#50: Dr. Stephen Seiler on 80/20 Training

You don't have to go that hard every day in training with the high-intensity sessions. You're building the cake, but racing is eating the cake, as we say in Norway. You got to balance that. If you eat the cake too much, then you're going to be in trouble. It's been given these different names, polarized and 80/20 and things like that. But what the fundamental commonality, the most consistent thing you see is that most of the training of the best performers, independent of endurance sport, if their, if their event lasts 4 or 5 minutes or longer, all the way out to hours and hours, they are training fairly similarly, and most of their training intensity is, in the physiology terms, below that first lactate turn point. Everyday language, you would say they're training at what for them is fairly easy talking pace, fairly comfortable, but they're doing it sometimes for a long time. It is very adaptive. It generates adaptations in the heart, in the musculature. You don't have to go full, full bore, full speed to get those adaptations. Now they do some of that high-intensity work also. There's more variability.

This is X for a Mileage Show, episode number 50. 50 already. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Floris Gierman, and on this podcast I speak with different guest experts about ways to become a stronger, healthier, and happier athlete. And for this special episode number 50, I'm giving away several different large prizes, and I'll be sharing more information about that at the end of this intro. Finally had a chance to sit down with Dr. Stephen Seiler. He's been on my radar for many years, and I'm so glad that we're finally able to record a conversation. Many of you listening have probably heard of the 80/20 approach that also applies to endurance training, meaning that 80% of your workout intensity is at a lower intensity and about 20% of your workouts are at a higher intensity. Dr. Stephen Seiler, he has studied many of the world-class elite athletes, and he started drawing several different conclusions, and he actually was able to identify this 80/20 rule that applies to endurance training as well, of how some of the best elite athletes are training. And this polarized training approach is quite counterintuitive in the early stages, but now it has been widely accepted by many different coaches and athletes out there. Dr. Seiler is a well-known exercise physiologist located in Norway, and we talk about exercise physiology, talk about training adaptations in particular regarding endurance sports. For this episode number 50, I'm going to be giving away two large prizes. The first one is a $150 gift card for PATH Projects. This is the only running apparel that I run in, and many women actually enjoy the PATH Projects gear as well. The running shirts, the beanies, and the hats. I'm also giving away a lifetime membership to my Personal Best Running coaching program, and more info can be found at pbprogram.com. To enter to win one of these two prizes, just let me know in the comments on YouTube what was your favorite lesson, your favorite quote, or takeaway from this episode. I know there's so many different nuggets in here. I would love to hear from you in the comments. What was it that stood out to you over there?. And this actually becomes a really fun summary on a, from a community perspective of what the different takeaways from people was. So yeah, I would love to hear from you there. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Steven Seiler. Welcome to the Extra Mileage Show. Really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your experiences over here.

Well, thanks for the invitation. And I, I was impressed with an interview you did with Ilya Kipchoge. And I thought, well, that's— I'm in good company if you've had an interview with him.

So thank you so much. Yeah, that was really an honor to have him on the show. And that's absolutely same here. Like, I've, I followed your work for many years and just being able to like take a deep dive into some of the research that you have done, really looking forward to our chat here. So maybe we could start out by you clarifying to some of the audience who might not be that familiar with your work, like, let's talk about exercise science for a little bit. And maybe you can clarify, like, what is really exercise science and what drew you to it? What, what got you excited to really dive so much of your life into this?

Yeah, well, it— for me, it's a great question because it, it obviously has been pretty important for me. But I was— when I was young, I loved two things. I loved playing sports, and I like— I was kind of a science geek, and I liked you know, looking under a microscope and going out and finding fossils and just, you know, I just liked being out in nature and understanding. And I had a little laboratory literally under the stairs of my house that my parents let me set up. So I'd live this kind of dichotomous world where I had my sports friends and my nerd friends. And so, you know, and then, you know, in school I won the physics award and then I was a fairly good, you know, American football player. So it was always this kind of, but they just didn't fit together. And then I read this chapter in a book. It was by Jim Fixx. It was The Complete Book of Running. There was a chapter on the science. It was called The Scientist of Sport. This book was from, I don't know, 1981 or somewhere in there. I just read that chapter. By the time I looked at the title, I thought, oh my goodness, this is me. This puts it together.

What it all—

Yeah. And so I just thought, oh man, I got to do this. This was early days in exercise science. Then you say, "Well, what is exercise science?" It is a kind of an integrated view of the various aspects of the human body and movement, which includes biomechanics, it includes psychology, it includes physiology. So it is an integrated discipline that draws from various, you might say, the pure disciplines, the biochemistry, the physics, and so forth, and then takes the pieces that are needed to explain human movement, to explain and understand the training, the adaptation process. So that is kind of exercise science. And the early programs in the United States and I got into one of the early ones, fairly early. They started emerging in the late '70s, I would say, and early '80s. And then have slowly evolved.— There is different aspects. Exercise science goes in the direction of health, goes in the direction of performance. So there is different emphasis areas within it. I have done a bit of both, but my emphasis now in these last 20 years has been more connected to, you might say, sport science. More the focus on the development, the performance development process. And a little bit looking more at what happens once you've already trained quite a bit. Going from untrained to trained, almost anything works. But once you have trained a while, then things become a little bit more tricky in terms of getting it right. And I found that interesting.

It is so fascinating how new this field still is. And you just explaining some of those timelines indeed, and how much things have like how much knowledge is still coming to the table, like over the, over the last even decade, if you see how much breakthroughs are, are happening over here. So, so what sort of changes have you been seeing? Like since, since the early days, there were certain mentalities, and then later on things have changed quite a bit as well. And like, like one of your big breakthroughs in this area as well has been about the training hierarchy., and with the volume, the intensity, and the overall distribution that you have really focused quite a bit of your research on that. Can you maybe explain a little bit further, like high level, like this, this whole concept?

