Dr. Stephen Seiler: How To Build Durable Athletic Performance

About this episode:

In this week’s episode, Adam Pulford interviews world-renowned Professor of Sport Science, Dr. Stephen Seiler. During their discussion, they touch on polarized training and do a deep dive into the intricacies of developing athletic durability. 

Episode Highlights:

• How to take a long-term approach to goal setting and development
• Quantifying and qualifying endurance training
• The process of building durability
• Why training stress, load, and strain can’t be lumped into one category

Guest Bio – Dr. Stephen Seiler:

After growing up in the US and earning his doctoral degree from the University of Texas at Austin, Stephen Seiler, PhD FACSM, has lived and worked in Norway for over 20 years as a university teacher, researcher, and leader. He is past Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation and past Dean of the Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway.  Currently, Dr. Seiler is Professor in Sport Science at the same institution.  While anchored in an academic environment, Seiler has over the years served as research consultant and scientific advisor for a research foundation, sports teams, a regional hospital and the Norwegian Olympic Federation.  From 2014 to 2019, professor Seiler served on the Executive Board of the European College of Sport Science, where he founded the Elite Sport Performance Special Interest Group in 2014.

Over the last 15 years, Seiler has become internationally known for his research publications and lectures related to the organization of endurance training and intensity distribution.  This work has included both descriptive and experimental approaches, investigating cyclists, rowers, XC skiers, orienteers, and distance runners. His work has influenced and catalyzed international research around training intensity distribution and the “polarized training model”.  Seiler has published ~100 peer-reviewed publications and written over 100 popular science articles related to exercise physiology and the training process.

 

Read More About Dr. Stephen Seiler:

Website: https://science-cycling.org/stephen-seiler/

ResearchGate: https://science-cycling.org/stephen-seiler/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephen.seiler

Twitter: https://twitter.com/StephenSeiler

 

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform

 

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Thanks To This Week’s Sponsor:

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Episode Transcription:

Please note that this is an automated transcription and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio for clarification.

Adam Pulford (00:00:00):

Our guest today needs no real introduction because as my colleague, Jason Koop said an interview with him, he’s literally everywhere. So Dr. Seiler, uh, where are you at today?

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:00:12):

Well, physically, I am, uh, in the S on the Southern coast of Norway. I’m in my home office. It’s, you know, still Corona time here and we are under some significant restrictions. So I’m, I’m working from home, uh, in, in, on the very Southern coast of Norway. And, uh, so I can look out towards England, look out towards Denmark and wish that I could get in an airplane and fly around the world. But, but like very many, I am not doing that right now.

Adam Pulford (00:00:44):

That’s, that’s very true. Uh, same thing here in DC. I don’t have the view that you do, unfortunately, but, uh, uh, working from home, I mean, how are you spending your time, these days with, uh, uh, working from home and, and gathering all the data and things like that?

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:01:01):

Well, I, I can’t complain because I have a good situation. I have a good office. I don’t have small children around me that I’m home teaching. Uh, so I have a great respect for the challenges that millions of people are facing and millions of families. But my day, you know, um, I live alone. My children are 22 and 17, and my 17 year old lives with his mother 300 meters up the road. Uh, and, and so I am able to work from home quite effectively, a lot of zoom meetings, a lot of teaching from, you know, and, and advising via zoom, it gets kind of old. And the teaching part is difficult because you don’t feel like you don’t know who your who’s actually listening to you at all.

Adam Pulford (00:01:51):

So, so that aspect

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:01:52):

Though is, is, is tiring. It’s, you know, it demands a lot of energy, uh, but you know, there are, I have to say, I don’t know that we’ll ever go completely back to the old, normal, whatever that was pre 19 to 2019. Uh, but man, my day sometimes starts at 7:00 AM with a zoom meeting with a colleague in New Zealand and I’ve had, you know, meetings or, or webinars that I’ve finished up with at 1130 at night. And that’s just because of time zones, you know, because of once you have these digital tools and all of a sudden time kind of goes out the window and then we try to flex, uh, just as you and I are doing, we’re working on different parts of the globe. So there’s, we’re in different time zones and, and just making all that work, I think sometimes stretches my day, stretches my week, you know, so that everything blends together.

Adam Pulford (00:02:50):

Yeah. I think, I think so many people can relate to that right now, for sure in your heart, at a grind in a way, and still have this fresh energy though in the endurance space, which I definitely respect and appreciate. And, uh, you know, first of all, you know, welcome to the train ride podcast and thank you for taking the time, uh, throughout all the meetings and teachings and zoom calls and podcasts that you uh, are doing. But, uh, with that fresh energy in the endurance space, um, you know, listening to your story and listening to podcasts, I don’t think I’ve ever heard really how you got into like where you’re at today in terms of the endurance, um, research and being a preeminent author and the kind of the father of polarized training. Can you tell our audience maybe a bit more about the background of Stephen Seiler?

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:03:43):

Well, going all the way back, you know, the start is just me being a kid that likes to things. I love sports and I love science. And, and so I was this sporting nerd kid that actually literally had a laboratory under the stairs. I kid you not, uh, with, with, you know, beakers and test tubes and microscope and, you know, and I would go out and collect pond water and put it under my microscope to see what things I could discover and just, you know, that was just me being a kid. Uh, I lived out in the country and, and, and, uh, so I did that and then I played, you know, sports, I did track and field, uh, football, and, um, and so those two things, as far as I knew, would never meet. They were just two different parts of me. And then I, by chance, uh, read a book, uh, uh, what was it called?

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:04:39):

The complete book of running, I believe by James fix. And, uh, he he’s passed away, unfortunately, but that was one of those early books in the, in the seventies, late seventies that was kind of coalescing this fitness movement. And there was one chapter called the scientists of sport. And I remember as soon as I read the title, I was like, Oh my goodness. You know, this is me, you know, I’m 15, maybe 16 years old. And I just, boy, I thought, man, I have found something here. And I ended up studying this young field at the time, 1983. I started a program in so-called exercise science and did a bachelor’s degree in that master’s degree and so forth and just, just build from there.

Adam Pulford (00:05:28):

Gotcha. And that was in Texas. Right.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:05:30):

And that was when I was actually living up in Arkansas, my family, I moved to Texas to do my PhD. I was in Texas until age 10 and moved to Arkansas. So I kind of went a bit back and forth between Texas and Arkansas in my, uh, in those early years. And, uh, yeah, so Southern United States, grandfather was a preacher, you know, just kind of grew up in that where if you didn’t play football, you know, you didn’t know what to do with self, from a sports perspective. Endurance didn’t really come into the picture until much later, uh, because all I want in the world to do when I was 10 years old, was play for the Dallas Cowboys. Right. And, uh, that didn’t happen unfortunately, or fortunately, fortunately, or unfortunately, as it was, at least my brain is still working and, and I don’t have any kind of a traumatic injury, but, um, but along the way I got in, I was interested in coaching.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:06:27):

I w I, I, at age 20, I went to the Soviet union. Uh, as a student, I was one of three students on a delegation of 50 from the so-called, uh, national strength and conditioning association in the United States NSCA, and wanted to learn their training methods, their string training methods. And so we were at the Moscow physical, uh, Moscow Institute of physical culture. This was 1986, uh, just after the Chernobyl incident, just after the, uh, space shuttle, explosion, challenger explosion. Both of those are things happen in the weeks. And, uh, a couple of months prior to me going there. So I was seeing all this, you know, propaganda on both sides and studying their methods. Yeah. It was quite a, uh, an amazing time because it was the beginning of Paris strike, you know, this opening up of the Soviet union five years later, of course the Soviet union is no more, or it becomes, you know, broken up into Russia and all the former satellite countries.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:07:30):

And so, um, that was the background is I wanted to, you know, my dream was to work at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs and work with power and strength and so forth. And then, and in the summer I was working in a fitness center as a strength coach. And I was literally working with some young kids out in the grass at 7:00 AM. Uh, they were, you know, had a little strength program that I was leading and I slipped on wet grass during, uh, uh, repeat long jump kind of exercise. And I pour, I tore the patella tendon off the bone in my right leg, a partial, at least partial tear. And so I had to have orthopedic surgery. And so long story short, the rehab from that involved me cycling. And I ended up borrowing a bike and I, within a few weeks, I get in a ride with a guy who’s a cat three cyclist in the U S and you know, decent, and I’m able to stay on his, on his, on his wheel.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:08:30):

And that kind of impresses him and, you know, for our, I stay on his wheel for an hour, you know, and so he kind of says, well, I think you should try riding. And that’s how I got into endurance stuff. Six weeks later, I did my first race. And I like as citizens, race got third and thought, okay, you know, this may be something for me because I’m apparently not going to be playing for the Cowboys or anything any times. Right. So, so that’s where the endurance connection begins. And then of course, whatever I’m doing, then I wanted to understand it more. And so then my master’s degree, my, you know, I went from doing my first publication on anaerobic power in American football players to actually doing a master’s thesis on interval training and rats and, and, and, you know, so that’s, you know, and then I did my PhD, uh, on cardiovascular function and so forth.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:09:22):

So it all stemmed to a great deal from to a great extent from just an accident, just a, you know, and, and I think that’s kind of representative for a lot of people. And certainly for me is that life, it becomes this mix of choice and chance in the sense that, you know, we have all of our big plans and for me it was education. And I followed that plan with great structure and commitment, but then the various chance things that resulted in my specific interests in me and, uh, hap happened to move to Norway and so forth. Those weren’t planned, you know? So, so life ends up being this combination of all of our plans and then a lot of, uh, a lot of no accidents or serendipity along the way,

