Improving Strength + Efficiency for Triathletes and Cyclists w/ Ryan Worn

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Today on the podcast we are joined for a second time by Ryan Mourn. Ryan came on the podcast recently to chat economy and efficiency. He has completed a PhD in Exercise Science focusing specifically on economy, efficiency and fatigue. And in the last episode we did dive into those topics in depth. We really, really spoke a lot about economy. So if you want to listen to that episode, it was probably six or seven episodes back. And so in this episode we want to speak more on the topics of efficiency, fatigue, delaying fatigue, and then getting into the one of the major ways that you can do that, which is strength and conditioning. And so it was another jam packed episode filled with some great exercise science. And Ryan does a terrific job of really explaining some complex terms into methods that we can understand and make that they're beneficial and practical for us. So we enjoyed the episode as always, dad. And it's complex topics, but worth paying attention to.

Yeah, I suppose my eyes glaze over a little bit when someone starts talking too technically and above my capacity to understand what they're saying. And this is a great episode because he really almost dulls it down that I can actually understand what are the things that we really trying to do here. And it's great to talk about efficiency in IT economy, but relate it to me so I can understand practically an example of what we can do to improve those components of our performance and in our training. And so I think it gets really interesting when we start talking about when your body starts to fail in an endurance sport or even in a short high intensity sport. We want to trained so that we're preventing that failure or we're delaying that failure as long as possible. And sometimes he who outlasts the others is the winner. And that's kind of what we're trying to do. We're trying to teach our body to hold form, be efficient, be economical, and understand what things we can do to help that along the journey. And that's where, you know, strength and conditioning is a key component in enabling us to hold our form on the bike, hold our posture as we run, get, get a far greater grip on the water as we swim, as examples where we don't fatigue because we've done this repetitive action many times. And I think this is one of the more practical podcasts that we've done that relate the science to more or how do we actually implement this into our program? So I think it's fantastic and I'm really wrapped that Ryan was able to come back on and speak in layman's terms because he is an athlete himself and he understands that the theory that we don't need to know the theory, we just need to know what to do to improve our basic efficiency and our economy, which will improve our results.

Without further ado, here is the episode. Brian, welcome back to the podcast for a very special part 2. After last time, we went really in depth into economy and efficiency, and then we ended up spending a lot of time on economy. So today we're going to look more into the efficiency side of things, plus some more applicable stuff in terms of strength and conditioning for the athletes. But welcome back. Thanks for joining us again.

Yeah, thank you for having me again. It was a really good experience last time. I enjoyed sharing some wisdom and had some good feedback about the podcast, but also had some really insightful discussion. I thought, too. Gee, you guys stumped me with that first question, how do you define sports science? I'd never been asked that, but it was a brilliant one.

Yeah, we often actually throw people on the first question because they're expecting something a little bit different. So we don't mean to. It's just happening that way. But no, it was very in depth and I know that dad and I were on the limits of our capacity trying to understand some of the concepts that you were talking about. And so we welcome that challenge and we want to have a crack at it again. And like I said, we really were in depth into economy last time. And I know you can talk about all these topics forever, basically, but we want to go back to efficiency and you did define it last episode. But for the listeners, if you could define it again, let us know. Almost in layman's terms, how do you define efficiency and what does it mean for the athlete?

Yeah, yeah, I'll try and define it a bit more basic this time. We'll start again with economy because it's easier concept. Economy is just for any given pace or workload, how much oxygen you consume. So if you're running at 5 minute K's, how much oxygen? If you're riding at 200 watts, how much oxygen did you consume? And that's mostly a running concept and it's because you can't measure power very easily. More recently with power meters, we can, but in cycling, power has been around for many, many years. And so what efficiency is, as opposed to economy? Efficiency is the relationship between how much power you produce or how much work is performed at the pedal first, how much metabolic work you perform. So what is the cost of generating that energy? And we do that by measuring watts and then also measuring oxygen consumed and looking at the breakdown of carbohydrates versus fats at a work rate. So what I mean by that, if I'm writing at 150 watts, let's say then, then, then that we can calculate that as nine kilojoules a minute. So 150 watts a minute is nine kilojoules a minute. If I then measure my oxygen consumption and I'm at whatever, whatever amount of fat I burn, let's, let's say 0.8, so, so one is around our anaerobic threshold where we start to burn carbohydrates. So if I'm predominantly burning, burning fats, let's say 0.8, then if I burned 36 kilojoules, let's say, which would be about right for that 150 watts, then you could say you can work out the mismatch there. So if I'm producing nine kilojoules of work at the pedals, but burning 36 kilojoules in total, then I'm roughly 25% efficient, if that makes sense. And the reason is because the rest of it's lost as heat and breathing. So if I'm pedaling and producing that much work, I'm spending roughly four times more energy maintaining my core temperature and being able to produce that work, because there's a physiological cost to it. When I start to ride, heart rate goes up, muscle temperature goes up, breathing rate goes up, and all of that requires energy. And so roughly 25% efficiency is what we see for most people cycling. As for running, we don't really know. There's no real studies that look at efficiency in running. I'm hoping to conduct one soon this year.

So give us an example of the range that people expect with efficiency. And that really helped me understand it, because it's not a wide range, is it? Because that cost, that physiological cost, is so big all the time that you're not going to jump from 25% to 50%.

