#46 - What are we polarizing in polarized endurance training? Dr Stephen Seiler

hello and welcome to inside exercise I'm Emeritus Professor Glenn McConnell from Victoria University in Australia I've just finished a really interesting and long chat with Professor Stephen signer from the University of agda in Norway he's really built a career and a reputation around exercise training research and his theory that people need to be exercising using polarized training so he talks about roughly 80 percent low intensity and 20 high intensity and then you know very little in the middle so we talked about the evidence for that the pros and cons of that comparing and contrasting it

with some of the earlier podcast episodes I've had on with Michael Joyner and especially Andy Coggin who are sort of saying that all roads lead to Rome um when Stephen feels that it's very important to do the a lot of the low intensity and not so much higher intensity otherwise you know you can burn out you can have you know excessive activation sympathetic nervous system parasympathetic effects on heart rate Etc I found it really interesting we could have gone on forever and indeed after I stopped recording we kept chatting for another 20 minutes or so

so I I really enjoyed it I hope you do too so uh stick around hi Stephen how are you thank you for coming on inside exercise well thanks it's great to be on the show I've I've looked at the list of past uh participants and I think wow this is a who's who list of people that I have read that I have studied with uh it's it's kind of a mixed bag of connections but but it was actually the Jerome Dempsey uh podcast that really turned me or made got it on my radar because it

was you know I was I'm working on some ventilation stuff and it was just a wonderful uh kind of span of all the all things lung function that he gave so yeah great to be here yeah I mean it's great thank you for coming on but yeah the people that have come on have just been amazing so uh very pleased um yeah so we might talk about your ventilation stuff uh later on you were saying something you've been looking at but um I wanted to say that I've known your names from wait I was trying

to think it was like I think it was like not correctly if I'm wrong it's like 1996 or something I just finished my PhD and there was this Sports Science I'm a bit confused I was trying to I said I've got to work this out Sports I think it was a sports science website and it's well before will Hopkins or something and you would you would send an email I guess I subscribed and I'd get an email every day almost and I was like how does this guy no like I was gonna say a little

bit but a fair bit about all these different areas and things that I was uh slightly impressed actually and um anyway so I used to look at those all the time and actually feel bad about myself because I just finished my PhD and I'm like well it's kind of like my son he my son is only slightly impressed with me occasionally so that's it's pretty much normal but no in 1996 actually in the fall of 95 I had finished my PhD in May and I moved to Norway in in October of 95 without a job

uh it was because of a woman which I've said many times before on podcast uh but then in the effort to kind of fill my brain with something useful this was early days in in the whole internet development you know 95 and 96 and so I decided Well this this hyperlink thing is kind of interesting you know how you can dig deeper and everything so I decided I was going to learn how to uh create a web page and back then there were no tools for it you had to code it you know you had

to write HTML hyper vertex markup language and so I learned the fundamentals I created a web page called Masters athlete physiology and performance and then I just started writing articles about different aspects of the physiology and different details on Sports specificity aspects you know running cycling rowing and so forth and it kind of in those early days it it got some traction uh got a lot of views relative to the size of the ecosystem at the time and guys like Carl Foster contacted me and because of that web page and so yeah it was a

I think it was uh actually turned out to be a very good use of my time uh back then I guess I didn't I didn't realize he was straight out so where did you just a bit of background and I guess I'm interested were you like an athlete initially and then got into sports science research or yeah you know I was as a typical I I call it is a different kind of bipolar but I was bipolar in the sense that I love sports I loved human you know activity I loved training I wanted to

be I wanted to play for the Dallas Cowboys American football team when I was little you know but then I also love science and and I had a I literally was given the the closet under the stairs so I had a laboratory so I had these two worlds of the nerd World of Science and in the this physical world of training in sports and they just kind of lived each their separate lives until I read a book it was a book chapter by Jim fix the the late Jim fix uh the complete Runner but there

was a book chapter towards the end of the book and it was called the scientists of sport and and just as soon as I saw the title I just wow you know and I read it and I was transfixed and it was basically it was actually a little joke yeah that wasn't well yeah I would like to say I yeah I thought of that but anyway uh it was really about David costell and the early days work of of establishing this the physiological model for endurance and so forth so that was the start and and

then I just started exercise science you know back in the early 80s late 70s early 80s these programs were springing up all over the country uh so we're part of that generation uh where exercise science became mainstream Sports Science exercise science Kinesiology it has different names but anyway but that's and at one point I was at the University of Arkansas the Razorbacks and they're a good you know Sports University and I called my dad and I said dad I I'm thinking about walking on to the football team you know and walking on means you try

to you try out without a scholarship uh and and my dad said Son do you think you have a legitimate chance of making a living playing the game of football and I said well no not really you know I have already kind of understand I'm not fast enough and I'm not big enough and he said well then I think you need to focus on your studies you know and so that was the end of the dream for me and but it was the start of a new dream start of a new process of trying to

understand Sports and understand the training process I really like the way you mentioned David costell there he is just I basically got a shiver up his phone because I'm um it's funny he saw Jim fix's book I was like a runner and I said A friend of mine was a physical education teacher and I saw this book of fox Matthews and I opened up and it was like wow what he could you know and they're talking about ATP and guys how do you mention that you know I want to do that you know and but

anyway I ended up with David costell during my masters you know and um I'm happy to say actually it was he was the first one I asked to come on the podcast and he didn't respond and it was he responds if I don't ask him about coming on the podcast you know if I send him other stuff in response but um anyway thankfully Scott trappy who's is so you know for people that don't know David's Castle started the Lost day Human Performance lab absolute Legend as you've already touched on anyway I had Scott trappy on

a couple weeks ago and um and I said to Scott yeah and he said oh well Dave asked me Dave said let me know how it goes so next thing Dave um you know emails me yeah come on so I'm pretty happy about that so he's going to come on come on that's great yeah yeah so that's definitely a legend he's definitely a legend all right so um now all right so what I wanted to say oh sorry can you just clarify again you've finished your PhD so tell me what tell me where did you

study and who's your supervisor yeah I was at the University of Texas at Austin so I had done my bachelor's and Masters at the University of Arkansas and then I went to the University of Texas at Austin I worked with a guy named Joe Starnes and my work was on I was doing isolated heart profusions uh so my Master's work I'd done I was using rats I was training rats both with steady state exercise and interval training I was doing an in-situ type procedure where you you know I was measuring cardiac output and it was

pretty I mean it was pretty fun it was you know trying to coax these this information from the in-situ procedure and and uh why I could go into stuff on that but anyway so then the next step for me was to go to UT Austin where they were doing the isolated heart method where I was extracting in the Heart from rats and then subjecting it to various you know perturbations and in my case it was oxidative stress you know in the 90s free radical oxidation was all the rage and and uh you know looking at

mitochondrial function looking at hypoxia reperfusion or ischemia reperfusion injury which happens in the heart you know during a heart attack or various you know heart heart transplant lots of situations so I was simulating that with my own work and published in you know Journal of Applied physiology in good journals on this field on this area but then I I kind of you reach this point where you have to say well either I'm gonna keep diving deeper and deeper into molecular biology or I'm going to go back to more systems physiology which was my kind of

My First Love from a standpoint of the David costell kind of thinking integrative yeah yeah yeah and so as fate would have it the decision was somewhat made for me because I met a woman from Norway at ACSM at the big Sports Medicine annual meeting and and ended up moving to Norway uh without a job but with a PhD and with with unbridled confidence that I would somehow land on my feet and uh but then that pushed me back towards systems physiology because Norway had a really strong tradition in endurance Sport and the physiology along

with you know you were in this area of Denmark Sweden Norway Sweden with with just all the you know uh olstron and saltine and and then you have the Copenhagen Research Center in August croak so there's a rich tradition in Scandinavia so it was easy for me to make that move and feel like well I'll figure this out and and there's great you know there's a lot of Competency here and so that's that's how worked out that's great yeah I agree with you on that one I'm about to do my fourth research visit to uh

University of Copenhagen with Eric Richter I love that we're on the August croak building so um I love that place so another six months but um I can't help thinking with your University of Austin Texas at University of Texas in Austin is that you must have been uh interesting that you had Andy Coggin and um and Eddie Coyle nearby and it could have been interesting or different if you'd ended up in that lab yeah now you know uh Andy was already done when I came in he was already finished and out uh but but Dr