Adam Pulford (00:10:16):

That’s it? Yeah. I mean, I guess I was, I was hoping or thinking that you’re found yourself in, in a fizz lab one day and you’re doing some, my muscle fiber typing, and you decided based on your composition of fiber types, you should start riding a bike. But, um,

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:10:32):

It was not that scientific at all, but in a sense, it was just based on the fact that I had some, a good experience with it. I did it right. So there was still a bit of fiber typing in a sense, and it would, but it was just in a very functional way, is that for whatever reason, my body functions reasonably well in this activity. So let’s see where I can take it, but then I get all kinds of things wrong in the training process. I can assure you, I mean, pretty much anything you can do wrong. And I probably, I, although I had zero data from that time, this was 80, you know, I’m riding a bike in 87, 88, 89 90 in that Frank timeframe. And then I went over to rowing, but there was no, I didn’t have a heart rate monitor or to the extent I did, it was just something I looked at occasionally.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:11:22):

Uh, so there was, I have no data, but I am almost certain that I just went out every day and thrashed it, you know? So that’s pretty, I’m pretty confident that that was my strategy. Um, because I had no coach, no one taught me about easy days and hard days, or certainly there was no 80 20 or polarized training or anything like that up in my head. I just wanted to get better. And to the extent, you know, when we had group rides, it just became chase racing. You know, we were in the guys that were established, they were going to try to kick my butt and I was going to try to hang on, you know, so, uh, I am quite sure I did not train very optimally. Uh, and I was not good in longer races. You know, I was quite good for about an hour. And then if it was longer, if it was two, three, those, you know, some, a few four hour races I was involved in are these long tour rides that were really racist. I would just slowly crumble because I didn’t have the base.

Adam Pulford (00:12:31):

Well, you know, it’s, it’s interesting. We segment into that cause that’s, that’s exactly why I brought you on the show today because there’s still is, are a lot of people that train like that. You know, they, they, they think going hard all the time is the way to do it. They, uh, jump in the group ride and it’s basically a race and, you know, they’re, they’re falling apart after 90 minutes or two hours maybe, and they don’t have that, that ability to endure, you know, to go along. And so, um, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re going to talk all about that and, and help some of these people, maybe a simmer down a bit on that group. But, uh, as we transition into the episode, um, I do want to say that, uh, I was, it was going back and forth with Dr. Sadler on Twitter, trying to shape this up.

Adam Pulford (00:13:19):

And, and, uh, what, what he asked me was, Hey, are we gonna, you know, speak to a different audience? Or are we going to, is, am I going to get asked different questions? Or is he going to answer the same questions even better than before? And I said, yes, of course, all of those. So I hope this, I hope this episode lives up to it. Uh, I hope you have some fun Dr. Seiler, and I hope everybody, all of our listeners learn something from it. So should we get going? Sure. I’m ready. All right. Okay. So in taking, well, everything that you’ve done, Dr. Sadler, and trying to wrap it up and bring some of this home, uh, one idea or concept is that you’ve been talking about a lot lately as an athletes development and kind of the, the long-term time courses that it takes to build an athlete. And in our last episode, we talked about puritization as a way of organizing training methods and how we as coaches and athletes try to organize those training modalities or, or the game plan to peak or perform at specific times when we want to, for, for peak performance, can you just kind of summarize it in and talk about the importance of planning when it comes to having a training program versus just going on all the time and showing up to the group rides and trying to grind it out?

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:14:43):

Yeah. Although you may not necessarily expect my answer. Um, I think maybe it was Dwight Eisenhower. It was who said

Speaker 3 (00:14:52):

Something like, you know, plans are essential or planning is essential. Excuse me. Planning is, is essential, but plans are useless. Expand on that for me. Yeah. So that, that seems like a contradiction in terms, but, but many people have said this and it has to do with the fact that the planning process obviously is important, but when, when you first get hit by reality, the reality of crap happening during the week, the reality of multiple stressors and so forth plans, don’t go necessarily, you know, like clockwork and you have to be flexible. You have to be agile in your adjustments. And so that’s kind of one of the things, you know, when I went to the Soviet union, um, that was one of the things is we, we had heard about this magical term and this magical thing called periodization. You know, it had this, this, this kind of something they were much better at, than we were, uh, in, in our understanding.

Speaker 3 (00:16:06):

And, and there was literally a guy, a former weightlifter who’d broken his back and training. He was now, you know, to take an education. He literally snuck to me, pamphlets are these, these, these, uh, booklets that were the basic periodization models for, for weightlifting, for the Soviet union. And, and obviously he was giving me something he wasn’t supposed to because he was sneaking them to me. And, um, and they were for different levels of performance. And, and it was, it kind of typified a feeling that there was something magical in the plan that if you executed the plan, then, you know, their plans were better than our plans. And, you know, historic history has now told us that the, well, there was probably a lot other things they were better at, but, uh, but it may not have been so much these plans. And in fact, those plans didn’t really come from much science at all.

Speaker 3 (00:17:05):

They came from a management theory, uh, more than they came from physiology. And, and so periodization models have been built on some assumptions of linearity. You know, if you, if you’re gonna build a garage on your house or you’re going to renovate your kitchen, uh, your build out a playroom at the back of the house, then you, you, you will have a periodization plan and it will be very, uh, linear, and it will be very, uh, sequence dependent, meaning that clearly you got to build, you’ve got to pour the foundation first. Uh, clearly you’re not going to do that third, right? So you, there is a logical order. And if you get things out of order on one of these building projects, well, then it’s a total fiasco. And, but if you do the order correctly, then you get a nice garage with everything in place.

Speaker 3 (00:18:02):

The electricity works and the lights, and there’s a roof that doesn’t leak and so forth. And the, the basic construct of that was transferred over to sports, to training a linear model, right? Meaning that if you do this first and then this, and then this, and then the issue reach a peak at the right time. Well, good grief. We know the route is it’s not that simple because biology is not linear. And, and by all biological signaling is complex. And there are, you know, in, in modern science, which discusses chaos theory and, and butterfly effects and things like that helps to help, helps us to understand the realities that you can have an athlete that last year followed this program and had a wonderful year with great progress. And then this year they follow what they think is exactly the same program, but something’s not quite right.

Speaker 3 (00:19:00):

Right. They’re not having the same effect. Why, well, it could there’s can be a myriad of reasons. They’ve, you know, they’re broke up with her girlfriend or broke up with her boyfriend, or they haven’t, they’ve had some, uh, an infection in their body. There could just be small issues that are changing the, the complex set of, uh, variables in that biological system. Right? So that’s, this is part of the reality that, that everyone faces. And therefore you do want to have a plan. Of course, you do want to have, uh, you know, you need to know where you are and you want to know where you’re going. And then you, you plot out a, uh, a strategy for getting there from a standpoint of performance. You know, what are my main goals for the season? What are the big blocks where I’m going to do certain kinds of training? Yes, don’t get me wrong. Planning is important, but then we need, um, monitoring tools we need on the ground awareness so that we can make adjustments on the fly. And this is, this is the art of good coaching, but it’s also the art of just being a smart athlete.

Adam Pulford (00:20:18):

Exactly. And I’m glad you went there because as a young coach, all about periodization and planning, all the things, right. And you may have done that too, in terms of writing the best program that you thought possible. And as you coach and coach, and I’ve been doing this for over 15 years, you realize I’m going to spend five minutes on that in terms of where everything wants to go. You want to think about the plan, but then once you’ve done that plan, you kind of set it aside. You get to know your athlete, you get to know how they adapt to stress. You get to know how they tick and talk. You get to know them so that when stuff goes sideways, you know how to adjust. And I think for all of our listeners on here, it’s, it’s more about knowing thyself, or if you’re working with a coach, it’s developing that relationship so that you can navigate the rough waters when they’re there cruise, when you got the calm waters and, and, uh, make hay while the sun shines.

Speaker 3 (00:21:18):

Right. Yeah. And I talk about a framework or, you know, and, and, and we’ll get into this a little bit, but people ask me, well, why does the 80 20 model or the Pope polarized training model work and dah, dah, dah. And I was just making a slide. And I, I found a picture of some guard rails, you know, on a winding road. And basically I would draw parallels with this 80 20 model that, that has kind of been a self-organizing process in sports training for many decades, that I didn’t invent. I just kind of observed and quantified. It seems to function as guardrails in a, in a way for athletes, that, that if you, if you achieve this basic intensity distribution, it solves a lot of problems from a standpoint of getting the balance, right between stress and recovery and so forth. And so just like the guard rails on the windy road, you still got to drive that road, but it tends to protect you from yourself.

Speaker 3 (00:22:27):

And the reality is your race. You’re you’re in because what are the realities on a winding down Hill road? Well, there’s inertia, you know, the car wants to go straight and not around the curve. And so mistakes can be made there’s ego in the sense that, Hey, I’m, I, this is kind of fun. I’m driving fast. I think I can handle this. You know, well, that’s dangerous, you know, cause he go gets us in trouble also as athletes, right. You know, there’s there’s competition. Somebody drives past me and I want to keep up with them. Somebody would rides past me on a bike and I want to keep up with them. So the guard rail analogy on that windy road is I think very relevant in the sense that it protects us from ourselves and from our, our worst impulses. And those impulses tend to be to double down on intensity, to push on the accelerator, to, you know, take not, not think big picture in the moment, but think Epic workout instead of re remembering that this is the one, this is one drive and alive. Let’s not make it a death experience because you want to get home to your kids. So it’s the same as the workout. This is one of hundreds

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:23:46):

You’re going to do this year. So put it in that perspective, right?