Oh, yeah, no way. So like 25% is actually a little bit higher. Most people are 19 to 22%. And the best athletes in the world, 22, 23%. And so it's such a narrow range, like to go from your casual super sprint triathlete, that Does St Kilda event once a year to Remco Evanopol winning the World Champs time trial. 2, 3% difference in efficiency. It's tiny, it's so small. And part of that comes because of pedaling technique is so narrowly constrained, because ultimately you're attached to the cranks. But also irrespective of how much you improve your physiology, this, this still a cost to it. There's still a cost, an energetic cost to breathing, to increasing your temperature, to having a higher heart rate. And so you can only shift those things a little bit, a couple of percent. So improving efficiency, not that worthwhile, I wouldn't think. Maybe there's merit to improve effectiveness, which is how well your pedaling technique is or how good your pedaling technique is, because that might then delay fatigue later on. But the purpose of looking at improving efficiency itself probably not worthwhile.

So in that regard, why do you think it's worth understanding efficiency in the first place?

Well, I think efficiency is worth understanding because it can tell you a little bit. Well, I guess it's because of how you calculate it. So in calculating efficiency you have to calculate economy. So you know a work rate, you know your oxygen for that work rate, oxygen consumed for that work rate. But you also need to measure power. And in measuring that power you can also measure effectiveness. So the quality of pedaling technique, now there are many, many ways to do that. Perhaps the most common is what's called index of force effectiveness, which is just how much force you direct tangentially, which is torque. So rotational force versus force directed away from the crank or unwanted wanted force. So we can calculate those, those measures of effectiveness really easy. And the other, the other benefit, I mean, even though it's not really worth enhancing it so much from a practical perspective, as a scientist, you can still see whether something, whether an intervention has a benefit. And even if it is small, it's likely still worthwhile to the athlete. And that's one of the problems with science historically you're looking for this arbitrary change of like a p value of under 0.05. And he might test these athletes. Let's say we're testing 100 meter sprinters on the track and we find that one training intervention might improve their time by a tenth of a second. And practically that means nothing to the scientists. If you run your significance tests and look at your P values, it doesn't mean anything. There's no significant change. But to the athlete it's the difference between making the semifinal or making the final or running in the middles or running fifth. There is benefit to measure it in that context, I guess, if you're looking for the real small 1 percenters to.

Improve, what about the relative difference between you say 19, 22% isn't a wide range when you're looking at it out of 100, but the beginner athlete or the casual athlete who's at 19% compared to Remco at 22%, but 3% is a massive difference internally. Even if it's not a massive difference, doesn't seem like it. You know, a percentage change of 3.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I take your point. And, and that probably reflects the improved pedaling technique over time in that if there are a few studies that look at the pedaling technique of beginners versus elite cyclists, and predictably, the elite cyclists that, you know are much smoother in the way they ride. And you can kind of see that. I mean, you, you guys would see that more than anyone in the sport of triathlon. I reckon there are some people you watch, some really pro cyclists that, that, that you might see at a crit as opposed to a, a criterium, as opposed to a triathlon, and you watch them warm up on the rollers and you're like that. There is. They're. They're doing something different to what most triathletes do. Sure, they're pedaling a bike, but there's something unique about it. The way they apply the force, the smoothness, the way their body keeps perfectly still. And that's what might explain those changes in efficiency. So an improved effectiveness. So they might have better orientation of forces and a lower metabolic cost or lower oxygen consumption for that, but it is relatively small change.

It's an interesting concept if you try to think about it in real life. When I look on our local ride, which happens to be in Melbourne on Beach Road, and there would be on any given Saturday, up to 3,000 riders. So you've got a huge range of ability and technical advancement, or beginner, you've got, you've just got such a huge range. And coming up behind a lot of riders, you can instantly see whether someone is a good rider doing a recovery ride, a beginner rider doing a hard ride. And the difference is chalk and cheese. You can see straight away out on the road who is experienced and who isn't just by their technique. And then you look at someone who has learned a good technique from a beginner who's only been riding three or four weeks or six weeks or six months, and you filmed them when they first started. And Then you filmed them six weeks later when they've been concentrating on pedaling properly and getting there cadence up from 72, which is what they started at, to at least something above with an 8 in front of it. And straight away they're an improvement in their efficiency or effectiveness. As they're bike riding, their power is higher, of course, they're training, so their power is improving, but just their overall technical ability is enabling them to absolutely ride better. And, and so therefore I think it is really relative. And even though it seems a minor percentage and we do go on about the small gains, they all count the $0.01 all add up to a dollar. So if we have 50 gains, we're halfway there. But really a lot of the, we take for granted that we think everybody can ride properly with good efficiency. And even myself, I have had to work at this for 40 years to try and get my efficiency as a pedal better than it was when I first started. And, and I think this is something that the listeners don't dismiss. This, this is, this can be really helpful to you, to your progression as a bike rider and not only that, as a runner as well. But, but you know, we know in swimming that if your effectiveness with your catch, with your pull, you know you're just going to swim faster without producing any more energy. And I think that's the message you're trying to get across. Would that be a good summary?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. And swimming is a really pertinent example. I guess because the fluid's so dense that improvement in stroke efficiency is much more rewarding. But the concept still applies to cycling. I guess using efficiency is the tool to measure that technique improvement though, is one part. The other reasons for improved technique are improved power output and fatigue resistance. And those are perhaps the greater reasons why you might want to improve someone's pedaling technique. And so although their efficiency may only change a couple of percent, it's not telling the whole story because efficiency is captured in a, in a small window. You're looking at someone pedaling in a lab for 10 minutes. You're not really looking at what happens to that person when they've been riding for two hours, when they've been riding in the heat, when they've had to, again, let's say they're writing a criterium and they've had to perform 25 to 10 second sprints and three 2 to 3 minute efforts to, to bridge a gap. Those are times when we want to maintain our pedaling mechanics because if we don't we'll prematurely fatigue or not be able to produce the power that we need to have those decisive moments in cycling.

