Is Polarized Training Still Relevant with Dr Stephen Seiler

Get away from the seven day microcycle. There is no, it's not written in stone that you have to organize all your training around a seven day cycle. And a seven day cycle is extremely problematic. It's just a pain in the butt to deal with.

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 Trivelo Coaching, Jared Donnelly, Doctor Steven Sahler. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. The very first question that we always like to ask our guest is what training session did you do today? Or as is your case, it's the morning or what do you have planned for today?

Yeah, today I have planned it's the morning for me. So I don't usually train until the evening. I'll be on Zwift up in my loft. I have my own bike and that. And I'll probably just be doing a two, two and a half hour, fairly steady state ride today and then tomorrow's hard.

Are you in training for any particular event really?

You know, I'm really not. I am, I just, I use the training both for my psychology and my physiology. I do some races on Zwift, but it's mostly just I enjoy the process and I, I'm, I'm a geek. So I end up using Zwift as a laboratory, you know, so I test out, test out different ideas, workouts, equipment, you know, different technologies. So I guess I need, I need to get a life, to be honest.

Now we would be remiss if we didn't ask what, basically what a lot of people say is the father of intensity distribution in the, in the triathlon and cycling industry. What does easy actually mean to you? So two, two to two and a half hours on the bike, what intensity is that specifically?

Well, in watts for me right now at 57, it's, it's going to be, it's been 200, generally somewhere around 200 watts. But I, I'm trying even to go a little lower than that these days. Maybe 180 for an average 185 for a two and a half hour ride. But then there will be other endurance rides. It'll be 225 average for two and a half hours. And, and that's kind of pretty close to my first lactate turnpoint. So I'm in that range 185 to 225 during those long rides. So, yeah, so I, my steady state endurance rides, I typically try to keep a fairly constant power and then I let heart rate slide a little bit and then I try to manage that. In other words, I will, you know, I'll shut it down when I feel like the, the heart rate drift has become enough, you might say, consistent with the goals of that workout. You know, other people do it a different way. Other people will keep constant heart rate and let, let power go down.

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that you said you're close to that LT1, because that was the next golden question is how close are you willing to kind of get yourself? I mean, I don't know if you've tested recently in the lab, you know exactly what your LT1 is, but it would 200 watts be 20 watts below or 30 watts or 40 lots? Because I think it does make a difference.

It's a good question. Yeah. Generally I, when I've done the lactate testing, when I, you know, that LT1 for me, both using ventilatory measures and lactate has been in that 220 to 230 range, you know, so 200 watts has been fairly comfortably below that. And then again, sometimes I will let the, let the power go up closer to LT1, you know, just trying to see how I'm handling that. And so for sure I'm doing, I'm not doing powers that I can't do at least two and a half, three hours, you know, without kind of being, go empty in those workouts. But that's just me and I, you know, others were probably LAUGHING and going 225 watts, man, that's just, I'd fall off the bike. It's such a low power output. But we're all different, you know, and.

And in, in the, the winter, the dead of winter in, in Norway at the moment, that is probably difficult to get outdoors and do some endurance riding outside. So you're really having to do a lot of your endurance riding indoors. And is that the reason why you're happy to do two, two and a half hours on the trainer? And are you able to get outdoors at all?

It's been pretty icy and snowy recently. I don't do I have before, but I don't do a lot of outdoor training right now. I have become an indoor training geek. And again, it's partly or it's a lot because of just the fact that being a physiologist, it has been so enjoyable for me to be able to use my, my training just to test out some things to test, like I say, the technologies. You know, I, I have told people before in my upstairs cycling room, I have done muscle emg, I've done muscle oxygenation, I've done core temperature measurements, I've done skin temperature flir radar, I've done lactate, I've done ventilation, you know, so I've, I'm pretty geeky. But mostly it's just because I'm using it to time to help me think about projects, think about ways of teaching things, you know, and test again, testing technology. So that's kind of become my arena there. And so I'm not getting outdoors to train for specific events, but I do some events on Zwift. So I've become a, an esports athlete, which is really weird.

Yeah. I heard you recently made the jump from B grade to A grade, which is always exciting on Zwift.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I found out it was just sucky because it just. All I did was, all I did was get beat on by the better because I was on the lower end of the age spectrum, you know, and so I was just getting ground up like hamburger, you know, so I went.

Back to baby, yeah, have some more fun. So, yeah, we have to start this conversation and really look at the definition of this now infamous word, I think, in the industry, and that's polarized training. And you are the pioneer of polarized training. And I know that the definition will get lost in translation. And we want to know from the source and from you, what are you talking about specifically with 80 20? Because that's what kind of polarized training means for how most of us see it. With 80 20, we, we really want to get clarity on. Are you talking about the whole week in its entirety? Are you talking about per session? So the intensity per session, per hard session, is it a mix of both? Can you, can you really clarify that for us?

Yeah, well, so the original research that we did, the methodology was based on sessions. So we were, we were essentially putting the sessions in boxes in categories based on the lactate concentration, the heart rate, you know, all the physiology. Plus the perceptual data says was this, was this a low intensity session, a threshold session, or a high intensity session? So we call that methodology session goal. What was the goal of the session? Was it executed to that task? And then we categorized, and that's where this distribution came from in a three, you know, three category system. Now if you, if you use your heart rate monitor and you use time in zone where you've set up thresholds for your LT1, your LT2, then you would also, you could get three zones from your heart rate monitor or, or, or anchor them with the same, but then have five. That's pretty typical. And you'll get time and zone based on heart rate and, and that'll be different, it'll give you a different distribution. And, and for example we compared these in athletes, high performance cross country skiers and 8020 would end up being like 90, 10 based on heart rate. Okay, so, but that's again these are athletes doing 25 hours of training a week and a lot of extensive work. And so then when those athletes, they'll get you know, even a 90% distribution towards the low intensity side. But the 10% still represents two hours of high intensity work.

20.

Right. You know, so, so that's the tricky thing. So anyway, so that's the session goal was the methodology that, that's where 8020 came from. 75, 25, 80 20. And if I, if I fast forward 20 years on and say what is what, what are we polarizing? Is it the signal to the muscle? Is it the stress on the heart versus on the peripheral system? Is it what is it? I would say my best guess is that we're polarizing the stress. We're polarizing particularly autonomic nervous system stress.

That, that just means total stress on the body. How the body, the body's not individualizing it, it's just, it's just what the body perceives as total work, that systemic.

Fight or flight response. Okay. So we're generally trying to generate signals for muscle adaptation, for various, for heart adaptation at the very cellular level, so that, so very micro level. But as we are generating that signal, we're stressing the whole body because the whole body is, you know, it's a multi system or organ. And in doing so athletes are activating that so called fight or flight response, this sympathetic mobilization, you know, where it's, it's in our DNA, it's in our organism. Organism as a, as a survival function. So when, when we're taking off on an interval session, heart rate's going up. You know, we're, we do a lot of activation processes that help our body to, to meet the danger. Because that's essentially what the body is saying, oh, you know, I'm running from the bear. So I, what do I need to do here? Well, I need to sweat, I need to move blood flow to working muscle. I'm going to turn off my kidneys for right now. I'm going to turn off My liver for right now, because I don't need that. That's not critical right now. I'm going to make sure I still get blood to my brain. So the body does a whole lot of things to allow for this, this mobilization, but it's costly. And if it's done, if we're mobilizing that system every day, then what ends up happening is we get a kind of a breakdown, the sympathetic nervous system. The brakes will go on in athletes. And we see it first as an overreaching and then in the worst case scenario, we see athletes becoming what we call over trained, this over training syndrome. And it can take months or even longer to come back from that kind of a system failure, you might say. But for, for most age groupers, if you're training, you know, 10 hours a week, what you end up doing, you may not get a pure over training center, but you just stagnate. You stagnate and you are chronically fatigued because you're doing a bit too much of that higher stress component. And it shows up in different ways. I had an athlete send me a message one time. He says, I've switched to this polarized train and it's amazing. My maximum heart rate has gone up 10 beats. And I wrote as well. I don't think necessarily your true maximum heart rate went up. But you sounds like you've been chronically overreached for 10 years. You know, you've had the brakes on, but now you've let the brakes off. You've, you've gotten your, your rest and recovery right? And now your heart rate is where it should be as a maximum heart rate, you know, and so we see a lot of that is when athletes get the distribution right, which is, basically means getting the, the high stress sessions and the recovery balanced out. Then they function better, they're more, there's more continuity and there's, and it's sustainable for them.

It's a real dilemma, isn't it? And you nailed it by mentioning the athlete who has eight hours available or 10 hours or six hours, and they're in this dilemma that how am I going to get that aerobic base built with such limited time? And I want to improve and every athlete's the same. I want to improve quickly and yet I know I need to do some endurance, I know I need to do some intensity. And the only time I've got available is intensity. So we end up just doing intensity day after day. And then, then we're not getting that recovery for us to train hard enough. At the end of the day and what do you say to those people who are in that situation? What is your advice around that short amount of time? Trying to get the best bang for your buck, I suppose.

