Is It Safe to Train When the Air Is Full of Wildfire Smoke?

Parts of the country now get a few weeks of wildfire smoke every year, and the obvious question is whether there is a point where the air is bad enough that the workout costs you more than it gives you. We went and looked. There is a real number, it comes from about 1.5 million people, and it is not the number that gets quoted.

This is a free preview of Direct Line, our monthly ask-us-anything for Barbell Medicine Plus subscribers. Two of this month's twelve questions are here in full.

First: training in wildfire smoke. What PM2.5 is, why the AQI on your phone and the number in the paper are not the same quantity, where the 90-minutes-at-100-micrograms figure comes from and why it is softer than it sounds, what happened when six cities modeled telling people to stay inside, and why your breathing rate during a set of squats matters more than you would think.

Second: the effective reps model. A subscriber noticed that if a set only counts when you are within five reps of failure, the triceps in a heavy bench press should not count, and if you are going to count that as a fractional set for the triceps, then a warm-up set counts for the chest. Both cannot be true. We go through the meta-regression on proximity to failure, the 67-study analysis that tested whether an indirect set should count as one, as half, or as zero, and where we actually put our sets.

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Timestamps

1:47 The question: is there a point where the air is too bad to train?2:37 What PM2.5 actually is3:05 AQI vs micrograms, and why your phone disagrees with the paper3:50 Where the "90 minutes" number comes from4:54 Austin: what breathing this air does to your lungs9:14 1.5 million adults: does dirty air cancel the benefit of exercise?10:44 Six cities modeled staying indoors. Mortality did not improve.11:22 Lifting vs cycling: breathing rate is the whole mechanism12:33 Indoor air during a wildfire, and what filtration does not fix13:24 Is wildfire smoke worse than city pollution?14:38 What we would actually tell a patient18:35 The question: hard sets, fractional sets, and the five-rep rule19:18 Reps in reserve, hard sets, and fractional sets defined20:19 The meta-regression: no threshold, just a line21:13 Do indirect set