Well, where do I begin? I need to step back a little bit and say, you know, that there are aspects of people— there have been wonderful physiologists, wonderful people that have studied the human body and movement going back to 100 years plus. So we need to— I don't want to say that sports science started in 1980. That would be unfair and incorrect. But its formalization as an academic discipline, that it took a while to get there. So just so we are clear on that, there were wonderful people like A.V. Hill and that, that were doing work in the '20s, the early teens and the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory before the Second World War. So the predecessors of the exercise science movement were 30, 40, 50 years before that. So just so we are clear on that. And then if you think about the growth of exercise science, where was it happening? Well, it was happening in universities. It was happening at these various programs. And who were the subjects then? Who were these professors studying? Well, they were studying the students. They could pull in students as volunteers. Volunteers. I am kidding. But who were they? Well, they were physically active, but generally not specifically trained. They were pretty untrained relative to what we would say is trained for a good endurance athlete. And then they studied, they started doing those early studies of the training process, of the adaptation process. And I mean, it was not that long ago. I mean, you can go back to Halazi, who did the early studies on rats and mice and made them run and found that there were more mitochondria. That was an adaptation. Now we think of that as like, well, we have known that forever, but that was not that long ago. It was 50 years ago, you know, 45, 50 years ago. Well, 1967, let us say, so a little over 50. So that, in the scope of human knowledge, that is still pretty early days where we understood that these adaptations were happening, that the body was literally producing more mitochondria, more capillaries, and all this. So The early studies were mostly on these untrained people. If you had them train 4 or 5 days a week at 75% of their maximum heart rate, 75-80, kind of like their threshold, 45 minutes a day, they got better. Their VO2 max goes up, you get some adaptations, it works. You do it in 8 weeks, 10 weeks. Those were the typical studies. That were done. And, and, and that makes sense too, because let's face it, these were students. So you got the semester schedule. So you're— there are constraints in the research you're doing that are a function of just the reality. It's just the practical issues of, well, these students, you know, if we do it in the spring semester, that's January. If we can get started by the 1st of February, we can be finished by the, you know, early May. And, you know, we can get it done and we can— in the master's student, you know, it's always— we, we have to think like those, that practical way. Yeah. But that results in a body of knowledge that's based on fairly short time frames and mostly untrained people.

That is the big difference, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then you extrapolate and then you assume, well, here's, here's threshold training is great. And, you know, and so you, you make some extrapolations from those early studies. Then in the, I would say, early '90s and moving forward, we start to get a little bit of data from a few sources, from rowing, that says, "Wait a minute, it does not quite look like that among the best. They are not training for 45 minutes a day and they are not training at threshold. They are training more time, but they are distributing the intensity differently." So we start to see, but it is kind of just small pieces. It is anecdotal. And then, you know, late '90s, 2000s, you know, some more data starts rolling in. And that's when I had moved to Norway in '95, '96 and just started seeing things that didn't match up with my academic training.

Let's talk about that part because I find that very fascinating of kind of like the one way of research and approaching thing. And there was a lot of no pain, no gain mentality. And then there was also a different type of approach that started getting more interest from your end. And from there on, like from, from other, um, athletes and researchers as well.

So let's talk through that a bit more. My, my thesis has always been that developments in the sports in training have not emerged from scientists with very few exceptions. They have emerged from the laboratory of the forest and the roads and the water where people are training and coaches are watching and trial and error is happening, dating back to Zatopek and to Lydiard. You can go back into Waldemar Gerschler and Rudolf Harbig, who had the world record in the 800 meters in 1939.— it was experimental, it was trial and error, it was understanding their perception of what the physiology was. But it was not coming from laboratories. It was coming from the field. It was coming from a laboratory, but more of the laboratory of sports training. Then the scientists were coming along and trying to explain it, trying to understand it. So we need to keep that clear and make sure— and I don't want to— don't anybody should think that I figured this out, that I made up polarized training or I made up this distribution. No, I just saw it. I just measured it and just said, wait a minute, uh, this is very different from the conventional wisdom that has emerged from all of those studies, those good studies on students. You know what I'm saying? It was just a different group. Fast forward a bit, we would kind of say, look, um, what we see now is that Let's take Formula 1 racing, which is maybe the most technologically driven sport there is, with 300 sensors on every car and unique technological development. Well, Formula 1 racing and the technological innovation, it scales down to your Toyota or your Volvo or your Mercedes. In your garage 5 years later. There is a scalability. We learn from that high-performance environment and innovation emerges that is useful, but the opposite doesn't occur. The family Ford, the family Volvo does not tell you how to build a Formula 1 car. Nothing about it helps. It's just not the same planet. So, you have to think from scratch if you're going to build a Formula 1 car. It's not going to You kind of can say, well, if we just power up the Volvo or power up the family station wagon, it will function as a Formula 1. No! It does not work that way. Well, it is kind of like that with training. Yeah, if you have not done anything, you can do just about anything and you will get better as an untrained person for at least a few months. Then you are going to stagnate. But if you have only ever measured that initial phase, then that is all you see. You are missing the point, the reality that it stagnates, that you get a plateau effect, that those same workouts do not— they are no longer optimal for further enhancements. But you see different information emerges when you measure these high-performance athletes. That is kind of what the last, I would say, last 20 years, that is where we have been. Been a lot of different good groups have been really getting into those weeds and trying to understand in different ways. I often start lectures with this thing as, how do I study endurance? It starts for me nowadays with just understanding what the best athletes actually do. Respecting the knowledge that they possess, that the coach-athlete enterprise, there is institutional knowledge there. And there is this developmental process. There are self-organizational principles. These different groups, the runners, the cyclists, the rowers from different countries and cultures, if they are organizing themselves in similar ways and we are emerging, there are similar patterns of training that are emerging from these quite disparate groups, then that, for me, I started saying, well, that suggests some universal truths. Those were, for me, very interesting. I was not so much interested in exactly how rowers train or how cyclists train, but more what do they have in common. Because those commonalities probably give us a foundation for understanding human physiology.

What was like one of those main conclusions indeed about the running intensity? And let's talk about that topic for a bit because you scaled it down to 3 zones and 5 zones, um, when you were talking about the intensity distribution there. That was the fascinating part, like when listening to your TED Talk and seeing all of the different examples that you're using indeed and what you mentioned here as well. It is not just the endurance runners, it is the cyclists, it is the cross-country skiers, like all at a high level that have a very even distribution across these, uh, like different sports between these different zones. Can you explain a little bit further what that breakdown is?