So here's the first thing I'm going to say and I think this is particularly true for triathletes. That is get away from the seven day microcycle. There is no, it's not written in stone that you have to organize all your training around a seven day cycle. And a seven day cycle is extremely problematic. It's just a pain in the butt to deal with. It's a number of days. Nothing works out. There's always something everywhere. But what happens if you, if you take that and go to 14 days? So now, now the triathlon microcycle I would argue should be 14 days or it would be a very functional cycle. Because why? Well, triathletes are, are obsessed with getting in workouts of these from these all three different modalities, right. And they obsess over should I get how many hard, I need a hard swimming, I need a hard running session, I need a hard cycling session and so forth. Well, seven days, you got no chance. But if you stretch it to 14 in your thinking, in your planning now you can start to get some room in your program so that you can do some of these, you might call them key workouts and still have sufficient air or sufficient, you know, recovery using low intensity sessions, filling those gaps and, and that's the first thing I would change for most triathletes. That, and it will let you lower your shoulders a bit and relax a little bit and not feel like you've got to cram every component of the training process into every seven day cycle because it's not sustainable, you won't be able to do it. And I think people who are trying are chronically tired. So that's definitely step one in my head. And the reason I say go to 14 is because then you still are tuned in, you're still aligned with facility schedules and so forth. Does that make sense? Because generally the thing that gets us stuck in a seven day cycle are these routines around weekend versus work week and what's open, what's available, what do I have time for? Am I going to do my long run on Sundays, you know, and so forth. That's why the seven day cycle tends to be very, it's ingrained, you know, because it's so into the workflow and the in the family flow and everything. So if you use 14 days, you're still aligned with that. Right. But you're giving your program more room. So that's step one. And then step two is, I would argue, to kind of flip on its head our mental thinking about the hierarchy of intensity, duration and frequency. Those are those three main components you have to control in your training. And if I'm thinking of a beginning triathlete, the first thing I'm going to try to work on is frequency is saying, okay, what are your life demands, your work demands? What is this project for you? Is it a four day a week project or eight days for 14 days, or is it a five day a week training? How much are you going to invest? And I'm not going to make judgments on whether three or four or five or six days a week is too much or too little. But we're going to be consistent, we're going to make that decision and then now we're going to get comfortable with that frequency because that's the first step. And four is going to be better than three from a training perspective. Five will be better than four, but not as much better. You know, it's a law of diminishing return. So we want to find that frequency of training that fits into their life without causing breakdowns, divorces and bad feelings. And it's sustainable. And you're going to hear me say sustainable quite a bit because really endurance training is about sustainable, a long term process. None of this stuff happens overnight. There's no magic three week cycle of training that's going to take you from poor to good as a swimmer or runner or cyclist. It's a process and that's why we like it, because it engages us for months and years. So we need to get cool, get to grips with that. And that means it's got to be sustainable. So frequency first, establishing frequency, making it a habit, getting the brain kind of tuned into this is what I do four days a week or five days a week. Now, once I've got that frequency and I'm in balance, then I can start tuning in and adding duration. I can start extending some of those workouts. I'm still not worrying too much about intensity. Intensity takes care of itself. Almost always the intensity ends up being too high at first anyway. So I'm going to go frequency first, then I'm going to start stretching workouts because I've got to build extensive. A triathlon is all about extensive endurance, right? And now only at the top of that cake am I going to start adding in and thinking a lot about the high intensity sessions. But we very often have that flipped.

Yeah, I think it's one of our favorite things that you talk about. Yeah, absolutely. Is the fact that the whole, most of the training world has that flipped. And just the go to solution is to try and do more intensity. I really want to talk about this kind of pyramid approach with frequency at the bottom, then duration, then intensity. But before that, I mean, you dropped a bomb on us thinking about the 14 day cycle and I'm glad you said it because it was one of the key topics we actually did want to bring up and you, you brought it up early. So I want to dive into it because it's something we've been considering for a while and some of the drawbacks we've been wrestling with are the fact that yeah, most, most just age group or masters athletes have to do their endurance stuff on a weekend because they just can't fit in an endurance session during the week. So can we explore that a little bit? Does a 14 day cycle look like in your mind, how does that play out and do they end up just doing, you know, one endurance ride and run, endurance run over two weeks or do they still do them on the weekend and the weekdays are a little bit easier? How does, how does that actually unfold? Because we really look at this with our athletes.

What I would argue is, is that you don't, you don't need to do, you don't need to have a seven day duration between two repeats of a type of training like the long run. It doesn't have to be now the long run might be important enough that we would do two of those in 14 days to, you know, but, but other issues. For example, how do we distribute the interval sessions? Do we need to do equal numbers of hard swim, hard bike, hard run each week? I would say no, we don't, that we can, you can, you can distribute that across 14 days. And now you can wait, you can wait by, you know, you can, you can emphasize and say, Well, I need two hard, two hard cycling sessions, but I only need one hard swim session in the 14 days. Right. Or, you know, and, and this may be individual depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the athlete and where they are in their TR program. Am I, am I trying to improve my swimming? Am I trying to bring in some emphasis there? Am I trying to work on the run more? Now I've got 14 days and I can, I can tweak up or down the length and the intensity of certain sessions. But just fundamentally what that does is give, you give your athlete More days to work with in the scheduling. So now if you're at a 14 day cycle and it's a, and they're a five day a week training athlete, now I've got 10 days to think about and then, and then position. And of those 10 days, you know, probably seven of them should be at least not too crazy hard, you know, they should be more on that extensive side and then maybe three of those days, it depends on the athlete. So I'm not going to get, you know, just totally locked into some very specific ratio, but I'm going to be sensitive to that ratio. I'm going to be listening to my body in terms of how I recover from certain kinds of workouts. And we are different there. You know, I, for example, I've got a lot of fast twitch fibers and I handle high intensity stochastic work pretty well. Threshold work kicks my butt. You know, a long threshold session will have me fatigued for a couple of days, whereas I can do the, the high intensity stuff and feel good. So I'm, but that's a function of my physiology. And you'll have another athlete that'll be the opposite, you know, so, so that's one of the things that athletes need to kind of tune into is, is which types of workouts cost me the most and require the longest recovery time. And I'm going to take that into account when I'm scheduling, you know, because it's the recovery clock that we kind of are managing. So our basic training sessions are on a 24 hour recovery clock. And what I mean by that is in essence I can do the two, two and a half hour ride on zwift and the next day, 24 hours later, I'm good to go, I'm good to do that again. Right. I'm fully recovered based on heart rate, you know, whatever you want to use as indicators. Whereas if I do the hard interval session 24 hours later, I, you know, I may, my heart rate's a little bit, you know, too high or too low, I'm a little bit fatigued, my legs are a little bit, you know, I'm not fully recovered. Okay. So that clock may stretch to 48 hours and then, you know, killer epic workouts. We may be on a three day, you know, recovery clock. And there's a reason why elite athletes don't do triathlons so very often because the stress of a full on, all out triathlon takes maybe, you know, weeks to recover from, at least mentally. So these, this recovery clock is what we're Kind of managing, I would say, with our training distribution.