So you think that it's important to understand, although you do also have to understand that it's not that changeable. Well, it's very changeable within a small window. So knowing both those things, what do you want athletes to take away from understanding efficiency and potentially applying anything from.

It, that you can't change it all that much, so don't spend too much time on it, but that the components of it are oxygen consumption and pedaling technique. And you can change pedaling technique which will help your fatigue management and performance. And you can change economy, practically speaking, when someone's moving outdoor, not in a laboratory, because you can manipulate gearing and, and drag resistance. So how aerodynamic someone is. So what, what you want to think about is can you improve your pedaling technique and can you improve how or the cost of movement can you get through the air easier through improved aerodynamics, improved gearing selection, improved drafting? Well, that's a dirty word in triathlon, isn't it?

Drafting? Not really. It's basically illegal. I mean, it's basically legal at this point.

Oh, it's allowed.

Yeah.

Okay, great. That's good.

That's a joke because there's just. The Last few major 70.3s have just been just rife with packs of cyclists riding together and nothing happening about it.

So, and I think, I think we, the next really important thing for the listeners to understand is exactly the point you made, Ryan, when you said it's easy to ride with beautiful technical form in the first 20 minutes of a ride? What are you looking like at the three hour mark when you've, you've got a high heart rate, you're very fatigued, the temperature of your body is through the roof. What are the things people can do to enable them to keep that efficiency through fatigue and through all the other cost energy costs that are going to increase as you process yourself or you work your way through the actual effort, whether it's a race or a training session, you are just going to accumulate more fatigue and energy being burnt for the same amount of effort at a higher rate. What are the things that's, I think that's probably what we're after is what are the things can people do to help themselves when they start to get to this state of disrepair?

Almost, yeah, that's, that's where I think the conversation should head. But before I answer that, I'm going to say what, what does happen before, while we, while we progress into the state of fatigue. And so you mentioned something really important. There's about maintaining workload or maintaining pace. And that's ultimately it. If you want to, if you want to hold a pack in running or a bunch in cycling, you have to maintain that pace. There's a cost associated with maintaining that pace. And if we go a little bit in training physiology here, provided that we start our effort at a relative intensity that's below the lactate threshold, if you stay at that relative intensity, eventually you're going to pass the lactate threshold, whether you want to or not, even if you stay at that intensity. And the reason is because things get fatigued. Your muscle fibers get fatigued. We have preferential recruitment of fibers during high intensity or any intensity exercise. And the body will do what it can to spare energy. And so one strategy we will use is to recruit slow twitch fibers first. But eventually those slow twitch fibers get fatigued. And so what happens when they get fatigued is you start to recruit more and more type 2 fibers. And they're really fatiguable fibers. The type 2A run on oxidative glycolytics, so they burn glycogen through oxidative means. And type 2B are anaerobic glycolytics. So they produce or they run on glycogen through anaerobic means. They are really short term, highly fatiguable fibers. And so when they start to chip in to produce some of that work because your slow twitch fibers are getting fatigued, then it's a race to the bottom. You can't really come back from that unless you lower the intensity. And what happens is, for a given workload, your oxygen consumption goes up, your heart rate will go up, your temperature will go up, then your lactate will start to go up. Your body will attempt to buffer that by releasing all this sodium bicarbonate into the bloodstream. And then you'll exhale that as CO2, so your CO2 will go up as well. All of those things will drive up acidity within the muscle, and ultimately calcium won't be released from the cell or it won't bind to tropomyosin in the muscle fiber. And so at some point you're gonna have a failure of muscle contraction. And that's what we see when people hit the wall. So think about the Tour de France. People riding at 6 watts per kilo, and it looks good until it doesn't. They're riding at six watts a kilo, and then all of a sudden they go from 20Ks an hour to 1K an hour. And you see them pedaling squares, and that's because they've got to this point. They're above their critical power, they're dipping into their energy reserves, and then they run out of energy. And so you can't maintain that workload. Now, while all that's happening, you're having to produce that force in any way you can. And your body will change the way you move in order to produce that force. And we see that when people get fatigued, their hips will rock more, their ankles will move up and down more, the knees might extend more. They're rocking around the bike because they're using different muscles that may be trying to capitalize on enhanced stretch reflex mechanisms from the glute or the ankle to produce that force. And that ultimately gets worse and worse. So what we see when people start cycling, they produce a lot of torque during the downstroke, and they're reasonably coordinated through the bottom of the. Of the pedal stroke. And then they produce some counterproductive force during the upstroke. Everyone produces counterproductive force. As people get more and more fatigued, though, they start producing more and more counterproductive force. And so if. If I'm producing backwards force, so let's say my right leg's pushing down and my left leg's coming up through the upstroke, and instead of helping, it's actually lagging behind and producing backwards force, my right leg's trying to push down, left legs aren't not helping it. Then that means my right leg actually has to push harder. And so that's what we see. Increased muscle activation during the downstroke because the up straight leg can't maintain the workload. And it makes the problems that we mentioned even worse because you're all of a sudden having greater force requirements, which makes the problem about using fatiguing muscle fibers worse and worse. And so eventually you'll fail. And so one strategy you can think about is how do you improve the fatigue resistance of those muscles? Or the holy Grail is how do you improve average power output? Because then if you improve average power output at any relative intensity, you're using less power.