It's been given these different names, polarized and 80/20 and things like that, but what The fundamental commonality, the most consistent thing you see is that most of the training of the best performers, independent of endurance sport, if their event lasts 4 or 5 minutes or longer, all the way out to hours and hours, they are training fairly similarly. And most of their training intensity is— in physiology terms, below that first lactate turn point. In everyday language, you would say they are training at what for them is fairly easy talking pace, fairly comfortable. But they are doing it sometimes for a long time. I often think I need to be careful calling it easy, because it is purposeful. Most of us could not do what they do for those hours each day.. It is not at that super huff and puff, high intensity. They are not there every day. They are not there every workout. They cannot be. But it turns out that volume, that frequency of training, that regular exposure to 65% of VO2 max, to 2 hours, 4 hours on the bike, those 2-hour runs, it is very adaptive. It generates adaptations in the heart, in the musculature. You do not have to go full bore, full speed to get those adaptations. They do some of that high-intensity work also. Absolutely, that is consistently there. But how they manipulate that and whether it is threshold or whether it is closer to VO2 max, there is more variability in those recipes that can be specific to the duration of their sport, some details. But the big picture is that humans can't train hard every day. You can't. It breaks down. The human will break down. The horse will break down. The animal will break down too. We have data from racehorses too. They can train really hard on their hard days, but they have to also go easy on their easy days, just like humans, or they break down. So there is some fundamental physiology there. And then you have to take training. 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 are trying to create some phenotypic expression of our genes. We are trying to push our genetic potential in a different direction towards more endurance or more strength or whatever, depending on how we are training. And so that is 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 muscles. 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 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, but I think there is a lot of progress being made explaining why the athletes have evolved in that direction.

It is very eye-opening indeed to look at it from that perspective. I think when we see— sometimes we analyze elite athletes and they have a lot of time available to train. They have more time to rest and to sleep occasionally. When we then look at the recreational runner who has a full-time job, family life, a lot of other responsibilities outside of athletic performance, sometimes there are some of these additional layers that get involved as well. So I'm curious, does the— in, 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. Yeah. And that is weird, I know. But the reality— and here is what I mean. If you are a high-performance athlete and you are pushing the very limits of what you can handle, it almost forces you into a certain pattern. You cannot 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 are training 4 days a week or 5 days a week and say 8 hours a week, well, yeah, 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's easy to fall into it. I cycle on this virtual platform, this Zoom— I mean, Zwift, I'm sorry, Zwift, not Zoom. We're 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 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 gonna, he's not gonna 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, come back another day. So, and that's, that is— 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. 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. And, and he's a— and I've even had people say "You know what? My maximum heart rate is 10 beats higher now. I have been chronically overtrained." My only explanation is I have been chronically overtrained for 10 years because my heart rate has gone up 10 beats since I changed the way I train. So it is anecdote, but good grief, I have had so much of it from regular folks who have experienced new performance records in their 50s. A guy sends me a message, he said, "I set a new PB in the marathon at 57.

It just shows you how badly I was training in my 30s." But that must be quite rewarding too, because I see, even on our channel, we talk quite a bit about the importance of low-intensity running and really taking the time to develop that aerobic base. And like you are mentioning too, these examples of athletes who are now coming back after a run and feel like they could do it again, or they feel like they're not dying on the couch on a Saturday afternoon, feeling like they're so tired and fatigued. Like, it's, it's an entire different approach again, and very eye-opening for, for quite some people too who have never experienced that.

Absolutely. And I, and I think back the way I trained when I started cycling, I went, oh my goodness, I've thought, you know what, I bet I, I don't think I ever even considered easy days.

I don't think that was even a term.

Yeah.

So, oh, absolutely. And so that, that, that's the easy part that we talk about. But then there's the hard part too, because when I think about, let's say 10 years ago, I got really into running. But when I think back about those earlier days, there was often that if I would do interval sessions, they would be so brutal hard that I would absolutely hate it. I would be huffing and puffing to the point that I would go to the absolute red, red line and it would just be quite miserable. Whereas you're, you're often talking as well about not going too hard on the hard days, like obviously being able to push yourself, but not pushing to an extent that it's going to set yourself back.

Can you talk through that a bit? Yeah. And in that regard, the term polarized training is probably an inappropriate term because if it, if it makes people think that easy is easy and hard is like even harder, then that misrepresents the reality. Because I think what we've learned, and I want to be careful using this term, but the sustainability training is about finding a sustainable kind of pattern of loading. And you know, my daughter exemplifies this. When I would tell her, you know, okay, we're going to do You are going to do 3 times 8 minutes or 4 times 8 minutes on the treadmill. Based on my research, we have shown that usually, if you give this prescription, that the prescription is like an equation that the athlete solves. The 4 times 8-minute prescription with 2-minute recovery puts them at about Zone 4 in that 5-zone model. It starts about 87% of VO2 max and then it starts drifting up and they are ending up at 92 or so. So they're working hard, but they're not going so deep into the well. You know, they're not at 12 millimolar lactate. They're like at 8 or 9, and it's manageable. Well, and that works on average. So the prescription generally works. But my daughter was just so darn, I don't know, competitive with herself that every interval session— and she was dealing with her own demons and so forth. An eating disorder and stuff, and we've been open about that. And so every darn interval session was a— for her, it was a test of her toughness, and, uh, and it wasn't sustainable. And so eventually I had to say, well, I'm sorry, but at 4x8, when I tell you you're going too hard, you're just blowing yourself up and you're not recovering fast enough. And so we're— you're kind of stagnating because these hard sessions are just a bit too hard. So I'm putting the brakes on you. And now I'm going to actually not only just say 4 times 8 at best, it's at, you know, your best pace. I'm not going to say best pace, I'm going to say at 90%.

And so you specifically give her a heart rate like this is your highest number?

Yeah, try not to go over that. Pulled it back, and then everything got better. And then she set a PR, you know, she PR'd her half marathon. And, you know, so then she fell into rhythm. And I remember her using the term, she says, Papa, now I'm in this, I feel the flow of my training. Yeah. You know, and, and Kipchoge, your interview, he says this, he says, I want to still be smiling when I finish the workout so that I can wake up and train the next day. I can't remember the exact quote, but I wrote it down as best I could. I thought, oh yeah, what a fantastic exemplification of that property. He understands that it is not the epic workout. It is the body of work that he is doing in preparation. So he has this beautiful innate understanding and he uses the terminology, "I want to still be smiling when I finish the interval session." That was such a good indicator. Yeah, what a great analogy. I was like, Oh man, you are my hero. You have taught me so much. And it jives, it matches up with what we have seen from the best in different sports. Now do not get me wrong. There are times when you are— and people in racing, for example, in cross-country skiing, man, when they are charging that hill, they are pushing the upper limits of what they can. That is when they are hitting very close to VO2 max at the top of those hills. And they are recovering on the fly.— So do not get me wrong, I am not saying that these people are not going hard in races, but it turns out you do not have to go that hard every day in training with the high-intensity sessions. You are building the cake, but racing is eating the cake, as we say in Norway, if that makes sense. You got to balance that. If you eat the cake too much, then you are going to be in trouble. That's part of this. And, you know, I use a lot of kind of slang or folk language, but there's underlying physiology there. There's underlying understanding of the autonomic nervous system, the immune system, and so forth, inflammatory processes. We're getting our hands or our head around some of this, that it is explaining some of these behaviors. So the science is catching up.