I'm so wrapped that you've actually mentioned that, because this is, it's almost like the training program has been from generations. And I can go back to being older than you, Steven, to the stuff that I saw in the 60s and 70s and 80s where it was, you didn't perform so well. So let's go and train harder to get ourselves performing the way we want to perform. And that has, and I tell our athletes, you know, if you train hard for a period of time, you will improve, but you will get to a point, like you said earlier, where your performance will stagnate and you will stay the same no matter how hard you train. And then eventually you will get worse. You'll, you'll get too tired, too, too fatigued and your performance will deteriorate rather than improve. And so, so now we're really flipping it and making recovery the key and building that around the key sessions that we do. And the recovery is going to be the thing that makes you able to train harder when you want to train harder. And without that recovery, that is the key component to what you're, what you're trying to say. Without this 48 hour, 72 hour, depending on what the effort you did in that previous high intensity session was. That's the thing that's going to make the difference between you being able to improve and not get fatigued so badly that you start to, you know, d train and, and almost have to take a break from the sport because you're so exhausted. Have you felt that that shift has come, taken too long to get to this point or, or do you think it's just the way it's been and we're just learning so much more about, about how the athlete functions. Are we better, better at it? What, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, it's a slow. Well, I think human, human nature is kind of designed for that. We tend to solve the problem of, of, you know, failure with trying harder. And that makes sense, you know, no pain, no gain. It kind of, it's part of a mentality that is your default. Our default reaction to things is if, if someone pushes me and I go back, I push harder next time or I, you know, and, and so I. But Even in the 60s, we had Arthur Lydiard, we had others that were kind of moving in a different direction. They were understanding the bigger picture. They were doing a lot of the long, slow distance and that. So it hasn't, it's not like it's only now we're understanding this, but I think the general understanding is getting better and I think it's really a good thing to that. We have people studying sleep, we have people studying fueling the eating part of all of this. And for the triathlete, that's the trinity. You know, train, eat, sleep and, and, and it, there was a wonderful interview, I think it was on another podcast, Rich Roll. And it was, it was Christian Bloom and Felt and, and Gustav Eden. Right after the Kona Triathlon, two days after they did, they showed up and did a nice interview and that's what they talked about. They said, look, it's about eat, sleep, train. They, they didn't do a bunch of fancy recovery stuff, but they were very tuned in to their E, their fueling and their, in their sleep. And, and we know, I mean they're pro athletes, that's what they get paid to do. But the mo. Most of us, we, we have issues with sleep, we have issues with E. We, we're busy, we got kids, we've got different problems. I train more than I have in years because I don't have kids in the house right now. You know, so our lives go through different stages and, but it always comes back to those kind of three fundamentals is the body needs sleep, the body needs fuel and it particularly needs more fuel when we are pressing that part of the system a lot with, with all these training sessions and when little imbalances happen. You know, we, there's even now research that's suggesting that a lot of what we have traditionally diagnosed as an over training syndrome has probably been at least in part or maybe almost mostly an under fueling syndrome. Right. Which has, but they both end up showing the same symptomology in terms of how the athlete kind of breaks down when that balance is not aligned between energy demands and, and the, and the stress and activity level. So, so even for the eight to ten hour a week athlete, this can be a big issue. You know, just like the, you know, having the discipline to immediately after a training session mentally be thinking fuel in, banana in, you know, begin to refuel, reload, glycogen, because again, we're on that recovery clock. And now if I've done a really tough session, I've really depleted glycogen levels in the musculature. That's going to be the issue 24 hours later is have I recovered the glycogen stores? Right. It's going to be one of the main limiting factors. In fact, some, you can argue that at least Part of the reason that we might do a kind of a polarized distribution is because of energy issues. If you go out every day at threshold glycogen availability becomes a limiting factor. I don't think that's the main reason but I do think that that's an issue that that in terms of fueling we always have enough fat available. We're not always good at using that fat. But glycogen is a limiting factor.

I want to finish off just one last question on the 14 day cycle kind of hypothesis and thinking about recovery and sleep and the main principle you said there was that if you're thinking about a 14 day cycle you have to do it starting with recovery in mind first. So you're basically working around what are your recovery blocks. I'd just love to know specifically in your head how you see that play out. What's an example 14 day period of splitting up cycling, running and swimming. And I know that it depends on the specifics of the athlete but we can assume that most athletes don't need to swim as much unless they're a horrific swimmer. If it's just a general athlete who's a decent swimmer, they probably won't need to swim as much. You spend the most time riding so it makes sense to probably do more high intensity or at threshold bike sessions and then obviously running comes next. So I'd love it. Just a bit more insight in your head as to, as to how you see it playing out.

Yeah, well, yeah by, by duration obviously cycling is your key event but by decisiveness at least in, in Olympic triathlons and you know the higher level performers, it's the run that will decide who, who comes out on top. Now from a physiological point of view you, I think you could make a decent argument that, that running can be a good general high intensity modality. You're going to activate, you're going to really drive cardiovascular function with running like he'll repeats and so forth and that, that is a general effect on cardiac function that's going to kind of cross over. Does that make sense if we take things central adaptations. So, so I'm, I'm, I think running would, might be my default for you know I'm going to want to do that if I'm wanting to think hard adaptations and then the cycling as you say is a bit more of an extensive high intensity meaning you know we're, we're around FTP but we're not. You're not really going to be cycling at VO2 max. You're not going to be pushing the throttle so hard, but you have really good threshold power if you're going to perform at a high level or you know, and even for the age group or threshold power is going to improve your game. Right. So I would probably, if I'm thinking interval sessions, I would do my highest intensity interval sessions as runs, you know, to really drive cardiovascular function. But you don't need to do a lot of that. And then I would do a couple of cycling sessions that tend to be more, more extensive, extensive longer intervals, if that makes sense. Threshold, you know, it may be a threshold and then a bit above threshold session or over under type work, those kinds of sessions. But I'm using in duration more on the cycling sessions. And what makes a, a session hard? It's not, it's not just the intensity, it's the intensity times duration, you know, it's that area under the curve. And, and we know when athletes, if I, if I prescribe for example for my daughter a four times eight minute interval session, you know, using duration, it could be, it could be meters on the track or whatever, but I want to have about 8 minute durations. So we may start with 3 times 8, then go to 4 times 8, then maybe peak out at 5 times 8. So we're using, we're using accumulated duration as part of our signal. And then when 5 times 8 is doable without heart rate getting so high that she's crashing, you know, then we can now start bump, we can bump up the speed again. Does that make sense? So we use duration, the accumulated duration of the interval session as a very important part of the signal. And I think a lot of athletes under appreciate that. They think that they have to get faster, they've got to use that vertical part of the deal, you know, and try to go faster for the interval session to be better. No, if I can now do 5 times 8 minutes and hit and hold the same heart rate that I started with 3 times 8, I am better. And that is going to transfer directly to cycling.

Yeah.

You with me?

Yeah, absolutely.

So we've got to get our athletes to think in terms of using both duration and intensity. And what that does is give you a much more fine detailed control of the total stress you're putting yourself at. And, and you can also see the improvement more clearly. So it's kind of like a stair step where you, you have a long, the run in the rise and I'm going to use the run of the stair steps, I'm going to stretch that more and then I'm going to have small increments in intensity when I'm planning intervals. Okay. And then again for cycling, I'm probably going to tend to be more extensively oriented. I'm going to be thinking extend power at time, at power. For running, I'm going to use VO2 max, you know, more high intensity intervals just to drive cardiovascular function as a, as a kind of something works across the board. It has value for the cycling as well.

It's, it's, it's makes sense. Yeah. It's gold. It's absolute gold to our ears. I could listen to this all day and you can tell that you're a teacher as well because you explain it so effectively. And this kind of leads into, dad, this discussion we were talking about and we want to get into. And it's, it's this question, dad, you've been asking about results from, from a lot of VO2 max testing, if you want to explain that.

Yeah, so we, we do send Steve and a lot of our athletes to get laboratory VO2 testing to just really, you know, for all the ones that.

Want it, the ones that are serious.

And we encourage it. And, and a lot of the data that comes back is really helpful for us in, in terms of understanding where the, where their training zones are and all the good, the good things out of the testing protocol. But one of the things that comes back almost inevitably and invariably with every single person that I've sent to get tested is the exercise physiologist in the lab sends me what I think this athlete needs more of. And without doubt it's VO2 every single time. This athlete will do better if they do more VO2. I just want to hear your thoughts on, on, you know, okay, so I've got that information. I know the training zones my program wants to include. The advice I'm getting from the exercise physiology lab. Am I doing the wrong thing by say this is a beginner athlete or a mid pack athlete who's really just in the sport for enjoyment, but they still want to improve. So let's make that clear. They're getting coached because they want to improve. And so are we, are we doing them a disservice by, by hitting them with too much VO2 or, or, or not at all? Any VO2? What's your thought process on, on where we should be including it in their program?

It's a curiosity why we tend to do that, but partly it may be that the physiologists maybe have a calibration of thinking that, well, VO2 max, if, if they're not hitting 70, it's just not good enough. You know, it's because they see a lot of hype, elite athletes. But the reality of it is, is most people can never get there. That, that's 70 or 65 or whatever. Those are high values. And, and, and Gustav Eden and Bloemenfeld with 90mls per kilogram, that is extremely rare. And it doesn't happen for most athletes ever, no matter how much they train. And most of your age groupers, they're gonna have a VO2 max of 50, 55. And they're, and they need to be happy with that because that's pretty darn normal. Now, the fantastic thing about the triathlon, in opposition to, say, a 3,000 meter. Now, if they wanted to be a faster 3k runner, then I'd say, yeah, sorry, dude, but you're kind of out of luck with your 50mls per kg because you're not going to be able to run that fast for 3,000 meters. You probably should choose another sport. And that's why, that's why we tend to go longer. Because the degrees of freedom for improvement in the triathlon are massively greater than the degrees of freedom for improvement in a 3,000 meter run on the track. Let's just put, let's just be honest.

Yeah.