Adam Pulford (00:23:52):

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So planning is crucial knowing how to navigate even, even just as important. Um, so to talk, we’ll come back to the kind of big picture and we’ll come back to long-term thinking because a lot of this, um, to build a durable athlete is, is you’ve said in various forms. I mean, it takes awhile, but in order to get there, conceptually, I want to talk about how we define some of this. And in particular, I want to talk about quantifying qualifying endurance training in the, kind of the forms of load stress and strain in, in this way. I mean, you painted a beautiful picture. I think it was, uh, I think it was endurance coaching summit this past year virtual. When you talked about how engineers think about load stress and strain, how does that correlate with how we do it in the endurance realm of things?

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:24:50):

Well, the, the, yeah, that whole process is I gotta say I got a up and I’ve been listening to a few episodes of this kind of nice podcast where a former president, Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen have been hit up.

Adam Pulford (00:25:06):

I haven’t listened to, is it, is it worth listening

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:25:08):

To? I think so. Yeah, but you know, I love Bruce Springsteen and Bruce and I also have a great respect for Barack Obama. Uh, but, but there was an episode where a Springsteen is talking music or they’re chatting, they’re talking about music this third episode. And, and, and, and, and he’s talking about his process and, and, uh, and I could relate to it cause there’s, there’s a creative process in your mind where, you know, just things are coming together and sometimes very unintended consequences emerged from it. You, you, you, you were doing something you thought was small, but it ends up being big. And, and I spend a lot of time thinking obviously about training and, and I was during the log down, I was thinking a lot about stress. I got, I bought a couple of, uh, books, uh, you know, classics from, from Salia on sale.

Dr. Stephen Seiler (00:25:59):

Yeah. From Walter Cannon, these are a hundred, you know, these are fit 50 year old and, and even closer to a hundred year old books, but they were about some of the basic research that has brought us where we are today, uh, on, on stress, on, on, you know, uh, the, the stress response of the body. And so, you know, and I, and when I look at training language training terminology, and all of our digital tools and all of the different metrics that have emerged both with, and without much science behind them, it’s a, it’s a muddy waters. The waters are quite muddy right now, a lot of terms are being, and there’s a lot of

Speaker 3 (00:26:44):

Overlapping. And if you make a, you know, I even made a, what do you call them a word cloud of all these different, you know, at least a lot of these different terms. And, and then I just said, well, look, and I went into the literature. I tried to say, w where, where can I get guidance in trying to, uh, bring some clarity out of this confusion? And, and it turned out to be a couple of things. One was a deeper insight into what Han Salia was actually thinking or what may be some, some actual linguistic mistakes he made because he spoke eight different languages with English being just one and not his mother tongue. And then, then going into what the engineers were doing, because the engineers are much more, uh, logical, right? They’re much more cut and dried in their approach. And that’s where I saw all this load, stress strain.

Speaker 3 (00:27:45):

And then I understood that when Salia wrote stress, he pro his CA contemporaries of the time have argued that he probably meant strain. And so then I said, okay, well, what’s all this mean, this is interesting because this may be creates a, a way to go into this forest and, and pull out something that people can understand. And that’s where this load stress strain came from. Because when the engine year talks about these terms, there’s just, there’s no confusion because they do this all the time. And it load is just, it is what it is. It’s a neutral, uh, you know, a weight or a mass or a pool or a push that they want to quantify. So they let’s say there’s a wooden beam. I’ve used this example, let’s say, you’re going to, you’re an engineer. And you’re going to test the, the low tolerance of a crossbeam right.

Speaker 3 (00:28:42):

A piece of wood. And that piece of wood has a certain thickness, and it’s got a certain length, and you’re just going to put a load on it, meaning you’re going to put 200 kilograms or whatever, and that killer that’s a mass, but then because we’re on earth, there’s gravity, which is a kind of a calibration, uh, just like, you know, humans that we have a threshold power or whatever. Um, but we put that load on it, it’s neutral. But now that that beam has to have STIs. All right. That load, it has to re it responds to the load and the engineer will then define a, a term. They will call stress as the low divided by the cross section of the, of the piece of wood or the piece of metal or whatever there it is. Right? So they, they, and then they, they define that as the stress on that beat or on that object right now, if they, the load enough, that piece of wood will be in.

Speaker 3 (00:29:44):

And if you imagine a piece of wood horizontally with a load on top, if you put enough load on it, it bends it. And that bending that deformation it’s being deformed right by the load, they call that, or define that as strain that defamation, now that defamation can be temporary where you just take that load away. And it just, the beam just bounces right back to its original shape, right. Or it may slowly come back or in worst case, it may never, never retain its original shape. It’s permanently deformed. And in, in the very worst case, it snaps,

Speaker 4 (00:30:35):

It breaks just like some various athletes. Right.

Speaker 3 (00:30:38):

There you go. See, you’re starting to see there’s a, there’s some connections here. And so that then I, for me, it just said it made sense. So just before, in the weeks, prior to the Manchester, or, I mean to the, the talk with training peaks, this is where I was at. And so I said, look, I, this is what I want to talk about. Load stress, strain, um, B in part, you know, and I know for you, and I’ve met the people from training pigs, but I would argue that training stress score is not that at all, it’s a load score. Um, and it doesn’t take into account the actual stress of, you know, and things changing during the workout. And so I just tried to exemplify this through this model so that we can quantify load in load is what we apply. It’s it’s duration times intensity. Uh, it can be calibrated up against our capacity, just like you calibrate against the thickness of the piece of wood or metal. Uh, but then during the workout, stress occurs sometimes very little, sometimes a whole lot. Now, what is stress in this situation for me, stress then is a growing challenge to meet the demands that the load requires.

Speaker 4 (00:32:01):

Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:32:02):

So let’s imagine I’m riding at 200 Watts and my heart rate will, of course go up. My oxygen consumption, goes up to meet the demand, but that’s not, for me. That’s not stress that that is just the body adapting, the body reacting to the load. But I come up to some kind of a steady state, my heart rate, stabilizes, my oxygen consumption, stabilizes my breathing. And now I am meeting the demand of that load. And if that just stays stable and I’m listening Bruce Springsteen on the podcast, and everything’s copacetic, there’s very little stress in that workout my heart rates at 60% of max for two hours, as you know. So I executed the workout with essentially no stress you with me. Uh, and I’m good to go the next day. No worries. But in other situations, let’s say that that we’re, that load is 275 Watts, which is much closer to my 60 minute power, which might be three 10.

Speaker 3 (00:33:15):

Well, now at 275 Watts, the first minutes feel pretty good. I feel, you know, I can, I can listen to this Bruce and, and focus, but to be honest, after about 20 minutes, you know, my all right, starting, it’s slide up. It’s starting to slide up, up, up. And if I do 175 Watts for 90 minutes, I can guarantee you that by the end of that, I am no longer focused on Bruce at all. I’m focused on trying to survive the workout and get the heck off the bike. I’m stressed, right? My body is stressed at meeting that demand, even though the, the load is staying constant, the internal cost of meeting that load of achieving that load is increasing throughout the ride. Okay. And that stress can show up. As, you know, heart rate drift. It shows up as increase in blood lactate. It shows up as, as an increase in, in, in ventilation, it shows up in a lot of ways shows up definitely as an increase in what we call perceived exertion. You know, so there’s a lot of indicators. And if we could measure hormones, we’d see that my cortisol was increasing, particularly towards the end of the ride. And so these kinds of things are indicators of an acute stress response to the load with me so far, I like it too. Right. And now the next question will be, well, how am I going to feel tomorrow?

Speaker 3 (00:34:50):

Now after that first ride at 200 Watts, which was, which is well below my first lactate turn point, you know, my, so I’m in the so-called green zone, I’m in zone woman. You know, I could stay in 200 Watts for four hours. So two hours is not a big deal. Um, well, the next day I’m good to go. There’s no after effects, I recover fully in 24 hours. Okay. Um, after that threshold session let’s call it that, you know, it was a tough, long threshold session. After that session. I may not, there may be some lingering effects as I go into the next day, 24 hours later. And now we’re starting to see, you know, if there is strain, if there is a diff a deformed, a D defamation in my physiology is something that

Adam Pulford (00:35:49):

Is, is still a little compressed in your analogy.

Speaker 3 (00:35:52):

Yeah. Yeah. There’s still I’m bent. I’m still, I’m still either. My, maybe my autonomic nervous system is strained. It could be that the muscle muscles are strained in a, you know, that they’re still depleted or there, there was muscle damage. If it was running, you know, there’s different. It can be at different places, different points in my system, but that won’t, I won’t know really until the next workout, because that’s where it will emerge. It can emerge in the form of my legs. Feel like crap, you know, I’m sore, I’m having a hard time generating the power. It can show up as my heart rate response is too high for the power compared to what’s normal. It can also show up as my heart rate response is too low. Now you think, well, good grief, Steve, make up your mind, right? Heart rate, too high heart rate, too low.

