Polarized vs Pyramidal Training with Luca Filipas PhD | Koopcast Episode 113

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is with an up-and-comer in the endurance space today and that seems like it has been a theme over the course of the last several weeks today on the podcast i have none other than luca felipe's out of milan italy luca is a PhD researcher as well as an endurance coach for all sports and luca just happens to be focused in a lot of his research on this big picture question of how different training design actually affects outcomes and i have come to appreciate this type of work likely the most out of all of the research that i read and that is because it is just so incredibly practical for athletes they can look at a training intervention and decide is that training intervention the best one for me or is there another one out there this research just happens to be extremely difficult to pull off though you have to have a lot of athletes they usually have to go through long interventions and the one that we talk about during the course of this podcast is 16 weeks long and at the end of

the day it's up to the coach and up to the athlete determine to determine if what intervention is going to work best for the outcomes that they are actually seeking i can guarantee you that those of you who are not familiar with luca's research and luca's work today will be over the course of the next decade because he is solving these problems that are so important for athletes and coaches alike so with that as a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with luca philippas thanks for thanks for coming on i appreciate it a lot um i got a i got an insider tip that you're one of the up-and-coming coaches and physiologists in the space so i figured i'd bring you on before you're in such high demand that you uh uh that that you had that uh you would push little plebs like me down to the down to the very bottom of of the rug um but um but before we get into it you know we have obviously a a predominantly an ultra running type of audience and you know i just mentioned you're one of the kind of the new kids on the block from a physiology and a coaching perspective and and maybe a little bit removed from the ultra running uh scene which tends to be very insular right we tend to kind of play in our own play in our home pool so before we get too far into it like who are you and

what do you do and tell us a little bit more about your lab and your studies and what's going what do you have going on at the university there yeah yeah i'm um based in milan as i said and i'm i i've studied uh at university of milan both my bachelor and master studies uh in sports and exercise science and now i'm working as a researcher at the uni milan um i'm basically working on endurance athletes and determinants of endurance performance uh both running cycling and triathlon so these three disciplines are my main focus in research and i think i i can say the same for for my um coaching experience i may mainly work with uh runners triathletes and and cyclists so uh basically i i have these two two activities so part-time with the university and part-time endurance coach um i have my my own team uh with runners triathletes and cyclists and i mainly um have athletes from from italy but some other athletes from other countries of europe and i train

um around 50 55 athletes uh individually and it's pretty demanding it's a big athlete load yeah yeah but not only elite athletes just few elite athletes and a lot of amateur uh and uh recreational athletes so luca you're one of those rare people in the space that does research in endurance sports and also directly works with athletes and one of the reasons why i reach out to people like like you the most is because you're able to bridge not only what you do specifically in the research world but also what other people are doing in the research world you're able to create that bridge in from that academia into athletes and not everybody is capable of doing that as you as i both know there are some very very very good researchers out there that don't want anything to do with directly working with athletes they want to stay in their experimental design in their labs and things like that and that's fine and they're fantastic at it um so i always appreciate people like you like your uh people people like you and the experience that you can bring to the table the paper that we're going to discuss is a perfect example of that and i'm going to give you a little bit of a pat on the back before we even get into this so unbeknownst to the coaching staff that i work with i kind of asked them uh off the cuff what what research designs would they like to see come out in the space to

kind of help them answer questions with athletes and right out of the gate when i one of my really smart uh colleagues corinne malcolm she she said i want to see stuff on training design like this training design versus that training design preserve produces these types of results which is exactly which is exactly what we're going to talk about because ultimately those end up being the most functional ones because you're comparing two very maybe not very different philosophies but you're comparing different philosophies and you're kind of seeing what the end result at the end of the day is and those are i i think all all too often the most practical ones of which so let's let's kind of dive into this paper right um the the links to the paper are going to be in the show notes so the people that are listening can go and kind of read it for themselves but before we get into the methods specifically what what kind what really motivated you to do this research in the way that you did it and what problems were or what questions were you trying to to answer initially yeah basically what you did what you said sorry what you say so i i was just uh looking forward to uh different uh type of studies in training intensity distribution but basically i started from um a coaching uh question so which kind of uh training intensity distribution is the best but it's not um a question uh just this question is