If you want to be, if you want to be Jakob Ingebritzen and win the 1500 meter or the 5K, you have to have a very exceptional set of qualities. But if you want to get better as an age grouper in the triathlon, man, you've got so much stuff to work on. You've got so many different ways to earn time, right? And it's not going to be VO2 max. It's going to be the most important one, okay? Because for the most part, the VO2 max of, of an age group triathlete, if they are doing normal doses of training, they're getting stimuli. They're getting stimuli. They're. They're climbing hills at a higher low. They're doing some FTP work. They're getting stimuli to cause what happens. The heart gets a bit. You get some myocardial hypertrophy, you increase blood volume, which increases stroke volume, which is one of the key issues for increasing VO2 max. And that adaptation, the VO2 max, is usually the first thing that peaks out in an endurance athlete. The first thing. It's not the last thing. So when we bring in athletes into the lab already at 18, 19, they've got the VO2 Max. They're going to have the rest of their career. All right. But they get faster. Why? Because of other adaptations. They're able to use a higher percentage of that VO2 max and use it longer. And that's the, you know, that's the key in the triathlon.

Yeah, that's incredible points. Just a really good way to look at it. And we look, we, we do know all the exercise labs that we send them to, we send them to various ones and we do trust them a lot. And I don't know if they're saying that, that they look because they see their scores and they do average between 45 and 60 plus sometimes, but. And I wonder if they're just saying that they've got a little bit more potential with VO2 max. So. So get that out or. Yeah, because it's like you said, it's this argument. I mean, they could be just at the moment performing, you know, at a slightly lower level than what their capability is. And so with a solid block of VO2 max training, they can get there and then bring it back to more triathlon specific race specific intensities.

Yeah, you have to also remember that when we do a VO2 max test, let's say it's a treadmill run, part of it is, is, is, what should I say? Lactate tolerance. Because when they are pushing towards the max and we're starting to see really high ventilation and they are starting to struggle, because now we are, we know that if we could have a, a probe inside their muscle, we know that blood muscle, lactate is climbing a lot of happening. They're starting to struggle. They're having to recruit more and more motor units to achieve that speed. They are really pushing the ragged edge. And so if, yeah, if you haven't been doing the high intensity work, then just the test, you, you just don't have that anaerobic capacity to, to keep pushing hard long enough to really fully activate, fully mobilize the cardiovascular system. So there will be age group athletes, all types of athletes, but particular age groupers that may not actually reach heart rate Max during the VO2 Max test just because they, they fatigue peripherally before they fully mobilize centrally. Does that make sense? And, and so that can be something that the, the, the test person sees in a way in the data and thinks, well, a bit of VO2 max intervals would help this out. They, they would, they would get a little bit of a jump. And, and let's, let's be, let's be honest. If you're doing reasonable amounts of volume and you do a kind of a high intensity interval block. What is the effect size? All the research kind of goes in the direction of it's something like 3 or 4%. You know, it's not, it's not nothing, but it's not massive. Right. 3 or 4%. So let's say you had 50 mls per kg. You can go. We might be able to bump you up to 52. 52. Really? You know, 50, 50 to 53. We're going to be happy with that. But you're not going to go to 65. I'm sorry. Okay, so. So that's kind of the scope. Now, this is assuming you're doing, you know, you've already got a normal, a fairly reasonable training volume. Right. So you're. Because another thing that, yeah. And another thing that people misunderstand is they think that only high intensity work improves VO2 max. That's totally wrong. Totally wrong. And that's just. And I say that with confidence just because of what we see in, in, in athletes and what happens when they train. And we see that VO2 max will go up with more volume also. Right. In, in athletes that are in that developmental period where they've still got a scope for improvement. I mean, we've got data for the whole careers of athletes like cross country skiers that have been among the best in the world. And their VO2 Max didn't really hit the peak until they had sufficient volume. It wasn't the intensity stuff that was the difference maker. It was. They had to reach a certain volume. Then they hit, for example, female cross country skier hitting 70mls per kilogram. That's when they started climbing to the podium. And they kept climbing to the Podium, but their VO2 Max stayed stable for the next 10 years. Right. It didn't keep getting better.

Really Incredible. I mean, can you, can you clarify, especially when you talk about frequency first, then volume, then intensity. Is that meaning there's. You're looking for no intensities to start with, no high intensity sessions. You're just looking to increase volume. I mean, I know I don't want to go extremes, but.

But no, but what I'm trying to, particularly. I did a, I did some work with Adidas and they had a program, you know, they were introducing a new shoe that was aimed at beginning runners and beginning athletes. If I start at that end of the spectrum, you know, you've got people listening that are really new into the triathlon and maybe haven't been doing a lot of this training stuff. And so if we think about them, the first thing we want to do is establish the habit of training, the frequency that it becomes, you know, because training is a, is, it is an addictive thing. Our brains, you know, our brains tend to have an addictive tendency on certain kinds of stimuli. But the, but training is not a strong addiction. It's not like some of the chemical addictions that we, we sometimes struggle with. Training will become somewhat addictive. It will meaning that we tend to want it once we do it enough. But getting there, the initial phase from doing no training to doing regular training, that's not an easy transition. It's not one of these, oh, that felt good immediately. A lot of athletes say, no, man, it sucked. It was, I was sore for days and I, my body was rebelling against all this stuff I'm trying to do. So it takes time. Well, in that phase, what I'm saying is I want to really focus on just that transition of getting out the door. Does that make sense? Is building it into their life? Because let's face it, most people have a life from before. They don't have just hours and hours of free time that they've been waiting to fill with some new hobby. No, they, they've already had a busy life and now they've discovered triathlon, the ultimate time, you know, vac time magnet, you know, and so because you can use as much time on it as you can as you want, right, you're never going to have too much time for training for the triathlon. So we've got, I'm going to focus on helping that athlete establish a sustainable habit, frequency wise. And during that time, I'm not going to be too worried about what they put into it. I got to, if I get them out the door on a cycling session, on a run, on a swim, I'm happy and it's, and it's developing as a habit and they're feeling good about it. And then we can start going into their training peaks or whatever and say, well, how long are these sessions? Well, my runs are about 30 minutes. Okay, well let's start thinking about lengthening one of those runs each week. You know, we'll start with that and we're going to stretch that towards an hour or toward, you know what I'm saying? So you just start, you start tweaking and pulling a bit, but always based on clapping them on the back and said, man, this is so great. You're getting out the door five times a week now, you know, six times a week. This is awesome. You know, you have got, you are building a training foundation. And so that's that platform. The frequency is, is what, is what kind of creates the platform for success, I would say. And then, and then we add it in, we add in the, the or we tweak in the, the extensiveness or the duration and then we tweak the intensity. They're going to get some intensity automatically and particularly when they're fairly low, poorly trained. It. Their scope from low intensity to high intensity is not very big.

Well, it's just exactly what you mean by them getting intensity. Would that be a case of if you, if in that example you just use. If the athlete starts to go, all right, let's take these 30 minute runs to 45 minutes or 60 minutes. They might be the same pace, but just because of their fitness level, they'll get a little bit of cardiac drift just over an hour period. And that's where a little bit of intensity or stress on the body is coming in. Is that how we should.

Yeah. And they're gonna, they're gonna, they're gon hit a hill. They're going to come up on hills. They're going to, they're going to, and they're going to tend to push the hills a bit. You know, they're going to try to hold cadence and so they're going to push the watts up or the, you know, and hold the speed. Heart rate's going to go up. It's very difficult to come be on a flat course, hit a hill and hold intensity at the same level. So the hill will tend to naturally drive some, some cardiovascular load, you know. So what I'm just saying is that organically, our, our age group athletes, when they're first starting out, it's really not a problem for them to get intensity because it's kind of happening whether they like it or not. They don't have really good metabolic control. They don't have. And they don't have a big scope, a big range. So the difference between zone 1, low intensity below threshold and above threshold hard interval in terms of speed running is not very big. Right. So they don't have a lot of room for error, a lot of margin for error. And then as they get fitter, as they do get a bit more VO2 max, as they do build out some metabolic control, lactate stays low. Then they start to be able almost to train in a polarized way. It's pretty tough to train polarized when you're really just starting out. Does that make sense? Discipline? Because Some, if you're talking, you know, some that maybe they're a bit overweight. They're, you're really starting out young early. They may have to walk up those hills right during an easy run.

That has really helped a lot of the newcomers to triathlon, I'm sure who are listening. What about Stephen? Those who are really well trained and they're, they're searching for, for a program that's going to take them to the next level. And, and you know, they're the ones who, who already have got that resilience from the frequency that they've got that duration. They've got the volume already. You know, let's talk specifically about, you know, getting into the nitty gritty of the intensity. Should they be doing, you know, more VO2, more threshold or make it so particularly accurate to their race requirements? If they're doing a 70.3 or an Olympic, you know, you've already got a 40k time trial compared to a 90k time trial where one's close to your threshold and one's close to more like sweet spot sub threshold and then you get to an ironman where it's almost, you're riding at tempo for, for six hours. So yeah, let's talk to your opinions on, on the athlete at the other end who's, who's really searching for that. What should I be doing in my intensity? I've the frequency and duration nailed. Where's my next step?

