Training Better With Age: Optimal Strategies with Joe Friel

As we get older, as athletes, we tend to lose muscle mass and gain body fat. And that's something that's really discreet for most athletes. You can become very aware of it. And the solution for that problem is actually quite simple. Just keep on lifting weights like you did probably when you were younger.

This podcast is brought to you by Trivelo Coaching, where we help triathletes and cyclists like you train smarter to race faster. I'm your host, Jordan Donnelly, and on my left is former Australian Ironman champion and head coach of Trivalo Coaching, Jared Donnelly. Joe Friel, welcome back to the podcast. We are so grateful to have you back on. You've been on our podcast before. It was a great episode. Everyone loves having one of the founding fathers of triathlon and triathlon coaching on the show. We are again so grateful to have you. Can you tell the listeners what have you been up to since. Since we last spoke?

Hi, Jordy. Yeah. And Jordan, I, I've been working on a project for coaches. I've been, this has been the back of my mind for years. All the books and all the projects I've done have always for athletes. But I've always wanted to do something for coaches because when I started in coaching, which is Haiti, there really was nothing out there. There was no information, even the smallest information, there was nothing. And I still coaches, who are they get started in coaching. And so I'm working on this project to answer that question and to solve this problem, which I've seen for years, which is how do we grow the profession of coaching not in terms of numbers of coaches, but in terms of how professional coaches are. And so that's what I'm digging into now kind of deeply.

It's really exciting. And what about from an athlete perspective? What have you been focusing on, athlete wise, what have you been diving into and really trying to push what kind of messages or lessons you've been pushing on athletes recently?

Pretty much the same I've been talking athletes about for years, which is, you know, there are very, you have to do to be a good athlete. And they're mostly, quite honestly, lifestyle issues. You know, I'll be getting these sort of things later on, but it has to do with how you design your life fit, what you're trying to accomplish in sport. That's a big challenge for most athletes. Blend the two together. And so, you know, so social media and so, you know, I do a lot of talking about on the social media side, which is along the lines of getting asleep, you know, getting carried away and you know, it's. Motivation is a good thing, but motivating too far, it can take you to. For training. And so that's the stuff I've been talking about, gosh, for I don't know how many years, but a long time about it with athletes. And, and quite honestly, it'll probably continue because not that athletes are slow learners, but they're resistant learners. They want to try to control their motivation. They don't want to try to get more sleep so they can get more push. You know, they try to get less sleep, they can get more into their day or, you know, all this. We're all familiar with these things, seeing athletes all the time. And that's the stuff I keep on athletes. And it's nothing new at all. It's just the same thing talking to athletes about for 40 years, the same consistency message.

And we will get into that, but we want to start with the topic of aging, something that you really, you've dived into in a lot of your work and with your book fast after 50. I really love the message that you push out in there, and it's coming from a place of we don't have to have such limiting beliefs about what's possible as we're aging. I just find that message really inspiring. And one of the things that you really push early in the book is talking about science on Aging looks at things from a global population perspective. But what you talk about is that if you're listening to this podcast, if you're a triathlete, if you're interested in this kind of content, you're probably not in the general population. You're probably in the top end of the population that are fit and healthy and active. And so the science on that kind of stuff doesn't always apply to you. So let's start with aging and talk about what are the key messages you're trying to get across to people with regards to limiting the loss of performance as you age.

Probably a good part of the conversation about aging has to do with what I wrote about in the first couple of chapters of my fat F50 book written for aging athletes. It has to do with the fact that when we get older, what we tend to do is we tend to gravitate to a long, slow distance where this everything becomes slow. We don't really do anything anymore that has any speed to it, no intent. You know, it's all low intensity all the time. And I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with low intensity. It's good. But you don't want just a diet only of low intensity if you want to be an athlete and be competitive in your age category as you get older. So what I did in that book was I went back and looked at some studies that athletes over the course of something like I forgot the exact details but like 20 years. So they looked at one of the studies, for example of athletes who were U.S. national class members and took them into the lab and found out what. So they're in their 20s. 20 years later I'm back again. In the, in the first couple chapters of that fast after 50 book that I wrote a few years ago, I, I cite a couple of studies. They're very interesting studies. Most of these are not done the way these were studies were done. Most studies they don't look at the same group of subjects over the course of years or even decades. What they do is they want, if they want to compare 50 year olds with 20 year olds is they grab a bunch of 20 year olds and group of 50 year olds, they test them all and they draw conclusions from that about what the difference is between these two groups. That doesn't really tell you anything because there's big problem is they're not following what those 20 year olds did for the next 30 years of their lives. And that's what these studies that I cite in the book did. They actually took the athletes into the laboratory, they were national class US hunters and they had them do a VO2 max test to find out where they were right then in their 20s, then 20 years later brought them back again and tested all over again, same thing, VO2 max. And they also asked questions like are you still racing? Is one of the questions, Are you still training? How much intensity work do you do? How many miles do you put in? So they come and they compared that with what they were doing when they were in their twenties. What they found was athletes who were still racing, still doing high intensity training had had very little difference, very little change in their VO2 Max over the course of 20 years. It had gone down a little bit, but it wasn't significant. The athletes who had stopped training altogether did no more races, didn't go for any runs or anything at all. Those athletes were experiencing gigantic loss of the VO Max, something in the order of about 12% over the course of 20 years after the VO2 Max had dropped. Then there was a group in the middle who were just in long slow distance now. They were no longer doing intervals, no longer racing. But they kept active by going out and doing things and they were losing, if I recall, right at the rate of something like about 6% over the course of 20 years. So we have the group who was training and doing high intensity pretty much maintained their, their VO2 max over the course of 20 years. And the other two groups lost a lot of fitness, a lot of VO2 max with a group doing absolutely nothing, lost everything. But even the group who was still exercising, albeit at a very low intensity and very, very slow runs, they were losing a significant amount of fitness also over that 20 years compared to the other group. So that was. There's a couple of studies like that that I cited to make the point. If you really want to maintain your, your racing fitness as you get older, you need to include some high intensity training. That does not mean going out and doing high intensity every day. What I recommend is an athlete do something like five easy workouts a day and two hard workouts a day, or not per day. I mean two hard workouts per week. Five hard workouts. Five easy workouts per week. Two hard workouts per week. So out of a total of seven, only two are going to be hard. And those should be spaced out like Tuesday, Friday or something like that, so that they're spaced and you get some rest between them. But I found that as athletes get older, something like that does a lot to maintain their fitness and still allows them to recover between workouts. The other workouts should all be easy workouts to build aerobic fitness, which is what athletes typically are pretty good at doing anyway when they get to, in their 50s and 60s and so forth. So that I think is probably the most important thing from the book is you've got to maintain some intensity in your training. I was going to talk about another topic that's related, which is that as you get older, as we get older as athletes, we tend to lose muscle mass and gain body fat. And that's something that's really, for most athletes. You can become very aware of it. And the solution for that problem is actually quite simple. Just keep on lifting weights like you did probably when you were younger and try not to miss any sessions. So do like two, maybe three weight sessions per week, every week, week after week after week after week. That will maintain your strength. I see this all the time in aging athletes. They've gained a lot of belly fat and they've just lost an awful lot of muscle. The exercise they do in the gym helps to maintain the muscle. Those workouts they do in their primary sport helps to keep the body fat a day along with things along the lines of nutrition, which I'll come back to later, that that's the other key takeaway in my book is that need to do something to maintain mass and try to control or even reduce how much body fat we're adding as we get older. The body fat thing is a tough issue for issue for athletes. It's one of those things that seems to sneak up on us without even paying attention.