which kind of training intensity distribution is the best in uh each period of the periodization of an athlete because uh you know uh you have read for sure many papers and usually they compare okay pyramidal with polarize or uh block periodization with traditional periodization usually never this never happens in the real uh field exactly exactly so so that's why i i try to bridge this gap between um uh science and and practice and try to to to um which i can't what i can say just solve this question that is um which kind of training this distribution is could be the best in at the beginning or at the end of uh periodization i know that this study that was published uh is not enough we will try to to do to do more because i know that you have uh other questions that came out from this always this yeah yeah from this study so yeah but i think uh for the future of sports science we need to uh try to do more uh applied uh research because usually yeah you know it's important to do lab research

uh try to understand the physiological mechanism but for coaches is to to to to talk with coaches it's so important to to try to uh to answer some of them questions so let's kind of back up a little bit and let me paraphrase it you're yeah what you're doing with this research design is you're looking at two different ways with which athletes can change their intensity distribution and those two ways we we describe and we're going to have to get into what this means practically because the audience is going to be largely unfamiliar with these with this terminology but these two ways are called pyramidal and and uh polarized you're looking at those two different ways of distributing intensity and how potentially you could combine those ways throughout the course of a 16 week period to produce to to produce results so before we get into the combined part of it because i think that that's that's really practical right when we look at different people's philosophical training designs you can see the way that you design this kind of mirrored actually out in the field within collegiate programs and track and field programs and things like that but before we get into this since we're talking about pyramidal versus polarized training why don't you take a stab at describing those two intensity distribution models first and then we can get into how how you combine them in the 16 week period yeah sure um i have to start with training intensity

distribution and the that is uh basically based on three zones um the three zones are zone one zone two and zone three zone one is the intensity distribution corresponding to the um intensity below the first ventilatory threshold the second zone zone two is the intensity zone between the first and second ventilatory threshold and zone three is just uh the intensity above the second ventilatory threshold so we can start with this and say and say that uh the polarized train um is defined as having the highest percentage of time spent in zone one uh so uh for a recall uh a smaller but relative high percentage in zone three and only a small portion of training in zone two um the pyramidal one uh instead is accumulating a higher percentage of training time in zone two and less in zone three uh but as in the case of uh polarized model uh the highest percentage of training is spent in zone one so uh for a recap uh in polarized training zone one volume in zone one is greater than volume in zone three that is greater than uh volume in

higher than volume in zone two. And in polarized model, the time in zone one is higher than the time in zone two, that is higher than the time in zone three. So just a rough example, a typical polarized model is for example, 80% of the time in zone one, 5% of the time in zone two, and 15% in zone three. And pyramidal training intensity distribution is 80% in zone one, 15% in zone two and 5% of time in zone three. So this is kind of an example of what for horizon pyramidal training intensity distribution means.

And before we go any farther, for the listeners out there that aren't familiar with a three zone intensity model, because there's lots of models out there and you and I both recognize this. And sometimes it just kind of makes me scratch my head. There's a three zone model as most basic. There's a five zone model, which will divide it a little bit differently. There's seven and there are seven, a B C D. And then there's all these colloquial names for it. The way that you're defining zone one, zone two, and zone three, that is progressive throughout the intensity, throughout the intensity spectrum. So zone one is easy. Zone two is quote unquote medium and zone three is hard. And I think the way that, well, actually we can go through the actual workouts, I think to, to kind of bring this to light. So a zone one workout for the subjects in this, in, in, in this research would look like what?

I look like, uh, 67 minutes at, uh, uh, around, uh, uh, four 30 per kilometer. Uh, easy for these athletes. Cause they're good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Easy between, between four 30 and five minutes per kilometer. Okay. Zone two workout would look like what? Look like, um, intervals, like, uh, continuous running, like 50 minutes at, uh, three 40, three 45 per kilometer or intervals, long intervals, like, uh, four time, uh, seven, uh, seven minutes at around that base. So three 40, three 45 per kilometer.

So interval work around, I'm going to relate it to a race pace, right? Interval work around 10 K to half marathon pace would be roughly what, what would encompass that intensity range? Yeah, exactly. And then zone three would look like what? Yeah. Zone three look like, uh, basically intervals, faster intervals, like, uh, 12 time, two minutes at, uh, three at, it's around, um, uh, an intensity between 5 K and 10 K, um, speed. So for, for that, it was like three 20, three 15 per kilometer. So that one was an example.