Coyle was still there he was one of my teachers um at the time he taught uh had of course carbohydrate metabolism of course in cardiovascular uh exercise or cardiovascular function uh so he was definitely uh influential for me in learning and and and he had his style of course and and and you had John Ivey you had uh you know just Jack Wilmore so there was you know some pretty strong personalities in that group and and they weren't always there was some time we as PhD students we we understood that there were Rivals rivalries there

were there was inter it wasn't a happy team always but at the same time there was this Crucible of of interactions and learning you know through our interactions across Laboratories and lunchtime discussions and um it's a cool place to be as well right Austin Texas yeah it was great you know and so I I think I I'm very happy I had a wonderful advisor and supervisor in in Joe Starnes and great guy uh and at the same time you know I was able to challenge myself and and let's face it at the time Lance Armstrong

was being tested in the lab deck next door and then all of a sudden it's the the uh the Iraq War and chemical warfare suits are being tested down in the environmental Chambers you know so there was just all of this going on both you know early days uh metabolic studies or molecular biology and then there was systems physiology there was just everything happened in all all together so it was a great environment for just learning and and and seeing different possibilities right well that was kind of my a little bit of a segue here

so I've had Andy Coggin was actually the first person on the podcast in the end and uh so him and I go back a long way he he actually visited um so I was doing my PhD with Mark Hargreaves um at Melbourne uni and he came down and we you know trained together and things like this a bit here and there and then he was on a few weeks ago talking about zone two and you know is there anything special about zone two and uh all that sort of stuff now I just want to say

um I used to be a distance Runner I was never you know I was decent like 31 and a half 10K or something but no not Elite and I used to do just you know just oh hang on what's my dog Lisa um um I used to do sort of you know Monday easy Tuesday intervals Wednesdays sort of Hills a bit longer there's easy Friday intervals certainly easy Sunday a race and or long run and that seemed to be sort of what people did and then um you know saying with Andy Coggin uh I had

him on and as I said he he was sort of like he kind of says all Rosalie to Rome he thinks there's nothing special about different zones and things and also I had Michael Joyner on talking about sort of the history of um endurance training and he was sort of saying all words later on you know like whether you do mainly in a long slow distance and then or you know intervals or a bit of both you'll tend to end up with a similar VO2 max uh similar lactate threshold um similar economy you know if

you're a runner for example so anyway but to be honest I didn't actually know all that much about all these zones and things until I got started the podcast got on Twitter and I saw suddenly it was like if you're not doing zone two the the world's going to come to an end it's like what is all this about so I'd already had Andy on to talk about nitrates and exercise and then I had a mom saying you know there's nothing special about its own two and now I've got you on it didn't it didn't

actually work out because I I asked him and it just worked out it's quite close together and you've got the polarized training so I wonder if I could sort of you know there's a bit of an intro there uh uh get you to talk about these sort of concepts of polarized training um in a pyramidal training threshold training and even all the different zones and how they're different you know the zones one to three the zones zero yeah we'll fasten your seat belt let's do it let's do it uh um yeah so so I think

all of us who have done any kind of endurance sport have understood this have tried to figure out how do I how do I mix the different modalities the different intensities you know if I'd go hard today can I go hard again tomorrow you know and and even all the way back at the University of Texas there was a mixed bag of discussion and one of the master students I remember he he wrote an article for some track magazine and the title of the article was all intervals all the time you know so so the

whole range existed um and I have to I'm I'm just going to turn off one little function here so it doesn't interfere there we go um and and so this has been an area of debate going back way past you know to lydiard and and and way longer than that and uh so so it's always been part of our Corpus of of knowledge of trying to understand training well when I moved to Norway I had my understanding of training based on having read the body of Articles which were typically untrained to train transitions you know

because that's what you did as a sports scientist or exercise physiologist you recruited students uh physical education students or less you know or or just regular people and you had eight weeks because that fit into the spring semester or the fall semester I mean everything about our training intervention studies was shaped by the University City let's just be honest and because research on this was happening at universities and there was very little interaction between University sports science departments and the college athletics departments those I mean at the University of Texas even when I was there

in the 90s those we were in the same building but we didn't talk to each other you know the the the athletic department had their systems their stuff there and then you had the the Weasley Sports scientists who were just geeking out with untrained people or you know there was there was some train but you get my point yeah so we have this massive body of studies done saying yeah if you train at 75 80 heart rate Max around your lactate threshold three four days a week for eight weeks you get a nice Improvement in

VO2 max you get a solid Improvement lactate threshold it works and there that's indisputable uh and in fact if you take untrained people and you you expose them to training in 900 different genes will turn on that's a rough estimate based on uh a review but the problem is or the interesting thing is is that then if you look at trained you know if you get past that first six months or a year and you've trained for a year and now you do that same stuff well now only 80 genes turned on so we go

from 900 to 80. in it in six months to a year hey can I just interject is that at the same absolute or relative intensity yeah you can play that game it's but even at the same relative intensity it's a dramatic change sure in in the because the body adapts very quickly exercise is such a powerful stimulus so the point of that is to say that just like in Formula One you you're not going to design a Formula One race car based on the chassis of your family forward it doesn't scale up so you can't

take information from that that setting and scale it up that's why cars companies invest millions of dollars in a formula one setting because that Innovation environment leads to Downstream Innovation that ends up in the family car but the opposite is not true and I think we have a similar issue that we have a lot of data on untrained to trained transitions that don't it doesn't really translate to a setting where you have athletes that are already well trained but they're trying to squeeze out additional adaptations okay and so that was an you know I I

started seeing this and then when I moved to Norway uh you know I I came to a place that has a rich tradition and endurance sport you know I came from the United States where everybody wanted to know your bench press and your 40 meter sprint or 40 yard Sprint to a place where country skiing they would sit and watch a two hours cross-country skiing race or a 10 000 meter speed skating event or a cycling race that lasted six hours with just amazing enthusiasm and patience and understanding of the process and appreciation for how

the athletes developed and and so then and I started seeing these things and listening to what the coaches were saying about training and it was not jiving with what I had learned you know like for example a national the national team coach of the cross country skiing team Who had who he was coaching the greatest cross-country skiers in history you know Bjorn Daly with eight Olympic gold medals and 90 MLS per kg VO2 max and so forth uh Thomas allsgor you know the list goes on well and he writes in the paper in the newspaper

he says well we don't do very much threshold training because it's too much pain for too little gain [Music] this is number one this is in the paper so that you know just shows how interesting you know how many people talk about endurance sport in the in the in the sports pages in the United States well in Norway they do and then he says this very explicitly no we we don't train too much in Middle intensities we're training a lot either low intensity and then we're doing some Huntington so he's describing a distribution just as

a part of an interview in the in the newspaper and I'm thinking well that's that's interesting because that is very different from what I have been taught by this Corpus of of research studies and so I started digging into it and ultimately did uh you know early days um observational studies of Junior skiers and indeed that's what they were doing they were doing mostly low intensity and then they were doing some high intensity they weren't turning too much in the middle and and I coined this term polarized it was not just based on that data

but it was based on several studies that came out in that period from running and Rowing and uh and and then cross-country skiing and so I use this term back in 2004 was the first time so coming up on 20 years ago I introduced this term and and like every term it will quickly get used and abused and and it will take on a life of its own in the same way that zone 2 training has uh it it terminology has utility it has you know but if we don't all and interpret it the same

way you know then we get in in a into a problem but part of what in this model said was is that and and I stand by it 20 years later is that what we typically see with high performance endurance athletes that are highly successful across Sports modalities remarkably whether it's running cycling rowing cross-country skiing we see the same thing that there is this distribution where most of the training they do is below LT1 below that first lactate turnpoint and and and and if you look at Publications the physiological studies on training uh it what

we generally have is a three intensity zone model because we can with some degree of of confidence identify this first turn Point either using lactate or ventilation we can identify this second Turn Point lt2 or vt2 and then of course we can identify VO2 max so we have these three um demarcation lines that we can use as reference points for establishing some kind of an intensity Zone structure and so that's three intensity zones and and you say well where do where do the five and the six and the eight come from well they come from

attempts to add Nuance to that basic model to you know any kind of discussion of intensity zones is is in it should be a pedagogical tool you know it's a toolbox or it or a language or or a mental model for understanding so that the coach can then discuss with the athlete okay how are you training and and so what ends up happening like the Norwegian model and they've been very successful they said after the 80 80 88 Olympics where they did poorly they established Olympia tolpin which was this Olympic development uh program and they

one of the first things they did is said well we have to have a common language we have to agree on some intensity zones as because that's one of the typical discussions so if we're going to talk around the table and the rowing coach is going to talk with the cycling coach and the track coach then we're going to have to agree on some things and and intensity zones that I think that's been a success criteria for Norwegian endurance sport is just they they just said okay here's our model and and here's some of the

details and then they revamped it in 2020 and really dug into it and published some studies around it and so forth and they're so so that's been part of this idea is we need a shared mental model and in that they say well we can take the basic framework where LT1 and lt2 demarcate this middle intensity Zone that we often call threshold and then we can move over to below that first turn point and we can split that area into two okay so the low the the sub LT1 we can now have a Zone one

and a zone two and then once we get above LT1 that's we've now entered zone three and then when we pass lt2 we've moved into what would be zone three in the three zone model but now we're gonna we're gonna chop that into as well and create a zone four and a zone five okay and so so there's a little bit complicated a bit uh yeah but five zones just overlays on top of three zones with LT1 and lt2 is a common demarcation so the middle is the same and and but but a five zone

model just gives more Nuance in terms of yeah Zone one can be anywhere from there's a lot going in zone yeah it's a broad range it can be anywhere from I don't know 50 of yo2 Max 45.50 to to 75 80 percent so it's a pretty big stretch whereas the the lactate range is pretty is reasonably narrow in cycling it might be 50 to 75 Watts range from LT1 power to lt2 power and then you get above lt2 power which also gets called FTP it gets called critical power it gets called maximum lactate steady state

you know it's got a a bunch of different names and there's probably some very some Nuance in terms of what we're actually identifying there but the idea is essentially the same uh and so so when I was publishing this early day stuff on polarized training we just used a three zone model because that was the physiology and we said look Mo these athletes are mostly training in zone one yep sub LT one they're below the first leg day Turn Point that's all we said uh and and and then when we started collecting a lot of

data Olympia top and did a wonderful job of of collecting data on on world champion athletes I was involved in some publications of you know like 12. you had to be a gold medalist to be in the study you know and and there were 12 gold medalists in one study and then we're looking at their at their intensity distribution across the year of their gold medal their best performance and and it was very clear you know highly uh focused on just aerobic work below LT1 and then some work uh in the threshold and and higher

intensity ranges and so so that's what we saw now 20 years on there's been a lot of nice research others other people have looked at this and I remember uh uh stuggled uh and his colleague they did um I'm just forgetting the name right now but they did a review where they went in and they said you know what it's not always polarized you know the 80 part where about 80 of the training sessions are below the lactate the first turnpoint that seems to be very consistent but the way athletes are programming the 20 whether