We.

One of the things I learned in writing that book, The Fast After 50 book, was that scientists are now saying that as you get older need to eat more protein in your, in your diet. And, and that's good by the way, for, for building strength. But that also means that something has to come out of your diet. We just don't want to add more calories to your diet by eating more protein. So what I would suggest you do is you cut back on carbohydrate, especially the carbohydrates that, that are easily turned into body fat, starches and sugars and things that are metabolized very quickly when you're between meals. You know, avoid eating snacks along that line if you're going to snack, eat something like fruit, vegetables, things that are good for you instead of eating something out of a package, plastic package, almost everything in a plastic package is bad for you. So, so that's the third thing is trying to control our, our fat by body fat by limiting our diet to foods that are not going to be quite as conducive to make us gain body fat.

Okay, that's unbelievably good summary and almost covered a lot of the, the, the discussion topics that we were aiming to go down that rabbit rabbit warren with. The good news is that, that, that you can definitely, from what you've done in your study, see that, you know, obviously high intensity is going to contribute to maintaining or, or even continuing to improve your performance even, even as a 50 year old or 60 year old. I'm sure you've got many examples, Joe, of people who, who have been sedentary for a long time and then taken up a sport, whether it be marathon running or, or triathlon, and have had a VO2 of 40 yet, you know, started training for 5, 6 years and ended up with an improved VO2 even at 55 or 60 years of age. Has that been your experience?

Yes, that is certainly possible. If you take somebody who has been inactive and get them started in some kind of an endurance activity, running, cycling, swimming, triathlon, whatever, some sort of sport they enjoy doing, which is the most Important thing. Sometimes people ask me what, what sport should I do to get in better shape? And the answer always is the same thing. The one you enjoy doing, that's the one you should do the most. And that, that will do the most for helping you to maintain your youth, if you will. I run into far too many people. I'm in my late 70s now, I'm almost 8 years old, and I run into far too many people, we'll say athletes now. Far too many people who are my age who are basically withering away and you can sit. I've known some people for a few decades and you watch them over the course of several decades, lose their muscle, lose their posture, lose their fitness, basically. And it's just because, you know, they didn't their lifestyle seriously enough. And that's really the key to this whole thing is you've got to maintain this athlete's lifestyle your entire life. It's not something you do up until you're 50 and then you throw it away and somehow start doing things that are not good for your health and so forth. You need to maintain that athlete's lifestyle well into your, you know, your 80s, your 90s. I know athletes in their 80s and 90s. I, I wrote an athlete here not too long ago. This has been, I guess a year or so ago now, a Frenchman who was, who was breaking records on the track in cycling at age 104. And the guy was remarkable things, you know, riding an hour and 17 at 17 miles per hour, which is quite, quite fast for somebody who's 104 years old. And he's continued to train every day on his bike. You know, the people like that just blow me away. They're really great indicators of what we can do with our own lives if we do the same sort of, same things they're doing, which is just stay active. Stay active and be very consistent. Unfortunately, that gentleman died here a couple of years ago at age 109, but he was still riding his bike every day. He just was an amazing individual. There are lots of people like that out there in the world who do, who just are, are very good about maintaining their health and their fitness, regardless of age. And yet I, I'm in the gym sometimes and I'll overhear a conversation going on in the locker room and I'll hear some guy say he's 35 now and he thinks he's over the hill and he's no longer going to be able to do anything. And I'm just blown away, you know, 35 years old, he's still a kid, he's still got tremendous number of things he can do in his life physically and he's already thrown it away because he thinks he's too old. It just blows me away to hear people talk about how they see themselves as being old and not even close to being old. They're still quite young and they can still accomplish a lot of things in sport and in life.