And another one could be a faster again, workout like three times, 12 times, 40 seconds on 20 seconds off at around that same similar pace. So three 15, three 24 that outlets. Yeah. Most, most people would describe that as a quote unquote VO two max interval, right? Even though it's might not elicit actually VO two max, but it's close enough to be, to call it that, I guess we can leave that description aside, but they're hard, I guess is what I'm saying in this whole intensity spectrum. So if we back up again, if we back up again and we look at, uh, pyramidal, uh, intensity distribution, there's a lot of zone one work easy.

There's a medium amount of zone two work and a medium amount of zone three work, but more zone two work than zone three work. If you go to the polarized model, there's a lot of zone one work, very little zone two work and more zone three work. So that's the name polarized, right? You've got, you've got the most intensity at the farthest ends of the spectrum, very easy and very hard. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Now we're going to get to the meat of it, right? And this is, this is the brilliance in this whole, this whole study design. I hope people can realize like doing a 16 week training intervention with a lot of very good athletes is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Cause they don't want, they don't want to do their own thing, right? They don't want to do whatever the research design.

Yeah. It was too difficult to do that study. I was lucky that the subjects were my athletes basically. So that's why I was more able to convince them that the study was an opportunity and not a waste of time. So you get your own guinea pigs all at the same time. I see, I see the design of the inner workings of your business right now. That's perfect. Okay. So there were basically four cohorts, right? Four ways that you designed, that you designed the training over this 16 week intervention. Why don't you take the listeners through what those, what those four, four, four cohorts, four cohorts were doing during the 16 weeks.

Yeah. Yeah. I can just start saying that these four cohorts were divided by which kind of training intensity distribution they did in the first eight weeks and in the last eight weeks of the training program. Um, the two, uh, first cohort were, um, polarized and pyramidal that's did for the whole 16 weeks, uh, both, uh, in one case. So polarized group did 16 weeks of polarized training. The pyramidal group did 16 week of, uh, pyramidal training.

And the other two group, uh, mixed, uh, polarized and, uh, pyramidal in two different ways. Um, the pyramidal to polarize, uh, did, um, the first eight weeks pyramidal and the last eight weeks, uh, of polarized and the polarized to pyramidal did the first eight weeks of polarized and the other eight weeks of pyramidal. So basically we had these four groups that were divided by the, um, the training intensity distribution that they did during the, uh, first eight weeks and the last eight weeks, uh, participants were, uh, randomized, uh, in the different groups.

We had, uh, 60, uh, participants that were able to complete the study and, uh, 15 in each group and were randomized, uh, based on their, um, fitness level that we tested at the beginning of the training intervention, just to match the different group, uh, for age, uh, relative, uh, maximum, uh, oxygen uptake running performance in the, uh, 5k time trial. But maybe we can talk about the test later on with the discussion. No, you can, I think that that's important now. I mean, what's the, what, what's the, like, how are you measuring the end results, right?

How are you measuring, okay, these people improve versus these people don't improve. And we'll come back to how and why that's important kind of at the, at the end of everything. Yeah, we basically tested them for, um, uh, VO2 peak in particular, um, uh, velocity speed at the, uh, at, uh, the two millimole block blood latte threshold and velocity speed at the four millimoles, um, blood latte threshold. Uh, we did a 5k time trial where we measure, of course, the time of the time trial and also lactate peak, RPE and heart rate peak.

So basically we had both physiological measure like VO2 and, uh, heart rate, something like that and blood lactate, but we had also, uh, performance measure like speed at the two different threshold and also speed during the time trial or just time to complete the time trial. Okay. So 16 week intervention. Yeah. One group does the exact same thing the entire time. And we'll call that the pyramidal group. And it's more, we'll call it a quote unquote threshold E, right? That's kind of threshold, more threshold centric types of workouts. Yeah. Next group does the same thing the entire time. And it's traditional polarized, lots of easy stuff, a little bit of really hard stuff.

Does, does that through the entire intervention? The next two groups kind of mix and match those two. One goes from the thresholdy stuff to the really intense stuff. And the next group goes from the really intense stuff to the thresholdy stuff. And then they're all measured at the end of the day, 60 people total, right? I'm emphasizing that because I want to give you more credit for getting this pool of athletes because it's rare. I mean, most of the time we're working on like N of eight. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was really difficult because also we wanted a pretty well trained athletes. Yeah. Yeah. Just to give it, give a number to the, to the audience. Uh, they are, uh, around, uh, 15, 16 or 16, 30 in the five K.