it's more threshold and less uh above threshold or whether vice versa he says that varies and so I was a reviewer there on that paper on that review and I said hey you're on to something you know the polarized we're calling polarized we're calling everything polarized when it's not necessarily truly polarized and so they introduced a little bit in the middle yeah and they introduced the term pyramidal yep and I said yeah I think that's fair and so in in in in in recent years what we've seen and there's been subsequent Publications that have shown

that you know again very consistent on this low intensity component that it's big but either as a function of your sport or a function of where you are in your periodization uh you can see differences in that distribution of of the use of you might call it threshold intensity versus high intensity versus this you know that zone four five in in the five zone model and and and often what we see is that for athletes that are competing at very high intensity they they will tend to become more polarized during the season so as they

move from um preparation period to competition period their training intensity distribution will tend to shift a bit towards a polarized distribution even more polarized the easy sessions will be even easier in the hard sessions harder and this this fits with I guess what what people were thinking years and years ago as well is it is it you you build up your base Etc you you do other training but as you get near your races you tend to cut back on the volume and do more well maybe that doesn't fit with that I was just saying

you tend to do more intensity you do but if we look at some of the great Runners and athletes that we have data on yes there is a decrease in volume the the question may be whether it's a function of that they have to decrease because of their trainings their racing schedule so you know it's a little bit of a chicken and AG weather the volume decrease is a functional change that helps them elicit better performance or whether it is just a uh obligatory difference that is a function of their racing schedule because let's face

it uh modern high performance athletes they are racing a lot um you know and and so they're traveling and once they hit the racing calendar they're basically going from weekend to weekend racing which forces them to to move into more of a recovery mode as during the midweek and and so forth so yeah but but volume does tend to go down that's that's a a a very typical periodization we see into the competition period and then the other is this shift towards more of a polarized model at least in F among athletes doing uh the

really high intensity stuff you know it may be a less true for cyclists and triathletes that are competing over so many hours you know that they're going to hold their volume pretty high so this is interesting a couple of things I was thinking about when we're talking so when I had Michael Jordan on um he was saying uh is it's a thing I really liked that he said he was talking about how all roads lead to Rome yeah but then then when I said that he said well it's actually more like all roads lead to

Tokyo so I don't know if you've heard so the 5 000 meters of Tokyo and Bob Shaw won and he was mainly doing like intervals just intervals twice a day every day that's what Michael Jordan said and then the person that got second was not far behind was was sort of long slow distance and then first we got third um you know they were all quite similar was it was a mixture right so he was sort of saying all those lead to Rome or actually to Tokyo um and that was interesting but he also said

it kind of like what he was saying as well is it even people that you tend to think of oh they were long slow distance they would actually race quite often so they'd be getting that so they'd probably be your polarized because right even though you tend to say oh they don't do any hard stuff no they're racing every weekend you know so they're getting it during the races right yeah but I guess an interesting thing I think is and it's funny enough I had a guy called Pope Mosley on just um last week he's

he's did a lot of heat shot protein back in the day and I don't know if you know Carl gazalfi he was a big researcher on yeah got a lot of heat heat stuff yeah Heat and the gut and absorption he had the triple Lumen thing yeah anyway they he he was saying he met Carl gazal because they were doing intervals they're in and they just did intervals all the time that's all they did you know and that was in the 70s or something so I'm wondering what you think about is that is that sort

of moved away you know people that used to do so it was sort of like the you know no pain no gain type thing right um you know yeah so so then you know if I go back to my early Publications and you know they've been sad a lot and it's about what is the distribution and and then but we weren't asking or we weren't able to answer the question why if this works if this kind of polarized model and works instead of doing more work in the middle and kind of getting more bang for

your buck at middle intensities why is this happening you know what's the mechanisms that are at play and and I think now 20 years on we've really got some interesting data to help us understand that but then you have to look at training as instead of a maximization process it's an optimization process because on the one hand the coach and athlete they are hobby molecular biologists they are trying to induce molecular signals which will elicit very specific adaptations increases in protein synthesis mitochondrial proteins structural development of capillaries you know literally building these structures in the

in the around weaved in and out of the muscle fibers and then of course uh a change in myocardial function both basically what we would call this eccentric hypertrophy and an increase in blood volume so there's some very specific adaptations centrally and peripherally they're all happening in concert and and the and it is a function of molecular signaling which you of course have worked with yourself and with one of the particular you know the you might say the energy charge sensor of ampk uh there that's one of the you know the the sensors that we

have for this process so that's on the one side but what we also see and what we also have to really understand to make sense of all this is that every time we train more or less we are stressing the body we are gen we are creating a stress response at the systemic level autonomic nervous system activation immune function uh depression um Implement inflammatory processes and so forth and and now when we start looking at this more carefully what we see is that the low intensity work that we do seems to elicit a lot of

cellular signaling it it we have Pathways like the calcium cow module independent pathway that is the calcium sensitivity is just more is better and it it keeps you know it responds as the athlete gets fitter there's higher calcium over longer periods so it's kind of not it's not feedback inhibited in the same way that ampk is and so on that side we've got all that going but then on the on the high intensity side we we elicit cortisol you know responses and autonomic nervous system is is is stressed and so athletes end up having a

managed signal versus stress and I would argue that what what's actually being polarized and and this is what I end up writing in this book chapter what I think is actually being polarized or you know managed is stress okay [Music] signaling I do think yes our body's Evolution has equipped us with some wonderful Co-op co-opting of various metabolites to create as signals right or or various aspects of of metabolism they get co-opted in a way that gives us a redundant signaling system you know there's reactive oxygen species calcium energy charged ATP to amp ratio and

so forth all of these seem to have signaling functions uh thanks to evolution but at the same time you know if we really go into it if you want to be successful as an athlete you got to stay healthy you have to be able to train a lot which means you have to recover essentially on a 24-hour cycle that's the basic cycle of of stress and Recovery now that doesn't mean it's every day because when we do these hard sessions we we extend that recovery time frame and so we have to build in we have

some of these days where we really push the body we elicit a big stress response that we have to build in more recovery time while staying active and so um it seems that what we what athletes have kind of converged on from different modalities different histories different you know this uh external conditions and so forth is a fairly similar solution to this problem with this optimization problem which is you know you can't train hard every day you can you need to use both duration and intensity you know we have these three levers as coaches and

athletes what do we have we've got training frequency we've got training intensity and we've got training and duration that's it once you once you choose your modality those are the three levers that you can manipulate in an optimization process right and the data seems pretty clear that over a fairly large range frequency matters and volume matters that that more frequency and more training volume is associated with a greater adaptive response now it is not linear and it is not forever you know it's a it's a law of diminishing return but the data is both on

amateurs and and Elite over years of development there is this clear tendency that as they do more volume their vo to Max goes up there initially but then later other adaptations continue to occur yo to Max Peaks pretty early for endurance athletes yeah 19 years old you'll often see they're already at their highest view to Max but they're not at their most competitive because that comes as they continue to develop to develop their uh fractional utilization their efficiency and those those processes seem to take longer so there's a a Time dependent process here but you've

got to stay healthy and you've got to stay motivated and you've got to be able to do the work and I think that is how we end up with this polarized model is that you it's sustainable I ask a few things there yeah that that's that makes sense just wondering have all of these things been shown I know you said you know what happens in the world isn't always the same as what happens in the lab and I'm very aware that um when you get trained athletes for example in the lab they are often not

as good as you know they're not only but I'm just wondering it makes sense to me that if you did say intervals every day twice a day you'd break down and especially money but like the cycling is there evidence for example that you know you're saying that activating the sympathetic nervous system over and over you know you're gonna break down is there evidence of that you know that the sympathetic nervous system stays elevated or or something like that if you're cycling I could see running because you're doing what yeah well you're in your contrast in

running and cycling because the one has all this ballistic or eccentric work so you have this mechanical load in addition to the metabolic and and otherwise whereas cycling doesn't but the reality is is a good test of this is uh The three-week Grand Tour you know where athletes the best cyclists in the world that's the that's the mecca is they get to go to the Tour de France or zero the tour of Italy or the Vuelta those are the big three three weeks essentially every day they get a couple of rest days but even on

the rest days they'll cycle for a couple of hours easy just to kind of keep the system going uh but what happens well particularly among the the domestics the help the the the helpers who are pushing every day they're grinding their their maximum heart rate goes down dramatically yeah you know I mean up up to 20 Beats per minute by the end of a tour there they can't reach anywhere close to maximum heart rate that they had pre-tour you know fresh so there is pretty clear evidence that we get uh we can get this parasympathetic

hyperactivity and and this has also been done in structured uh studies where they use you know try to induce overreaching and then you get some that have what we call functional overreaching and some that will have a non-functional overreaching uh and and but what we see across the board is when they're in this overreaching state heart rate is reduced at essentially all intensities so so the brakes are on okay maximum heart rate is reduced but also sub Max and this is what gets tricky when athletes and coaches try to interpret heart rate responses because heart

rate can both go you know you can let's say I do a hard um a single hard string session and then the next day I'm working out and my heart rate's a bit high this is very normal you know heart rate's a bit elevated but it's also very normal in fact it's even more normal according to asking a thousand athletes which I did on Twitter is the more normal responses they'll say ah the brakes are on my heart rate is too low it's 10 beats too low and I'm tired and you know and so that's

this typical response is the the brakes come on well how do you get how do you fix that you rest you recover you go low intensity and so so you build in these cycles of of push and then recover but recovery is not on the sofa recovery is happening while still inducing signals using low intensity right so they're doing the work but they're not they're not going to do a new big stimulus on the sympathetic nervous system or a new big hit on these stress responses until they've had some recovery time so they're kind of