Speaker 3 (00:36:51):

What are you talking about? It didn’t help me much at all, but that’s the reality of it because it depends on, on where the strain is. Let’s say if I have muscular damage, if I haven’t recovered at a muscular level, let’s say I did a tough weightlifting strength training session. Also. Then now I’ve got some muscle damage, which is changing the muscle recruitment. I can have higher heart rate at that same load, but if I’ve been doing a tough block of training, I’ve had a big volume block, or I’ve done several hard sessions in a row. It can also be a, an autonomic issue where literally the brakes are going on to my so-called autonomic nervous system where my sympathetic nervous system. And you’ll hear athletes talk about it. They’ll say, yeah, I’m in shape, but I can’t, I can’t get my heart rate up. I don’t know if you’ve seen this in your athletes, but it’s very common.

Adam Pulford (00:37:47):

Yeah. I try not to see it too often. Let’s put it that way, of course. Right. Because it’s not,

Speaker 3 (00:37:52):

You want to be, you don’t, it’s a, it’s a warning lamp, but yeah, you, you say, they’ll say, yeah, the brakes are on. I don’t have that last gear. Well, that is an example of strain. Okay. In, in, in this three, three part delineation that I’m trying to set up for you load stress strain. And so those are the, you know, I want to be able to quantify the load, but I also want to be able to be sensitive to and aware of and quantify the stress and the change in stress responses during the workout and know when enough is enough. Right. And then I want to be able to detect eventual, uh, strain reactions in my athlete. And, and also because that can be a warning lamp to say, okay, we pushed a little too hard. Uh, we need to back down, or you need an extra day of recovery and so forth. Right. So though that’s, if, if, if we understand that conceptualization and then we have a set of tools that are calibrated appropriately, and that we use with the right consistency, then we have, uh, a structure for, uh, exactly what we were talking about before regarding the periodization, which is being agile with that is, you know, being, making those adjustments on the fly based on how our athlete is responding to the loads that we are prescribing.

Adam Pulford (00:39:27):

Got it, got it. And if we lump all of this training into one concept of stress, we basically missed the point on, on several things and probably have some mismanagement of how we do the next workout or how we do the next block or something like this.

Speaker 3 (00:39:45):

I think so. Yeah. And we metrics are dangerous. They’re, they’re fun. And believe me, I love numbers, so don’t get me wrong, but they also have some, they do bring out the worst in us because we tend to train to metrics. We tend to get lost in our log book. Uh, and, and this is, this is just human nature. So, uh, yeah,

Adam Pulford (00:40:12):

That’s really important because people, can you talk, can you clarify metrics cause I a hundred percent agree with you and I, and I want you to clarify what a metric is versus say what you look at to monitor performance or, or training. Can you speak to metrics for us?

Speaker 3 (00:40:28):

Well, an example of metrics with no harm intended, but an example of a very popular metric is the T S S the training stress score, which is in training peaks and training peaks is a very popular, very, uh, you know, a, a wonderful tool that connects coaches and athletes, right? And, but the T S S is this so-called training stress score, and it’s got, there’s an equation. There’s a, uh, uh, an equation behind it related to, you know, the intensity relative to the so-called functional threshold power. And there’s a, it’s basically squared. So the in intensity factor squared times, the duration is essentially what’s giving you this training stress score, but an underlying assumption of that piece of math is that every hour at a given intensity factor, meaning a given percentage of your FTP is every hour is the same. So if you’re on a four hour ride at, let’s say 70% of your FTP, then every one hour block has the same stress score associated with it.

Speaker 3 (00:41:59):

The first hour is let’s say, it’s, let’s say it’s 50, 50 TSS. The second hour is 50 TSS. The third hour is 50 TSS. The fourth hour, still 50 TSS. Well, that’s not true in a sense if that was actually measuring stress, why am I measuring our four, if I’m running the same power Dr. Seiler. Right, right, right. And so, but now if we call it load that I’m with here, it is the same load. If you were in a steady state where it was just a four hour ride at, at, at a given power output, right? Yeah. It’s the same load, but it’s not the same stress. Because as that ride proceeds, glycogen depletion is ensuing. They may be becoming dehydrated. There’s an awful lot of processes. There’s no true steady state in physiology. And so the cost of doing that, of, of achieving that load is increasing the body is becoming stressed by the endeavor.

Speaker 3 (00:43:06):

And it’s, it’s not just intensity dependent, it’s duration dependent. And so this is one of the unfortunate issues is that there’s too much focus on the intensity as being the only, or the most important purveyor of stress or, or cause of stress. So higher intensity, higher stress score. Yeah. But you can have a low intensity ride that goes long enough and you can, you can stress the hell out of you if you’re not used to riding long. Okay. So, so these kinds of things are not baked into that stress score. And it’s, it’s, it’s poorly named to be very honest with you. If we use that language of the engineer, the load stress strain. If we follow that logic, then, then the stress score is a load score and we need a stress score or a stress conceptualization we need, I need my athlete to be sensitive to.

Speaker 3 (00:44:12):

Yeah. That’s what, that’s the load you rode for three hours at an average of 200 Watts, which is, uh, 70% of your so-called. You have your threshold power. Okay. But how do you feel, how did you feel at the end? Would it be honest with you? I was feeling really tired and I was really empty in my legs and my heart rate was 20 beats higher than it was at the store. And I just, you know, if, if I had said you were a 12 perceived exertion, it started, I was at about 15 at the end. Well, that tells me that that was a pretty tough workout for that kid, that kid stray, you know, that was, uh, there was a pretty big stress here. So I definitely wouldn’t have wanted him to go another hour. That’s one thing that would have been way too much for his current state of durability.

Speaker 3 (00:45:01):

And two, I’m going to be a bit careful because even though this was in theory, a low intensity workout, I may have a kid that this interval session he was supposed to do tomorrow. He may not be fully recovered for that. He may not be as ready as I thought he would be because I overextended him a bit. Yeah. Okay. And so now I’m talking in singular workouts, but often this happens more over a stretch of workouts that add up to too much and they haven’t fully recovered. And so then we start seeing these strain responses, but do you see my logic here?

Adam Pulford (00:45:42):

I do. And where I want to go next, if you want to. So that’s a metric, uh, what is not a metric that you look at when you’re trying to build durable athletes? What, what should we be looking at? What should our audience be thinking of either separate from a TSS score or a Sufferfest score or something like that? Um, or in addition to,

Speaker 3 (00:46:07):

Uh, it’s a great question. And, you know, and, and if the TSS, if you have an understanding of it and a calibration of it, I’m not saying throw it out the window. I’m just saying, uh, be more aware. And so what do we use? And I generally talk about this, uh, this Holy Trinity, you know, I grew up in the Southern United States where there was some religion in the, in the game. And we talked about the Holy Trinity, well for an athlete and particularly endurance athlete. But I think all athletes, you have three way, three feedback sources, or three measurement sources that you, you, you rely on. One is just the external load. And we have all these tools for pace and power. We have our GPS, we have our power cranks and we can get the power, whether it’s on the road bike or on the train or at home.

Speaker 3 (00:46:58):

So power is, or pace are definitely worth knowing. And then we have physiology in our, our most relevant window into the physiology. That’s accessible to pretty much, everybody is a, is a heart rate monitor. And, and heart rate is a very good, um, surrogate measure of, of the relative stress on the system. And then we have that third, which is just our brains that are our brains are a wonderful, uh, aggregating mechanism for taking all of the signals and changes that are happening. And then, and then equating it as a perception of perception of effort or exertion, you know, and that, that can be very qualitative, but it can also be kind of quantified that’s where you get these Borg scale, you know, the re the RPE, the rating of perceived exertion. So some coaches use that and say, Hey, where were you today at the end of the workout?

Speaker 3 (00:48:06):

Well, I was at about 18. Okay. That’s high. Right? So there’s, there’s so there’s those three ways you’ve got your, I want to know your power or pace. I want an, and then I wanna know some physiology, and then I, and then I want to know some perception. And if I have those three, they form a checks and balances system, like a well-functioning government, right, where you’ve got the judicial branch and the executive branch and the legislative branch. As I, as I recall, I think they are, they are, uh, in a well-functioning system, they, they S support and, um, create checks on each other because they each have their weaknesses. Same thing when it comes to training, uh, you know, perception, it can be, it varies from person to person. It can be off the power. Doesn’t tell the whole story. The physiology may not tell the whole story, you know, for example, the low heart rate versus high heart rate. Well, if I can link that to perception, then that helps me to, uh, internally calibrate and make better decisions as a coach or as an athlete, if I’m self coached.

Adam Pulford (00:49:20):

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And I think that one of the things that I’ve talked about and kind of preach about to my athletes too, is, is self-awareness knowing myself in that perceived effort. That is something that I’m asking all the time. I want athletes to put into their training logs or training peaks or something like that. And then as a very overlooked, uh, quantifiable and qualifiable, um, I dunno if you’d consider it a metric or not, is, is it number, but it’s very overlooked and very important in my opinion,

Speaker 3 (00:49:54):

Absolutely. You know, and, uh, uh, I often joke about the only athlete I coached day-to-day is my own daughter. Who’s, who’s doing distance running and, and, uh, I was on the phone with her last night. And, and, and let’s, let’s say it this way, my goal, and I think every coach has goal is, should be to gradually help their athlete become more and more self-sufficient and self-aware, and less and less, um, a passive recipient information and more and more of an active participant in a process. Uh, I happened to have a daughter who is extremely actively participating in that process. So that’s never been an issue. So, uh, but it’s an interaction that, you know, she, she, she wants to understand, she wants to understand her own body and learn. And so I, and I use some numbers, but then I listened very carefully to what she says and what she doesn’t say, you know, knowing your athlete allows you to also read between the lines I think. And so the nonverbal communication, the verbal communication, the, the, you know, the qualitative feedback is absolutely important. Uh, but then it, it depends on a trust relationship between athlete and coach that both are calibrated and a willing to use honest metrics, honest feedback, and you might think, well, of course, that would always be true, but now it’s actually not always true, uh, in situations, if the athlete feels like that, if they show weakness, then they maybe lose their position on the team or whatever. So there’s lots of this going on.