I absolutely love that point, Joe. It's the exact message I was talking about with, with what I really resonate with at the start of your book, which is just breaking down the belief of what's actually possible. And when you hear that story of a guy riding his bike to 109, you go, wow, that shows how many years you could have in you where you're staying this active. You really gave a great point talking about the importance of maintaining muscle mass. And I want to get a little bit more specific on that. What is your gym routine? What is your weightlifting routine for yourself? What are you doing throughout the week? Specifically how, how often?

Yeah, I, I live twice a week religiously on Monday and Thursdays and I, you know, I do a full body workout. It takes probably about 40 minutes to get it all done. And this, this whole thing has to do with where I live actually. I used to go to a gym, found that to be kind of nuisance because you had to wait to get into a machine, somebody else is using it, you had to drive or ride your bike or run to the gym, which took extra time, etc. So there's just a lot of minor things I didn't like about going to the gym. And sometimes I would use those as excuses. So here, I don't know, gosh, probably, oh, it's been 20 years ago now. I decided to build a gym on my own in my garage. So I took one bay of my garage and turn it into a gym. So I've got everything out there I need for all the exercises and workouts I do and I keep adding things to it. Every year or so I'll add something new to my gym. That led my wife and I to decide we need a different house. Because our house, when I started doing that, only had a two bay garage. So I had to park my car outside on the driveway. I'm sure my neighbors are getting tired of seeing my car in the driveway year after year. So we finally decided we basically buy a house. It's got a three bay garage. We've done that twice. Now we're in the second and I've got this great gym now that I use twice a week and I do a full body exercise, full body workout. It's not just strength. Strength is the main focus of it. I've got a rack of weights I use for total body workout, for strength, squats and bench presses and curls and calf raises, et cetera, et cetera. But I also do a lot of core things, planks, side planks and front planks. To maintain the core area. I do a lot of stretching exercises. One thing I've noticed, in older people, they tend to lose their range of motion. So I do a lot of range of motion exercises just to kind of maintain my ability to do things that just around the house that a lot of older people can't do. Like, you know, reach over and touch something on the floor, pick up a piece of paper off the floor. Little things like that that somehow leave you when you get older. I work on my balance. This is something I've seen also in older people. As they age, they lose their balance. And so I work on that. So I have this whole program that I go through to maintain lots of things that have to do with strength, with mobility, which you mentioned, with range of motion. And all this stuff has to do with basically my physiological health. And I've managed to maintain my body mass over the years. And it's just because I've been consistent. It's not because the stuff I do, it's because I do it consistently. I do it two times a week, every week. That's been going on for month after month after year after year after year after year. So it's the sort of thing you got to do.

It's not complicated, but it's just that consistency principle again. One last question on the specificity of that. What kind of rep and set range are you doing? Are you doing something like three sets of eight reps or a bit heavier and lower? So three sets of five reps or four sets of 12 reps, the weight stuff?

Yeah, I'm doing three sets of. It kind of depends on where I am in the. In the year. I kind of. I kind of periodize things today like I did when I was. When I was younger. Same sort of thing. So I'm. I'll start off this. What I consider. Consider my season, which is going to be starting in the late fall, winter. And then I'll start doing just lighter weights with higher repetitions, 10 to 15 repetitions, challenging myself to. Whenever I feel I can do 16 or 17 repetitions, increase the load a Little bit. And after a few weeks of doing that, I begin to increase the loads and do fewer reps. By the time I get to the peak of that season or that seasonal program, I am doing about three to six reps for each of the exercises, each of the strength exercises, three sets of those with, with pretty heavy loads. And I've been doing that same sort of thing for, for decades now. And it just pays off long term. I know it's, it's been very beneficial to my health and longevity.

You're a great example, Joe, to everybody listening of, you know, practicing what you preach and, you know, all the stuff you put into your book. You're actually an unbelievably great example of what the things that you've, you know, mentioned in every chapter in your book. And with your actual cardiovascular side, apart from the strength side, you're still doing two high intensity sessions yourself each week, or how has that developed to 79, 80 years of age?

I need to qualify that. I just came off a period in my life which is kind of messed me up. My wife and I decided many years ago we invited my granddaughter to go to Europe with when she graduated from high school. This is probably when she was like 10 years. She'd pick any she wanted to go in the world, especially Europe, and we would take her there after her graduation. Well, because of COVID that got pushed back by two years. So we went this past spring and we spent four weeks in Europe. And I really wasn't able to do anything along the lines of lifting weights or exercise other than something like walking and doing simple little things around the room. So I had this big drop in my consistency which lasted for about six weeks. And lo and behold, when I got back from that, I developed a kidney stone. And that sent me back for another, gosh, two or three weeks, I guess it was. And so I've been. So I'm just barely getting back into my normal routine and the routine is coming along quite nicely that I'm, I'm, I'm not where I normally would be in terms of types of exercises I'm doing. But that's, you know, that's the sort of thing you run into as you get older, is you get all these little obstacles that get in your way. You get all these little things that happen to you from time to time. Even if you've been very good about maintaining your health, there are still things that are going to sneak up on you. And you've just got to be prepared when those things come around like the kidney stone, you know, really very little control over things like that. And it's going to have a big impact on your, on your training. So I'm right now trying to get back into my routine. I'm riding the bike seven times a week. Five Easy too hard. Two hard workouts are. Have been. They're not right now because I'm still kind of getting my base back from having been through all this stuff with my health and the travel. But the two hard workouts typically have been number one, a group ride. On the weekend. Like Sunday, I do a group ride that's now changed to a Tuesday morning group ride. I've noticed since I've been off the bike for ho Hub because of all the stuff I had in my life. So I'll be doing a hard workout on Tuesday and then I'm doing one workout a week where I do hill repeats on the bike, high intensity hill repeats. And it kind of depends on where I'm in the season, what kind of hill repeats they are. If I'm in early in the season, I'm going to be doing longer hill repeats that I intensity just below my threshold, my lactate threshold. And when I'm at a point where I'm trying to do higher intensity stuff, I'll shorten them to about three minute hill repeats with much higher intensity. Something more like about about 20% of VO2. I'm sorry, of. Of lactate threshold or FTP. 20% of lactate of FTP higher than what I was doing before. So that's kind of the routine I'm following. I change that around with the seasons, as you can tell from what I just said there. But I'm not there yet. I'm kind of still working my way back to it. And I hope, in fact, I kind of hope I'll get. I started back at the trading ride last week, group ride. And I'm kind of thinking about doing, going back to my High Intensity on Friday of this week and keeping my fingers crossed that the weather hold out. We've been in a lot of rain recently, so we'll see how that goes. But if everything goes right, I'll have me back to two hard workouts per week again.