With the trial and error experience of the high performance environments. Yeah, awesome. Um, on your YouTube channel, and to anyone listening, I highly recommend checking out Dr. Seiler's YouTube channel because there are many great detailed videos on there. You also have a few videos where you and your daughter Siran talk through some of her training And I would love to talk about that a little bit further as far as for when you're coaching her and when you're training with her. Obviously you do work on certain training schedules or certain guidelines of workouts. How closely do you suggest her to follow these schedules and how much does she really adjust it on a day-to-day based on how she feels or how things are progressing?

Well, you know, my, my daughter, again, with all— would be full disclosure, it's been a, it's been a special case in the sense that she was a dancer for 10 years. She, at the end of her dance career, developed an eating disorder, which I never even contemplated could happen. But she was at a— she was studying away from home, she was at a top sports high school, and, and it happened. And, and. And then part of the pathway back to health for her went through— for her, running became a carrot. You know, she wanted to, because she just liked training. And so I had, I said, all right, I'll be your coach. And she's the only athlete I coached, you know, and I, I, it was like part coach, part dad every day. The dad who's trying to help his daughter recover, keep her alive and move her towards health. And the coach who's trying to carefully help her achieve the goals that she has because she's very competitive. And so I was balancing these things daily and with great— what should I say— stress, you know, and, and concern for my daughter. And she— it took her a long time to fully recover. And she has fully recovered and I'm so happy, but it's years, 5 years, 5 and a half, 6 years. Um, so I have to, the reason I say that is because obviously that colors, that had something to do with the way I work with her, you know, and, and, and, and my conservative nature with her and that, and, and also that she is, uh, she's my daughter, she's stubborn. And, and like many athletes, you know, she, and she's even said many times, she said, Papa, Dad, for me to find my limits, I got to go over them and then I come back. And so she has made pretty much every mistake you can make as an endurance athlete. But at least we have been intellectually tuned in to say, yep, okay, now we see what happens when those interval sessions get too hard. Now we see what happens, you know. So, so we've— it's been learning for her, learning by doing. And, uh, and, and then combining— I've had some numbers, so I've looked at her heart rate and things, and she has a sense, an innate sense of feel. And, and so she's kind of like a Kenyan, you know, she just feels. And she said, 'Papa, I wish I could just move to Africa,' you know. I like— she loves that. That kind of atmosphere. She said, I would love to train with the Kenyans. Oh yeah. Yeah. So it has kind of been— we have tried to be complementary. I said, well, I like a few numbers. So we kind of— Let us find a balance. Yeah. And so she doodles on her daily training diary and I look at some of the Polar data, the heart rate data and whatever, and we come together around What is— where are we right now? Where is my— her body? And what needs to happen? And, and so forth. So if she did not tell me the truth about her, how she felt, then things went shitty. Just pardon my French. But, but if, but if her eating disorder was— what her— that voice in her head was preventing her from being honest about things, then, then that was just a recipe for, for further disaster. But when the, you know, when she's able to say, Papa, you know what, I'm just not— I'm having these voices that things are not working, I need help, then things went well. We figured it out together, right? So, so I, my, I'm just trying to say my daughter is not like exemplary of all the perfection in athletics, but she's learned a lot. I've learned a lot from that process. And I think all good coach-athlete relationships that there is, there has to be trust, there has to be good communication. And at whatever level, that's what it starts with. And if you got that, then a lot of things will fall into place. And, you know, and female athletes, male athletes, are they the same? Yeah and no. There are some differences in generalities that can be worth understanding. You know, the big picture physiology is the same, but a bit of the personality, psychology issues, the tendencies maybe are a bit different is my long-term experience working with different groups. And so, and not just my daughter, but a lot of different groups. So these are— man, coaching is amazingly wonderful and very challenging, very hard. Absolutely. You know, I don't know which is harder, being a dad or being a coach, but they're pretty darn—

they're both— especially when you combine combine them too. Like yesterday I went to the, to the running track with my 8-year-old and we're still going through the concept of slowing down on some of your runs. And like when my 8-year-old is starting to get it, my 5-year-old only thinks like she can sprint for 10 seconds.

So that's basically what she can maintain. It is. Yeah, it's— well, but, and that's, that's very normal, you know, young children, they don't have much of an aerobic system. So it's just, it's just— I love it. Yeah, sprint and recover, sprint, recover. So there's no point in You're not going to overcome that. They just have to have fun. But that's the way their body works.

And then slowly it changes over time.

Yeah.

And that, I think, too, like the whole part of going out and playing instead of trying to make it a workout and just going to play. And then you see they get really excited about it. And as soon as you mention the word running, it's like, I don't want to go running, but I do want to go playing.

So let's go playing, which involves a lot of running, but you trick them. I don't believe in, I just don't see the point of a lot of organized sport for 5 and 6-year-olds. I see a lot of, but I see a lot of value in just super fun play. That's how the human, that's how human brain and the human body were designed by nature to, you know, they, animals play and they play themselves into shape. Even the tiger, the lion, the young cubs, what are they doing? They play, they play wrestle. Baby bears wrestle with each other and it's play, but they are literally training for the time when it will be life and death. Yeah. And they just don't know it, but it's— but the play is preparing them. And I, and I think that's just— that's the way it should be with sports too, is, is early— the early exposure to human— to movement is about— it's on the kids' terms and it's play. If you do that well with your kids, then they will want to do more. They'll want to play more. And then eventually they'll say, "You know, I'd kind of like this play to be a bit more systematic." Then we could start calling it training.

Yeah. I thought you made such a good point earlier when you talked about the importance of getting your health right for maximizing and optimizing performance. And this is something you you guys talked through in the analysis of Molly Seidel's video as well. You have a really, really good video on your YouTube channel where you break down Molly Seidel Olympic performance, whereas she earned bronze in Tokyo, and that was an exceptional performance, obviously. So it was a really nice detailed breakdown, but one of the things that came out of that video too was she experienced her fair share of injuries in in the past, she has had her challenges where she worked very closely with her coach to first get back into health, get, get that under control before starting to build volume, before starting to add in that part. Maybe you can, can add a little bit more insights from what you're seeing from the perspective of like, yeah, we can't keep pushing, pushing, pushing. We have to keep the, the health element under control as well.