Adam Pulford (00:51:46):

Well, there’s so much, and it goes back to what you’re talking about before. It’s just human physiology is not linear in the slightest, and it is, you know, whether it’s the pressure to perform, to make the team or get the paycheck or, um, to impress coach or the egotistical, I need to be fast all the time and I need to win. And I need to, all my friends think that I’m awesome. Therefore, I need to do this thing or post a big number. Like there’s a lot of things that go into it that are barriers to not knowing yourself, right?

Speaker 3 (00:52:18):

Oh, absolutely. And, and this feeds into, uh, the deer, you know, everything’s connected with everything, but this feeds into the durability issue and that we tend to train what we can measure easiest. Right. And, and so a lot of our fitness metrics lets in cycling particularly because, you know, cycling is very, um, metrics friendly because we can measure power and all these things pretty, pretty consistently and accurately. Um, so cycling, what do we have? We have our, you know, your five minute power if it’s training peaks or your 20 minute power and uh, your, your 15 second power and your 32nd power and your one minute power. Um, and all of this is automatically re you know, extracted from your, your ride data. So every workout, my darn training peaks, because I don’t, I don’t have WKO, I don’t pay for all that, but it will tell me I have a new threshold power all the time you cause, cause it’s just, it’s dumb, you know, it’s, it’s extracting information from rides without having any real conceptualization.

Speaker 3 (00:53:34):

Well, this was not actually a 20 minute best effort. This was just 20 minutes during a three hour race, you know? Um, you know, you know what I’m saying? So yeah, yeah. So all this, but we tend to be intensity focused because the metrics are relatively short-term metrics. They are these 15, second, 20, 30 seconds and one minute and five minute powers. And so we’re constantly trying to improve those, right? Yeah. It’s fun. And you know, I get it. Uh, but the reality is is that if you’re training properly and if you’ve been trained a while, those efforts, those metrics stabilize. Yes. But they don’t, you know, they, they go up and down and from day to day a bit, but they don’t, you cannot expect if you’ve been riding reasonably well for five years, you know, doing the training, you can’t expect that your five or your six minute power or whatever is just going to keep going up.

Speaker 3 (00:54:29):

It flattens out. And in fact, it’s one of the first metrics that flattens out in this long-term development process. Yep. Okay. But you keep beating that horse to death because you know, you want it to get higher. Well, that is one of the things that tends to kind of facilitate or, um, incentivize a, you know, a lot of training mistakes, uh, because it’s really not the F the increase in five minute power. That’s gonna make the difference for you moving down the road. What’s gonna make the difference for you is being able to reproduce a big percentage of that five minute power again and again, and being able to produce it three hours into a race. And so that’s what we need to be working on. That’s, you know, we need to be extending, you know, I always tell people, I said, look, every workout, you’re asking the question. Do I today? What is the main goal intensify or extend it’s really those, that simple, right?

Adam Pulford (00:55:33):

So by intensify, you mean go harder, produce more power or run fast.

Speaker 3 (00:55:39):

Yeah. Produce more power in a given time unit. And then when you there meaning increase the duration. Now we get the D dur in durability duration ability. What is your ability to extend and repeat those periods of effort longer and longer, over a longer timeframe. Okay. And so the training essentially becomes this management of these two processes of maint increasing, and ultimately maintaining our ability to produce these high power outputs, these high intensity periods, and then gradually extending our ability to repeat them, uh, or maintain a certain power longer. And when you put those two together, you develop the complete endurance athlete, the endurance athlete, the athlete that has this durability and this repeatability in their functional capacity. And this is, this is triathlon. This is road racing. This is many of our endurance sports. Now are their endurance sports where it essentially comes down to just the high intensity component. Yeah. There, there are there, you know, you have track cycling, you have a rowing races. I used to row 2000 meters. It’s six, seven minutes of hell. Um, you know, so it is always, essentially going up to over your VO, two max and doing it once and, and, and, uh, going and throwing up after.

Adam Pulford (00:57:25):

But this is, but a lot

Speaker 3 (00:57:28):

Endurance athletes, it’s about extending, right? It’s not just the intensity part. And I would have you, I would say that even those rowers, if you actually look at the way they train, you would have a hard time distinguishing them from marathoners. You would find that they are very good at, at the, at the duration part too, because they train holistically, they train the volume, they train the durability, they put the total package together. So some of these world-class rowers have been able to do also excellent things on a bike or on a, on skis and so forth. Uh, so it turns out that whether you’re a six minute or six hour athlete, a lot of the training characteristics, if you’re at the highest levels, they’re very similar.

Adam Pulford (00:58:14):

So what, what is the Dr. Stephen Seiler definition of durability since we’re talking about? Well,

Speaker 3 (00:58:23):

Well, I have I’ve argued, or just said that, look for me, durability is primarily something related to your ability to do, to, to extend and do long duration, uh, work that is at, or below the first lactate lactate turn point without that big stress response. So the way I would measure durability in an athlete would be to say, all right, what’s your, what’s your first lactate turn point. Uh, and so you say, ah, what’s 240 Watts. Okay. So I was like, all right, well, let’s, let’s ride it to 20 today. I want you to ride at 220 Watts under that LT one, but I want you to just, Oh, we’re going to just stay there and go, you know, and then I’d ask you, how long is your typical endurance ride? You know, your low intensity ride, you say two hours. Okay. So here we go, one hour in heart rate, pretty flat, ha 90 minutes in maybe heart rate starts to drift up heart.

Speaker 3 (00:59:24):

Now power is the same, but heart rate starting to drift up. And by the time we get to the third hour, your heart rate has really drifted. It’s gone to third 20 beats above normal or above what would be, you know, what, it was 20 minutes into this ride, you with me. Yep. So I am, I’m quantifying a cardiovascular drift and I’m, and I’m using that to say something about your current durability, because, um, um, our, um, defining durability as your ability to maintain a constant internal versus external workload relationship. So it’s costing that athlete more than the third hour than the first. Yeah. A lot more. And so what I want to do over time is decrease that increased costs, that tax, that, that tax that’s happening right now, you know, because that’s gonna, that’s going to influence the next step, which is the high intensity repeatability.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):

Because if you’re, if it’s costing you more and more just to do the low intensity part, then it’s going to be sure as heck to, for you to stack on top of that, those Hill repeats that are coming in, the race, you with me. Yeah. You, then you’re going to be really in trouble because you’re not going to recover from those fast enough. And you’re going to get your dropped on the second or third lap of an eight lap race. Right. And so this is how these things go. And so I want to build my athletes durability. That’s just their base, their basic endurance there, you know, I I’ve gotten better, but, but a, a world, a world cup or a world tour level rider, I’ve got data from there. You know, they can sit at, at, uh, you know, sub threshold pace for six hours and they have no drift, no cardiac drift.

Speaker 3 (01:01:27):

I can’t do anything for six hours without cardiac drift. I can’t sit at my, you know, I don’t think I can sit for six hours in front of this screen without my heart rate going up. So, you know, but you get, my point is, yeah, that’s one of the things that defines the, these elite performers is they have exceptional durability, uh, because they have to, if you’re going to succeed at that level, you know, so there’s a filtering process. And then even among the best, there’s better than the, the, the other, the rest there’s the Vanderpools and the Von arts and the Saigon’s and so forth that have over the decades, these, these singularities, they they’re the ones that win the classics, the monuments, why are the monuments monuments? Because they’re longer, they’re that extra hour, even 75, 90 minutes long, or then usual stage races, usual, uh, races for four and a half they’re six hours long, six and a half.

Speaker 3 (01:02:26):

And that, that separates the best from the rest, you know, before the race ever starts, the Pereira Bay or two or Flanders, there’s only going to be 20, 25 riders that are really in the hunt because they’re the ones that have a track record of actually being able to, you know, call upon and mobilize good PA big powers after six hours a ride. And so this is th that’s durability. And then of course, then you have that high intensity repeatability on top of that. So those that’s the way I kind of look at this is, is durability is low intensity endurance. And then the high intensity repeatability stacks on top of that.

Adam Pulford (01:03:10):

Yeah. So it’s not that you can do four to six hours. It’s how much it costs you. And it’s not that you can say do 500 Watts. It’s what that costs you and how many times you can do it.

Speaker 3 (01:03:23):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many times, because to be honest with you, there are very few occasions in a cycling race where you actually go and use your full five minute power for five minutes. Yeah. You with me, we’re going to see that because why is that? Well, because you will then you’re, you’re exposing yourself. You’re, it’s like, it’s like exposing your neck to a, you know, a dagger. You’re just saying, well, just, just killed me because if you have gone that deep into the, well, then you’re going to get dropped. Yeah. Because you’re not, you know what I mean? So, so riders are always using a percentage of this capacity they’re using and they do it repeatedly. And if we look carefully at the data from road races, from mountain bike races, what we see is literally I’ve already started looking at Vanderpools rod, for example, installed Bianca, this fantastic ride, you know, and he’s, it’s one of these new rides.