Yeah. So what can we do to almost delay that fatigue from happening? What can we do? What other things can we do in our training that will slow that fatiguing factor down. Yeah, that's basically what we're trying to find out. We know that it's going to happen, but what are the things that we can do that can Contribute to making us more resilient and delay that onset of fatigue, I suppose. And the classic example I'm thinking straight away was last weekend's race at Kona. Over the years you've just seen people slowly go to a grinding halt in the marathon. Not so much in the swim and the bike, but even the best, the most elite, the most well trained, the top of the tree looking like they are not even fit enough to be out in that, in that race yet. They are, but they're just not coping with obviously there's temperature increases. It's a 7, 8, 9 hour event with endurance. So the muscles are just not coping. But they're well trained in this in other events. But when they go to Kona a whole lot of other things are contributing to this problem. But I noticed for the first time, I RECKON in almost 40 years of being involved in this event, there were a whole group now of more than 20 or 30 people who seem like they have worked out how to maintain their pace in the marathon. And for someone to run a 236 marathon after, after riding a 44 kilometer an hour bike ride for 180k is unbelievably out of this world. And not only in the male race, but in the female race, the same thing happened. To be able to run, you know, a 252 marathon which is only a minute off Miranda Carfrey's world record was just, it was an example of seeing people hold their form. And that was the efficiency thing that I was kind of thinking about. They just look great from start to finish. They didn't look like they were faltering. I know there's a few risers there. I was thinking I can tell they're going up a hill here because the gauge has changed but, but once they got over the rise they were back to their really nice form. And this wasn't just the first three runners, this was down in the males. I could see guys coming 23rd, 24th, really still holding form and running close to their PBS. And it was kind of a little bit of a change in the guard in the depth of the ability now compared to what it was before. You would only have a few people. I know that's a long winded example but I'm just trying to get get across the question of what do you think they're doing differently than the previous professionals at that level. And we can learn a lot from watching professionals because we're not as well trained as them. Obviously we're only age group is doing Our best with the time we have available. So getting bang for our buck is the question I'm asking. What can we do to help ourselves Delay that falling apart syndrome.

Yeah, there's so much to unpack there. One thing not so related to the physiology side. I really think there is a bit of a Roger Bannister four minute mile effect going on in triathlon at the minute and I think a large part of that same with running after the sub 2 attempt. The sub 6 and sub 7 attempts have shown people what is actually possible. Now I realize they're quite contrived to paces and pace groups and basically a pro tour team sitting in front of you on the TT leg. But. But at any rate, it seems to be faster and faster and faster and the times they're running in the marathons, like you look at 2:35, that's sitting you top 20, top 25 at Melbourne Marathon a couple of weeks back after 180k ride and a swim. It's crazy. And I guess that circles us back to the physiology. If we look at Iron man triathlon in particular, it's probably about the most grueling. No, not probably. Almost certainly the most grueling single event you can do in one day. Maybe events like Ultra Trail Mont Blanc or something might take it, I'm not sure. But it will go close because of the intensity and the duration required to do that cone is unique because it's so hot and it's so humid, both which cause problems with glycogen sparing and hydration. Which brings us back to our physiology. Now the first thing you can do to delay fatigue is the easiest, which is train properly, which is why you get a coach. If you're not prepared for the event like I hope people aren't. I know. I realize Kona's a bit different because of the selection policy, but I hope people aren't just turning up to an ironman having done a park run, you know, and a local charity ride. I'm sure there are some, but that's the easy one. Tick that box. Have you trained? Yes. Okay, go. The second thing you can do related around pacing. If you get your pacing wrong, then it's going to be disastrous no matter what you do. If you're ignoring what your pace should be in the water, you're not looking at your stroke count. If you're on the bike, you're not looking at your power meter and your cadence and you're on the run and you're not looking at your pace, you're not superhuman. Something's going to go wrong. If you go beyond that point I mentioned earlier, where you're above that lactate threshold and you're starting to get into that severe exercise domain, then no matter what you do, it's finite, you'll run into trouble. The third part about that though is of course nutritional and hydration considerations. And if you're not taking in enough glucose through sports drinks or gels, preferably gels, like ultra endurance events, are a bit problematic when people start to take on too much fluid. I often run into the problem of hyponatremia, which is effectively water drowning. So you have too much water as it could to sodium in the blood. So gels are a bit better there, but trying to maintain that somewhere around 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrate per hour in terms of gels and drinks, and if you're not doing that again, you're going to run into trouble, you're going to run out of energy. And even if you do that, do maintain that, you'll probably still run out of energy because your gut will get sick of trying to pull process those gels. And I'm sure we've all felt that next day horrendous gastrointestinal issues after too many gels and then related to that. So if you've got pacing, nutrition and training, basic training down pat, that's when you can start to look to interventions around training. And so if we ask the question, what, what happens if we use cycling example again when you fatigue and those things I mentioned earlier about unwanted forces or counterproductive forces and different muscles activating, the question really becomes, what can you do to improve that? And the answer is you can do a bit of cycling technique stuff. So there's some evidence about single leg pedaling and also independent cranks. So uncoupled cranks, I'm not sure if you've seen them, but the left and right cranks aren't joined, so you could pedal one forward while the other one went backwards, for instance. They're not joined because they force you to pull up through the upstroke. But more than that, the real silver bullet is resistance training. Strength training is remarkable in its capacity to improve force orientation and minimize fatigue. The problem with endurance athletes is probably a cultural one and also a time management one. Where do you put it and how do you value it? And I think it's more about how you value strength training. A lot of people wrongly believe that there's too much muscle mass and that it won't help their performance as much as it does.

That's a great segue. Let's dive right into strength and conditioning. And the first question I'd like to ask is, how much do you value it for endurance training for endurance athletes?