And it's that fine line in between. Yeah, in that particular, you know, that was my daughter. I got to give her credit. She's the one that did that analysis. She's the one that— and then she's the one that connected to Molly Seidel because they, they had these commonalities in terms of Seidel had dealt with eating disorders. She had, she had had multiple stress fractures, you know. She had a tough— some tough side effects of the eating disorder, uh, that she had to get under control. So she was a wonderful role model for my daughter, and my daughter is very good at going into the weeds and analyzing. So I just said, look, this needs to— we got to do something with this and let me help you. So let's make a video. So that's kind of— but that was her, that was her, not me. And it just— Molly Seidel resonated for her and helped her. It helped her to be inspired and see that, yeah, this can go the right way, you know. And so I think it's good to, you know, it's one of the wonderful things about these different outlets, social media, is that it can be helpful to find athletes that have been through some of these struggles and come out on the other side. And so that's what that was about. And I think it really helped. And then I think it helped my daughter realize, and I tried to tell her, I said, look, you have something to share. You don't have to be a world-class athlete to have a voice that can help people. And so, because she said, I'm not that good a runner. Nobody's going to listen to me. I said, "Well, don't be so sure!" You know, so that's— and I would say that to others is, you know, if you're able to help people, if you've been through things, then you can help them. You don't have to be world champion. I'm not a world champion and you're not either, but we can share. We can help people find the balance in their training. And getting back to your issue, in Norwegian there's this word called It's called overscoot, overshoot, and, and it's a term that means energy. You know, you have to have this overshoot, you have to have energy to do the tough things, to do sports, to, to push your body. And if you don't have health as a platform, then you don't have that overshoot, that extra energy to put into the process of developing your body in a different way, in a, in a demanding way. And the body is quite remarkable in the sense that if, if there are problems, if this body senses energy imbalance, inflammation, if it senses there is an invader, that there's an infection, then it will dedicate resources to those deeper needs of survival and it will turn off adaptation. It will not absorb training. It will make choices that go in a direction of a kind of a physiological Maslow's hierarchy, if you understand. And it will say, uh-uh, I'm not going to build hemoglobin at altitude because you're sick. You, you have an infection, that's a priority here. That's— I'm— the body will prioritize energy resources towards that deeper need, and then the training is wasted, right? Because your body is making decisions. When my daughter was in an imbalance, an energetic imbalance, her body is not receptive to the, the training adaptations at the same level.. It's just not going to happen. And so this is no health, no performance. And that sounds like this kind of this little philosophical mantra, but it's actually deeply embedded in biology, in the human biology. You know, and the animal world is brutal in that regard. The worst example and the best example I can give you, when I was a master's student, my research involved rats. I was going to do this study where I was going to have one group of rats do interval training, another group of rats was going to run steady state, and a third group of rats were going to be the couch potatoes that stayed in their cages. But to get the rats, I had to breed male and female adults, and I had to make sure the wine was the right temperature and the room was the right temperature and achieve some litters of rats. And this was in, I do not know, November, December. Anyway, so I come in to the lab or to the rat, to the facility one morning early, 7:00 in the morning, and I'm cleaning, doing my usual thing. And the mothers have had pups and they are eating their pups. Yes, I've heard of that. They are eating the babies. And I was like, what the heck kind of crazy freak show have I got myself into? The tails of their babies are sticking out their mouth. And I— and, and yeah, and so then I talked to the people and they say, yeah, that— well, apparently that maybe the temperature in the room was a bit too cold or something. The, the mother rat has— her instincts have said situation is not good, get rid of this litter. Wow. Yeah. And I was like, wow, this is brutal. This is brutal nature. You know, I— this doesn't— I wouldn't— you couldn't even put this on nature show. It's so brutal, you know. And so I had to start from scratch and redo it and, and finally got the litters. But, but it was such a good example of this, this fundamental issue, which is that our bodies are in— you know, we have— we don't eat our young, but we still have this biology that says health first, that my body has to be in a state that is receptive for the stress of training or the adaptations don't happen.— because of the allocation of resources. So it is not just good philosophy, it is physiology. In practice, for example, in Norway, the athletes do a lot of altitude training because in part, some of the events are at moderate altitude, but also just altitude training is part of the recipe. And but they just have found that, you know, if they have so much as a toothache before, when they're— before they go up, they just won't go up to camp.

They just say nope, no point. Yeah, so it's once again about the hierarchy.

You have the basic under control first before you've got an infection in your body. We're not sending you up to altitude because it won't happen for you. All it'll— the best case scenario is nothing, and worst case scenario, you get worse.— So those are just like basic rules that are in the system for the Norwegian athletes. Have you had an infection? Do you have the sniffles? Anything? If you do, then we are probably not going to send you up to camp. So this is that philosophy in practice or that issue in practice.

Health first, and then you are going to be receptive to training. And I see it even in our own running groups and coaching, like working with a few different runners, the topic of stress has come up quite a bit, especially in the last 2 years where people were saying like their stress levels were to an extent that they wouldn't even feel like doing higher intensity training. And we often talked about like, let's push out some of these races and let's just go to a maintenance mode and just going out there for overall health and for relaxation and feeling good versus putting pedal to the metal, especially when when those stress levels are at very high levels.

Absolutely. I was having that same conversation with my daughter because she is a student at a university and this is the tough exam period. There is even research that shows that scholarship athletes in the United States, they did a study where they could just show that when they were in the exam period, they were less responsive to training. They did not get the same adaptation. Stress, this generalizable state that we call stress, the body, human evolution does not differentiate the source of these threats. You can think of it as there is a threat on our homeostasis, whether it is a threat of an exam or a threat of a boyfriend leaving me or the threat of an interval session. The basic autonomic nervous system response is the same. So the stress bucket gets filled, but the source of, you know, the different bottles, the different sources can be different, but it's the same bucket. And, you know, in pretty much— and so, um, this, this is something that we have to be clear about. And this is where, yeah, where you were going back to the fact that age groupers, regular people, they got real jobs, they've got kids at home, they've got all of these realities. Yeah, in many ways their training situation is more difficult than the high performance triathlete that's sponsored by such and such and they're able to train every day and sleep at noon, take a nap and— you know what I'm saying? That's a different reality. They've earned the right to do that with their talent and their efforts.. But once they get there, they actually have, in some ways, an easier situation or a more conducive situation to performance than the 35-year-old mom with 2 kids that also is training for a triathlon.