And I find in general endurance sports are being influenced by the power of television, the power of the view, you know, how we want to package the product, the triathlon. And what is that doing? Well, it is making race courses. For example, Olympic distance courses are becoming tighter with more, for example 90 degree turns, more little short hills. So they're more like a criteria and less like a traditional flat time trial. So one of the issues for elite performers, the high level athletes who are doing some Olympic distance type stuff, is that the bike segment is, if we look at the power distribution on the bike segment, it is not steady at 350 watts or steady at 380 or 400 watts. It is quite spiky because of the course. And they have, they can't, they can't use an even distribution of power. They'll lose, they will lose time, they'll lose the group. They have to ride in a more stochastic way. So the pacing issue for the, the particularly the bike has changed or you know our, our traditional argument that you want really even pacing. That's true. If you have a really even course right out and back, flat as a pancake. Then yeah, then you're going to find an exact watts and you're going to try to hold that. But that's not what those races are looking like these days. They are much more stochastic and you've got to have the ability to handle those repeat accelerations. And so that would, that would influence how I would prepare for these, these races depending on what kind of course it is and whether I'm talking Olympic distance or half marathon, half Ironman or Iron man, because that's going to dramatically change the limiting factors.

So let's take it back a level to the top end sort of age group. And not even the top end, just someone who's well trained, maybe up to the top end age group who are most likely doing a. Whether it's an Olympic up to Ironman, it will probably be some sort of out and back and it'll probably be relatively more even power. Can we ask that same question? Should they be focusing on really that, that those threshold style sessions of longer duration or should a lot of their blocks be pushing up to that high.

VO2 max power, you know, of, of a high power longer rather than a higher power for the same duration? Meaning, you know, I'm going to think. Well, and there's a couple of reasons for that. One is just the, the. For the power velocity relationship that I've gotta, if I want more speed, I've got to have, you know, the, the relationship is, is exponential. So it takes a pretty big jump in power to get a real jump in speed. That's why it's difficult to break away. Right. But if I can extend the duration that I can hold power and my ability to transition to the run rapidly, these places are where you suddenly can earn chunks of time that they're really meaningful. Whereas if I do a 1010 watt increase in my max power, that's not necessarily going to translate to the, to the long bike as well. So I'm gonna, I'm going to tend to think in terms of for the most part extending, extending time at power and improving transition capacity, if that makes sense.

It does. And I've heard you talk about even taking, you know, we talk about the five zone model and the three zone model and I've even heard you start saying now that you just refer to it as two zones as either just easy or hard. And can you explain a little bit about that? I mean the body doesn't know exactly when you're in VO2 max versus just threshold.

If I prescribe an interval session to an athlete, it depends a little bit on the particulars of the session, but they may move through three different intensity zones in a five zone model during the workout. Right. The, the first, let's say it's four times eight minutes. Just as an example, because I've seen a lot of these. The first bout, they may be at thresh, what looks like threshold heart rate. They're at the up, they finish, they're at the upper end of zone three in that five zone model. The second bout and the third, they're in zone four. And the fit. The fourth bout, they're tweaking zone five. You with me? So in the course of that interval session, they have. They've crossed through three zones. If we look at heart rate or if we look at perceived exertion, right. And even blood lactate will be. It'll be drifting up. It'll be probably quasi steady by the third interval, but. So it's not a steady state. Even though they may do all four of those bouts at the same power, the body is fatiguing. The efficiency of the musculature is actually going down. The brain is having to recruit more, what we call motor units, more of these groups of muscle fibers. The brain's having to call in reinforcements as fatigue ensues. And the reinforcements are type 2 fibers. They're more fatiguable, they use more, they burn hotter, you know, in terms of the glycogen burn. So a lot of things are happening. There's no such thing as a steady state in training, actually, you know, it's all time limited. So even those long runs and long rides, you know, you start and you look at heart rate and it's flat, and that's good. But then at some point it starts going up, it starts inching up. Yeah, right. So you have a finite steady state period, you might say. And. And I'm always. What we're thinking about as triathletes is trying to extend that ex. And that's this durability concept that's been kind of. We've kind of brought into the, into the discussion here because we've always. What do we do when we bring people into the lab? We measure three things. We measure mostly VO2 max, and then we measure threshold, which is just in a sense, what percentage of VO2 max can you work at for a long time? And we define that in different ways. And then the third thing we measure is efficiency or economy. And that just connects the motor to the velocity, how much is it costing to move your body at that speed or to generate that power? So those are the three traditional components measure anaerobic capacity. But it's not that important now. We're starting to say, yeah, well, the problem with that is, is that when we bring people into the lab, we warm them up for 15 minutes, we do the test, they're always fresh. We've always said, don't train hard the day before. Don't. You know, we do everything we can so that they are the best version of themselves for the test. All right, that's great. But here's the deal. That version of you is already gone after an hour in a triathlon. It's. It's sailed. That ship sailed. You're no longer that athlete. You've already started deteriorating. I'm sorry, but that's just what's happening. Okay. And so my job as your coach is to try or, or my job as an athlete is to extend out and say, well, how. What percentage of me at my best do I still have four hours in? What percentage of me at my best can I still bring to bear on that darn marathon in, in Kona, right? I mean, look at the Kona Marathon. Look at Gustav Eden. Look at that race. If you want to understand this, that's what you see is you see an athlete that hangs in there. He's not the best swimmer. His, his cycle is not the best either in that day, but he is managing his body. He's a good runner. And not only is a good runner, he's a good second half marathon runner. And that's where he eats, eats up the field. I mean, he destroys the competition in the, in the last half marathon. That's where they cannot compete with him. Right.

I'm so glad you, you brought that up because we talk a lot about these training principles and what we've just spoken about for the last half hour. It is, it is definitely a conservative approach, you would say. And that's necessary because as you've explained, we just tend to jump to intensity way too much. But at the opposite end of the spectrum, those Norwegian boys put a lot of their training online. And it's, it's. A lot of, it's on YouTube, a lot of it's on the Strava. And some of their sessions completely defy these training principles, kind of, kind of throw these, these rules out the window a little bit. I don't know if I'm just reading that wrong, but some of their days are monstrous. Swimming, biking and Running and they're doing them. I know they're having a lot of recovery between, but they're, they're really stacking so much intensity into one day that it just seems unfathomable.

Why? Because now let's go back to what we talked about earlier. We talked about the recovery clock, right. And alignment of the recovery clock. I, what we see and I've even said the same thing. I said if you're first going to do the hard day, the hard session and let's, let's think of it this way. It's now I made it a hard day. I have, you know, because the, the body doesn't really distinguish sessions as saying, you know, what is the state of my body? So now if I'm already going to challenge my body, turn on that, that sympathetic nervous system response, I'm going to generate this, I'm going to now go to a longer clock for recovery. I'm not and I'm really fit like they are. I mean they are world class athletes. Then they say, well let's go ahead and stack the stimuli and align those stimuli so that now the recovery clock is aligned and I then have the easy sessions after. Does that make sense? So they've said I've done a hard swim, a hard bike and a hard run on one day. Well that's crazy. Well yeah, it's crazy in the sense that it's a hard day but now I get two days of recovery. Now I have to, now I have aligned these and the recovery clock is lined up instead of having multiple days with hard sessions. So I would argue that their logic is sound and we see the same thing. For example, Jacob Ingebridson, who for those who don't know is, you know, Olympic champion in the middle distance athlete, he's 12, 48, 5000 meter runner and probably sub, sub, sub 27, 10k runner. So he stretches across a pretty big spectrum. Fitness wise and running wise he, he's done the same thing. I mean they have literally had days where they had a race and so now they've done a hard warm up, they've, they've done the race but then they say well that wasn't that much of a stimuli. So let's do some intervals after the race. So they've been on the track after the race was over doing intervals because they want to get the most out of that hard day. Same logic.

Yeah, I think it speaks to exactly what you said a couple of minutes ago in that the Norwegians. It also makes a lot of sense because when they have this big day they're actually doing this hard bike session and then doing the hard run session, building that fatigue and it's the exact same as what they were doing a race. So they're actually doing all these sessions, hitting these numbers, feeling the fatigue that they will in the race, which has to, has to help, right?

Recovery, some micro recovery in fueling advantages of being able to break it up with some, a couple hours in between or whatever they're using. But yeah it's, it's more realistic in terms of when they hit the run they've already got accumulated fatigue just like it's going to be. So probably it's a mental issue as well as they're just say well this is what this is. I'm in my comfort zone because this is, we're, we're trained for this and they are. But, but I do think that's, and even with research way back in years ago on horses, racehorses, what they found was, is that they could intensify their hard days and they, they, they, they managed it. But if they made their easy days harder, the horses fell apart. This was brewing years ago and this was one of the, the studies that kind of was formative in terms of over training and intensity distribution. And it, and it speaks to this fundamental issue of hard days. Hard, easy days. Easy and hard days can be very hard if you give sufficient room in the program for recovery.