Sorry, yeah, a lot. But in certain time or physically, I guess you have to do it. You have to do it the right way at the right time. And I think a lot of those issues around the cultural reluctance to training is fear of gaining excess muscle mass and fear of soreness. Excess muscle mass is really not an issue. There's been a number of studies on both running and cycling that have shown strength training interventions improve all sorts of things. So improve power at lactate threshold, improve fractional utilization of VO2, improve exercise economy, improve max power pedaling technique, all free of changes in total body mass or changes in hypertrophy in specific muscles that don't affect muscle mass. So you've actually gained some quad mass and lost overall body mass. So the idea of gaining muscle mass is really not, not possible. And it's mostly to do with nutritional considerations. You just can't eat enough. You can't eat enough food and enough protein for the amount of training you do. Plus there's this molecular interference effect, it's called going on as well, where you've got this endurance pathway which is called AMPK versus mtor. And I won't bore you with that too much, but it's this interaction effect where you've got this AMPK which drives endurance pathways. So its role is in cellular energy regulation. And then this MTOR pathway, which promotes all things growth, insulin, Insulin, like growth factors in the body at that MTOR is activated after strength training and really heavy strength training and after protein ingestion. But the problem is AMPK basically counters all of those effects of that increased MTOR activation. And that's what we get from endurance training. So not only are you not having enough nutrition, you're also getting this molecular signaling to not gain muscle mass. And so it's really, really hard to do that. And the only people that might gain a lot of muscle mass during that training, either they're new or they've been eating absolutely rubbish and they haven't had enough energy. So Relative Energy Deficiency Syndrome, they're just not eating enough or they're cheating, they're enhanced, they're on some sort of drug to improve their performance. And so it's really, really unlikely that that would happen. So gaining muscle mass is not really a thing.

So then the fear of soreness comes In. And I know that is a big thing for a lot of athletes. And definitely personally, you don't want your key training sessions to be affected. And I do want to touch on that and touch on scheduling. But before that, can we just talk about some general principles of strength and conditioning for endurance athletes?

Yeah. So soreness is brought about by unaccustomed activity, high intensity activity, and eccentric activity. This is in the gym. So unaccustomed activity, if you do something new, you're going to get sore from it. Even if you've been doing strength for a long time and add some really, really novel stimulus, you're going to get sore of it. So build up slowly and become accustomed to it and don't completely take a 90 degree turn in your training and chuck something else in. And it's remarkable that people don't consider that because you would consider that with any other mode of training. If your sport was triathlon and you're doing swimming, cycling and running, and then you suddenly decided to go play a game of tennis, everyone would assume that they were going to get sore back, sore chest, sore arms from that. But people seem to not think that when they're in the gym that if they just keep chucking different exercises every session, that they're not going to get sore because it falls under this, you know, this banner of gym, which is just not true. So, so don't, don't, don't go chucking in crazy exercises. As long as they're consistent, then it's not unaccustomed. Second thing is the intensity. If, if the intensity is too much and you're doing too much volume at intensity, that's a real killer. Intensity per se, is fine. So heavier is cycling economy and efficiency. And explosive plyometric base is better for running economy. But if you do too much at intensity, you're just going to run into too much muscle damage and that will cause a lot of soreness. And related to that muscle damage is eccentric activity. So where the muscle fibers lengthen under tension, so you contract them to shorten them. You think about this actin and myosin filaments overlapping each other. When you then pull them apart reluctantly, things break off. And that's what we call micro tears in the muscle. And that causes a lot of pain and swelling. So minimizing too much of any of those things is fine. And there was a paper out a couple of years ago by a guy, Brock Freeman, showing that if you introduce eccentric Nordic hamstring exercises, which are about one of the most painful doms causing exercises. You can that in as little as three sessions of doing them. The doms had disappeared for participants. So we're talking three to four sessions of soreness, which if you start that in your off season, it's. It's nothing. It's nothing.

The benefit of it is just so worth it. So many examples of people who have just been training for years without concentrating on developing a little bit more strength in their muscles and introducing a strength component and all of a sudden they're riding better. And it could be a lot of other reasons because they've concentrated on their nutrition, they've concentrated on their program a lot better. But the underlying thing is that is one subtle change that can give you a benefit that's really. I just don't know how you could argue against it because there's very little evidence to say that if you don't do it well, you aren't going to get an improvement somewhere. So how do you then time the actual session in relation to your number one sport, which is could be triathlon, could be cycling, could be running. And it's a question that I think doesn't really have one answer. It could be a multiple of things. And can you go through a little bit about where you think the timing should be? And for example, let's just take a cyclist to make it really straightforward where there's one sport and they've got a program that's got two hard sessions in it, an endurance session in it, some recovery and saying maybe some zone 2. Just a give everybody an idea. And most people have this in their program. Where would you see someone who's an endurance athlete who's looking towards being improving their VO2, improving their FTP and maybe, you know, doing the Melbourne to Warrnambool or something that's got an endurance component. Where would the strength component be in their program?