So not, yeah. High, uh, professional athletes, but you know, uh, it's not, um, not so easy to have 15. Yeah. They're good. They're good athletes. And I think a lot of people can go and they can kind of identify with those PRs. Whether they're an 18 minute 5k runner or 14 minute 5k runner, they kind of know, you know, where it is, even in, even in the ultra running spectrum spectrum, they're, they're, they're good enough runners. And the reason that that's important is you're not taking people from scratch, right? Because a lot of times when you take people from scratch and you do a training intervention, they're going to improve regardless. And it's hard to like filter through the noise here. You have experienced athletes that are already pretty good where the training design actually should actually should make a difference between, between those, uh, between all of those groups.

And I think, I think it's important sometimes to have this kind of athletes, because when you read some papers, you read, or, or God, uh, you have 10, 10% of improvement. It's kind of impossible in this type of athletes. So you, you, you, you read, okay, with this intervention, you've got, uh, 10% of improvement, but when you train real athletes, you know, that also even 0.5% of improvement is really high. So yeah, it's, that's why I think it's more important in, in the future to have also really, uh, to have studies with real high level athletes.

Well, in, in, in a lot of ways, the, the design of the training architecture of the 16 week intervention actually plays out because if they weren't so good, they would all just improve regardless. But here they're already starting at such a high level. The training architecture actually makes a, makes a really big difference. Um, the, the one, the kind of the one design that really sticks out to me is the pyramidal to polarized. And this is every, I don't know how familiar you are with this, but this is every collegiate program in the United States uses this type of uses the type of structure. No, you're probably laughing because you see it. They do. They start out with a base building phase, which would be before the 16 week intervention. And then they do a threshold phase of what they would call tempo runs, 40 minute tempo runs, 60 minute tempo runs, maybe some longer efforts, two mile repeats and things like that.

And then they transition on the track and they do thousands and four hundreds and stuff like that. Roughly over these kind of eight week chunks that you, that you mentioned. And so the, here we've got this proof of concept, right? It's like, here's like pretty much every collegiate program in the world has this one intervention. How did these other interventions kind of stack up with it? So you mentioned that you're measuring at the end of the day, at the end of this 16 week intervention, you're looking at VO2 peak, fundamentally VO2 peak pace at the, the different lactate thresholds, the two millimolar threshold and a, in a four millimolar, molar threshold, and then 5k time trial, which is kind of the ultimate, you know, performance metric there. So what were the results at the end of the day, at the end of the 16 week intervention?

Um, basically we are, um, uh, an improvement, uh, in all these four groups. So we are the, an improvement in performance and also in, uh, relative VO2 peak and especially an improvement in the two, uh, the speed at, uh, associated with the, uh, uh, two lactate threshold. Um, the improvement was, uh, was not so big, just, uh, around 0.51% of improvement in all the groups. But we, we noticed that the group that improved the most was the pyramidal to polarize exactly what you said about the, uh, collegiate.

They've all got it right. Exactly. Exactly. But we, we, we started exactly with this, the same, uh, hypothesis. We, we told that starting from polar pyramidal to polarize could, could have been the best to, to improve performance. We started with that hypothesis. And so we were pleased that the results were exactly on the same way. So, okay. I'm going to back up then a little bit. Why? And this is that we're going to start to transition to the coaching part of this, right? Why was that the hypothesis that the pyramidal to polarized group was going to improve the most? And for the record, I would have had that same hypothesis when I actually, when I was reading the abstract, I'm like, oh yeah, that group's going to improve the most given what you were measuring. So what, why was that specifically a hypothesis?

Yeah. Because, uh, you know, as a coach, that's the real, uh, guide for the shape of an athletes is intensity. So modulating intensity from the start of the training program to the end, just picking the intensity, just guide the shape from the, from a low shape to, to the top, top, uh, shape at the end of, uh, uh, training intervention or a training program. So basically I think that is not volume that guides the training, um, uh, the training program, the training, um, the shape increase through a training program. But I believe that, um, that it's intensity.