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):

It just kind of gives him legend status, uh, four and a half, four hours and 45 minute race, uh, Strada, Bianca. I believe that would mean the white road. This, this is a racist destined to become a classic if it’s not already. And it’s just a shootout and the race, the first, uh, three hours of the race are pretty, pretty, you know, copacetic for everybody. But then the game starts with, and there’s an hour and 45 minutes of just pure, uh, you know, just these, these guys are just, just throwing out a one power bomb after the other, against each other. Uh, and it’s, it’s phenomenal to, to see or to look at the numbers, but what you see, if you really into it is lots and lots and lots of short bursts, you know, one second, two seconds, 10 seconds, maybe 15 seconds of, of, of energy expenditure that is above the so-called critical power above the anaerobic threshold. You know what I’m saying? These, these, these high intensity energy bursts, but it’s not five minutes. It’s not, it’s rarely that it’s, it’s very Mo much more often five seconds, 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, but it’s, they’re carefully applying it. And then they’re getting some recovery because they’re never, they never want to put themselves all the way out there until the exam, till the end of the race, because otherwise they’re, they’re too far, they’re too vulnerable, you know, because it doesn’t take much to lose a wheel. So the way this,

Adam Pulford (01:06:11):

Yeah, I was going to say so, so they’re durable, but they got a lot of awareness too, because they know that 20 seconds better get on that wheel. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:06:20):

They have a really instinctive feel for what, you know, how it’s like a battery and how much, what percentage of this battery can I use up before. I need to put it on the charger again and be ready for whatever eventuality that comes. Cause I don’t, you don’t want to leave the house with only 10% charge on your phone, right? Yeah. For sure that then you’re too vulnerable and that’s exactly, uh, I would analogize that to cycling is they don’t want to be a 10%, uh, at the bottom of the Hill, right? So this is, this is this game that’s going on? Is this, this calculation all the time of, of how much power can I exert here? And then of course, breakaways and things like that represent these high risk strategies where yeah, a guy like vulnerable will say, I I’ve got the big engine, I’m going to challenge. I’m going to make a push and try to get rid of half of this group. Uh, you know, I’m going to start whittling down this race to the real contenders, by applying four minutes of at 450 Watts or whatever he does, you know? Right. So the, you know, that, that happens. It’s a calculated gamble and he knows his body and he he’s saying, I can do this. And I don’t think most of them can keep up with me. And so this is the, the, the strategy,

Adam Pulford (01:07:50):

That’s it. And so

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):

He can recover. He’s also saying he already in his head says I can do it and I can also recover on the fly. Yeah,

Adam Pulford (01:07:59):

Yeah. Which is both. I mean, it’s like, it’s impressive to see not only the power, but it’s impressive to see the ability to recover and kind of like how’d that genetic potential to on, on either

Speaker 3 (01:08:13):

End. Absolutely. Sure. Yeah. But it’s also behind every one of these races where you see these massive power outputs. What you also see is there has to be time well below their thrift, their threshold. There has to be a recovery component. And when you look at these res files, there is a lot of time mixed in where they’re basically doing nothing. You know, they’re, they’re on the wheel and they, they get 10 seconds of recovery time. So th this is part it’s very bipolar in these races. They’re, they’re quite sta task. You know, I can show you the date. It’s quite interesting. But if you’ve got, if events, people spending lots and lots of time at high intensity, there has to be some recovery time he has to, you know, and, and that’s one of the other things about these good reiners is they’re smart.

Speaker 3 (01:09:04):

And they, they sneak in a few seconds, like even before Vonda poles, big push at the end, he was able to come down to around 200 Watts for a little stretch. And that was probably really decisive for him that he was able to Reese to get a reset. And then he just pulled out the power bomb. Uh, but he had some recovery time. And so that in that critical power w prime model, that’s, you know, that’s what you, you play with this, this relationship between time spent above critical power, and then the necessary time below it to recharge that battery.

Adam Pulford (01:09:44):

So this, I think you said it before on another podcast, but this biological durability that’s based in a low intensity durability in a high intensity repeatability, right? Like you’re training, you’re training and organism to, uh, produce power and recover and become more resilient to that. But being able to do that say in a race or being able to do that in a workout. I mean, that’s, there’s pacing. That’s critical too. And there’s also like this psychological component. That’s, that’s going on to be able to do that, say in the race with the Vanderpool. I mean, when you’re say coaching your, your daughter or working with an athlete, I mean, how much do you spend on that cognitive portion to pull them down from those high intensity time periods? Or if you get the intensity distribution right. In the workout. Right. Is it something that you don’t worry about?

Speaker 3 (01:10:38):

Yeah, that’s a good, I think it’s a little bit of both. If I use my daughter as an example, you know, so she’ll sometimes say, well, if I, if I do these really tough workouts and it’s, it’s quite easy for me to go easy on the easy days, you know, in the sense that she’s so tired that she needs to go easy. So there is a certain degree of self organizational property here I would argue. But then she also does have to be quite aware. And I, and, and she, like most athletes, I have often described her as she, you know, she’s ready to dig. She carries a big show and it’s not a problem for her to work hard. So I have to be the brakes and I’ve, and slowly she’s overtaking this and absorbing this understanding of her own body. And she is more, um, let’s, should I say less combative in the sense that she thinks every workout is a race she’s much more big picture.

Speaker 3 (01:11:41):

She’s understanding the realities of, of the training process. It’s chess, you know, it’s scene moves ahead. It’s understanding that, Hey, in the course of this season, I’m going to train probably, uh, you know, anywhere from 300 to 600 times, depending on athlete and how they organize their training and stuff. So hundreds of times, even I a 55 year old age groups whiffed, or I’ll end up training maybe over 300 times this year. So that’s a lot of stimulation. And, and, and it also tells me that pretty much I can be pretty darn confident that there’s not going to be any one Epic workout that is going to define my fitness great in the, in the forest of 300 stimuli. So I have to have a big picture understanding a helicopter view of what am I trying to achieve and what is my body capable of at my age, and with my current training background.

Speaker 3 (01:12:43):

And where are the places that I can relatively speaking at my age, get better. Right. I have to have an honest assessment of that. And if I’m honest with myself, I know that, yeah, I think I can do I’m about good for 400 Watts. It’s for six minutes and that’s not going to get better. It may, I may have a brilliant day and do four Oh three, you know, but I don’t know, bad day, it’s three 87, but that’s where I’m at. And it’s only going to go down with time because my, you know, I’m going to get older, so I’m not going to get too crazy about training, super, you know, lots of intervals. I’m going to maintain that. Yeah. But now I’m going to look on the other end and say, you know what, I’ll tell you, what I’ve seen is that, that I’m getting better at being able to produce a darn decent power, two hours into a race.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):

Now that I was not two years ago. Yeah. That extensive power that you talk about. Yeah. And so I, I, and how am I achieving now? Well, this year I said to myself, well, one thing I’m going to do is I’m going to try to have an increase in number of my total sessions, where I hit three hours, I’m going to, you know, so I just give myself some guide markers for some small steps along the way, in the bigger picture I want to have, you know, more workouts that are on that long end of the spectrum. Cause I want to try to stretch, extend my durability a bit and try to then stack on top of that. You know, I’m going to do some workouts where I am going to purposefully do some intervals, some pushes after two, two and a half, even three hours of riding instead of always doing them fresh.

Adam Pulford (01:14:38):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that, that depth of training that you speak of, and that, that need to go three hours, I mean, that is promoting or developing the durability, um, on those days. I mean, can you, can you get that without doing three hours, plus, I mean, if, if you got 10 hours to train and he always do too, are you leaving something on the table if you don’t go for on a day?

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):

Yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t have data, you know, and this is one of the kind of interesting questions that we discuss right now in training is, is the single long workout versus two shorter workouts on the same day, for example, uh, in a lot of sports in, in rowing, for example, the norm at, uh, once you reach a reasonably high level, you’re going to split up and do doubles. Okay. But here’s where that interesting difference is is that that rower race is six minutes and the elite cyclists at least may raise six hours. And so the argument for the row or doing three hour rows is less compelling than it is for the cyclist needing to do some very long rides, right. Uh, to build endurance that they will literally, they will sit that long on the bike in races. So that is a more compelling argument for that.

Speaker 3 (01:16:05):

You do need at least some of your workouts to be quite extensive, both physiologically in terms of signaling for adaptation. But I think also psychologically you need to get in that head space of what does it feel like to be five hours into a Fondo, uh, or, or a triathlon or whatever it might be, and how am I going to, what is my conversation between mind and body? What should I anticipate? What are the questions my body’s going to ask my brain and what are my answers going to be, because that conversation will happen. And so it’s helpful, I think to have had the conversation, or at least had a dry run of it, you know, and, and be ready with some answers that are not negative, that you don’t put yourself into a negative spiral. So that’s, that’s hobby psychology, but, but to be honest, the physiology and the psychology do kind of mixed together.

Adam Pulford (01:17:14):

Yeah. Yeah. They, they coalesce for sure. And there’s specificity built into that. Right. And so if you’re, if you’re competing for six minutes or six hours, I mean, logically, it just makes sense. Oh yeah. We should have a longer training session. Um, absolutely. But when you, when you’re talking about at the level that we are, you know, I think from the metabolic and, um, biological signaling, um, I mean personally in my practice, yeah. I want that athlete to definitely go longer if they can and organize it in that way, especially if their events are three, four, six hours in duration. For sure.