Yeah, okay. We'll start more globally. So if you are looking at a competition at the end of the year, then your more intense strength training should, should be happening earlier in the year. And so I don't think you could maintain the focus or three to four days of strength training a week as you move throughout the season toward competition. So you'd move just as you would periodize any sort of training as you move toward it to competition, you might reduce total base case, so you reduce the amount of, of total volume you're riding because you're doing more intensity. The same is true for resistance training. So starting in the off season is really good, but then maintaining that there's only a couple of papers that have done that. There's one really important paper by this guy called Bent Ronnestad and they looked at him and his colleagues looked at training in elite cyclists. I think that was 25 weeks. And they did 10 weeks of three sessions per week and then 15 weeks of one session per week. And they showed improvements in strength in the gym, improvements in peak power on the bike, average power on the bike, average power at lactate threshold, improved torque during the downstroke. So both increased torque and a longer application of torque and then in a follow up study, less counterproductive force in the upstroke. So basically everything improved and that was off one session a week. In season they were able to maintain those qualities. So the first thing is the bulk of that training should be in the off season or in the less important phase of the season. I know for a sport like cycling it's not really, there really isn't an off season, but you can certainly go categorizes into A, B and C races, where the C and B races you might prioritize off the bike training in terms of scheduling within a week. Again, it depends what you're doing. If, if you're in a base training phase in the off season, it doesn't really matter if you come into that base phase a little bit tired and with heavy legs because you're riding at 150 watts anyway and the, the importance of that is low, you're still going to get those endurance adaptations. If we're at the other end of the competition phase though, you want to prioritize the sports specific training before strength training because it's more relevant. And we all know that strength training can enhance your ability to go well at that sport. But just doing strength training itself doesn't make you good at that sport. Because if that was true, everyone that went to the gym five days a week would be a good cyclist and runner. And that's of course not true to think. And so what makes you good at those sports is doing those sports. And so you need to prioritize that. So strength training will be less of a focus and you might move back to more of kind of a maintenance style training session where you did a little less volume and less frequency. In terms of day to day scheduling though what you want to think about is that interference effect that I talked about. And so those two molecular signaling pathways, the ampk, which is called adenosine mono phosphate activated protein kinase. So that's one pathway that drives all our kind of cellular Energy or cellular metabolism adaptations. Now it lasts, its signaling is upregulated for about three hours. Mtor, which stands for mammalian target of rapamycin, which is our growth factor that's elevated for about 18 hours. And now that's really important to know that because what it means is we have a window of opportunity there of which we can do one and the other without interfering too much with the other. And so depending on the relevant the part of the season you're in, you want to have those sessions as far apart as possible. And if endurance training is first, you want to allow at least three hours before you then strength train. So you might do it your high intensity interval session before work and then your, your strength training session after work. But because of strength training's effect and that, and that elevated MTOR pathway, it really doesn't matter because that's elevated for 18 hours on average. And, and so as long as you could not be too fatigued that your, your training on the bike would suffer, then you've got to, you know, it doesn't really matter too much how close closely you do it within reason. I mean most studies show somewhere between six to eight hours is optimal. And so for the average working person, that's we're talking about at the end start and the end of the day. So you do your strength training is the focus in off season. Strength training in the morning, aerobic training at night. If you're in the competitive phase, then you're doing your high intensity training in the morning and then than your strength training it at night. And as long as you're allowing for nutritional considerations, as in you're getting enough protein. So endurance athletes need about 1.6 kilos or 1.6 grams per kilo of body weight of protein each day and enough carbs and enough sleep and the rest of it, you're treating yourself like an athlete, then you should be able to get the best of both worlds.

Is that true across multiple sports? So running and cycling the same in terms of the scheduling morning and night?

Yes, scheduling is much the same. The problem of course for multiple sports becomes you have to fit it somewhere. So cycling, cycling is a real time intensive sport. As you know, if we look at running, the best runners in the world, even the top guys like sub210 marathoners, they're only 12 hours a week. The equivalent cyclists are 30, 35 hours a week. So cycling is a really time intensive sport. But also so is triathlon. Because you're training for three sports, you're becoming good at Three sports. And so you have to fit it somewhere. And so again, it's about scheduling the relative importance of strength training, when in the year you should do it, but also keeping the sessions short so there's no need to do eight exercises. It might be as simple as a leg press for leg extension strength, some sort of deadlift or hip thrust for hamstring and lower back strength. And that's it for lower body. If you want to include a bit of upper body stuff, maybe you have some rotational work and then for swimming you have some sort of of weighted chin up or pull down exercise. And they're your four exercises. And it doesn't really need to be special. I think more broadly not related to triathlon. I think social media has a fair bit to answer for in that the most viewed and successful content is that content, which is a little bit extremist. And so it's not. No one wants to tell the story of consistent, simple gym training for week in, week out, year on year, because it doesn't look as good as some crazy exercise with jumping and bands and chains and Instagram filters. But the reality is it works perfectly fine. In fact, you'll get better results from training simply than you will from from doing these complicated, crazy things.

I'd love to continue on that theme. And go. You've highlighted some really key areas of focus and what not to do. What are some other key mistakes that you might see endurance athletes make when it comes to strength training?

Not replacing a portion of their training with strength training. And what I mean by that is thinking that you can still do all of your training and then chuck strength training on top of it. That's probably the biggest mistake I see most endurance athletes make because there's that belief, I guess, that the more training you do, the better this linear belief that if I can do more K's and more swimming and more running, then I'll be better. And it's not true. It's true to a point. And the best endurance athletes do train a lot, but there's a lot of variance in that some people are able or look at. There's a couple of studies that have come out in the last couple of years characterizing training in cycling. And on average cyclists train about 30 hours a week to be World Tour cyclists. But there's variance in there. Some athletes are pros off 18 hours a week and others are 40. And so finding that sweet spot for you is really important. But in general, just chucking more training at yourself is not going to have a Better effect. It's going to have the opposite effect. Your tissues and your structures will get damaged and they need time to adapt. That's the classic general adaptation syndrome. If we cause a stress or an alarm response then we need a time for our body to recover to that response to get to baseline. And if we allow it to recover a bit beyond that, then we super compensate. We get better adaptations from that training. So more, less is more, I guess. Replace a portion of some of your training with strength training. That'd be the biggest mistake. The second biggest mistake is kind of the green eyed monster of jealousy. This is going to sound harsh and blunt, but you're an endurance athlete. Guess what? You're weak. Okay? When you go into the gym there will be 55 kilo females lifting more than 80 kilo male triathletes. All right? Chasing gains because other people in that gym are strong is really, really, really stupid because they wouldn't come across to your sport and think they could run 345ks and hold 42 on a bike leg. And so comparing is a really unhelpful thing. So pick basic exercises, start slow and replace a portion of. I don't like the term but junk miles, those long slow distance miles that, that up to a point aren't going to make you any better. Particularly if you've got an athlete with a long training history. And we're not talking a lot, we're talking cutting out three, four hours a week of aerobic training to put in strength training. It more than makes up for what you take from those endurance hours.