And that's why, um, yeah, many athletes train exactly in this way. So just, uh, trying to reach a good volume, uh, during the first phase of the season and like, uh, in the base period. And then they try to keep this volume or even reducing a little bit and trying to, uh, keep up the, the, the intensity through the periodization to keep the right forward. And, uh, at the right moment, because, um, a typical, uh, I think of mistake that, uh, sometimes, uh, coaches do is, uh, to have a really high intensity, uh, at the beginning, since the beginning of the periodization.

And that, uh, I think it's kind of difficult, uh, after that to guide the shape through a periodization in the right way and know when you have to pick exactly for the, for the, for the, for the, for the competition. So I think it's, uh, the, the best way for train, uh, endurance athletes is to keep high the volume at the beginning with low intensity and then increase gradually the intensity to modulate the shape of the outlets through the periodization. Um, uh, basically, um, the, this transition is because when you, um, when you train harder, you get more, um, cardiovascular responses and cardiovascular stress.

And this cardiovascular stress is an important, uh, marker for, uh, increased shape through a periodization. So if you keep the cardiovascular stress low, your athletes, uh, don't get fit. Uh, if you, if you increase the, the cardiovascular stress, for example, doing interval session, uh, high intensity training, uh, VO to max intervals, you increase the, your shape almost immediately after a few days, you know, as a coach and probably the audience know if, if you, if you are doing just base training and then you, um, uh, start, uh, doing a couple of intervals after that, you realize immediately that you are in a higher shape than it doesn't take much is what you're saying.

It doesn't, it doesn't take much, but let me, let me kind of, let's put a little bit of a different hat on. Right. Um, cause I know you work with cyclists and triathletes and runners and across a lot of different disciplines. Yeah. Would you, would your hypothesis, or do you think the results would be the same specifically on the performance metric part of it using 5k to benchmark the performance? If that performance benchmark were, let's say in a different intensity domain. So let's say a marathon or even an Ironman triathlon, which would even be longer than that, longer than that. Could you, do you think that it's still a reasonable conclusion or would you start to change how you're thinking about it? No, I think the, um, the, the conclusion would have been completely different, completely different, but the, the, the only thing that doesn't change to me is that the increasing intensity should remain.

So maybe for, for a, for a marathon or for a ultra marathon, you have to start with more, uh, pyramidal. So I think even more volume, uh, in zone one, less in zone two, and maybe nothing in zone three, and then start, uh, progressing the, the intensity, the increasing the intensity, but maybe arrive at the end, uh, of the training program with a full pyramidal training intensity distribution, classical pyramidal, I think could be an option because, uh, you know, that, uh, if you are running, um, um, five K time, five K time trial, you are, you are doing a zone three.

It's, it's in zone three. So that's why it's kind of specific training. If you, if you, uh, go from pyramidal to polarize, but if you are doing a marathon, the intensity target is zone two, because zone two is the specific marathon pace. Uh, so that's why I think it's even more important for, um, for of course, five K time trial going from pyramidal to polarize, but I think maybe for marathon runners, you can arrive at, uh, at the end of the periodization with the pure full pyramidal or, um, kind of, uh, equal volume in zone two and zone three at the end, just to pick, I think it's, uh, one conclusion that can, can be translated to, to different disciplines.

I think, what do we, what do you think? Well, I mean, from a, so when I read the design, I look at what, what are the performance benchmarks? And then what is the physiology that's elicited from the training that is leading into those performance benchmarks benchmarks the most? And for this, the pyramidal to polarized group fits that narrative the best you're teaching to the test with that group essentially. Um, and from a, from a training perspective, you know, this is one of the advantages I think with coaches like yourself and, and, and I'll put myself in this category, uh, in my, in the early part of my coaching career of working with a lot of different athletes across different intensity domains.

And you learn that the training that you're doing does in fact elicit subtle nuances across than athletes physiology that may or may not be specific to the intensity domain of the event. So first you have to understand the intensity domain of the event. And you, you very eloquently just said 5k it's VO two max intensity domain, right? Marathon it's zone two intensity domain ultra marathon it's zone one, or maybe even whatever's below zone one for some of these ultra marathoners. It's even, it's even easier than that. And if you kind of recognize that first, then you can design the training architecture to suit that. Now we can have a different debate on whether it goes from this to that or that to this. I would, I typically just take a least specific to most specific approach.