Yeah. And I see it around me too. Some of my friends who are indeed parents of 2 kids who have a full-time job, we're still trying to go out there 20, 25, sometimes 30 hours a week. And it's at that point it becomes a fine line with how much can you sleep and how much can you train too, because I also see athletes making that mistake where sleep gets compromised, whereas a lot of training benefits come from that part again.

So yeah, it's, it's all about that, that fine line there. So, you know, and, and people's— everybody has their own motivation, and so I have great respect for that. But I do think sometimes we do, we have to step back and say, what's my motivation here? Yeah, you know, what's— am I, am I operating from a position of health and happiness? Am I able to smile at the end of these workouts, you know, as my hero Kipchoge would say? Uh, or am I fine? Am I finding myself— I'm putting myself on this, this running wheel, you know, And I'm, I don't know, feeling some pressure to perform for the rest of the world or for my officemates or whatever. What is my motivation here? And so I do think we are modern society and social media and that we get pulled into things that aren't very healthy.

And so I guess every once in a while I just want to say, hey, are you having fun? I'm so glad you bring that up because that has really become a common a theme throughout different guests that I've had on the, on the podcast. Indeed, the very important part of having fun and joy in your workouts for the longevity in the sport. It's not what are you going to be able to do in 2 months, but where are you going to be in 2 years, in 5 years.

Yeah, well, I, I lately in the last year or so, I've been asking often in lectures, I asked the question, how many workouts will you do this year, or will your athlete do this "Put a number on it." You know, people start thinking. I said, "What is it going to be?

300?

400? Maybe even 500 workouts that you are going to do this year if you are a top high-performance athlete?" But if you are an age grouper, 300 is not an unreasonable number. 300 workouts you will do in this year. That is training 5 times a week, 5, 6. Now think about it. What would be a really really good improvement for you this year in your, you know, triathlon Olympic distance time or whatever? Would a 5% improvement be good? Oh my goodness, it would be fantastic, right? Think if you improve 5% in your half marathon time. That is huge. That, in fact, it's pretty much unrealistic, right? 3%, 2%, 1%, you know. But let's say 5% just for fun. Alright, now I want you to do the math and divide 5% by 300. Divide 0.05 by 300. What do you get? Well, you get— I can't tell you exactly, but you get a tiny, tiny number. And it is not a number that you can identify. You are not going to be able to see it. So it should tell us something about that these epic workouts, the individual workout is not what leads to performance gains. It's the sum of it all. It's the process. It's the sustainability of the process. It is being healthy and staying healthy and being able to do the 300 workouts, being able to do the 400 or 500 if you're Bloemenfeldt or Gustav Iden, the guy who won. He debuts with a record in the tri— in the Ironman. You know, it's sustainable. It's the, the daily grind. It's the finding that balance and having the health to do all of that work that builds up to being able to perform on race day. So it's just a different— a bit of a mindset issue is let's, let's back up, let's zoom out, and no, don't get so zoomed in on this a particular workout. We have a tendency to say, well, should I do like 6 times 4? Should I do 4 times 6? Should the rest interval be 90 seconds or should it be 120 seconds? I tell people, I said, look guys, it ain't that complicated. Your muscle cells are not that sophisticated in terms of their precise evaluation of the execution. It is Pretty simple. Do the work and get some high-intensity work in and collect some minutes. It can be 30 minutes, it would be 88% or 92%. Approximations end up being close enough often. And so I just find that a lot of people are getting too wrapped up in details that turn out to not be as important as bigger picture issues. And they forget the bigger picture because they get zoomed in so narrowly into the specific structure of the epic workout that they're going to do. You know?

Yeah. So that's me on my preacher's stool right now. You know? No, I love it. I couldn't agree more with you right there. So that's very well said. I have a few last questions here. I do want to be respectful of your time. So way back in the day when heart rate monitors first came out, it was like these big bulky machines and it was more for like a doctor office or it was only for like the researchers. Now it has come a long way. A lot of people have their own chest heart rate monitor strap or they have it on the optical or they have it like—

there's a lot more tools available right now.

We're starting to see—

Mine is this. It's even this big.

Is that, is that the armband?

Yeah, I love it. I've been using it. Which one is that one? This is the Polar OH1. Yeah, free advertising. I love it. You know, I'm not— nobody pays me anything. But anyway, this— my daughter and I both use this. Nice.

I use it on my forearm and she uses on her bicep. Good, good, good. We're now also seeing like from the Oura Ring with the sleep tracking we see the permanent blood glucose meter and all of these kind of things. It has come a long way. Are there any additional, like, obviously it used to be research, very research-driven. Now there's a lot more data, like bigger data available out there. I know on your Twitter, sometimes you do run some of those group initiatives where it almost like you're collecting back some of this data which has been really fascinating to follow, actually. Are there some things in some of the new bio tracking that excite you, like what's happening now or what's, what's going to be coming here in the next 3 to 5 years?