But you're even saying make it simple. You gave the example of four basic exercises that you could do and they're actually not even going to take you more than 20 minutes each session. If you warm up well and cool down well, it could be as low as an hour and a half and you've got your outcome that you're after. So it's not a big time consuming thing. But for people who are wondering whether it's valuable or not, it is a game changer. It will, it will improve you. And people are searching for 1 percenters all the time. And as you said, just be consistent with your training, add this into it and watch the results flow. It's that important.

And it's not 1 percenters. They're big things. Like looking at again the same authors, Ronnestad Hansen and restart. I'm sure I pronounced that wrong. Did, did this, did another 12 week training study. Twice a week they rode but then they then Their test was quite novel. They had people ride for 185 minutes and then do a 5 minute all out time trial at the end of it and their time trial at the end of it, their Average power increased 30 watts during this five minute effort. At the end of the day, this submaximal ride and that sub maximal ride was at 60% VO2 max. So they're riding pretty steady and then able to hold 30 watts more at the end of that, off only 12 weeks of training twice a week. And that was four exercises they did in that study. That's profound. To give yourself 30 watts at the end of a race of eight sessions. You know, the rewards are really great. As for exercises, depending on your sport, it does differ a little bit. So for cycling, strength is more beneficial, so not so much power. The results are pretty clear that the studies that have failed to show improvements used really rapid training, so explosive training. And then the studies with the largest beneficial effects were those that employed strength. So getting three to four to five repetitions, and that takes a little bit of time to overcome that soreness. Again with probably only three to five sessions. But then heavier is better. For cycling, the other spectrum is running. It's basically the inverse of that. And that's due to the contrast in those sports. Cycling is about pushing the biggest gear you can in a desired cadence range. So if everyone's operating between 80 to 90 revs, which is roughly where you should be, the person who produces more torque at that power will go better. All other things being equal or even if they're not equal, if you look at the individual themselves, if you can produce more torque or more power, you're going to go faster. But for running it's the opposite of that because we have short contact times and that stretch reflex. So you want to think bouncy exercises. And that's where you include plyometric exercises. But through scheduling of sessions, it's pretty easy to do. You just start with plyometric exercises. So start with a couple of bounding exercises, short contact time, drop jumps, simple things like pogos. Skipping. Skipping is great. There's a study that shows 5 minutes of skipping every day improves running economy and 5k time trial performance. It's not real hard, so warm up with five minutes of skipping. Take your shoes off. So you're just doing it in socks, so you're getting more tendon benefits and planter benefits, and you're going to be improving that for really, really skilled athletes that have a strong strength training history. You might think about Contrast training, which is where you have a heavy strength exercise followed by a couple of minutes rest and then a plyometric exercise that could work for an experienced athlete training for cycling and running. So triathlete, because they work quite well together, but in general, I would start with the kind of bounding, poppy, explosive stuff first.

And how, how high rep are they? Because you say that strength is obviously lower rep, heavier load, plyometric stuff. How high rep you're talking when you say more explosive.

The, the studies are pretty, pretty clear, around two to 300 repetitions per week. So, so what does that mean? If you've got three jumps and it's a, it's, you know, 100. If it's 300, it's 100 repetitions per week, 100 jumps. And so if you, that's 100 skips or it might be 20 skips and you know, 20 contact jumps and three sets of 10 pogo jumps or whatever it is. So 200 to 300 jumps per week tends to be the advice around that. And light loading.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You can't be doing box jumps with massive weight on your, on your back or I mean, you wouldn't be so safe anyway.

But yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, that's the opposite end. Like sprint cyclists, BMX athletes.

Sure.

Go, go Ham. You can do that all you like. But not for, you know, not for endurance athletes where short contact time is, is warranted.

So to finish off, give us your top five to six. Go to exercises you'd give for cyclists. Just generally, I know everyone's a little bit different.

Yeah, well, I'm actually about to finish a paper for the National Strength and Conditioning Association Journal which will have some exercises in it based around choosing exercises for cycling based on the pedal quadrants. So where you produce force around the quadrants. But I think if I had to choose them, I would say leg press is great because you can load easily. It's relatively similar to the cycling motion. And it's safe, it's simple, safe, you can load it. You don't want exercises that are too similar or too different either to the motion you're trying to perform because it might interfere with your coordination. The jury's a little bit out on that though. But leg press is great. Sled push, awesome for cycling because it's about orienting the force down and around the bottom part of the crank. Hip thrust similar about directing that force down and around the crank and then some sort of pulling up exercise. So like a mountain climber or like a Row where you might be standing up and tie a theraband around your foot and then you're kind of pulling your knee. You're pulling it causing knee flexion and hip flexion. So you're moving your kind of knee towards your chest to work on that upstroke. And then you could probably argue about some sort of hamstring exercise in there as well, which could be a hamstring curl, a hamstring slider like that, that's around the pedal stroke. The other really important thing for cycling though is I would include at least one bracing exercise. So that could be something as simple as a push up or a plank or something like that. Particularly for triathlon because you have to be in that position a lot. So you want to be strong in that position.