That's. That's brilliant. And I'm really so pleased you've been able to give us a little glimpse into your own personal journey. And that kind of brings us to the next topic that we wanted to talk about, which is how do you balance as an athlete? And there's people who do some activity and there's people who do none. So anybody who does some sort of activity I'm going to call an athlete at this particular stage. But most of our listeners are race orientated. They're really trying to improve themselves as performers and of course they've got health and health and well being as a goal as well. But the majority of people we're talking to in the community is the people who are actually race orientated. So from what you've just given us, a really good briefing of what's happened to you just in the last year with balancing everything that's going on in your world with some sickness, with some distraction from having some fun traveling and so that, that makes the consistency goal really difficult, doesn't it? And so the balanced athlete is kind of what we preach a lot in our coaching is that you're going to have days where, and weeks and months probably where things don't go your way and it's those times where you're planning and you know, management of your, of your daily life, your weekly life and what's going ahead in months to come is, is really important. So, so you know things like, you know, your family, your work and then the passion which you're doing, whatever sport you've chosen to do. What are your key things that you, what are the tips that you would give to the listeners out there about trying to get that all important consistency thing into your, into your program of everyday living?

Yeah, that is the key issue. You're right that most people fall down on the consistency side. Consistency doesn't mean just do 10 or 12 works in a row and call it good. It means doing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of workouts consistently. That's what it's all about. I kind of think of this from a different perspective. I think of myself when it comes to this as being a role model for somebody. I'm a role model for number one, my son. He's now 52 years old by the way. And I was a role model for him growing up and I wanted him to understand how important it was to be to exercise and to be fit. And so I saw my workouts if I ever had, whether or not I wanted to do the workout today, mine and myself, I am a role model for my son. Well, that worked because my son went on to race as a pro cyclist in Europe back in the 1990s. Race continued to race pro in the U.S. now he's 52 years old. He just won the masters division in a four day stage race in Colorado, which is Pretty tough competition here last week, and he's still very consistent in his training. And I think he's doing the same thing I'm doing. He sees himself as a role model for his daughter, who is now 19 years old. And, you know, that. That sort of way of seeing the world, that I'm here to help somebody else, that somebody else for me was always my son. And that's what kept me going. Sure, there are plenty of days when I got up and I said, you know, I'd really rather not work out today. It'd be nice just to just take Sunday off and just kind of like read the paper and watch television and all that kind of stuff. But the next thing I know that Monday would be the same thing. I'd get up Monday. So, you know, it felt so good yesterday. I think I'll do it again today, do nothing. And, you know, that was the sort of thing I always told myself I'm. You're the reason you do this is because of your son. That's why you do this is for him. When he was a kid, I wanted him to be very aware of exercise and. And what it means to your health and your. The sort of thing that drives me to stay consistent. I try not to miss workouts at all, although I'll admit today I missed one workout because I was. I didn't sleep very well last night. I woke up, I was tired, I had to go out and ride. So they have taken from the hospital a few weeks ago, and I'll be back in the saddle again tomorrow morning. Can't wait, in fact. But that's the sort of thing I think most of us can just. To do is to think about this is not doing it for yourself, but doing it for other people. In my case, it was always. I was always doing it for my son. I want to grow up with the right attitude about healthiness. And he does it for his daughter. And so. And hopefully she will pass it on. When she has a child, she does the same, sort of. She becomes a role model for her child. That's how I saw this dilemma. Everybody's probably got their own way of solving this idea of consistency, but that's how I do it. Just by seeing myself as I'm doing this for somebody else. It's not just me.

And where do you get that mentality, right, where you have to make a decision between the example you just gave of choosing consistency, but then also knowing when to not train? Because we can try and drum this message into ourselves that consistency is the most important thing. But there are some days when you need to rest. Like you said, you had a really poor sleep. You're still coming back from those problems you spoke about. And in your case not, training was the right decision, but then that feels a little bit conflicting because you want to aim for consistency. So how do you get that mentality right in finding that balance?

