Dr. Stephen Seiler explains why most athletes train wrong: they do too much medium-hard work instead of following the 80/20 rule of easy to hard training. Elite runners like Eliud Kipchoge nail this. Recreational athletes get stuck in the middle, which stalls progress.
Chapters
The training process is a yin and yang process in the sense that, yes, I am trying to use exercise to induce signals that drive protein synthesis. I mean, it's my, you know, I'm trying to make more mitochondria, I'm trying to build more capillaries, I'm trying to, you know, at the fundamental level, we're all being molecular biologists. We're trying to, we're trying to create some phenotypic expression of our genes. You know, we're trying to push our genetic potential in a different direction towards more endurance or more strength or whatever, depending on how we're training. And so this is— that's the one side, but the other side of the puzzle is, or the coin is, hey, this training is stressful.— it causes stress, it challenges the body, it disturbs homeostasis, it does damage. There is damage to muscles, there is immune system challenges, there is inflammation. So then you start to say, okay, that suggests that training becomes, over time, you have got to balance these. Just like the yin and the yang, you have got to find the right— it becomes an optimization problem. It's not a maximization problem and those are very different if you know what I mean. You know, maximize just means just, well, if I were to just train harder, I'd get better. Harder, better. Harder, better. Harder, harder. Better, better. It doesn't work that way. Right? You have to maximize— maximization doesn't work. It's optimization and then you— now you're starting to say, okay, how do I find a rhythm of signal Recovery, adaptation. That is what we are seeing. The data is coming in. Now we are getting more mechanistic explanations for a lot of this. Both on the signaling side and on the stress side. That say, okay, wow, that actually makes sense why this pattern is emerging. This kind of 80/20 or easy-hard. I want to be careful with my terminology. I think there is a lot of progress being made explaining why the athletes have evolved in that direction.
I am curious, does in your research of what you have shown, this 80/20 approach, does that work as well for the elite athlete as for the recreational runner?
The answer I am going to give you is, in some ways, it works even better. And that is weird, I know. But the reality— and here is what I mean. If you are a high-performance athlete and you're pushing the very limits of what you can handle, it almost forces you into a certain pattern. You can't train 25 hours a week and at the same time go hard every day. So the body will kind of force you into a certain degree into a pattern. But if you're training 4 days a week or 5 days a week and say 8 hours a week, well, yeah, you can. You know, you can fall into that kind of temptation to go medium-hard every day.
And we see that so often happening, right? Like a lot of athletes spending time in that yellow zone in between, no man's land, not slow enough, not hard enough.
And I get it. I mean, it is easy to fall into it. I cycle on this virtual platform, this Zoom— I mean, Zwift. I am sorry, Zwift, not Zoom. We are on Zoom now. But I zoom around on Zwift. And yeah, it's easy to start what we call chasing the squirrels. You know, there's this, you know, oh, that guy, he cycled past me. I think I'll catch up with him and, you know, and then maybe he just thinks he's faster than me. Well, I'll show him! And so you just fall into this. Our egos get us in trouble and whereas what I always say is one of the things we see with great endurance athletes like Kipchoge, is they have intensity discipline and their ego is robust enough to not be too concerned with some silly teenage runner that runs past them on a day. You know, because Kipchoge knows what he's good for, right? And he's not going to chase that squirrel. But if that guy comes back on a day when Kipchoge is doing one of his tough runs, well, it's a different ball game. You know what I mean? Come back another day. But recreational athletes, age groupers, the most common training mistake they will make is that regression towards the mean. This medium-hard intensity, fairly short workouts, fairly high intensity, repetitive and monotone, a monotone load, and they stagnate. Right? And I can't— with my hand over my heart, I cannot tell you, I can't even count how many emails and text messages and Twitter messages I have received from people who have said, my goodness, what a difference this makes. You know, I have finally learned how to ease up on, on my easy days and figured out what easy actually means.