playing something about that my first thought when you say about the Tour de France is they people tend to get stronger um during the tour of fun maybe not the domestics that are doing the now you can picture Yen's bolt you know shut up legs sort of thing just logging himself to death but but often the the actual winners uh Stronger at the end is that is that fair to say I'm not sure but there is uh you got to remember Everything's Relative so you're comparing against but but you're protected Riders your your GC candidates

they are being protected the whole race so what you see is they are able to be polarized they're able to do certain stages essentially just just coasting I mean coasting for them right whereas the domestics what are they doing man they're out in front pulling pressing you know working threshold plus every day so they're get they're in a functional overreaching protocol at the expense of their of their GC candidates who are being protected and so yeah it's it's possible for the GC candidate to come into the tour slightly undercooked yeah and then they use the

first week of the tour which traditionally tended to have some flat stages they would use that to kind of just get in the game and then they would bring it on towards the second and third weeks where they were into the Pyrenees and so forth so there now that's kind of changing now because of the nature of the racing it's getting harder to make it even more aggressive all the time yeah the other thing I thought of was um you know Victoria University where where I was I basically have left from an Emeritus Professor there's

no so David Bishop is there I remember he he wanted to look at mitochondrial um you know function and biogenesis and wanted to see with over training you know he assumed that you'd get a reduction in mitochondrial function and things like that so you got people in that were trained already and then he trained them like just added like hit trading twice a day I think it was for like three weeks or something just wanted to screw them up basically and see what happens in the mitochondria they got better they mitochondria got better so and

I remember also I think John Hawley and I just started something similar where they they got people in and they just got better you know so I'm just wondering I'm not saying I'm not I'm kind of been a bit of a devil's advocate I guess I'm just trying to keep popping my head I'm just throwing them out there um what do you think about that I guess well again I think you have to separate the local adaptation from the systemic strain and so you it's all about sustainability so I think athletes or subjects can be

pushed through pretty much anything for for four weeks yeah exactly yeah but that's not what athletes do you know so how many how many workouts will an elite or a high performance athlete do hundreds in a year you know even an average yeah even an age grouper is going to do 150 training sessions training three days a week now if you're training six to seven days a week my my daughter is a runner she'll take a rest day every second third week you know so it's almost daily training and and and some of them are

doing twice a day training so there can be 500 sessions in a year 600 sessions in a year among triathletes okay so that is a different situation yeah I totally understand that uh-huh now what about I I try and keep it simple I guess is is you know it's always been hard day easy day hard day easy day do people really because I forget the feeling people are like oh I better I've got to work out my lactate threshold you know I've got to like go into the lab and work out where's my lactate threshold

one where's my lactate threshold two now can they just do so hard easy Hardy No which is what I used to do you know had an easy day um or do you think it does need to be and again I guess I want another thing I want to talk about is I saw your Ted Talk where you're saying you know that that your average person can train like a like an early athlete so I want to bring that in as well like yeah it was trying to be a bit motivating to the to because it

because I think I also did a a bit of a I was asked by Adidas to to help with a a launch of a shoe aimed at at uh beginning runners and and in both cases the point of all that was to say that you know one of the best ways to kill off the enthusiasm of an untrained person that's been sitting on the sofa that you want to help if they go out too hard they get told by some personal trainer no pain no gain and all this and what do they do after two

weeks they're back on the sofa because it was just a it was just a horrible experience the worst thing is they have these things you know the biggest loser or whatever I don't know if you have that yeah they get them in there and they just take them to the gym and just kill them they just beat the crap out of them or something like so so I tend to you know in recent years I've said look here's how you do this if you want to help people uh you start with frequency you just you

start with saying all right what are you willing to give what what do you have time you've got three kids you've got a job what is a sustainable uh investment and and that person is hey I'm I'm able to do this three times a week great okay so let's start there and let's get you out the door out the door that is just like in in metabolisms that that enzyme kinetics you know it's it's that first push that is the hardest right and so is if we can get them out the door and then they

say yeah but how hard do I go I don't don't worry about it walk jog a bit do something whatever just get out the door and now we do that for two or three weeks and we're starting to establish what a habit we're starting to establish the brain is starting to get used to this and then I say all right how you doing three days a week you're consistent have you been able to do this yeah all right now you're ready to increase the duration a bit what's your duration been ah 20 30 minutes awesome

okay so one of those three days a week I want you to we're going to start stretching it slowly with the goal of reaching 60 minutes okay you know and then we go four three four more weeks in five weeks and it slowly build out the duration a bit and then we say all right how you doing still waking up every day ready to go enjoying training rest able to sleep yeah I'm handling this okay now on one of those three days you remember you know that Hill that you always that is by your house

all right we're going to use that as an interval training Arena I'm gonna have you run up that hill and then come back down and run up it again we're going to do that six times and then you'll keep going okay that sounds scary yeah but it's going to be good and and so now we've introduced some high intensity are you with me so it's frequency duration intensity as the cherry on top and and that works and that's what athletes do as well but unfortunately what often happens when the untrained person goes out they get

their personal trainer they go to the 50 cents that's too much exactly they flip it on his head they flip it on his head because the personal trainer doesn't feel like they're used they're not doing their job yeah exactly unless they've got a whip all right come on no anyway so that I totally agree yeah so you know you don't need a personal trainer to be with you out in the forest for two hours I think it's probably come up on every second podcast we just need people to be doing something that's the problem yeah

that's the population my problem because Evolution has equipped us with a remarkable adapt adaptability at that low intensity range you know you can take what is it uh David Lieberman I think is the name that's done all the work on on on the hunting process you know the the what do you call it persistence hunting so that's kind of in our genes that we're we have their responsiveness to that to that steady low intensity aerobic work yeah so Okay so we've managed to get we probably haven't done a podcast this long and we haven't mentioned

80 20 yet so I guess if we're talking about polarizing we're talking about uh 80 percent easy yeah so and this is where again I saw someone said Zone zero so you need to explain Zone zero to me somewhere that hasn't come up but well you know I I've in this book chapter I'm right and I've tried to create I've used some zones and I said yeah obviously there there must be a too low intensity so sitting here now is Zone zero right yeah I think yeah I can't I don't think this is Zone one

we're doing now and so we have to you know and it's probably a moving scale for a high for a very untrained person maybe even 40 45 percent of eo2 Max is enough to get some adaptive benefit for in the first two weeks you know what I'm saying and then and then that that lower end moves up but we have to also remember now because we are we typically will gauge intensity as a percentage of VO2 max right and so now when I take a highly trained athlete with a very high VO2 max so their

cardiovascular system is maxed out they've got huge plasma volume they've got a huge stroke volume they can deliver a lot of oxygen so when they're at 50 60 percent of their VO2 max their the metabolic flux that they're able to sustain for hours and hours is huge compared to the the low untrained with with two and a half three liters of VO2 you know so that we have to keep that in mind that we're using VO2 max as our calibration for intensity um but that can lead to some misunderstandings of metabolic flux of what we're

at you know the the volume of and the signal inducing power of even 50 60 percent of vo2max for these highly trained athletes uh and and that tends to as the athlete moves from untrained to train that plays in is is 50 it's 50 of a bigger flux it gets complicated so I started touching on it but I think I went off on a tangent about testing people so you know just just make sure people are clear on this so as you start training you increase your vo to Max but you also increase what percent

of your vo to Max you can hold right so it's shifting that's what you're basically saying right so the uv2 Max has gone up but also what so if people are trying to do this because you know people go oh do I need to go and have a lactate threshold test I mean I'd like to think that you're not in car I don't know if it was your mouth I'd like to think that that maybe that's just a bit you know too much because yeah I don't think I'm not trying to sell people say hey

you need to get to your local University in in and get your lactate tested or you need to invest in a lactate meter if you want to you can uh I have done that up in my pain cave or whatever you want to call it my my laboratory basically yeah but I would say no that's not what we're trying to say however understanding that physiology then makes it possible for us to try to give you a give our our people some a toolbox of surrogate indicator that help them and and I always talk about you've

got this triangle of monitoring you've got one you you know as Andy Coggin helped bring into the fore you've got power you can actually just measure external load the the running Athlete on the track or on a very you know on a on a consistent service they can just use speed and so forth so the external load is certainly relevant but we've got to connect that to some physiology and from the 70s we've had heart rate as one of those tools blood lactate is a possible tool ventilation now is moving into the four as a

possible tour that we can move that out of the lab and so forth and then we've got that third part of the triangle which is what it's just this it's perception it's perceived exertion it's a it's a well-calibrated brain that can feel how things are going and when we put those three together we get a kind of checks and balances system uh you know that's I learned that term from from government class or civics class back in ninth grade that in a well-functioning democracy you have checks and balances among the different forms of government or

the parts of the government well it's kind of the same way in training monitoring so now do I have to measure blood lactate no but but now I know that if I'm if I prescribe to you hey I want you to run for easy for 90 minutes I want you here's what I'm going to say you should be at an intensity where you can actually be looking externally your brain can be enjoying the scenery you can be talking to your you know talking to your mate so you've got I've got both this idea that the

brain is not having to squeeze down and concentrate because the intensity is so high that's very typical I'm telling them that they should the talking test is implicit because they can be having a bit of a conversation now you're not going to jabber all day all the time but you can talk in in sentences and and you feel like it works with your breathing so that's a secondary measure and then I'm going to say you've got if you've got your heart rate monitor on then that heart rate once you've warmed up and gone gotten 15

minutes in and core temperatures up and everything it should be a pretty flat stable heart rate it shouldn't be just drifting up up so I'm giving them some surrogate indicators because I here's the problem that the one thing that's missing from once you're well trained in that is when you go out and run for 90 minutes and you stay disciplined you don't get the huge endorphin kick right whereas when you nudge up into the threshold I think you get a higher endorphin kick and so it feels more stimulating but if you do that every day

then you got you end up with some challenges in in terms of recovery and so that's the thing when you talk to athletes they they'll say well you know I'm not getting an endorphin kick every day because it's I'm just doing the work but on a six hour ride we'll stop and have a cappuccino and we're laughing it up we're we're having we're enjoying what we're doing in different ways but we're kind of past that stage where every day is an endorphin key where we do this for a living that's that's a bit of a

that's a bit of a thing that annoys me because even when I was a runner so I'll be running on a 100K 60 miles or 80 miles a week I reckon I had like the runner's high thing I reckon I had it like once ever maybe twice it's more of those just like sizzling up a hill and I was like I couldn't get the smile up my face like I was doing your repeats and I'm like smiling I was like this is just awesome they're burying your teeth you're not smiling you're bearing your teeth and