And maybe this is an argument for the 14 day cycle for the age grouper that works full time. Stack the midweek sessions a bit more. Do a morning and night session. You might not have time to do both sessions before or after work, but really stack that day. Then have a full day, two days off and repeat that over 14 days off.

Your thinking recovery, you're saying I got to sleep, I got to eat, you know, so you have to be attentive to. It's, there has to be an intentionality. So we don't want to think of so called, I don't even like the term easy days because it tends to give the wrong impression and we hear people using terms like junk miles. Well, this is just, this is an unfortunate term and it's, and it's wrong in the sense that it suggests that really all that matters is the hard sessions and the easy days are just filler to get us to the next hard session. That's, that's wrong. Based on everything we've seen with, with high performance athletes, the, the low intensity volume is, it actually helps build a platform to tolerate the high intensity. So they are, there's a synergy, a symbiosis in a, in a training program that has what you might, my daughter called it flow. She said, papa, now my training is, I mean flow. And what she was trying to say was, is that balance was achieved and the low intensity and high intensity were kind of complementary. They were, they were building each other. Right. And, and that's, I think the way we should be thinking about the training is don't think of the low intensity sessions as ah, this is just trash. My, you know, I can't wait till the next meaning session. No, it's, it all is very meaningful. It all is part of a totality of stimulus, of preparation for the war, of the event, you know, the battle, let's say, maybe not war, but the battle. And so I think when we have that mentality, then those low intensity sessions are done with more intentionality. You know what I'm saying? More purposefulness. Yeah. That when I go out, when I do the two hour, three hour ride, there's purpose in that ride. It's not just wasting filling time. Yeah. And then even in that ride I can be attentive to specific issues. For example, my, my drinking schedule, my cadence, you know, and so I encourage athletes to use the long sessions to work on details.

Yep.

Right. With intentionality this day, this three hour session, I'm particularly focused on my breathing and in fact I'm going to breathe, I'm going to breathe, no mouth closed during the whole ride. I've done that myself just to work on controlling breathing. So, so every, every low intensity session there's potential to, to learn to work on details of how do I manage my body for maximal, what should I say, sustainable for durability, how do I work on management issues? And, and, and when we have that mentality, we get more out of the training and we have a, again, I think I use that word intentionality. There's an, there's a purpose, there's a focus in every workout. Even the low intensity sessions, we can use them as a teaching moment or either teaching, you know, intellectually, but also teaching the body. Right. In a way.

That'S great. And I wanted just to pick up on one of the things that you've said. When we talked about the high intensity session, we've really looked in detail about the Zone 2 session and not getting out of that zone, staying predominantly in that zone and maybe being well below the zone 2 and working ourselves up to zone 2 limit. I want to talk about the high intensity Session where we use the example of the 4x8 which we were talking about before and you're suggesting that we could cross across zone 3, 4 and 5 in that particular session. Is it the same principle that we shouldn't go into zone five when we're trying to do a threshold session that does create such stimulus on our body that we are crossing into a zone where if we're trying to teach our body to stay for longer time in that threshold zone, say we're picking zone three, touching on zone four. Should we just try to drop the power down and stay, stay in that zone rather than let our body get more stress from. From the session being too hard?

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on that?

And. And I again can exemplify with my own daughter as a runner, you know, 1:16 half marathon, so pretty solid runner and came from dance. So she had 10 years of dance and then transitioned into running and it went pretty fast. But she.

And coached by you?

Yeah, but mostly she just pretty smart kid, but also pretty driven. And the problem she faced was that when I would prescribe something like a four times eight minute session, which for most people will kind of naturally put them in zone four, she would bring a big shovel and dig and end up in zone five, you know, racing the interval session. Does that make sense? And if she didn't go faster for that, then it was a failure. So she had this racing mentality on that session and it ended up she dug a hole for herself. She didn't recover from those sessions very well. And so what we ended up having to do, instead of me saying four times eight minutes at maximum session effort, which would work maybe for some people, for her it was pushing her too hard. So I said no, four times eight minutes at 90%. And then she, then she, you know, brought down the speed. And just like you're saying, Jared, is she kept it under control, didn't push over into Zone 5 as much and recovered much faster. And then everything. That's when she said, now I'm in a flow. Yeah, now it's flow and it's not, you know, I'm saying. Well, Steven, so you're basing your whole philosophy on your daughter. No, what we, we see exactly the same. She's just a good example because we see the exact same thing in elite performers is when we've gone in and looked at their training distribution over time, there tends they tend to back down a bit and, and accumulate minutes in that zone four or upper zone three area. Okay. They don't go into Zone five very often in training, but they can race there like rowers, you know, rowers are racing in Zone 5 and, you know, and, and beyond. But they don't do a lot of Zone 5 training because it's just really tough, it's costly. And, and there is, you can say that it. The zone four work scales up. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So there's a, it's what you're saying.

Before about you don't have to do VO2 max work to improve your VO2 max. That's what you mean.

It does scale up. And so we, we tend to see that if we were gonna, if I was gonna say, yeah, polarized training. Where are the poles? Where are the attractors, the intensity attractors? In a, two, in a. You know, if we think physics and astronomy or whatever, then I would say, yeah, it's somewhere around 60 here. 60. It depends on what you're 60 of. What. But maybe 65 of heart rate, max. And then it's somewhere around 99. You know, it might start at 87 and end up at 92.3, but it's somewhere around 90 in those high intensity sessions. So 65, 90 might be kind of general attractors. Now, please don't interpret that as a. Well, if I'm not at 90, it's wrong. If I'm not at 60th. No, but those are kind of the magnetic poles in the, in that polarized model, it seems. Okay, so the problem with a polarized, with that term is that if you take it to its complete logical maxim, then that becomes 100. You go absolutely as hard as you can. Right. That's how you polarize, is the hard becomes just harder and harder and harder. No, that's, that's an unfortunate interpretation of polarized distribution. And, and, and to add to that, while I'm on the topic, when we first understand what's being polarized, which I believe is stress, the stress response, then that means that a hard threshold session, a hard zone four session or zone five, they are all hard, but they're hard as a function of different combinations of intensity and duration. Does that make sense?

Would you say that's the biggest misconception of the polarized model is that because the tagline is you can go easier on your easy days, so that you can go harder on your hard days. And, and then people just go harder, harder, harder.

And that's. If I'm the grandfather of this, then that's my fault for using a term that seemed good at the time. But any term you Use can be misinterpreted. And certainly it is possible to interpret polarized as just keep, especially on the high intensity, just keep pushing it out, out, out. That will get you in big trouble. And that's not what athletes do. What is fundamental and about the polarized model is that the athletes have understood the value of low intensity. And when I say low, I don't, you know, low is relative. Let's keep it, you know, because you got to remember, let's say Neil's Vonder Pole, the speed skater who, who did a really nice, he kind of manifesto of how he trained to break world records. And you know, you know, he was doing 260 watts on the bike for six hours in his low intensity sessions. That, that's not, that's not, you know, lazy. So, so, so just so we're clear on what, when we say easy, everything's relative here, you know, but for him, who could hold 400 watts for 90 minutes, three times 30 minutes, yeah, 260 was low intensity. So we just, we need to keep that in mind.

It's ironic that the summary of this episode is that we're putting too much emphasis on high intensity. And you do preach this message a lot, which I am thankful for because it's obviously needed in the industry. But at the same time, all of our questions have been around high intensity and not focusing on volume and frequency. And I'm going to ask one more question on intensity and that's. How do you respond to the, the argument that older athletes or aging athletes or masters athletes should avoid high intensity? It's risky, quote, unquote risky.

Some objective truth to that from the standpoint of that, you know, some of the aging issues, what happens with aging? There is some, for sure, muscular muscle, muscular tendon changes that make the tendon stiffness tends to increase. So for sure, age groupers who jump out on the court and want to play basketball and they haven't in 20 years, they are just a candidate for an Achilles rupture. So that's true, you know, because of tendon stiffness. That's an age, an age related change. Another age related change that is what we call obligatory, meaning you can't keep it from happening, is that maximum heart rate will slowly go down in the aging athlete. There is a decrease in, you might say that maximum sympathetic stimulation and the responsiveness of the heart to that. So we all know that for most of us we can say, yeah, I can remember when my max heart rate was 190, but now it's 174. You know, that that's a generalizable change, but it doesn't mean the heart's not healthy. It's just, it has, there is a change in its responsiveness to stimulation. And then the third big aging issue that I would argue is, is just loss of muscle mass.

Mass.