You're exactly right, Jordan. That's. That's a big challenge. Athletes, highly motivated athletes run into is they cannot say no. They drive themselves beyond what is health. And because that they get themselves into all kinds of problems, not only physiologically but also psychologically, I found because they just drive themselves so hard that they eventually break down, you. Nobody can drive themselves point of exhaustion day after day after day for the rest of their lives without breaking down somehow. So it's. It's actually very important. And it's a great skill for an athlete to know when it's time to break. Even though this break is not scheduled, even though you like to go out and work out, you know, psychologically you feel like you ought to go out there and do it. You know, physiologically you shouldn't because, like in my case today, I'm just. I was just very tired. I was fatigued. I just came off my biggest training week last week from the, from all this travel stuff and everything else that was going on in my life and that had made me tired. And then I had fortnite of sleep besides that. So as I'm drinking my cup of coffee thinking about what I'm going to do today, you know, it dawned on me, you really shouldn't do anything today. You should take it easy. And so I did. And that's just part of being an athlete is knowing when to take a day off and when to, when not to.

When we talk about getting our balance right and you've given so many good examples. Take us through some of the key things that, that you think will contribute to improving your performance but still maintaining the balance. For example, I can think off the top of my head. We on this program have lots of advice from nutrition, and some of it's extremely, extremely specific. And some of it's very general. You know, nutrition, sleep, learning from your mistakes, reviewing your performances. Give us some. Give us some key things that you think contribute to enabling you to get that balance right and still improve your performance.

Yeah, the two big things really are, number one, sleep athletes, for the most part, especially older athletes. I don't mean professional athletes or elite athletes, and I mean age groupers. We tend not to get enough sleep because we try to wedge too much into our, into our day. You know, the typical age group athlete has got a day job, has a family probably doing something else in their life, like volunteering for an organization someplace or doing things at work that step them into the evening very late. And the thing that always they give up, these athletes, the thing they always, in their time, in their day, they. They give up to fit more things in is sleep. They just do not. People don't, do not get enough sleep. If you're not getting at least seven hours of sleep per night, at least seven hours of sleep per night. And you're an aging athlete, if you're, you know, if you're in your 50s, 60s especially, you've got to be getting more sleep even and, and younger athletes the same way. In fact, the younger you get, the more you need. A teenager probably ought to be sleeping nine hours per night. And they try to. I know my granddaughter who's now 19, and when we took her on vacation with us, she can sleep like the devil meant. She can really put away those hours in bed. And that's good. I mean, that's the sort of thing you gotta be able to do when you're that age is get enough sleep. That's when everything happens that's good for your fitness. That's when all the hormones are released into your bloodstream that build your body, rebuild you every night. If you get enough sleep, you don't get enough sleep. You lose out on some of the stuff you tried to accomplish in your workout that day. Your workout had a lot of losses in it because you just didn't take advantage of the things you could have gained had you gotten enough sleep that night. Hard workout, you're not more fit right after a hard workout. You're at it right after a hard workout. It's not until you sleep that you begin to realize the benefits that the hard workout gave you. So that's the start starting place. You got to get more sleep. One thing is I, when I coaching anymore, but when I was coaching, one of the things that I always do is ask athletes how much sleep they were getting per night. If they weren't getting seven hours, then we had to have a conversation about something had to go in their lives. If they had a very high goal, it meant we had to get into only three things left in life. If they wanted to qualify for Ironman Hawaii, if they want to be on the podium at some big race, or if they want to just do something which they've never done before, which is. It would be a gigantic achievement for them. They had to get down to three things in their life. Number one would be their family. You're not going to quit your family. Just you can get in an Ironman race. You're going to quit your jobs. That's number two. You have a job in your life, your career. And number three, you're going to have training. That's it. If you have a high goal, those are really the only three things you can fit into your life and make it work. As far as being able to accomplish your goal. If you start, try to stick in. One more thing. Let's say the person says, you know, I think what I'd like to do is take up tennis also there's tennis. And be able to qualify for Ironman Hawaii. That's not going to work. So we can't do that. You can do that after you've qualified, after the race is over. Now you can take up tennis, play all you want. Or they want to volunteer to be on the board of directors for nonprofit organization. That's great. Let's wait until after you've. You've qualified and actually done your Ironman, then you can do that. So sleep is critical, and that was always a key thing. First thing I would look for an athlete is are they getting enough sleep? And if they aren't, we had to figure out a way to change that so they could. And quite honestly, that's the most important thing I probably ever did for any of my athletes is just make sure they got enough sleep. The workouts are not that difficult to come up with at all or the training plan. Those things are actually pretty easy to do. It's trying to make it take advantage of your training so you grow as an ass. That's the hard part. So the first thing you got to do is you got to get enough sleep. Second thing you got to do is you got to get your diet right. So many people in our society eat junk food all day long. I'm amazed when I go somewhere, places sometimes and I see people eating. The stuff they're eating is just amazing. It's just big packages of things like potato chips and candy bars and just all this junk food and they eat it as if it somehow is going to be beneficial for them. I'm not sure how they see that, but somehow they like. Maybe if nothing else, they like. They get a sugar high off of it. But that's they. We just eat far too much stuff like that in our Diets, you know, what my wife always talks about is when she goes to grocery store, she typically buys food from the perimeter of the grocery store. That's where all the healthy stuff is down the aisles in the middle of grocery store. That's where you find most all the packaged high sugar, high starch, highly processed foods is in the middle aisles. And so she typically doesn't go down there very much. She's always looking for things on the perimeter of the, of the grocery store. So diet is very important, but, and people can improve that. You know, if you don't keep junk food around the house, you're not going to eat it. That's, that's the key. Just don't keep it in your house. If you've got it in your house, you're going to wind up eating it. So, you know, just if you don't buy it, you're going to be much healthier. In the long term, you can keep your body fat down, you'll train better, you'll get better results. Everything starts coming together when you do those two things. And then the third thing I tell people is kind of along the lines, what we already talked about is, you know, if you're going to train, you need to know when to train hard and when to train easy. And the easy part, you got to make sure it's really easy. That's where people fall down. Easy workouts easy enough, they make the hearts hard. But the easy workouts are typically not easy enough. They don't really get much benefit from those. They think if they go hard, they become more fit. But actually it's just the opposite. If you go easy, if you go slow on those easy days a week, you'll wind up with much better aerobic fitness down the road than if you did, you know, five moderately hard workouts per week, which is what most people do.