I know this is smarting I couldn't because people are driving it was it was dark and I was running uphill and the cars were coming back the other way and I thought they're just gonna think oh man I'm smiling running up the hill so I think that's the only time I had around this High thing but I don't know otherwise with all the intervals and things um right now one thing all right I got to ask you this because I did an interval session two days ago and uh and I haven't been doing really high

intensity intervals I haven't been doing been doing them in a way that that I felt the other day and here's what I felt and I bet you'll remember this the taste of blood in your mouth right do you remember those sessions where you could actually taste what tasted a bit like blood I guess you don't remember that a metallic taste in your mouth the other taste and then the other thing I had was I had some pulmonary issues I was coughing after that workout and and and those are two interesting phenomena that say something about

when we're really on that ragged Edge and I had to look up I said why do you get this metal taste and at least the consensus is is that you get a bit of pulmonary edema and that you at the alveolar level you may have some blood blood cells that are getting ruptured and then you get hemoglobin a bit of hemoglobin leakage and so then you get the iron taste that's the that's the you know argument for blood it tastes but the thing about this is and also with the pulmonary edema and the coughing probably

also due to some scraping of endothelial cells and so forth both of those are happening at really high intensity but they both are very common when you're not well trained but as you get trained well trained it doesn't happen right because the fitness level is high enough that we're not going that deep we're not getting that really tough pulmonary response we're not getting that and so I was like wow I haven't tasted blood in my mouth in a long time that was tough it just tells me I haven't been doing this kind of interval and

there's probably a good reason because I'm 57 I don't want to do this very often you know but it says something about how deep you can go you know and and I'm sure when you raced when I raced in rowing man I would be coughing up a lung after a lungs I would I would get what do you say because you mentioned Jerry Dempsey's podcast um that you've seen was that before we started recording I can't remember was that during the podcast what's that people we started I can't remember he said you saw Jerry Dempsey's

um and he was yeah I just heard his big yeah the horses yeah yeah yeah so we didn't wear a nasal strip unlike humans saying you should horses actually have a rationale to wear a nice trip yeah because they got this big long long you know anyway so I love comparative physiology and Jerome Dempsey was getting into some of those weeds as well yeah okay another thing I've thought of is um you know how you said pretty much every event they tend to do polarizing but you did touch on some pyramidal um you know yeah

absolutely but um what about swimmers though they tend to do the high intensity stuff the whole time like intervals no that's not true that's not true maybe not the whole time I check you on that because man swimmers do such high volumes in fact I would almost argue what I don't get is that even the sprinters the 50 meter Specialists if you look at how they're training you would say that's not how sprinters on the track do that's they look more like endurance athletes because they do so much volume a lot of high intensity intervals

though back to David costell David remember David costell got half that was when I was there he got half the Ball State swim team to to do like just one session or a day instead of two and a half but then you'll probably say it's because of the short term um anyway they they did as well or better doing the I would say two things one number one the the one endurance sport that I have kind of stayed away from has been swimming because it is it is different and I think there is some tradition

of functional or non-functional overreaching it's almost built into their programs that they're they will tend to train the athlete on the assumption that they need to push them pretty deep into a state of of fatigue and then they get this as well yeah they do yeah so they do a long taper a big super compensation effect and there's been a number of studies that have really put a lot of question marks around that whole thing is do you need that can we demonstrate it doesn't seem to make sense yeah no it doesn't you know but

it's so deeply into in in entwined in the in the in the Mystique of swimming so I'm I'm actually gonna I've been asked to give a lecture in September for like American swimming coaches association so I'm going to fly over and talk for two lectures and you know I'm going into this den of of of cultural bias towards what they've been doing and so I said look I you know I'm I'm I don't do swimming research but I'll do the best I can so it should be fun now with the 80 20 thing again um

I have to admit I was actually thinking it was uh the time that you're actually exercising but it's not it's the it's this it's the number of can you see is it the number of sessions so if you're doing five sessions you'd say you do four yeah so let's let's unpack that a little bit so back in 2004 and 2006 when we did this stuff we you know we we use the categorical model where we said all right what was the intent of the session and was it executed according to that intent and then we

would Place their training sessions over 400 sessions among these 11 athletes at the time in these different categories and then looked at the distribution so we were looking at it from from a categorical session goal approach not from a Time approach and then subsequently I had pH a PhD student who uh went to Elite Training Camps with cross-country skiers and they were unaware of the actual intent of This research and so we were able to get you know data on how they were training uh and whether or not they were training as prescribed and then

we were able to do a bit of a a a conversion process and so what we saw was that 80 20 based on session converted to like 90 10 based on time in zone you know because long low intensity sessions tend to be longer and even when you're doing a high intensity session you've got warm-up time and cool down time so the time in zone that accumulates below LT1 it can be in it can be 90 of totals 90 so it loaded and only ten yeah so based on time and Zone you can get end

up with 90 10 even though you're doing 80 20 based on training sessions you with me okay so it does depend on how you uh how you measure this what are you measuring and and the other interesting thing to think about is that um what we see is that sometimes uh highly trained athletes will choose to concentrate their hard work whether it's long threshold session high intensity intervals whatever it might be concentrated on one day in you know and and make the hard day harder but then they will protect the recovery time they will make

sure that the low intensity is is they're well disciplined on maintaining low intensity in the subsequent days because they they know they're going to need about 48 hours maybe even 72 to fully recover from that so we've seen athletes like one of the best examples is you know currently is quite well known as Jacob Inga britson family and Inga britson is the big 1500 meter Runner who also has the 1248.5 okay you could probably run a 10K under 27 if you needed to but they would sometimes do a race you know and then say well

we've done the warm-up we've won we've we've activated a stress response let's get more out of this day individuals after the race yeah they would do an interval session after a race that he did he had won it was this idea is I want to protect my recovery yeah do more work hard work hard but then I'm going to make sure that I'm disciplined I'm protecting uh the recovery instead of breaking it up and having kind of hard here and another kind of hard tomorrow and then you know so that's where athletes get in trouble

is they interject too much intensity and then it and then it becomes kind of kind of amazing because it's kind of boring right when you go I used to like the intervals you know I used to be bored during the easy run I did put music on the the thing that's funny when you say about doing I definitely have got um the last 10 years or whatever it's made sense I've heard people about saying make your easy days easier make it hard days harder because I know I used to ride to work and back to

Melbourne Union to BU and everything so it was 16 20 KZ 20 whatever it was the thing was you're always like racing a jelly because all the guys are writing to work you know testosterone and whatever you'd all be racing and I realized hang on I'm I'm going like pretty hard morning and night every day of the week yeah you know but I'm not going like really I'm never going like really really hard and I'm never going easy so I was always sort of you know and this is they call it you know this moderato

you you land and and years ago I was I used to call this the black hole intensity kind of it because your low intensity days tend to get sucked in towards middle intensity because it's just like you're saying you tend to start half Wheeling each other you get competitive and then you're not really recovered so your high intensity days move a little bit down and so you land you you end up in this kind of black hole intensity and and there is research that is shown both in horses and in humans that that's a great

way to induce stagnation and over training it's just I keep going back to what you were saying about long you get strong for us yeah you end up stronger than the other guys you know because you're just competitive and you're pushing it but you don't end up maybe as strong as you would if you were well you get strong compared to the other guys because they aren't doing that aren't really good the other guys that are also doing that same thing so you know that you got to decide what you want to compare yourself with

can I exactly you're gonna think do I want to be the guy that wins the race to work or do I want to be the guy that Windsor race on the weekend um the thing I want to ask you sorry I keep getting back to my own running but my mentality was okay if I'm doing a 10k race right I want to train around that speed and I know that's what you remember the name Derek Clayton he was Australian yeah yeah so Australian I like talking about do you have the marathon record for years yes

of 1969 he went to eight thirty three in 1969 that wasn't broken until Alberta Salazar to 8 18 in 1981. but anyway the famous thing there was that apparently he used to we actually tested him in 1990 when when David costell came back to do a follow-up of testing all these great Runners so he tested Derek Clayton in 1969. the 1990 he came over here and we Max tested Eric Clayton but the point was supposedly Derek Clayton ran most of his running was it his marathon Race pace so he was always so his thinking was

kind of like my thinking but a lot this impressive was that you know if I'm going to be racing so just say let's make it easy 35 minutes for 10K well shouldn't I run you know around that so a bit so a bit harder and maybe if I'm a 35 minute 10K Runner maybe I should do my intervals at 34 minutes and a lot of people do like really faster than that you say well what's the logic of that that's more sort of anaerobic type intervals so I remember there used to be we'd be doing

