial density (the floor / lactate threshold); intervals push the VO2 max ceiling. You need both, and most of it should be easy.
  • The master adaptation: mitochondrial biogenesis is to this series what myofibrillar hypertrophy was to the last — the lever the whole program points at.
  • Benchmark honestly: every quality is testable; know what each test actually measures (the shuttle is change-of-direction speed, not reactive agility).
  • Cardio isn’t free: the interference effect (AMPK suppressing mTOR) means engine work is paid for with some chassis gains. Manage it; don’t ignore it.

Your Day 1 Task List

Anchor your current engine before you train it. Do not guess these numbers.

  1. Get an engine estimate: Run a 1.5-mile time trial or a 12-minute Cooper test on a track, or pull your VO2 max estimate off your wearable. Record it. This is your anchor.
  2. Run the field battery: In one or two sessions, honestly test vertical jump, standing broad jump, the 5-10-5 shuttle, push-ups in 2 minutes, sit-and-reach, and a single-leg eyes-closed balance hold. Log every number.
  3. Log resting markers: Record your resting heart rate and HRV (morning, before coffee). These are your recovery baseline for the diagnostic tree.
  4. Learn your Zone 2: Find the heart-rate ceiling for your easy pace (roughly the highest HR at which you can still hold a full conversation). You’ll live here a lot in Part 2.0.
  5. Confirm your chassis baseline exists: If you haven’t already logged the strength benchmarks from Part 1.1, do that too — power and agility are built on a strength base, and you’ll need the number.

Up next is Part 2.0 — Energy Systems & the Aerobic Base, where we build the diesel engine: the three systems in depth, the lactate threshold, and why most of your cardio should be boring and easy.

Then Part 2.1 goes deep on the master metric and the master adaptation.

To train the individual outputs, skip to Part 3 — The Five Qualities. To learn how to run this alongside lifting without killing your gains, jump to Part 4 — Concurrent Training.

Disclaimer

Not medical advice. Everything here reflects personal experience and reading of the research. Maximal-effort testing (VO2 max trials, all-out sprints, heavy jumps) carries real cardiovascular and injury risk — clear it with a medical professional first, especially with any underlying heart condition, and warm up properly before testing.

Sources & references

Footnotes

  1. Mandsager K, Harb S, Cremer P, et al. (2018). “Association of Cardiorespiratory Fitness With Long-term Mortality Among Adults Undergoing Exercise Treadmill Testing.” JAMA Network Open, 1(6):e183605. Cohort of 122,007 patients; cardiorespiratory fitness inversely associated with all-cause mortality with no observed upper limit of benefit. Full text — JAMA Network Open and PMC6324439. ↩

  2. Functional/athletic benchmarks drawn from sport and combine-style testing standards (NFL combine, military fitness tests) at the “elite / above-average” recreational level. Female benchmarks run ~60–80% of male values, with smaller gaps in lower-body and endurance qualities — consistent with the strength-standards adjustment in Part 1.1. See standing broad jump norms at fitnessnorms.com and vertical-jump norms at topendsports.com. ↩ ↩2

  3. Three energy systems overview: phosphagen (ATP-PC) fully tapped in ~8–10 s and needs 3–5 min to recover; glycolytic covers ~10 s–2 min before lactate accumulation; oxidative powers everything beyond ~2 min and drives recovery between bouts. See Breaking Muscle — Understanding Energy Systems and US Army — Understanding the Three Energy Systems. ↩

  4. VO2 max norms by age and sex based on the Cooper Institute and ACSM fitness classifications. Men aged 20–29 median ≈48 mL/kg/min; women ≈37.6, both declining ~8–10% per decade; recreationally fit males 50–60, elite 75–85+; recreationally fit females 45–55, elite 65–75+. See FitnessNorms — VO2 Max and BodySpec — VO2 Max Chart. ↩

  5. Estimating VO2 max from field tests: the 12-minute Cooper test and 1.5-mile run feed validated formulas (Kenneth Cooper, 1968). See Cooper test — whyiexercise.com and the walk/run validity meta-analysis at PMC4795745. ↩

  6. Zone 2 training drives mitochondrial biogenesis via the PGC-1α pathway, raising mitochondrial density and lactate threshold (the “floor”); high-intensity intervals are the direct stimulus for raising the absolute VO2 max “ceiling.” See Data Driven Athlete — Zone 2 guide and Biology Insights — Does Zone 2 improve VO2 max?. ↩ ↩2

  7. The 5-10-5 pro-agility test measures change-of-direction speed in a pre-planned pattern rather than true reactive agility, since the athlete isn’t responding to an unpredictable stimulus; times ≤4.5 s indicate a good athlete. See Science for Sport — Pro-Agility Test and Physiopedia. ↩

  8. The interference effect: resistance training drives hypertrophy via mTOR, endurance training drives adaptation via AMPK, and AMPK suppresses mTOR — so concurrent training can blunt strength/hypertrophy gains, with the effect scaling with endurance intensity. See Barbell Medicine — Concurrent Training and the Interference Effect and Baar K., “Using Molecular Biology to Maximize Concurrent Training,” Sports Medicine (2014), PMC4213370. ↩

Graph View

Backlinks