anaerobic lactic and alactic regime training just has a hard metabolic and fatigue thresholds where you won't see any improvements if you add volume.
aerobic regime training (which is by its nature low intensity) does, from what we know, not really have the same limitations. on the contrary a lot of its most important adaptions keep increasing with absdurd training volumes and only show up after accumulated years and decades of training (long distance endurance athletes can often peak or maintain near peak shape into their 40s or 50s because of this).
all of this necessitates large volumes of low intensity training.
E.x. in cycling a lot of the high volume low intensity work is targeted at the elite athletes that are putting in 20+ hours a week of training time.
I guess it's different for everyone but I still train somewhere between 7-15 hours a week and have always needed some of that to be low intensity.
That isn't relevant. The paper is not setting out to find the optimal way for people to train.
And Magness isn't saying anything revolutionary here. Every other coach says very similar things. But Magness has the credentials to make him more authoritative than a random coach out there.
Probably need to define. Are we talking about professional athletes or just people who have a lot of training experience?
Exercising hard for a person who has never trained is very different than someone with years under their belt training. An untrained person can't even tap into what hard means compared to a trained person.
I'm also confused about the focus on endurance. Yes, all people need some cardio, but everyone would do better with additional strength. The stronger someone is going into their 50s, they better they will end up in the 60s and 70s.
This is likely around what is best for most people and probably cutting the strength training time to 1h before cutting the rest if you "don't have time".
This would be 5 h per week, or 250 h per year, or over 10 years, 3.5 months of continuous 24/7 exercise. This is a large amount of training. 4% of your waking time would be spent on exercising. Or 6% of free time. At what point does it turn net negative, ie as time that it eats away from life. You can't attend events or hang out with family since you're always at the gym. I have understood smoking reduces your life span 8%. On the other hand, if you replace watching reels with gym, maybe it's also positive time otherwise.
Likely best for most people is to just start moving and once you have _actually_ established the habit of exercise, slowly add intensity. Let your body accommodate.
What are you talking about when you speak of good/best outcomes? I think especially when it comes to talking about fitness it is important to be explicit about outcomes because only with outcomes in mind can you talk about what “good” actually means.
In that context I’m a bit confused by your focus on (endurance) athletes. Their overriding goal is obviously increasing their athletic performance in a way that keeps them injury free. Their main focus aren’t health outcomes. That’s not the same. So if you focus on them you are in danger of talking past each other.
To that point: sure, those studies often have unrealistic protocols but the way (performance) athletes train is also unrealistic for most people!
If those studies are about population health they should have realistic protocols (in terms of: realistically achievable and adhered to by non-athletes, in the best case also empirically grounded in the sense of: this is a realistic range of activities non-athletes might actually engage in on a regular basis) for non-athletes.