For sure.

Yeah. For running, I mean, all of those exercises are quite good at producing strength for running as well. Because even though running is different range of motion, it's still cyclical in nature. As in, you have to produce hit. So drive the leg down in front to produce force, contact the ground, drive it behind you and then lift the leg back up into recovery. So it's kind of like an exaggerated cycling motion. I guess you could, you could think about it as. So those exercises are all right, but really skipping is great and so skipping up and down on the spot. But also that kind of skipping that you did at school, like skipping back and skipping forward, just taking steps on the go. Fantastic.

Yeah, bounding stuff like you see sprinters do those kind of exercises where they're.

Exaggerated bounding is really good and I found it very useful with sprint athletes. But it falls into that category of you need to have a relatively good level of strength first because it's a really doms inducing exercise because you've got these extreme ranges of motion and because you're bouncing quite high, you're getting these quite large impact forces as well. But for someone that's been doing pliers for a while, it's great exercise to do.

I don't know if you've seen Ryan. There's some fantastic YouTube videos of Kenyans. 5, 6, 7, 10 Kenyans all in sync doing these pre, pre warm up drills with legs going forwards, backwards, up in the air, behind, you know, and they just do it to a beautiful rhythm. And that's part of their actual warm up routine before they do a lot of their running. And a lot of that stuff's really just short contact time with their feet on the ground. And it looks super impressive when they're all doing it together but they're the sort of things I still remember. Jordan will remember when he was an 8, 9, 10 year old. I would get him to do those things before any of our training sessions. We would be doing a lot of that plyometric stuff where you're just jogging along and you're kicking your heels up so you're. Your back of your heel hits your backside and then you're lifting your knees up high and then you're rotating hips side to side. There's just so many little things that you can think about that are really going to help you with coordination as well as just giving yourself some sort of bounding because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to replicate the actual action to a certain extent and warm our muscles up but also give us some recruitment at the same time.

Running is perfect for it. Like cycling's a bit harder because you have to get into the gym for those exercises.

But.

But if you're a runner, the buy in so low. If we're talking three to five minutes of skipping like with a skipping rope style skipping then some, some A B skip some basic technique drills and three to five strides, there's 10 minutes warm up and you've got. There's a lot of evidence that will say by doing that before every run you're going to improve your economy and improve your time trial time. If you're running six days a week, that's an hour extra of training as part of a warm up. It's really small buy in. I'm surprised not more people do it. I think it's again they probably devalue it. I know I do buy training a bit. I certainly do some technique drills, particularly before slower runs, recovery runs but. But everyone wants to be doing the hard efforts, don't they? It's great to do K reps and smash yourself because the perceived value of it's more but it's probably not more.

That number of. What did you say? 200 to 300 reps per week, jumps per week just makes it so attainable and so achievable. And when you think of that you think well yeah, it's not that much spread out over. You wouldn't even have to do it every session. If you just did it for three or four of your sessions then you'd be able to hit it.

So yeah, for sure it's not that hard. Yeah, yeah.

Is there a sense that you can overdo it if you. Obviously you can overdo anything but if you built it up to where you were doing 500 jumps a week or 600, is that no more beneficial than 200 to 300?

Yes, you're correct. So the studies that I've seen on that there is like an inverted U shaped response where nothing, you're getting no jumps, you're getting no performance. And then some jumps you're getting this optimal level and then beyond that you're getting this decrease in performance and that's because you're fatiguing those muscle fibers. But you're also likely causing tissue damage because your tendons and connective tissue have to absorb that force of that load from the jumping.

That's a brilliant way to finish. Ryan, thank you so much for doing your best to take all of that brilliant knowledge inside your head and applying it to our layman athlete brains. I'm sure the listeners appreciate your patience in explaining everything to finish off. Where can people find you? Where do you want them to look you up? You're obviously doing a lot of work. You do a lot of work down in Ballarat at a phet uni plus producing, like you said, some journal articles yourself on the science. So yeah, where can people look out for you?

Sure.

So on social media you can find what I do at Federation University. So if you look up at fedunisport on Instagram Eduni Sport or just type in Federation University Sport on Facebook, you'll find us there. And we're doing a lot of athlete testing stuff. So our aim in the next little while is to delve much more into testing and research. So doing a lot on cycling efficiency, running economy, improvements in. We've got a study at the moment looking at hip motion and running economy. We're about to start a study on ISO inertial versus isometric training on cycling performance. So we're really looking to branch into that area. So hopefully there'll be a bit of kind of content coming out about that. Yeah, I guess. Otherwise, keep an eye out for some articles that I'll be hopefully publishing in the next little while about these topics.

And did you patent your idea of your own individual economy test that you've done where you take 10 shoes and you.

Yeah, there's a page on Instagram, what's it called? Lab Rat Rundown, I think it is. And he's got the market covered for that, mate. That's all he does is buy shoes and test economy. I don't know where he gets his money from, but he's blowing thousand dollars a week on shoes now.

Thank you so much again for joining us. We really appreciate you having on, and I know the listeners really enjoy the explanation, so thanks again.

Cheers. Thank you very much for having me.

Fantastic, mate.

That's it for this episode. Thanks as always for listening and we'll see you next time. You.