400s and he's all these guys will be blowing me away on the on the on the you know the training but then I'd blow them away on the race on the weekend because I'd be sort of trying to do these aerobic animals sort of thing so anyway I guess that's threshold type training you know and and I I guess you're saying that's something that you don't feel like you don't need that you need really fast really slow or not okay not really slow it just you're you're slow and really hard and you don't really need

to do anything around is hard hard depends on the situation because remember intensity does not live in a vacuum intensity only has meaning when you attach a duration to it so like one of my one of my PhD students said look threshold running at threshold when you're really well trained is hard because you are well trained enough to hold 88 90 for a long time you know it is tough and so I said all right yeah let's I want you to be my PhD student you know so that because he was kind of arguing a

bit against this idea of just pure polarization and and so I think it's become more nuanced in saying that that look A Heart a threshold session is hard it's not easy it and in fact because again it's intensity times duration so it's more an issue of how you are combining those and generating that stimuli and the stress but once you pass LT1 once you get into threshold plus you know for example we we looked at this using heart rate variability we had well-trained orientiers and Runners do four different kinds of workouts they did a low

intensity for 60 Minutes low intensity for two hours then a threshold session and then a typical I think it was six times four minute interval sessions or six times five I can't remember exactly but it was a you know a typical VO2 max interval session so we did four different sessions and then we looked at their heart rate variability recovery after so we had resting heart rate variability and then how did it recover and what we saw was in these well-trained athletes man two hours at low intensity blood lactate one millimolar rpe 11 10 11.

their heart rate variability actually super compensated within 10 minutes I mean it was just like and they would say oh I feel better after the workout than I did before but as soon as they hit threshold intensity blood lactate 2.5 to 3 millimolar for those guys and and then also for the high intensity it was the same delayed heart rate variability recovery response it there was no it was indistinguishable between the threshold session and the high intensity interval session you with me so there seemed to be a bipolar response not a tri-polar or you know

what I'm you with me I I would have kind of expected low intensity has this reaction High uh threshold here and and and then high intensity but wasn't that way is once you crossed into that sympathetic activation response then we were not able to distinguish you know and we published this in like 2007 and it's been cited hundreds and hundreds of times but um and I think it's been consistently reproduced so so the point of all that is to say that when we're thinking about training intensity I after 20 years I would almost say it

ends up kind of being a buy a bipolar deal you're either using an extensive session low lactate low stress response using duration to your favor or you are using a high stress high intensity approach where intensity times duration is going to create a pretty strong sympathetic nervous system response but you're you're gonna you want that because you want the signals that come with it right so you're managing that those two approaches and then the distribution seems to be something like 80 20. now is 80 20 a straight jacket it is a is it a golden

number no it's a it's a a typical range and depending on where you are in the season and your individual how you recover your age and so so forth it can be a bit different but that gives you a a it gives you I would call guard rails as a starting point you know like guard rails on a windy road going downhill you still got to drive the car but it'll keep you from going off the cliff if you make a mistake yep okay um I realized I also kind of convoluted what I was saying

so what Derek Clayton would do was he'd do all his running at sort of about his base space yeah yeah so that would be doing a 10 mile run or did he really you know well that's that's supposedly that's what I mean I did say surprise before because well I don't always record all those easy runs what I meant with my that's true with my threshold stuff as I was saying I would say okay let's run up my 10K Pace or just slightly under but do you know a minute and then have a recovery and

then do another minute so I just I just want to clap what I mean now something that came up with when Andy was on was this sort of concept you see again on on Twitter where people were like you can't do high intensity because as soon as you have lactic acid produced it's going to inhibit fat oxidation and um you know and also you'll never get back again or it takes ages to come back again because you know it takes a long time to reset your metabolism and Andy was was saying that that's not actually

true so during his PhD or maybe in later he just sort of like five minutes hard five minutes easy five minutes hard and the fat oxidation is you know when obviously when he went harder fell off station went down because he would burn more carbohydrate when you're going harder but then it within you know minutes it was sort of back and then it was up and also that the George Brooks had papers showing that if you do a lactate plant so if you're exercising at a low intensity but you infuse lactate so that it's you

know three or five I'm not sure what it was but it was only four three and a half four millimole that didn't actually reduce fat oxidation it didn't um it didn't uh reduce it didn't affect it free for the acid levels it didn't affect your um glycerol so it's indicating your rate of the policies so that release just wondering what you think about that because that became a bit of a thing on Twitter where yeah you know I'm with I'm with Andy for sure on that and we published a study in in cooperation with uh

some colleagues from New Zealand where we looked at interval training and what we saw was with really well-trained athletes if we you know you have you have assumptions when you're using respiratory exchange ratio to try to make some sense out of carbohydrate and fat but we we looked at you know made some corrections in that what we saw was man these these well-trained endurance athletes are still uh metabolizing a lot of fat even during a high intensity interval session you know they they are like you say fat fat oxidation is still happening they they have

such good metabolic control yes there is blood lactate you know the blood lactate is elevated but they're still oxidizing fat to a great much greater extent than the the Lesser trained athlete so so I the data we have on that is completely consistent with what Andy is saying uh Inigo son Milan has you know kind of I suppose with others is popular popularized This this term zone two training I think what indigo is trying to say is that he's trying to argue that well you don't want to be way down on the lowest end of

Zone one or the that green zone or sub LT1 you need you want to be kind of up towards lt2 so that's basically what he's saying is you know we're uh towards LT1 you want to be excuse me so if your LT1 is 225 Watts that's about where I'm at then you know you may be at 200 Watts not at 140 right that's that's that zone two conceptualization is that I'm still in that green area I'm still in that sub threshold range sub LT1 but I'm not late I'm not way down here where I'm just

you know not getting anything out of it so and and that's been turned into this biblical kind of value and then you say well where does LT where does Zone one end and zone two begin we don't have data on that um maybe maybe inigos or Milan would say well I can look at it from a perspective of of glycolysis and fat metabolism and the interact or the the total you know between them maybe that's how he's approaching it yeah because people have ended up thinking if if I go outside zone two I get lactate

and that's going to stuff up my fat oxidation and I won't be able to burn fat not burn up use up all my glycine during my races and things like that and that that to me that's not really I I would argue for a different reason is that hey you know don't don't let every easy workout turn into a threshold session because you're you know you end up having to race your friend up a hill and then you do a Sprint and then you have something yeah yeah yeah it's more about that is is maintaining

some discipline and keeping keeping easy easy and hard hard and over 500 or 300 500 training sessions that does seem to make a difference so it's for me it's more about managing stress uh I I do think there's some interesting data like David Bishop has done some work that suggests that yeah very high lactate or high or low PH may have some inhibitory effects and and what we've found with Elite athletes is they tend to self-manage when they're doing the so-called high intensity interval or they tend to be you might say in zone four not

zone five there if if we they're above lt2 but not very far above this is sort of Sweet Spot people talk about is it yeah oh so don't get me started Sweet Spot it's the most misused terms it's it's it's so misused because if you ask when I ask people yeah what's Sweet Spot then it's somewhere between uh Zone one and zone three at all three all three of the zones you know it can be below LT1 it can be slightly above lt2 depends on who you ask so I do not use that term good

um okay now one thing I wanted to are you okay for time yeah um well we're in it now man cool well I want to keep going so uh you mentioned the David Bishop so the idea uh that you mentioned earlier about are doing volume so frequency and volume is more important than intensity for mitica I think that's what you said that you need the volume to get the increase in mitochondria but what about the the sort of Mardi Kabbalah stuff with the hit where it seems like you get similar increases in citrate synthase depends

on a bit of more with the high intensity and you mentioned the calcium so the calcium transients are going to be bigger with the high intensity so these things that turn on mitochondrial biogenesis but but you've shown also you have published work with ampk yes showing what happens that the the fold change in am in in signaling goes rapidly down in in the course when you train right so the problem with ampk are not you know it's it's an important uh signaling pathway but it has feedback inhibition so that as we get better metabolic control

as we produce less amp because let's face it when you're getting a lot of amp it means you have poor metabolic control you're working at high intensity and you're decharging ATP is so robustly conserved and protected so the the change in ATP is 10 to 15 percent but the relative change in amp is huge in that untrained person doing a high intensity so you get this really big signaling effect but pretty quickly right back to the thing about absolute relative because yes definitely ampk we actually showed so I'm very pleased you saw that because it

doesn't actually get taken notice of enough I don't think we actually showed that after training 10 days of training there was no activation of apk at all during during 65 of via to Max for two hours and these were untrained people so before training the game became an up tenfold during the two hours of sub Max exercise it didn't go up so I liked it I like that you know that and and that and that showed a dissociation with glucose uptake and fat oxidation because you know they were not zero but um anyway yeah the

point is then because they were doing the same absolute workload so you've got to actually do the same relative workload to get the activation so I totally agree with you that you actually have to to train harder and harder to get activation of APK and to get those these signals yeah but still I just what I want to do is I just I just don't know if it's that that clear that that you know people again they tend to run you know we know it's like on Twitter and things people tend to they know enough

to be dangerous to anyone with it yeah so they've sort of got this idea that oh you've got to do the low intensity to get an increase in Monica so I actually saw something intensity does not build mitochondria and I'm like what I was on this trainer Road website yes it does it does well again I I I I I just do not discuss these variables in a vacuum intensity takes on meaning when you attach a duration to a duration to it you have to you can only consider intensity I can I can work at

a thousand Watts for five seconds you know so let's we have to attach a duration to these intensities to make sense of them and we do know and and I think some of your work also has explored this issue of that there are moderating effects such as glycogen depletion such as reactive oxygen species and so forth so the athlete as they're due in a training session at a specific training intensity it's not static they're they're they're not in a steady state no there is no such thing as a steady state there there but it does