There's a generalizable kind of. It's been called sarcopenia. We always have to have a Latin term for, for stuff. And now that just is less muscle. You know, so, and, and, and so as we get older, we do lose muscle mass and we lose it preferentially kind of in the type 2 motor units, the, the power, and we lose it in that, in those big muscles like the, the, the butt, the hips, you know, so we lose that, that acceleration and power capacity. Well, this is why age group athletes tend to migrate from the shorter distances to the longer distances because they play to their strengths and, and they're, they're kind of smart. You know, they may not realize it, but that's smart because mitochondrial function is not deterred, is not deteriorated by aging. So the, the relative functional peripheral capacity of the aging athlete is just as good. So that, that's the good news, right? Is in, in fact, you can even have athletes, you can have people that have heart disease and their, their threshold intensity is like 90, 95% because they have such good peripheral adaptations, but they've got a heart disease issue. So they, they actually are. Have a higher threshold than they, than normal because they have a lower max capacity. So, so that's the aging problem. Now is, is Stephen Seiler at greater risk of. Because he's now 57 instead of 27, is he at greater risk when he does intervals? Maybe technically. But, but I would argue that because I'm 57 and I'm still going strong and haven't had a heart attack, probably that's an unlikely event. Now that I've moved past the point where that was a high risk issue. If I had a hereditary problem where lots of people had had heart attacks in my family at age 50, yeah, that would have been an issue. But I don't. And I didn't. I had an issue of arrhythmias. You know, so the heart, I've, I've talked before. The heart's a pump and it's an electrical device at the same time, and the pump function. And it's also a muscle that needs oxygen. The pump function, you know, it depends on, it has to get oxygen. So heart attacks happen when, when some part of the Heart's own oxygen supply get, get, gets cut off. And that's, that happens over time. You know, you have problems with these coronary arteries and it's some particularly, it's pretty genetic. There is a high genetic component to it. So you can have people that could be in a very high risk zone just because of the genetics. You know, they, their dad died at 45 and they're, you know, and their uncle and, and you know, I'm just being honest. And then there's the arrhythmia part which seems to be somewhat more training, you know, be a training issue where people who have trained a lot may increase their disposition for, for example atrial fibrillation. You know, I've had atrial fibrillation myself which, you know that, that small chamber that's kind of the waiting room for the ventricles starts quivering. The ventricles are still pumping because if they don't pump you die. But the atria can quiver and, and you can survive. But it's very uncomfortable and you don't have the, the right, you don't have maximum pumping efficiency. So. So atrial fibrillation is quite a lot in triathlon. Yeah, well, it happens quite a lot it seems. Some have argued that it's kind of a, the middle aged man epidemic. You know, people like me that train quite a bit and that maybe that is somehow creating an increased risk of atrial fibrillation. I can say. And there was a nice book written by, on that by a guy named Chris Case, Fast Talk Laboratories. He wrote a book, the Haywire Heart with a couple of very good cardio cardiovascular experts, you know, and, and I can recommend that book if you're dealing with these issues yourself. I've had atrial fibrillation. It is a risk for athletes. The, the, the, the arrhythmia part of it. I can say in my case what I found. I had a period of my life where I was in a leadership role at the university. I had a lot of stress in my life, life, both family and, and work and I developed the atrial fibrillation during that period in my life and I had to really shut down the training. I had to, I had to quit doing the interval stuff because if I tried to do interval training I was getting my heart up in my throat. I mean I was just feeling it wasn't responding appropriately. And I gave it a couple years where I just didn't do much of any kind of high intensity work and, and I didn't made some changes in my Life, you know, and I decreased stress. Now fast forward a few years later, I, I'm hitting heart rate max regularly during races and that, you know, and I have had no issues. So. And I haven't had an arrhythmia, a serious, like a pure atrial fib episode in five years. Four at least.

Is that a common response to backing off lifestyle changes?

I guess all I want is, is that the heart is also, you know, I've said it's a pump, I've said it's an electrical device. I've said it's a muscle. The fourth thing it is, is a stressometer. It is a stress meter because it is tapped in the, you have the sympathetic and parasympathetic stimulus coming in from the, the medulla, from the brain and it is responsive to these stimuli and it is kind of a, it's a window into the stress of the, of the person, you know, through heart rate variability, through heart rate, morning heart rate, all of these things. So all I would argue is, is that stress is not coming from one direction in our lives. And, and as age group athletes in particular, in some ways age group athletes are bigger heroes than elite athletes because the age group has to juggle more stress sources. The elite athlete has the luxury for a certain period in their life of saying, well, I don't do that part. I don't do the high stress job right now. I don't do, I only do the training part, you know, and so they get to select the sources of stress and reduce the, of degrees of freedom. Most of us don't have that luxury or at least we have to be really. It takes a lot of effort to make changes in our life to reduce stress. But the heart is, you know, there are, that's why kind of heart rate variability has become so popular because it's a somewhat omnibus indicator and it responds to stress sources of various, you know, anything from drinking four beers the night before to the high intensity interval session to COVID 19 infection. It is responsive to various sources of stress.

It's a point that I wanted to actually bring up. And I've used heart rate variability for almost eight or nine years and I've got a lot of historical data from my own personal journey and I was saying to Jordan earlier today, we were hoping to touch briefly on heart rate variability and, and a lot of our athletes are being dictated to by what they wake up and find from their, whatever app that they're using is telling them that they're stressed today, highly stressed, and they shouldn't train. And in my experience from the, the years that I've been using it is that I don't use it that way. And one of the reasons I didn't do that was because whenever I had a key race that I was aiming for over a, you know, a four or five month period, the day, and the day of the race, my heart rate variability told me that I shouldn't do anything today and I should rest.

That's because you're stressed.

That's exactly my point. And I'm trying to get this across. It will pick up on any stress levels. My, my adrenaline was so at its extreme level that I, and I knew after a period of time when I, I finally worked it out myself that I'm in for a great day today. Not only do I not have to rest, but I'm going to go out there and race my butt off because my heart rate variability is telling me I'm in a very stressed state of mind. And I think that's just an example of. I want you to touch on. We shouldn't be dictated to by the stuff that we see coming back at us on these screens. And how would you use them? The best way possible.

And I use the term the Holy Trinity partly because my grandpa was a preacher, you know, and so I've still got a little of that in my background. But the Trinity is a sun is triangulation. And we know triangulation is a conceptualization, you know, that you use multiple inputs to get the truth to either where am I or what. And that's used in gps. You know, your satellite navigation system is based on triangulation and your monitoring of your, your training should be based on triangulation. So let's. So Natalie says, well, Steven, what do you mean? Well, train. Triangle. Three points, right? What are they? Well, in general, the one is just the external load that I can actually measure. And we've never been more capable of measuring the actual work done. And the intensity for, you know, the power output. That's the, that's the output. What did I do? You know, I did two hours at 225 watts. All right, that's the external load. Okay, but what did it cost? Well, there's two ways of measuring that. There's some physiologic physiology. I can measure heart rate drift. I can measure blood lactate. I can measure oxygen consumption in a laboratory. I'm not going to do that out in the field. I can measure breathing. That's something we're doing a lot more of these days is measuring ventilation. But I can measure some physiology and those will generally show me that again there's no steady state. So there's a, there's a relationship between that internal physiology and that external workload. And it changes during workouts. It also changes with training, hopefully for the better. You know, that higher power but same heart rate, that's a good change in general long term way. So that's, that's the second and then the third is perception. Our brains are integrators of information. Our brains are receiving both feedback from the body and feed forward information as we, as we turn up the volume, as we turn on more muscle. Our brains are sensitive to this. And so this gives us a tool. We often call it perceived exertion. You know, like the Borg scale, you know, where are you? How do you feel? And we can use it both acutely, you know, saying where are you? Right this, in this, in this interval bout and it was 14 and now it's 15 and now it's 16. It's going up, the perceived exertion is going up even though power is staying even. That's typical. And we can also use it more as a, as a, you know, how was the whole session or how do you know? So there's different ways of using the perceptual measures, but when you combine those, the perceptual measures, the physiology, which can include heart rate variability on that physiology side and the external power. Now I have a triangulation that, that offers me a kind of checks and balances system, if you understand. I learned, when we learned about civics or government, we learned about how the government is supposed to work, right, Your judicial branch and your executive branch and, and how they kind of balance each other out in a well functioning democracy. Well, same thing here. They, they, if we get the monitoring right, then the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods balance each other out. So I'm never going to depend 100% on one measure like heart rate variability. There's no way I'm going to. And I got to be honest, I don't use heart rate variability like that, that I've used it in research a bit. I've, I've looked at it myself. But I don't do it on a daily, daily basis. I depend more. I, I get a bit of, you know, how is my body responding during the warm up? I, I, you know, general perceptual stuff. What's my watts? I typically look a lot at whether my, because I, when I'm tired, my heart Rate will tend to not come up like it should. It'll. The brakes will come on. So I know my fatigue responses pretty well. Others will be a bit different depending on the kind of fatigue it is. The fatigue of a hard strength session and what it does to my cycling the next day versus the fatigue of a, of a hard race or interval session and what it does to my heart rate the next day. Those are different. Right. And, and so there's no one variable that I would feel comfortable saying that's your magic monitor. Value in heart rate variability is not. And, and, and I know, for example, Marco Altini. Wonderful. He's got the app heart rate for training. So I'm giving him a free plug. But it's a good, he's, he's a great guy. Does. He's an engineer, PhD in engineering. He's developed a great tool that's based on the smartphone technology and it works. It's validated, it works. But he will also tell you that that's not the only thing you're going to look at. Right. He will be honest and say it's a tool and it goes into your toolbox. Right. But you don't, I don't know of any carpenter that's just got one tool in the toolbox.