I want to ask about that specifically because it's something we always like to ask coaches. Their theories on, you know, zone one, pure recovery sessions versus zone two, aiming for a little bit of aerobic benefit. What are your thoughts on those easy sessions and where do you sit in that range of zone one to zone two? Because technically, you know, you can. If you are used to the frequency of training and used to the volume of training, you can push to the upper end of that zone, too, without crossing that lactate threshold. Get the training effect without, you know, exhausting the body. What's your theory on, Is that too risky still for you in your mind, are you saying no, Go easier, sit at the bottom of zone two. Even do some more sessions in. In zone one. That pure recovery kind of style.

What's.

What's your theory around that?

I tell athletes that the easier the better. If they can keep it easy, they're going to get a lot more aerobic benefit out of it. The ones ask me, how do I know if it's easy? You know, you know, you should know from being in the sport long time what is really easy or not. But however, if you have to something that helps you as a tool. What I tell them to do is to yourself sing Happy birthday to you. And if you can't get through Happy birthday to you without taking a breath, it's too hard. So sing Happy birthday. Happy birthday to you. Take a breath. Happy birthday to you. Take a breath. Happy birthday, dear Jared Happy birthday to you. If you can do that, then. Then it's easy. If you can't do that, it's not easy. That's just one. It's the same idea as going for a run with somebody and carrying on a conversation. If you can't carry on a conversation without taking a breath every four or five words, it's too hard. I just tell you right there. It's just too hard. I prefer not to tell people about zones one and two and so forth. Probably because I find so many people have their zones wrong to begin with. It's really kind of becomes useless information for them. They may think they're doing things right, but. Or I. The other side. What I usually gives the other side. I can't get my heart rate low enough. I can't get to zone one. Well, that tells me they got a problem with their zones if they can't get to zone one. So, you know, so they're. So. I prefer not to talk about zones too much with them unless I was involved in helping to set their zones up, then it's different. But if they're. If I've had some athlete who I don't know says they can't get into zone one, I realize the problem here is probably not the fact that they enough or bike slowly enough. The problem is they've got their zones set up incorrectly.

That's. That's. Yeah, that's a really great point. I. I want to take this topic to training specificity. So you've given us unbelievable insight into how to approach aging, how to approach balance from, you know, it's. It's a lot about your perspective on what you're trying to achieve. And you quote, unquote, said that the Actual training itself is probably the easy part in comparison to all this. But we want to dive into the training specifically and we're interested in your thoughts in relation to training for endurance events. And we, we coach athletes from, in a range of events from marathon running to 70.39 Ironman into endurance swimming and ultra running gravel riding, which is really taking off now, which are really long events of nine to 14 hours. And all these events are three hours up to 15 hours. So we want you to focus a training answer in relation to looking at firstly how to train to endure the requirements of the event. What's most important in your eyes?

Yeah, the most important thing is the duration. When you talk about being able to endure the event, it's not how long the event was in terms of kilometers or miles, it's how many hours or minutes. Whichever it is we're talking about here, is it going to take you and then getting to the point that you can maintain your, maintain a level of, of low, a low level of effort intensity for that period of time. That's, that's the starting place. Now there are some, some obvious, obviously some exceptions to this. In the US we have a race called Race Across America on a bicycle which takes days and days and days, some people weeks. Certainly we're not going to try to go out and do that to get ready for it. So we're going to break it down into some pieces and find out which is the piece that we need to work on. If you're doing something which is more reasonable, like you're doing a, for example, and you want to be able to do a three hour marathon, well, the first thing you got to be able to do is run for three hours. Not at marathon pace, but just very easy, nice and slow and easy. You got to build up to doing that, that builds that aerobic fitness. That's basically the five days a week of my 5:2 plan I mentioned a while ago. So you're, you're working on building that general aerobic fitness by getting to the point that you can maintain the duration but not necessarily the intensity. That's the first thing you do and that's, and along the lines of doing this, you're doing lots of other things also. I won't get into all the details, but they're like your skills, running skills, pedaling skills, swimming skills, all these skills. This is the time to be working on those things. At the same time you're working on building this aerobic base by working on going the duration of the race. You're aiming at, once we get through that, then we start moving toward a more specific period of training where the athlete's going to be doing things that are much more like the race. So now instead of going out and doing a, a three and a half hour run, what the athlete is going to do is maybe do some intervals that are done, long intervals, Perhaps something like 880 meter, 800 meter intervals at marathon intensity, marathon pace, and building up the number of those you can do in a single session. That would be an example for a runner running a marathon to start focusing on the intensity side of training. They've already got the aerobic fitness built. Now they start working on the intensity side, the specificity. But along the line of doing that, they've got to maintain the base fitness they built, the general fitness they built up earlier. And so we still blend in those longer runs that are done at an easy intensity. So the idea is that we start bringing together, we start off by working on the general side of fitness, which is primarily just the endurance side. Just being able to do things for a fairly long period of time depending on what you're training for. And then that gradually becomes more and more like the event you're training for because more specific to the event you're training for. In other words, the intensity of the, of the event becomes the focus of your training once you've got the more general side, the aerobic side built. And we can bring all both of those things together by maintaining the general side as a specific side as being brought together. And we come to race day with both of these things. If we've done everything correctly and there's lots more details from we're not going into. Obviously if you've done that, you come to race day being able to run your marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes. So that's the sort of thing you would do the same idea no matter what your sport is, the same concept, and apply it to your sport and you should do quite well in your event come race day.