seem that below LT1 that steady state they're in it's it seems to be steady longer it's more steady longer whereas as soon as you move into threshold it becomes quite non-steady uh you you start seeing this drift this uncoupling we see it with heart rate but we see it also with ventilation it's quite fascinating even the ventilation picture a little bit Yeah because they're so you're becoming less efficient you're recruiting more type 2 motor units which are less efficient so there's there's all kinds of things that are happening that are moving us towards a state

of that it is we're having to mobilize more and more to achieve the same external power or Pace so it's a sliding scale that those intensity zones that we always we bring people into the laboratory to establish based on saying don't do anything hard the day before make sure you're rested blah blah blah they you know so they're fresh values but what already after an hour running or cycling they're out the window exactly and that's that's why you know even if you if you're a millionaire and you can come in and get your lactate threshold

tested every five minutes it as you say it's going to depend on what glycogen is and it's going to be the thing that does my head in is sometimes people say oh my heart rate's meant to be in this this Zone but but it drifts because the cardiovascular drift well they don't get that but they think do I have to slow down they actually like so if they work out they've got to be 130 beats they actually slow down the longer they go and it's like right yeah no and I have really dug into some

of this and and there's been some recent Publications we published with New Zealand colleagues this issue of durability where we looked at the uncoupling and we tried to quantify it using heart rate Reserve percentage of heart rate Reserve versus percentage of six minute power and and so forth and we could try to classify and say you know how much is a lot of drift how much is moderate drift how much is low drift and so I think there is some scope there for trying to use the drift magnitude is is a bit of a a

bit of a guiding variable for saying when should we say enough is enough on a on a long run or a long ride you know for example if I ride at 200 Watts for two hours I essentially have a flat response I don't get much drift at all but after two hours I I'm very consistently I start drifting up you know and and I know I have a lot of fast twitch fibers I'm not a really pure endurance type and so that third hour I start getting a lot of uncoupling but I can deal with

one more hour however if I go to four hours the uncoupling is huge and I'm stressed out and I want off the bike and I'm really fatigued the day after so now a low intensity session has become a high stress session just as a function of duration you with me yeah what I wonder about is is it also makes a difference how much you're drinking for example if you don't drink then you're stress anymore but even if I maintain a really good drinking schedule I'm in Norway at 16 degrees C I've got really literally my

cycling I've Got 5 five different fans blowing on me both front and back so I'm doing everything I can to take core temperature elevation out of the picture and still getting the job yeah you're still getting I'm still getting the drift okay I guess my point is if people aren't drinking enough they think oh I'm getting the stress because my yeah it's worse it just makes it worse yeah exactly yeah all right now Alonso Gonzalez who you've had on the show you know we were contemporaries we were PhD students together and he was doing a

lot of great work on all of that at the time so I'm very cognizant of heat stress uh but even if you control for that you can get you get cardiovascular now do you mind if I saw I've got some questions from Twitter and things so someone said isn't it true that most endurance I think you're going to say no isn't it true that most endurance athletes actually train in a pyramidal not polarized fashion question mark it really depends on how you measure it because if I I can show you all kinds of workouts where

I can take the power and it's it's polarized but the but because heart rate if you're using always heart rate as your indicator well heart rate has lag time both pre and post so you end up as you move up to high intensity what are you doing you're going through Modern intensity or through threshold intensity so based on your heart rate distribution you'll say oh I had quite a bit of work at threshold well no you didn't you your power output was either why don't they just based on power of their Cycles assuming they're going

to power me up well I wouldn't do that either because power is just the external load it's neutral but what we really want to know is what's the relationship between the internal load and the external load and how is that changing over time and how is it changing in the workout but a lot of you know a lot of distributions will look pyramidal even if they are polarized in intent just because of heart rate drift heart rate lag time and so forth so we had to just be a little bit careful of that interpretation you

know you know I've tried to show this with some different figures where you can look at the data and I say all right what do you see here oh that's polarizing and I say yeah but here's heart rate and it looks pyramidal it looks so so you would just say that you just have to be consistent top athletes a pyramidal you would say most polarized is that right no I would say it depends I would say that most of them are doing again the thing that the observation I am most comfortable with saying this is

what we see is that most of their training is below LT1 is it 80 is it exactly 80 or so at the low intensity you're happy with but it's the the higher intensity is a bit of pyramidal is it polarized it's more yeah it's a mix it's and so I'm not going to argue I would say polarized what's that you're saying that's not that important anyway in terms of you're saying the sympathetic effects and uh yeah I think when when we understand training intensity distribution as a management an optimization process where we're managing stress and

Signal we're trying to ensure we get signal while managing stress then there are different ways to roam within that framework and yeah hard threshold session high intensity you know five times five interval session versus three times twenty minute threshold can both be very tough sessions very stressful very demanding and very you know have big signal but they also have a big stress response associated with them so within that 20 percent I think then it becomes we go back to some of the issues like you were discussing earlier which is race Pace specificity you know whether

you're preparing very specifically if my daughter is going to run a 10K we may be doing four or five times eight minutes and so pretty close to race Pace we're starting to really zero in on 10K race pace and that's going to be a really tough session but we're gonna you know try to manage it carefully yeah so it does depend a bit on the on the race duration okay the other thing I've just thought about a bit is you know I said the tech talk um you were sort of saying 80 20 for them

you and then people were that aren't you know serious world-class athletes are thinking 80 20 and then the people that are welcome 80 20. so is it is it's another one here isn't it simply logical that the greater the training volume the lower the average intensity must be so in other words don't believe athletes do a lot of Zone one below LT1 training simply because they have to because they're doing so much so I guess it's kind of putting together two things yeah I think that's a good point that it all works yeah okay it's

a fair because again I I have argued that there's a bit of a self-organizing principle here that you know you given the constraints that athletes face they've got to recover they've got to get enough energy in they've got to wake up every day and do it again and again so there are some constraints that seem to result in a kind of a self-organization towards this this distribution and I do agree with you that if if if the they know they have to train a lot and they also know they need to train some hard and

so those are the two things you know you have to have you we really have very almost no examples of elite world-class performers that have said you know I only need it three days a week we've just never seen that it's never happened so maybe maybe dots no but I mean exactly in endurance sport there are I don't see any evidence of that you have to train a lot and you have to train some hard and so so there are some constraints I agree with your the question it says yeah so it will you will

be forced into if you're trading 25 hours a week it won't it can't all be hard now here's where things get interesting what if you're training seven to ten hours a week exactly and I would have thought you said more bang for your buck at one stage earlier on and that's what I would have thought they you they would want to be doing right here's where I I have we have there are experimental studies that show this but there's a heck of a lot of anecdote as well people that have actually you know given feedback

that even these seven to ten hour types and I would be one of them number one because we don't have the training load we don't have that Training Fitness seven to ten hours is still tough for us it's still a reasonably a reasonable volume for us in our state of capacity uh even there it is the most common training error is uh that they do too much in the middle Zone they end up every day becomes kind of hard and they stagnate now I'm not saying you can't get adaptations and you do but you will

tend to that you might say the the pyramid is flatter because your your potential your Peak is lower because you don't you're not able to to get uh the last five percent out when you when you do that kind of an approach so we've seen very often that when athletes become a bit more disciplined in their training distribution that they find that they're recovering better they're enjoying the training and they're setting PR so I think also in that seven to ten hour range it can make a difference now if what about three hours three days

a week do I need to be polarized at three days a week probably not because you've got so much recovery time however even for the three day a week or I would say look try to make one of those days longer don't just think intensity all right try to stretch so that you have a long run you have an interval day and then you have a middle day where you just kind of get out there and get your hour in if I were doing if I'm only able to do three days a week I still

want to use intensity and duration as stimuli and just a bit of a priority even as well right and you know just yeah it's good variety but it also we should not underestimate the value of duration as a signaling part of the signaling process things happen in the second hour that don't happen in the first hour yeah but you got to do the first hour to get there now I was amazed again I keep bringing up so hopefully you get some more views on your uh Tech talk from this one but um I was amazed

you said the pro cyclists um averaged like 65 of their max heart rate when you look at them across for their training yeah that was from uh toon Von Arab I think was the it's his work where they had data from the professional cycling team uh for several years I think they ended up with four years of data uh and that's part of this digital age where all the data is going into various digital uh platforms and so they were able to extract all the data and and that's what they saw was that on average

you know the intensity was quite low now you know that can be misleading because when they go hard they're they're scary you know so don't don't get me wrong uh I was using this to make a point but when they go hard Steven is off the back so fast his head spins you know they're so much better at every level but when they're riding easy yeah I could keep up with them on flat ground for an hour or two you know if they're going easy I know yeah I actually have to say in Twitter I

have seen professional cyclists sometimes we had the speech Road here in Melbourne and uh it's like holy crap they're going slow I thought they must have just done a race or something but um yeah because I worked out for me and I think my max heart rate's 170 or something they're selling like 110 and I'm like what it's that's just not much but as you say though when they go hard it's really hard so it's like you know when you do intervals and then you see like your average wants it's like it's pretty crap it's

like you know yeah it's very misleading to take the average you know because it hides a lot of hard work uh but I guess it's all about you know the one of the first things I saw and I've said this many times is that I was running in Norway in the in the local Forest on the trails and I saw this girl running and a woman young woman and we attested her in the lab so I recognized her and she was the sister of an Olympic silver medalist in cross-country skiing and she was also a