The issue that I've been fascinated with in the last year is breathing. Strangely enough, you know, it is the— as a, as a group from the UK, they wrote an article about it was the kind of the forgotten vital sign or whatever, you know. And if you, if you're unconscious, you've been injured, and you are wheeled into a hospital, the first two things that the doctors or nurses will evaluate is, is your heart beating? Are you breathing? And then more specifically, what's your heart rate? What's your breathing rate? Right? And that has extremely, you know, a lot of value for them in making some initial decisions about the state of your body. These are called vital signs. In sports, we have discovered decades ago the heart rate as a window into the human physiology, into what intensity am I working at relative to my max. It is a powerful tool. We have done a great job. In making that accessible to people and pretty good job at calibrating it and so forth. But there are situations, there are movement situations, training situations where heart rate does not tell you everything you would like to know. For example, during interval training, during these different kinds of stochastic work with lots of variations in tempo and that heart rate kind of may find a middle zone that is reflective of the overall oxygen demand, but your brain is saying, "Yeah, but this is harder than that." Right? Because those peaks are costing me a lot. Well, if we measure your breathing, even something as simple as your breathing rate, just what breathing frequency are you at? It tracks with the realities that you are facing in terms of getting that work done, of mobilizing, maintaining that pace in those repeats or in those intervals, even better than heart rate. That is one of the things that has fascinated me. Because I was looking at the heart rate, I have developed some tools. I have spoken a lot about cardiac drift, about internal workload versus external workload. There is no such thing as a steady state during training. We can measure this kind of internal workload shift relative to the external. Does that make sense? Yeah. And it works and it is important and it is useful. And it tells us that the first hour of a 2-hour run is not the same as the second hour. The second hour is harder even though the pace is the same. You cannot equate those because they are your efficiency. Things are breaking down in your body. It is costing more to do that same work, whether it is cycling or rowing or swimming or running. And so we have to be cognizant of that and we have to understand that intensity has no meaning without putting a duration to it. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely! It's a unidimensional construct that only has meaning when we add duration. You know? Right? I can hold any pace up to 1,300 watts for a second, you know? But already after 10 seconds, I have lost a lot of— and after 2 minutes, it is a different— So it only— these power values and pace values only have meaning when I attach a duration to them. And we are not in a steady state. Heart rate reflects some of that, but in that very high-intensity regime and the stochastic regime where you are doing lots of this up and down, cross-country. Ventilation tells us some things. You know that if you have raced, you can hear your competition. How are they breathing? You know, and there are famous examples of athletes that have kind of come up to the side of an athlete and can tell they are breathing hard and then they attack. Or they hide, they try to hide the fact that they are like— They are trying to hold their breath as they run. Up, you know. So we know it instinctively that breathing is a truth teller, right? So long story short, we are doing— we are really getting into the weeds and trying to understand breathing and what it can tell us and whether we can use it as a— we can scale breathing in the same way we can do with heart rate reserve, where you take maximum heart rate versus resting heart rate and you have the percentage of the heart rate reserve.

You can do that with breathing too.

You can do that with breathing frequency. Yeah. When does it change over, right?

Yeah.

And you can find your athlete's kind of maximum breathing frequency when they are really in the cellar all the way, maximum effort. You know what the resting breathing frequency is. It is pretty typical, 12 to 16, somewhere in there. And so you can establish this range and then you can use that as an intensity scale. And it turns out it has more scope than the heart rate part of the scale. Anyway, I do not want to get too far in the weeds, but that is a variable that is very basic and new technology is making it possible for that to be kind of measured just as easily or easier than heart rate in the daily grind. So we will see whether that can add, can help us do a better job of monitoring and perceiving where we are and when to say, that is enough. I've done enough work today. I'm at 85% of my breathing frequency. If I go farther than that, then I'm really starting to— I'm going to blow up. Then it's too much. And I think we're going to get there.

And so that's an area that I'm spending a lot of time on right now. I love hearing that. I've previously had the Iceman Wim Hof on the podcast when we talked about breathing quite a bit and about how you can I also like, if you're very highly stressed, how to reset your autonomous nervous system through breathing. And then I had Patrick McCowan on the podcast as well. We talked about nasal breathing quite a bit, which is another topic that I thought was quite fascinating. Yeah, I've done that. I've tried that. I saw you on Twitter.

Like, please describe a little bit more about the crossover, what you started noticing. Well, you know, if you see in the video, I have got a pretty solid nose here. So I probably have some anatomical advantages for nose breathing. But yeah, you know, I saw these initial things about it and I thought— and I have done a few workouts, 2-hour rides inside, outside, you know, just breathing through my nose. And my question was, and I even had a master's project where we tested this last year. The idea that nose breathing acts as a poor man's kind of governor to make sure you are below your first lactate turn point. It turns out that is not true. It does not work that way. There are, with training, people can get quite good at nose breathing and they can achieve pretty darn high intensities just without opening their mouth. So that does not work. The— but there are other questions that are kind of interesting. You know, there's been discussion about whether there are different neurological hormonal issues that emerge when you just breathe through your nose. And I don't know enough about that. But I just— I do know that I find it interesting that, you know, on a good day, if my nasal passages are open and I just breathe through my nose for 2 hours, it's kind of calming. It's kind of, you know, it's kind of like it's almost meditative. Yeah. And so I've done some nice, easy, steady state, you know, like 200 watts for 2 hours and just breathing through my nose. And it's— I like, I kind of like it.

It's got, it's got a certain, I don't know, there is a certain mindfulness aspect to it.

Once you get past the first few weeks, snot bombs that are just dripping out of your nose, like— Yeah, yeah. Well, it's kind of, for me, it's like there are just days if I'll try and I like immediately my brain will just, no, I ain't doing it today. It doesn't work. I'm a bit tight in the nose. Whereas other days, you know, okay, this is going to happen. You know. So it, I kind of, my body just gives me feedback pretty quickly whether this is going to happen or not today. I've pushed myself pretty far up the scale and I was able to get to almost like 300 watts, which for me is a pretty high intensity, just breathing through my nose. What heart rate was that? Well, if I stayed there, again, depends on how long I stay there, right? Because that's like 300, 310 is what I can do maximally for 1 hour.. And the first 5 minutes my heart rate is 80% of max, the last 5 minutes at 100% of max. Right? And this is an example. This is just— that's a great question because it's a good example. You can't, you can't say, well, what's your heart rate? That— because I then I have to ask you, yeah, well, how, how deep into the weeds am I? You know, how long have I been going? And then I'll give you a decent answer. You know, after 30 minutes I'm at 90+ percent of heart rate and it's starting to hurt. You know, but the first 5 minutes I am like, oh, I am good, I got this. So this is such an important aspect to understand for people is that, you know, you got to really attach duration onto these things. And workouts that start at threshold can end up at heart rate max. If you go hard and if they are pretty tough to start, they can end up at maximum intensity at the end.

So there is no steady state, and that's very important. Here's two examples that I want to just share. Like, when I started out with nasal breathing for like an hour, after about— at about 135 to 138, I kind of felt that crossover point of like, I need to start mouth breathing now. It starts to become a little bit uncomfortable. Fast forward like 6 or 7 weeks of training with that, more and more I started noticing it became 140s, 145, 150. And at the end, after 1 hour of like pushing it, I was able to run like a 6:08 minute mile at 165, 167 heart rate, and I was still nose breathing. And it was like so mind-blowing to me to see how that crossover point was able to change that much in a relatively short period of time as well.