That's a great answer. And I want to just go a little bit further and just ask your opinion on. So you've done your first marathon that you've been training for and you've done it in 3 hours 30, you've reached your goal target and then you know, the next two years you want to see if you can do 3:15 and get down to three hours. You would, in my imagination, try to repeat a similar program. What things would you try and implement into your program, Joe, if you wanted to you know, improve your intensity in the race. What are the, what are the sessions for an endurance athlete we're talking about here that, that you feel are the best bang for your buck to, to get that person because you've set up the standard, they've got the, the, you know, the time in their feet. What, what sessions do you think are going to be key to letting them, enabling them to, to, to be a better version they were a year ago or two years ago.

Yeah, this is, this is a difficult question to ask answer because it depends on who we're talking about. If, if the athlete is brand new to the sport and they've just been able, you know, they've been running for a year and they've just been able to finish off a 3:30 marathon, which is the goal, then I would say if this is a new athlete, then they've got a lot of room for improvement. Yet we could, I'm not sure where we can go depends on more variables like how old are you and how's your health, do you have injury problems, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have the time to go? But I'm sure if this is relatively new athlete and things are good in their life, we could have them down to three hours within two years. That should be easily attainable for that type of athlete who's new to the sport. And if the athlete's been around the sport for a long time, let's say 8, 10, 12 years, not so much. You know, the chances going 3:30 to a three hour in two years, really, really very, very distant possibility. Unless the student, the athlete just not been training well. If their training has been very inconsistent, doing all the wrong things, then possibly yes. So it kind of depends on who we're talking about. And it's always difficult to answer those questions without knowing the person because it really comes down, excuse me, to who they are and what they can do with their, with their physiology and psychology to produce the result they're wanting.

So in that sense, what, what you say that, you know, it is relatively simple process, that doesn't mean it's easy, but relatively simple to improve. Yeah. What kind of, what kind of session specifically are you thinking that people need to incorporate more of once they've got that frequency of training and that volume of training down pat? What, what kind of high intensity sessions do you like prescribing to them?

This is, this is the, the specificity part of the season, like the last, let's say 12 weeks before the event in that Case we need to start doing things which become increasingly like the event. So let's use the marathon thing again. If an athlete is training for a marathon before we put the base up in the general training period, now we're 12 weeks out from the race. I would start havings that are, that include more race intensity. Not very long at first. It may only be three to five minute intervals done at race intensity or slightly faster. But over the course of several next several weeks, what that will become is it'll become something which brings them to the point they can run any number of long distance repeats, you know, kilometer repeats or 2 kilometer repeats even at race pace, with relatively short recoveries between them. When they can get to, they can, they can do a workout like that that simulates a piece of the race and they can do it at race pace until they've got something left in the tank. Once they've got the work done, then I know we're in a really good place for the athlete being able to achieve their goal, which may be whatever a 3:15 marathon the next year. So it comes down to really just kind of nurturing that intensity and bringing it along gradually up on them. All of a sudden with doing things that are extremely intense or extremely long durations for an intensity like a marathon intensity, but things that allow them to adapt over time. And that's one of the places where self coached athletes fall down is they just don't allow for these changes to take place in their body. They become impatient and they think that somehow they can force their body to become fit by doing workouts which are extremely hard, in which they discover they really can't. If they do, they push themselves too hard and they're so tired the next day they can hardly get out of bed. If that's the case, then they're really ruining their chances of having a good race. The issue now becomes how can we hold the athlete back so that we do this very gradually? We have to be very gentle with the body. We can't hammer the body into fitness. It becomes fit by doing things very gradually over a long period of time. And if we do that, then we'll see the benefit. It only comes to how much time have we got. The more, the farther the athlete is from having been able to achieve their goal, the more time they need to get ready for it. So we're 3:15 marathon and you only have six weeks to go until the race. If you've, if the best you've run up until then is 3:30, you know, we're probably going to need another year to get to that point again because that's a 15 minute jump is gigantic. Even somebody who is new to the sport. So we got to make sure we get enough time to do what's required because we cannot hurry the body into becoming fit.

That's a brilliant answer and really helps people understand that time is really one of the key considerations. You can't just fast track things because you're motivated and you want to train hard. Invariably causes the opposite to happen. One of the things I wanted to get your opinion on is for endurance athletes and we've talked a lot about the aging athlete and the need for high intensity training. Regardless, we were talking about didn't really matter about the event they were aiming to do. It was just in general, the aging athlete will keep a good level of fitness by doing some intensity. What's your, what's your opinion as a, as a, an endurance coach and endurance athlete? Should there be, you know, two high intensities training sessions in an endurance program that are well above the race intensity?