skier so and I saw her she's running and then she gets to this kind of a steep hill and she starts walking up the hill fast and I knew her veal to Max was like 68 MLS per kg you know which is pretty good for a female athlete and I said well why the heck is she walking up that hill I would never walk up a hill you know and no pain no gain but she was as time would show she was just showing intensity discipline because that day she was her goal was to keep

it easy so she walked fast up the hill and then she resumed running so she flattened out the the hills by controlling that but then you know maybe the next day was an interval day and she would have kicked my butt if she you know I would have not been able to keep up with her so so that's that's the thing and I have a colleague he used to work with the uh the Olympic the cross country ski team and he was a decent Runner himself and but he was he said hey Jordan Daley you

know the 90 ml per kg guy with eight gold medals he's I could run with him during on an easy day for two hours but then he would run two more hours after you know if you would be slogging it out for four hours you know but he said but I could stay with him for a couple of hours and and so this is just part of the point but don't don't come to Bjorn daily and say I want to do the interval session with you unless you're ready for a whole lot of hurt so

it's that's that idea is that the really good athletes what I see is that they just have they they take off their ego is is robust enough that they don't care if some young upstart kid goes past them on an easy day they're not gonna start half Wheeling some cyclist just you know during their ride to work they know what they're good for [Music] yeah and who makes you know I always find that athletes that didn't quite reach their goals as athletes they tend to be the ones that are the most aggressive in the age

group Sports you know so whereas the Chan the guys that are females that were Champions they're kind of done with it they don't they don't have anything to prove so it's an interesting psychology there yeah exactly a bit of a twisted design what you call it um all right so okay if you're still happy to go I got a Twitter question here again it's it's the evidence so is there any evidence that matching a training load training below LT1 is more beneficial than training at higher intensities and then is there any evidence that training in

the threshold Zone learns to burn out it leads to burnout so like I said earlier is there evidence for that or you could say that the studies are too short and you know things like that well I do think we don't have really long studies to do I mean the the the the groups that have the most data on this are the high performance environments themselves you know Olympia top and the the big cycling teams in that they've got a lot of data that they're able to bring to bear on some of these topics but

they're not publishing but they've got the real longitudinal data that tells them when it goes wrong and so forth you know how it is for us in our careers we don't have time to do a longitudinal one-year study and no one is gonna we're gonna lose subjects you know we're not going to be able to get to the end of that one year period with enough data because we're going to lose people along the way so I would say we do have some short-term studies where we've on functional overreaching there are studies going all the

way back to I think green with horses that show that yeah if you want to induce overreaching or over training a great way to do it is lots of threshold training so we have studies that show that that is if that's what you want if you want stagnation if you want to induce uh these kinds of of maladaptations then a great way to do it is to just train every day at threshold and you will get that stagnation if that's your goal and so functional overreach and you can do that with a combination of up

in the intensity and increase in the duration and and and so I think we have mechanistically we have good data to show that this this happens and it I think there's a lot of data in the high performance environments like you know in Norway that's they've won gold medals and all these Endurance Sports and that at the organizational level there and they published a lot of it too but at the organizational level there they're very comfortable with their database as to what is happening and they have very clear mandates as far as all right if

you're a cross-country skier and you're at the hyper you know on our national team you're going to need about a hundred hard sessions a year all right so that you know they've got rules of thumb based on 30 years of of data that says you're going to need to be stay healthy so that you can get 100 hard sessions a year that's going to include races uh and then most of the rest of that is going to be aerobic you know you say a hundred hard sessions a year that's a lot you know that's a

lot of sessions but they're training 12 sessions a week so in that context it's it's a relatively small percentage so I I would just say to your to your reader I would just or the person who called in I said yeah I I got to be aware that not everything is getting published because a lot of these environments that's not their main agenda no no is to teach you how to train their main agenda is to win the Tour de France and I guess sometimes they don't want it probably they don't want people to know

what they're doing there is that too and I got to be honest what I what I'm seeing now is there is protectionism as far as you know it used to be some of the data was being put out on Strava you had uh World Tour cyclists that were putting out their workouts like Matia vanderpol or their races but they're starting to shut that down yeah they shot a couple day a couple of weeks before the race and stuff they shut it down yeah yeah so so we got to be clear on this is that at

those levels it's a it's a competition and it's it's like uh their training data and their racing data is kind of uh institutional knowledge or or assets you know that's part of their assets I don't think that's very much true like you know a guy I remember for Olaf tufta who won two gold medals in the in the in rowing 2004 and 2008 you know he published everything or he you know put it all out there and he just said look I can tell you what I did but that doesn't mean you can do it

yourself exactly so I'm gonna I'm gonna go out and do what vanderpol does now yeah so in the end it probably doesn't matter that much but there is a certain degree I remember the same with when when I was first starting my career of researchers some people were like all secretive about their research and again it was how confident you were once I got more confidence I thought actually I'm there's more to be gained than lost by telling people what you're doing they say oh why don't you do that I agree with it I saw

a response to one of the questions that was on the inside exercise about your chat we're having today and and anyway it just made me think as I was just looking at it you said how you know the vast majority of people train in zone one not zone two right so you're saying um I think you have an important point I can see that data on numerous Norwegian World Olympic Champions multiple Sports they train sub LT1 Zone one not zone two and when I saw that I thought the minute I finished this it's going to

be oh there's a great chat and quite chuffed and then I'll watch like I'll see something on Twitter and I'm like no no you got to do so you've got to do something so what can we what can we say to people about this it's almost like a religion um yeah I I left religion years ago so I I I'm very careful to to not get and I avoid even on Twitter when I start seeing these kinds of discussions that I can tell that there is emotion in them I just stay out of them you

know because I said I I'm not going to get into that but I would just say that that you know we do have a lot of data on exceptional athletes that have you know both had the huge VO2 max the big fraction utilization just all the numbers are what we would call Elite and they're not you know they're training a lot in what I guess some Milan would call Zone one in that five zone model now there's some in zone two now here's the deal um you what's really important is is that the Zone one

if you're in zone one obviously there is a z a Zone zero there is some lower boundary so let's let's be clear on that I'm not arguing that you can just walk around and that's training don't don't don't misunderstand me but whether it's 60 or 65 percent of eo2 Max or even you know 55 that's a that's a very a fuzzy kind of Mark and it depends on duration as well so sixty percent times uh four hours versus 65 percent times three hours versus seventy percent times two hours can all be maybe an equivalent uh

molecular signal with me all right so so we I I that's I if I can get in the the listeners to take home anything from here I would say please stop considering intensity in a vacuum it only has meaning when you attach duration and the body seems to be exquisitely uh exquisitely sensitive to that that what should we say area under the curve the intensity times duration uh the total signal and and all the all the mediating effects such as glycogen depletion and and so forth that are influencing that signal Stream So it the physiology

is beautifully complex but the training doesn't need to be just think about the the yes you're saying if you just think about design you just think about zones you're not thinking about how long you're doing it for it it reminds me of the paper you mentioned of mine because the when they did that the untrained people wrote two hours at 65 video to Max it was hard for them the ambk went up 30 pole but we did biopsies at rest 30 minutes in two hours at 30 minutes it was up three or four yeah two

hours was up because I should say you're getting depleted you you're you know your energy balance isn't as well maintained your homeostasis in the muscle so yeah to take a snapshot so if I'd stop them after three minutes and I'd say oh this Zone doesn't do anything exactly well so exactly so that's a good job I understand and that's why athletes athletes get this and they they say well the first hour is basically just setting me up for the second hour or this or the first two hours are setting me up for the the second

the third and the fourth hour that's when things that's when I'm pushing my Frontier exactly adaptively look at chuggy running a marathon like he's I know he didn't do well in the last one but the first hour even at 59 minutes 47 or something whatever it is it's just setting the scene and then that's when the business starts then the race starts and that's what we always talk about in this class you know in cycling they have this term the classics and and the classic races are in that March April period and and they're often

six hours long and they're what makes them Classics well one of the things that makes them Classics is they are longer than typical raises and and it seems to have a tremendous filtering effect that that out of the whole world to our circus you you suddenly zero in on about 15 20 athletes that are able to bring the bear the kinds of Power you need to win a race after six hours right that's a different animal and and there's not as many of those even in the world all of them are world-class level athletes but

there there's just another level uh that emerges when you start racing for six hours on a bike detection thing you know they haven't got the domestics they do have some protection you sort of on your own if you're the best writer yeah you can't sort of just sit in a group on the on the Cobblestone because if you're that good yeah things are getting broken up and you're just having a fend for yourself so anyway so it's uh uh that's part of this adaptive process that they have to adapt they have to be able to

have the physical capacity to mobilize after all those hours where the body is slowly being broken down so it's kind of like which athlete has preserved which athlete has the best durability which athlete has the highest VO2 max after six hours you know because it's not the same as it was after 15 minutes all right well that's great I think we've covered quite a lot is there anything you think we haven't uh covered thank you for being generous with your time no I think we've had a nice two-hour chat yeah yeah I started this may

be the longest podcast you've you've published if you put all this out there so uh yeah I I generally just stick it out there if I if I yeah there's nothing to leave out anyway but if I did I know what will happen because I say I like to talk about it only but we didn't talk about earlier no yeah that's pretty good I always say these these podcasts are great if you've got a long easy run or a Long Easy Ride you can listen to them so that you're giving your audience something they can

use during their Long training sessions exactly great well thank you again for coming on it's fantastic and nice to meet you and chat with you art all this time after reading your emails back in 1996 or something I was yeah yeah good on you thank you thank you and it's great to be part of such a great a group of impressive researchers so I appreciate it oh thank you okay see you mate bye-bye bye-bye I hope you enjoyed this podcast please like subscribe pass it on to your friends and colleagues check out the other podcasts

thanks again