So yeah, that was— that is fascinating. And I do not know enough about what is going on, but my assumption is that the oxygen demand is fairly much the same. And so you might be a little bit more efficient on the breathing, but something is going on. There are some adaptations that are happening pretty fast to allow you to get more air in. Because your body needs the air it needs. It needs the same amount of oxygen basically. Give or take a bit of efficiency on the ventilation aspect of it. So it is pretty interesting. The other thing with some sports, particularly running, rowing, you have something called entrainment. Which means that the ventilation pattern links into the movement pattern.. So if you are a runner, you can— if you go out, next time you go out and run, you have probably done this where you count strides and you say, well, I am really— if I am really easy jogging, it might be 4 strides in as I breathe in and 4 as I breathe out. That would be a really relaxed, slow rhythm. And then it might go to 3-3 as you pick up the pace just a little bit, but still quite comfortable. Then maybe once you get pretty close to threshold, it might be more like 2:2 or 3:2. So there are these step changes, literally, that are connected to the running frequency, the running cadence. So the running cadence and the breathing cadence link in, in some multiple of each other. This is true in rowing, this is true in running. There are just certain situations where the because of the running movement puts some demands on the diaphragm. You have to stabilize that. So it kind of locks you in to different patterns. Jack Daniels, the famous running coach who had the book, Daniels Running Form, he talked about this decades ago. But we haven't really investigated it very much. But it might be a reasonable way to approximate your running intensity where you are. If you can just know, well, yeah, when I break through, when I go from 3:3 to 2:2, I have crossed the threshold. You with me? Yeah. You are in your inhalation-exhalation pattern connected to your cadence. So that is one of the things we are going to be looking at, is whether we can detect this very clearly and whether it links very clearly and individually these phase changes to intensity, to threshold, to anaerobic threshold and so forth.

Because if it does, then it gives you a kind of a poor man's tool in the field for saying, where am I? That is why I love athletes to run without listening to music too, so they can truly pay more attention to the signals from their body as well.

There's a lot of technology going on. There's lots of other stuff going on. So don't misunderstand, but that's the one that I'm kind of zeroing in on to see if I can make a bit of a contribution and see, you know, add something to the— you know, because the way I look at it, the technology is only useful if it helps inform decisions. If it informs the training process. If it makes the athlete-coach conversation better. Uh, you know, if it adds to— I use the analogy of the heads-up display. You know, the fighter pilots, they need to keep their eyes on the prize. They need to keep their eyes looking forward because they're moving so darn fast that if they take their— you know, if your head's down looking at all these instruments, you're gonna get in trouble pretty quick and crash into a mountain. So you need to be able to keep your head up, but you need some information, some— and, and so then you have the famous heads-up display where they projecting certain data onto the screen of the athlete or their visor so that they can see these numbers and see out on the horizon at the same time. I think that is kind of what we want to have as athletes or coaches. I want my athletes to be looking, focusing on the actual process of running or cycling or whatever, but there are certain numbers, certain quantitative pieces of information that can be useful to them.. And we got to figure out, we got to pick out the ones that are useful, because too many is overload. So is it 2 or 3 different things that might be useful? And that is that heads-up display. And whether— and heart rate is probably part of that display, perceived exertion, maybe ventilation, maybe— so I am just saying lactate for some, it is part of the heads-up display occasionally.

That is the idea, is find your little set of tools that give you feedback and help inform your daily adjustment process. Love it. Maybe in the future there will be lactate numbers on that blood oxygen level. There might be glucose level.

It will be interesting to see where things are going to be going in the next years. Just so we are clear, we know there is a lot of Olympic champions and world record holders that do not I don't use any of that crap. Yeah, that's the beauty, the simplicity of things sometimes. I don't want people to walk away thinking, well, Stephen thinks he can, you know, technology is the key to success.

No, I know that that's not true. Yeah. Last two questions.

Where can people find more about you? I know you're active on Twitter. What is your Twitter handle?

It's just Stephen Seiler.

It's just my, you know, S-P-H, S-T-E-P-H-E-N, and then S-E-I-L-E-R. Very straightforward. Yeah. Any other platforms for the students? If you're a student, if you're connected to academia and things like that, then I am on what's called ResearchGate, which is, you know, the repository or kind of social media for science geeks. But it is also a repository of a lot of the research publications. So it's a place where you can download articles and stuff that I've actually published that the substance behind the message here. So that's a channel. And then of course, like you mentioned, I dabble in making videos, low-tech videos. I want to just—

a disclaimer there, I am not a director that's going to be getting any awards, but I just put out these videos occasionally about different topics related to training. Low tech yet high value. And just to talk about like ResearchGate, 181 publications, more than 5,000 citations, and almost a half million reads over there.

And I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes. So you're better— you're caught up better than I am. So yeah, so it's a resource, it's a tool, and I'm very happy that a lot of people do read that stuff, you know. It's so— that gives me joy. That's more important to me than, um, scientific citations now that it is actually finding a place in the practical world that it is helping people do a better job and train happier and keep a smile on their face more often and still set personal bests in the marathon. I think both can happen. I guess that is the end message for me, is that we can both have happiness and smile and enjoy training and go dig deep and set new personal records and experience new breakthroughs.

They're both— they're actually two sides of the same process. Love it. Thank you so much, Stephen. I really appreciate the time. I'll absolutely look forward to following the rest of your work developments in the coming years, and especially in the area of sleep. That will be very fascinating to see as well. So thanks so much.

Yeah. Oh, so sorry, I mean, uh, not sleep. I actually meant to say, uh, the whole breathing pattern. Yeah, sleep's important too, but I, I'll let other people work on that. So anyway, yeah, I've still got a few good years left in me, I think, so I hope I'll be able to do some decent research.

So thanks for having me on the, on the program. And great, thank you. Hello, hello, Floris Gierman here with a few last closing comments. For this Extra Mile List episode number 50, we're giving away several different prizes. So you can win a $150 gift card to PATH Projects, and you can win lifetime access to my Personal Best Running coaching program. And all you have to do is let me know in the YouTube comments what was your favorite lesson, quote, or takeaway from this episode. I know there were many different nuggets And everyone has different perception of that. Would love to hear from you, what was it that stood out to you over there? And I'm going to be picking one winner at random who comments over there. This actually becomes a really fun comment section. You're going to notice quite a few different comments from different perspectives where people have their takeaways from this episode. So just want to say thank you so much for listening. Saying. And in closing, I absolutely agree what both Dr. Stephen Seiler and Elliot Kipchoge are saying, that it is so important to have joy in your workout. So have fun out there on your run.

Bye now.