Probably yes. We start getting to a lot of who are we talking about again here? Sort of things, but probably the answer is yes. I would say most of the time it's yes. These would be things like VO2 intervals for athletes and athletes for a marathon would benefit from having a high VO2 max. But that's not specific to the event. You know, high VO2 max means doing things that's quite fast. That means running faster than, than mile pace or, you know, 2 kilometer pace. Running faster than 2 kilometer pace is moving, is something like a VO2 max pace. But you're not gonna do that any place at all during a, during a marathon if your goal is a 3:30 marathon. So the time to do that is in that general period of training, which is, starts somewhere around, let's say 24 weeks before the race. You start throwing in some workouts along that line. Once you've got some general fitness built, especially base aerobic fitness, then you can start sneaking in a few of these workouts that kind of get you going with the higher intensity stuff because that will boost your VO2 max. And then as we move into the more specific training the last 12 weeks before the marathon, in this case, we would cut those out and start doing things which are more like the race itself as far as the intensity. So I think it just depends on what we're training for and who the athlete is to some extent. Also.

One message. You've really hammered this entire episode and it's just something I always love hearing from you is the message of almost simplicity. It's consistency. It's not overcomplicating things and there's no magical answer. It's all these things combined. And whether we're talking about how to prevent that loss of performance with age, whether we're talking about balance, but whether we're talking about specific training sessions, you're always coming back to, to not over complicating it and simplifying it. And I think that's a really good take home message that there's, there's no more magical answers out there that we need to try and find. It's all there. It's just about doing them consistently. I'd like to finish by asking, is there any kind of message that you think the triathlon or cycling community are still not getting that you're trying to push? Is there anything that you really want coaches and athletes alike out there to understand?

I think we've touched on all those points, but let me just emphasize that last point point that you brought up there because I think this is really the key. This, the, the key to training is consistency. The key to performance is consistency. I sometimes tell athletes I would rather you did the wrong workouts consistently than the right workouts inconsistently. You get a lot more out of it because consistency is the key piece here. It's really not so much the workouts, it's just doing it consistently. Whatever it may be you're doing, do it on a regular basis. Don't, you know, try to avoid missed workouts that are only because you don't feel like doing it? If there's a good reason for it, yeah, you shouldn't do it. Otherwise, you know, let's get out there, do the workout. I used to tell clients when I first started coaching, I coached people who were novices, brand new to exercise. I gave them this long list of things they wanted to do to kind of make sure they were consistent. And for example, one of the things was, one of the best things you can do if you want to be consistent is get a training partner. If you know you're supposed to go for a run that morning and you don't really feel like it, but you know your training partner's waiting down at the corner for you to show up, you'll get out there and you'll meet even you'll do your workout. You know, having little things in your life like that, that kind of get you going are sometimes really helpful in helping you become consistent. And that, that's number one. It's always having a training partner. Then there's all these other little things I used to tell my clients all the time. You know, little things like lay out your clothes tonight before you're going to wear for the workout because you don't have to think about which shorts am I going to wear today. And my workout is already done. All you got to do is get out of bed, you know, whatever you do, you know, get a cup of coffee, whatever it is, put your clothes on and go out the door and do your workout. So you have to think about what kind of wear. You review the workout the night before for your training plan. If you have a question, you call me coach, I'll answer the night before so you're ready to go the first. First thing in the morning. So I gave them all these things they could do that would help them become consistent if they just did all these things. And one of the things was if you start the workout and you get in your. Let's. Let me back up. Let's say you're not really sure you want to do the workout. You don't really feel like doing it today. There's no real great reason for this. You're not tired, nothing's wrong. You just feel like staying home and being lazy today. Well, here's something to do. What I would tell my athletes in that case is go out for five minutes. Just go out the door and start it for five minutes. If at the end of five minutes you still don't want to do it, come on back home and call it quits. But at the end, it's fine. Five minutes into it, it's okay. Now they're going to be able to do the rest of the workout. So I used to give them all these. This list of all things, and I talk about these things with them so they understood how to take advantage of them. But the idea was be consistent. That's the whole bottom line for training, for exercise, for sport, especially endurance sport, is consistency. You've got to do it day after day after day after day with very few breaks. And those breaks should only be because you have extremely good reasons for missing a workout.

Well, I don't think you could get a clearer message to everybody listening. And it's just gold, because that is exactly what we profess in our coaching is you've just got to turn up. And unless you've got a really. You've got a really good reason, and it's not an excuse, it's a reason, then you should be just aiming to, as we say, put your shoes and socks on and then you're on your way. But to actually say go out for five minutes and see how you go, I think that's a better analogy than I'm always saying put your shoes and socks on and see, you know, see if you want to continue to proceed to your training session. But actually getting out there for five minutes is a better way. I think that's a gold little tip. So, yeah, just really pleased and thankful, Joe, that, you know, we can still get your wisdom and the things that you've. You've learned over so many years as one of the leading coaches in the world. And some of the stuff that you've put out there is just gold and would help so many people get to their journey and destination in the right shape. And yeah, we want to thank you again for giving us the time and we really do appreciate your expertise and your knowledge and hopefully the people listening equally as grateful to, to the time you give to us. So thank you very much, Jared and Jordy.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak with both of you. It's always, it's always enjoyable to talk with athletes and coaches and see what else we can talk about that, that we can share with other people. So thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, just to finish off and reiterate Dad's point, it's an absolute privilege to be able to talk to you. You've just been such a golden voice in the industry for so long and so many coaches out there, coaches coaching based on your knowledge and your teaching. So, yeah, I just want to reiterate that. And thank you so much for joining us again. We hope we can speak to you in the future and we've really enjoyed this episode. So to all listeners out there, we hope you got a lot out of it. Please take these words of wisdom seriously. It's all in the simplicity. It's all in everything that Joe's spoken about. And if you apply these things consistently over time, you will become a better athlete. So thanks again, Joe. And that's it for this episode. To everyone listening, see you next one.