Speaker 3 (01:17:54):

Yeah. And I often think of tarps of stairsteps is the staircase has a rise and run, you know, each step has a certain run. That’s how long the step is or how deep it is. And there has a rise and you can use both the rise and the run in training in the way you prescribe athletes tend to be too focused on the rise, you know, the, the intensity, but you can both in your, even in the interval training prescription, even in the high intensity training prescription, we can get better at you manipulating both of these variables in an inappropriate way so that we titrate load more carefully. If I exit, I can exemplify this in endurance and an interval session, you might let’s say my daughter, she’s been, uh, she’s now going to go into a prep cycle for a 10 K in April.

Speaker 3 (01:18:51):

She’s been doing a lot of middle distance ish training. She’s training with a club in Oslo where they do a lot of, you know, four, 20 times, 400 meters and 10 times, 1000 meters, you know, a lot of short intervals, you know, relatively short intervals, cause she’s more of a 10 K half marathon top. Um, so now I’ve said, okay, dear dollar, we’re going to go back to our formula. We’re going to go back to some of these longer interval sessions, uh, but we’re going to, you know, ease into it. So the first session she’ll do on Saturday will be essentially three times, eight minutes. So 24 minutes of work, eight minute duration interval. So those are obviously a lot longer than 400 meter repeats or a thousand meter repeats. And we’re starting to move towards that sustained effort that sustained race pace of a 10,000 meter, you know, 34 minutes or so.

Speaker 3 (01:19:44):

And so, and then, so what step two, is it to go a bit faster? No, we’re going to go four times eight instead of three times eight at the same speed. More time in zone. Yeah. And then it peak, you know, she’ll, she’ll probably hit five times eight. Yup. And then she’ll race and, and if we compare her, her intensity to last year, then it, yeah, it’s a bit higher, but it’s not a huge amount higher. Right. So small steps of in intensity times 40 minutes, that’s a big change, you know, that’s a big change in capacity, right? So we use the accumulation of work time as a very important variable in the, in the training prescription execution and, and, and mentally also doing those longer intervals, she feels more tuned in to race pace for the actual 10 K. And there’s no, it’s less deceptive because you can deceive yourself with really short intervals and get through the really short interval workout. But, but you don’t realize that you’re using a lot of this, you know, anaerobic capacity to get your way through it, but you really, it’s not really sustainable. So that’s why we, you know, you know, in a race prep both mentally and physiologically, we like to use some of these longer animals just to kind of it’s there, they are the truth tellers in terms of where is this athlete in terms of, you know, in terms of pace maintenance, can they hold that pace for 34 35 minutes?

Adam Pulford (01:21:32):

Yeah. And the pacing is a super crucial thing. And one thing I’ve appreciated in your work, uh, over time is your, uh, passion and encouragement for a 60 minute effort for, for cyclists. I know we were just talking about a running, uh, pacing, but when we’re spending time at a specific power duration or a pace duration to find those thresholds or to explore a race simulation type thing, to be able to then race better, um, I think it is from the pacing and psychological standpoint, um, super important. So whether you’re building up in through intervals or you’re actually just going for it in that like 60 minute approach of finding your threshold or your edge, I think that the, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot to be gained there from a psychological standpoint as it pertains to the physical.

Speaker 3 (01:22:25):

Yeah, I think absolutely. And, and also I, you can almost show physiologically that you can see athletes that have a big gaps between their 20 minute power and their 60 minute power. And then you see athletes that have much smaller gaps. Um, and, and, and like, for example, myself, I’ve seen that that gap for me has gotten smaller just because I’ve gotten a bit better at extending, right. And so that, that adaptation is more accessible to us longer as athletes I would argue. Um, and I have even talked about this as you know, in the age, as an athlete gets older, what do we tend to see? They, they go, they migrate to longer events. Why, well, it’s in tune with how we age and what, what our relative deficits become. And we lose top end power faster than we lose that extensive power. And so, so this is one of the reasons why you can see quite good marathoners pushing a pushing 40, but you’re not going to see a 40 year old doing super stuff at 3,005,000 meters, you know? Um, so that’s, that’s a bit of this issue. And, and, and I just think that good grief cycling is fundamentally, I mean, the hour of power is so, is so fundamental to the cycling history, the cycling psychology, that, that I think it should be a badge of honor to have some, um, understanding at the boat at the most fundamental level of what that feels like they are a power, you know, and it’s such a good, it’s a, it’s a very good benchmark.

Adam Pulford (01:24:17):

Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And if people are intimidated by that, I’d say, first of all, just go out and try it, see where you’re see where you’re at. And if you can’t make 60 minutes, we’ll then, uh, you know, adjust the pacing accordingly and get there. But some of this takes time too. I mean, you know, a young athlete may not have the, the pacing mechanism in the brain to go out and do a 60 and also the, the power duration that it takes to get there. Um, so Dr. Sadler, when we’re, when we’re talking about developing an athlete’s ability to do a 60 minute sustained effort or something that is applicable to their race performance, I mean, it takes years to get there. So can you speak to how you would go about developing an athlete to, to, to get there and how long it would take?

Speaker 3 (01:25:04):

Right. Well, actually this is where we come back to this idea of polarized training or 80, 20 whichever terminology you like. And that is basically that the majority of the training volume of the athlete is going to be at an intensity below that first lactate turn point. It’s going to be talking pace or green zone level. Extensive endurance is another term that gets used. And there is, there’s a misconception about this type of training among people. They think of it as recovery training or trash miles, or just something they do to get to the next meaningful training session. And this is really poorly understood, um, because it turns out lots of research shows lots of observation of the best demonstrates that these low intensity longer do a ha have a great, uh, adaptive signaling effect. They are very important and a very important part of the adaptive process.

Speaker 3 (01:26:15):

So to get to the point of your question, that person who wants to improve their one hour power, I want them to be comfortable doing two and even three hour steady rides. And that is going to form a great platform for now starting to interject intensity and prepare them for the one hour of power. Okay. And so we think they, but they will often approach it backwards. They will approach it from an intensity standpoint saying, well, I’ve got to get, you know, I’ve got to get a bigger five minute power, and then my 60 minute power will get better. Well, no, we, we need to build your, your, the pyramid from the bottom. And that is extensive. We need to get you comfortable with two hours, get you comfortable with even three hours. That’s going to help make one hour feel more, uh, reasonable, and then we’re gonna X.

Speaker 3 (01:27:11):

So we’re going to first extend in then intensify. So if I give it ordering effect to this, I’m going to, we have to have more faith in the value of just getting up, increasing the volume of, of training, doing longer long rides, finding an extra, uh, session time for an extra session, if you can, but at the, at the least trying to extend your longer rides and don’t let them all become these 70 minute threshold sessions, right. That we, we extend them. So that would be some of my, the most important thing I can say. And then building on that, then we’ll do, uh, some interval training, some, some, some of this intensification where, and when we put those together, we’re going to, what will come out of. It is a good and an improved 60 minute power. And I, I almost want to say, I guarantee it, but I’m not a used car salesman, you know, but, but it does work, uh, and ended up so many times I’ve gotten so many, literally hundreds of emails over the years where people say, good grief. This worked, you know, I, I did a lot of extensive work. I did some minerals and then my threshold power just got better and they don’t understand it because they weren’t doing those threshold sessions all the time. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:28:34):

You got to pour the concrete before you build the roof. Right?

Speaker 3 (01:28:39):

Yeah. And so anyway, if, and it goes back to that deal, you, every workout, you either extend or intensify, you have to understand the value of both and the extensive work, the, just doing the time and putting your hours in on the bike that does have dividends. It does pay dividends if you’re, if you’re, um, disciplined. And if you have, you know, some clarity in what you’re trying to achieve, and those workouts agreed,

Adam Pulford (01:29:09):

Agreed. So Dr. Salar is, we’re kind of wrapping up and going along here, I’ve got a few more questions before we, uh, uh, do the final summary and, and take this thing home. So, first of all, for our audience who are seasoned veterans and have been doing, you know, three plus years of structured training, and maybe they’re doing some ultra cycling or iron man distance events, I mean, what should they monitor in their training? What should they be looking at in order to get the most out of the results that they intend for right now, after listening to this podcast, what they should be, what should they be looking at?

Speaker 3 (01:29:47):

Well, if they’ve been training, what should we call it? I don’t want to say properly, but if they’ve been training, you know, doing, uh, using a reasonable model of, you know, a good training, intensity distribution, and they’ve been doing several years of this, then we have to assume that most of their short high intensity metrics have stabilized. And it’s about repeatability. It’s about energy, about maintenance, about body maintenance during longer, these longer fondos or whatever the goal is. You’re trying to maintain your physiology as long as you can. And that then you start integrating not only the training, but also your, you have to start training your gut for, um, for food intake. You know, what, what are the w how am I going to get in enough carbohydrate during the ride? How am I going to maintain a disciplined drinking schedule? How am I going to put these pieces together to, um, achieve my goals on, on the day?

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):

And so I would then start as part of that durability development in that I’m gonna look at. For example, I, I have a digital weight scale in my cycling room, and it’s not because I’m too concerned about my weight. It’s just, I use it to estimate the hydration, uh, on most workouts and particularly long ones, just to see, am I actually maintaining hydration? Am I following a drinking schedule, which keeps me, and I try to, uh, you know, say, I want to be under one kilo under, uh, under a kilo of weight loss in the ride. And that’s tough. It actually cause your thirst doesn’t keep up very well, particularly if, if there’s some intensity and you’re really focused and that you forget to drink. So this is an example of things that we can do where the physiology is, is intertwined with the nutrition, the body maintenance, the, you know, you’re pacing, understanding your mental, self-talk all of this.