Yeah. That is the, One of the top lessons we, we tell our athletes all the time is especially when they get, they get down about their power in a race or. And so often athletes, athletes will see their power was down even though their speed was up. It's exactly what you're talking about. It's, it's understanding. Yeah. That I love that triangle analogy of there are always so many components to what you should be looking at.

Yeah. See. Of values and the other, the other kind of metaphor I like to use is what's called what we call the heads up display. If you, if you're into any kind of military stuff, you know, the fighter pilots, they, they're pretty amazing men and women, but in terms of what they can keep their eyes on. But you want to, if you're traveling it. I don't know what they're traveling at a thousand kilometers an hour or something, you know, 800, 900 kilometers an hour. Flying through the air, you need to be looking forward. Right. You need to have your eyes on the prize or else bad things are going to happen. But then at the same time you got all this information. You got all these, these cockpit dials and numbers that they need that are relevant, you know, fuel and flaps and all this stuff. And so there's this competition between keeping the eyes on the prize and then looking at all the numbers. Right, so what is the, what is the fighter pilot developed? Well, the engineers have developed the so called heads up display so that now you're keeping your eyes looking forward, but there are some key numbers that are on your visor screen that are in your field of view as you're looking forward. You know, fuel, fuel availability and altitude and so forth. Yep, key numbers. Not all the numbers, but the two or three that really matter the most. Right. Well that's kind of what we want in our training process and our monitoring process too is, is a bit of a heads up display. Good grief. There are a thousand numbers you can generate from training, you know, and we know that various training programs have been pretty good at creating metrics. Right. And those metrics can start steering our lives as athletes. And that's, that's, that's the unfortunate side of technology, I would say. So what we want to really think about is simplifying, not increasing the number of variables, but simplifying the number of variables not down to one, but down to two or three, you know, that, that are, represent our heads up display for the training process and how we feel and how our body's responding. And everybody's different in the sense that, you know, there are, there will be athletes that are more feeling based. They've got a really sensitive perceptual meter in their head and it's tuned in. And then we've got other athletes that are going to be more, they can really man, they can look at that heart rate data and heart rate versus power and it tells them what they need to know. So, so, so let's, let's be fair that individual, there needs to be an individualization of that heads up display.

That's a really great point. And I know that with us between dad and I. I think dad is very in tune with his perception and I really am not. If my data goes away, I kind of am guessing how I'm feeling and sometimes I feel like I'm a bit weak in myself and I, I need the data to tell me, oh, I can push harder here.

And that's probably a bit of a generational issue. You know, your dad was probably training before all the, all the technology came of age. So I suspect there's a bit of a generational issue there. I'm kind of both, you know, I, I grew up on feeling, but I kind of like the power numbers nowadays. So I, you know, I do a bit of both.

Yeah. Yeah. Given you've given us so much time here, I think we'll end it there and we'll have to get you back on because we did discuss with you some topics before this that we wanted to get into and we'll have to get to them another time. But Stephen, thank you so much for all the info you've given today. I could just listen to you give these answers all day and I have listened to many hours of you, so it's great to sit in front of you and talk to you.

My son, he cannot stand to listen to me very often. So there's varying opinions on that. But, but I appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun. You asked some great questions.

One final question I do want to ask is this is a bit of a personal one, but I know that you did get to train the famous six time NBA champion Scotty Pippen before he won six titles in the NBA. And if you, if you don't know who he is, he's a Chicago Bulls player. He's Michael Jordan's right hand man. Do you remember you were personal training him. Do you remember what kind of training you were giving him back in late?

Yeah, oh, absolutely. Nature, you opened up a can of worms here. But, but I, before I was a endurance person, I was all about speed and power. I went to the Soviet Union as a student to study their strength training methods. And that year, that same year, I believe that was the year I was also, I worked at a fitness center. The owner of the fitness center had been a basketball player. So he was, he knew the local coach and, and he, so he's the one that pulled Scottie Pippen in, in that year before he became a Chicago Bull or this, the summer before, he had been, he'd been a lottery pick as they call it. And he was dirt poor. That kid was dirt poor. And so they, you know, were basically trying to protect him from himself and had rules about how much money he could spend without a co signer of his, of his checks, you know, and all this stuff. And they also said, well, we got to get this guy stronger. Yeah. So we were doing, we were doing basic stuff, squats, power cleans, push presses, was, you know, just trying to build some beef and, and at the same time use some power type movements. So I was trying to teach him how to do what we call power cleans, if you know what I'm talking about. The, you know, the, the, and, and, and he, I tell you man, that's a powerful athlete. But he's not a powerful weightlifter, you know, because when you're that long and you've got these tremendous long limbs, these kinds of, of the squat, the power clean, they're not in your, that you're not in your backyard on that stuff. But he got better and it was all about just, you know, using, helping him use his natural athletic ability, but build up hip power and so forth. So I was his strength coach basically at the time, and I, at the time, I was very involved. My first research paper that was published was on anaerobic power in American football players. So I kind of do have a background on that strength and power side. And that's, that's where Scotty Pippen came in. Not. It wasn't endurance. We, I can assure you he did no endurance training with me back then. Oh, yeah.

Surely.

And you know, and it just shows also one of the things about talent development, he's an extreme example of the fact that you need to be careful. We need to be careful when we start deciding who, who the talents are and picking them out too early in, in life, too young. You know, the extremes that we're starting to pick, age group teams, they're eight years old, and we're deciding who the talents are before they hit puberty. That's just silly. It doesn't, you know, with the exception of maybe gymnastics, they would argue, probably they already know by 10 or 11 who the stars will be. You don't know, you know, who the stars will be in, in track and field and in basketball and so forth when they're 10 years old, 11, you know, so. And that's one of the aspects and, and that's one of the nice things about, you might say, the endurance process is. It is a long process and it takes time, you know, and the, there is a talent component. Yes. But one of the talents is persistence and patience and perseverance towards the goal. That's a talent also. And in the case of Scotty Pippen, you know, he had that talent and he grew up, he grew late. At age 18, he was 6, 3. At age 20, he was 6, 8. You know, so he grew in a way that made him go from good to great or helped him go from good to great, but it happened late. It happened much later than it should have. So it's one of those rare stories. But it helps to understand, helps us to remember that the talent development process is not the same for everyone.

That's a great way to finish. Any last words from you, dad?

No, I just Love that that actual the key point you just made there about, you know, for everybody out there listening, you just can't have quick fixes as an endurance athlete. It, it takes so much time to get your body to adapt to the stress and strain and particularly the event that you choose. You, you just can't have a quick fix.

It.

I'm forever telling our athletes this could take years for you to achieve your personal best in, in reaching your. And I say there's no ceiling to anything. But, but you know, I love what you just said there about, you know, this is something about perseverance, persistence, consistency and giving yourself the appropriate time to let your body get to the goal where, where, you know, for someone to come to our group and say they've got 18 weeks or 12 weeks to an ironman, it's kind of madness to us. What are you trying to achieve here? You know, yes, you could finish the event, but was that why you're asking for a coach? And I'm sure we could delve into this as well, but I don't want to go any further. But I really love that how you finished there was. That is one of the key things and we've talked about many key things today. This would be something that people should really grasp a lot of is you just need to keep working and things will turn your way eventually. So thank you you so much for the time you've given us and for that those words of wisdom throughout the whole discussion. So we're really grateful. Stephen, thank you.

Listen to any elite athletes and they get interviewed and they, you know, ask, you know, what was the key to your success. You never hear them say, well it was that epic workout I did, you know, 14 days ago. But what they always say is, you know, I stayed healthy, I didn't have any injuries and I had a really nice period of training where I just, everything flowed and, and that's, that's what they will bring up. Not epic workouts or epic four week periods of, of hell in their training or anything like that. So maybe that's a lesson for us.

Perfect way to finish. Again, thank you so much and thank you to the listeners for joining in and tuning in as always. And we'll see you on the next episode.

Sam.