Speaker 3 (01:31:59):

So every workout you have put, even if it’s a low intensity long ride where you think, well, I can just turn off my brain. No, there’s things you can work on, work on position, work on, you know, am I sitting in a certain way? That’s tending to create some problems for me down a couple of hours down the road with, with fatigue and my shoulders or in my back or whatever. So there’s all of these, you should always be purposeful and looking for, you know, each workout has, has sub goals and learning elements in it, whether it’s controlling your breathing or your drinking schedule, are you with me in my, my logic?

Adam Pulford (01:32:41):

Yeah, for sure. I mean, substrate, you know, furnace camper,

Speaker 3 (01:32:46):

Because I’m going to work more and more on as part of that extensive durability aspect. If I’m a, uh, you know, a typical age group or that is trying to extend and do some longer stuff and fondos are half iron man or whatever, that’s where I can achieve, you know, I can still get better even in my forties and fifties, you know,

Adam Pulford (01:33:10):

For sure. But to clarify, are you weighing yourself and looking at hydration after an hour session? Or like, what kind of session are you doing before you, you wait,

Speaker 3 (01:33:20):

I’ve played with everything, but you know, what I have found is for myself is that there’s like a, a hydration threshold where I it’s not linear. So my, the, the sweat rate seems to increase nonlinearly and once I get up and these, you know, for me, what’s, for me pretty close to FTP ish kinds of powers, my sweat rate just increases dramatically. Yeah. And this is, and this is pretty important because at the same time, it’s increasing dramatically. My time to think about drinking is going down because often I’m in some kind of a situation where I’ve got to be, I’ve got to stay on the wheel of somebody, you know, you, you with me. And so this is a dangerous combination of, uh, a non-linear increase in sweat rate and combined with a testy situation where I just don’t have time to chill out and drink.

Speaker 3 (01:34:17):

And that’s when the dehydration really, really amplifies. Uh, but no, in an hour workout, you know, number one, I, I gotta be honest. I don’t do too many hour workouts. I try to, that’s one of my things, as I’ve gotten to the point where I try to do in cycling, I feel like I need to get, it’s almost a 90 minutes is my minimum nowadays, our workouts happen. But, but, uh, I tend to go a little bit longer now. Uh, but then for particularly if I’m in two hours, plus I’m gonna weigh myself just to see how I did and see if I’m doing a reasonable job of body, you know?

Adam Pulford (01:34:58):

Yeah. And clearly, I mean, we could have a whole other 90 minute podcast on nutrition hydration with, uh, Dr. Siler, but, uh, we’ll, we’ll put a pin in it there, but I did want to clarify and make sure that there was proper intensity and volume correlating with a, uh, need to weigh yourself after situation. But that’s actually, it’s, that’s actually a really good answer, uh, to that question. So for a younger crowd, uh, Dr. Salar, and we actually have, uh, quite a few juniors listening to this podcast as well, even here in DC, um, a little group that I work with as well, but for those getting into cycling or, or really eager to go and race and make the national team in this kind of thing, what, what would you say is most applicable to them that they should be focused on when it comes to building durability at their age?

Speaker 3 (01:35:50):

Well, I guess if they’re, if they understand that term and are thinking about those things, then that’s already a great step in the right direction. I’ll give you an exact example. I was testing, we tested a couple of, uh, twins. They, they kind of just serendipitously, came into cycling at a, a little bit older. They were teenagers and they’re just phenoms. Uh, you know, they went into mountain bike. They had no coaching, but the made the, the Norwegian national team and the mountain by their VO two max is 80 to 83 MLS per kg, which is just that’s world-class class. They are currently at 19, I guess now. Yeah. So they were being brought in onto this developmental team. But the thing about these kids is, is they’ve got no durability because they’ve never trained it. They’ve done mountain biking, they’ve done these short races.

Speaker 3 (01:36:47):

They’ve got this big engine that just seems to be mostly hereditary. They just responded to just doing almost nothing, but now they want to be road cyclists. And that big engine, it turns out not to be that useful if you can’t handle four hours of riding right. Or five, you know, so they are now having to learn to get the durability. And what I would say to young athletes is, is be aware that the cycling game, you know, everybody’s got a big VO, two max. I mean, everybody’s got a pretty big six minute power, so that’s going to come, you’re going to have that, but you’re going to distinguish yourself. You’re going to differentiate yourself and climb the ladder with the, the Azure durability improves. You’re going to get noticed based on your time trialing, uh, that’s often the, in the entry way into various teams is, is they’ve got, because it’s kind of the truth teller about basic capacity.

Speaker 3 (01:37:51):

And then it’s gonna be a matter of extending, extending. So durability, even as an 18 year old or a 16 year old is something they should be comfortable with working on. And that, and that, and that’s just spending time on the bike and not being obsessed with the intensity stuff and not being obsessed with, you know, beating, you know, the half wheeling game that tends to happen. So what I have seen is the young kids that have that calmness in them and that intensity discipline in them at an early age. They’re the ones you look, you say, Oh, watch out for this kid. They’re smart, you know, smart like a Fox. And they know how they’re going to get better and better. So that’s what I would be looking for. And that’s what I would be trying to instill in my kids.

Adam Pulford (01:38:44):

Yeah. Hear that kids straight from straight from the man himself, he came for that longer distance. And I think that applies to those.

Speaker 3 (01:38:50):

I am arguing this from the standpoint of having done all of this wrong at the same age. Don’t get me wrong.

Adam Pulford (01:38:58):

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, I mean, it applies to the people just getting into the sport at whatever age, just like you were describing at the beginning of the podcast. It’s just like you thought, Hey, it hurts really hard. I don’t want to hurt harder. I should try to hurt myself harder and do these hard group rides and try to keep up. I mean, it’s, there’s a long game that gets missed for sure. At any time.

Speaker 3 (01:39:17):

Oh yeah. The long. And I’ll give you a last example that in, in Norway, of course we like our cross country skiing and the cross country skiing world championships were just held and in cross country skiing, the shortest races are so-called the sprint, which is really like a middle distance event, but it’s a knockout sprint with multiple, you know, like you have to win four races to win the overall sprint. And we have a particular guy that already at age 18, 19, he was just world-class in the sprint, uh, fantastic technician on the, on the skis greats, you know, the had high peak peak speed and, and that, and so he was already a gold medal material, Olympic gold medal 19, you know, but he couldn’t, he was not considered a complete cross country skier because he couldn’t win the longer stuff. And, and, and in skiing, you know, they want to be complete.

Speaker 3 (01:40:11):

They want to be considered a complete skier. And now in the last, now he’s 24 and it’s this year for the first time that he was at the con, you know, he was winning the 50 kilometer race as well. And so it’s taken five years of additional training to build that durability, to build that high-intensity repeatability that is also necessary in cross country skiing because there’s lots of Hills and clams and draw, you know, so it’s often the same kind of thing as cycling. So that gives you an example of, of, of the process is those, the peak powers, this peak speed happens pretty early, but that durability takes longer. Yeah.

Adam Pulford (01:40:58):

Yeah. I couldn’t couldn’t agree more. I really couldn’t agree more. Um, and I guess, you know, this final question that I had kind of is already answered by that one, but I guess if there is a common thing for all cyclists and triathletes listening to this that they can do to elevate their performance through increasing their durability, uh, what is that that they can start doing today?

Speaker 3 (01:41:24):

Well, I guess I go back to what I’ve spent the most time, and that is if you get the basic training intensity distribution, right? You solve a lot of problems. You, you prevent some over-training over-reaching issues, but you also achieve a total stimulate that is necessary for long-term development. So, uh, my, my words of wisdom to up and coming athletes is to appreciate the yin and yang and the balance between intensity and duration and to respect the realities that they are both really important parts of the adaptation process. And if you get that, if you understand that, and don’t always double down on intensity, then you, you will solve so many problems in your training and you will have a much more, uh, sustainable, enjoyable and act and effective training process.

Adam Pulford (01:42:23):

I think that’s a great summation of the, of our conversation right there.

Speaker 3 (01:42:30):

Well, that’s yes. That’s what, we’re what we should be achieving now after two hours.

Adam Pulford (01:42:35):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, uh, I say let’s put a pin in it there, and we’ll both get back to our day jobs. Um, but Dr. Zeller, if people, if people want to have more doctor Salar in their life, uh, should we send them to research gate? Should we send them to Twitter or where we’re best to find you these days?

Speaker 3 (01:42:53):

Yeah, I guess three, three places. One is, is a research gate for the hardcore research publications that are available. Uh, second is Twitter, which is kinda more of a, a forum for discussion about research, about training. Uh, in often they’ll get just as much worthwhile information from all the other people that respond to tweets. So that’s a nice place. That’s, I think there’s about 14,000 followers in that kind of little group that, that I work with. And then the third is, is I do put out periodically some, uh, videos, teaching videos and so forth on, I have a YouTube channel. So those are the three ways that I try to kind of disseminate and communicate with people.

Adam Pulford (01:43:41):

Excellent. Well, we’ll put our links in, uh, to there on our landing page. So for everyone listening to this, uh, head on over to the trainer, your podcast landing page, and you’ll get all those resources, Dr. Sadler, thank you so much for all the two hours that you provided today. I hope our, and I do think our audience will get a lot from it.

Speaker 3 (01:44:01):

Thanks a lot. I’m going to go put on my cycling gear and Ryan for a couple of hours easy. So I’m going to go practice what I preach. Sounds good. Thanks. Take care.