I don't even call it poor polarizing pyramidal or anything like that. If it's the most specific intensity of the race, you're doing the most of that close to the race. If it's least specific to the race, you're doing the most of that was far away from the race as possible. And then we kind of manipulate the intensity in between from an ultra marathon perspective with that. If for most reasonable ultra marathoners, what that either results in is just a lot of zone one work, almost exclusively zone one work leading to the race, or if they're really good, maybe something that would resemble a pyramidal structure as you, you know, kind of alluded to. Yeah. I was thinking about, about exactly what you say with my bad English. I was trying to explain what exactly you did.

You say. So yeah, perfectly agree with, with, with your, with your talk. So what do we need to do next? I mean, you know, you've kind of cherry picked a 5k, right? And you, you started out, you started out saying that, you know, we need to do, we need to do more research to start to tease this out. Yeah. I feel like we keep circling the wagons around this and don't have a good conclusion because 10 years ago, high intensity training was kind of all the rage. And you definitely saw a disproportionate amount of that in the, like the, what I would call the field of practice across all of the different sports. And now it's kind of flip flop to her towards the other side where it's a lot of like low intensity that sort of rules the day when you look out there in the social media space and, and, and, and a lot of practice.

And I think the research drives that, right? If there's a lot of high intensity research that says, oh, this is better than people will go there. If there's a lot of low intensity research that says, you know, this is better than people will go there. So what needs to happen going forward to start to figure out the answer to this in your opinion? Yeah. I think we need to start doing some more research, like, uh, apply research because when you, when you, uh, what you mentioned, so the, the rise in high intensity, high, uh, high intensity interval training, uh, prescription, uh, around 10 years ago started from, from some studies that compare just high intensity interval training with continuous running.

Yeah. You know, you know, you do high intensity interval training versus continuous people that do high intensity interval training, of course, get better than the other, but never happens in real life that one athletes do only high intensity interval training. The other just continues running. So that's basically a misunderstanding between science, pure science and practice. And so I think we need more mixed approach with high intensity and continuous running, uh, low intensity session, high intensity session, just what has happens in the real life. Well, and it's the same thing with the low intensity stuff now, right? We're going off on a tangent, which the, I think the listeners will kind of appreciate a lot of, not all of, but a lot of the move to more lower intensity work now across all of the endurance spectrum, marathon running, 10 K running, cycling, triathlon, and things like that is driven by this, uh, I'll say case study and research narrative.

There's kind of both of those at play that not exclusively, but predominantly pits, pits, pits, pits, an unfair situation. Athlete a does 10 hours a week of whatever intensity distribution, and then they increase their total workload to 12 hours a week, all in the low intensity domain. So it's automatically an unfair comparison, I guess is what I'm saying. You have an athlete that's doing 10 hours a week and athlete that's doing 20% more and all that extra 20% is all in the low intensity. Well, it kind of doesn't matter. Like if they're doing an extra 20% more, you can do whatever you wanted to do. They're still going to improve because there's just more workload in the second, in the second kind of situation. So it's the exact, it's the mirror image of just what you mentioned on the high intensity piece that's happening now.

And I completely agree with you that more of this, how do we ebb and flow the intensities throughout a long period of time, not just four weeks, 16 weeks, 20 weeks, and things like that. I know that's hard research to design. You know that more than I do. How does that actually impact a physiology and then be outcomes more of that needs to kind of come to the forefront to really kind of tease this answer. I think you can tell me what you think. I think it's still going to be this, whatever you're doing last is the stuff that shows up the most, like whatever physiology you're eliciting the most towards the end of the test or intervention, that's what's going to show up the most. And then yeah, everything else kind of plays in the background, but that's the dominating force that happens. Yeah. I agree. Fully agree with you.

Exactly. What, what, what I think. And we are, I can't spoil something. I, we are trying to do a 52 weeks intervention this year just to, to try to, to, to bridge again the gap that in cycling this year. I cannot spoil it more, but we are trying to, to, to do a 52 weeks intervention in, uh, almost 60 cyclists. And we are trying to do an intervention that can maybe can answer an other question. Not, I cannot spoil it more now. That's a weak tease, man. Come on. When we get offline, you can tell me the rest of it. Yeah. It will be tough, but we are, we have just started and we try to, to, to complete this one by the end of 2022 and then try to publish this paper.

Well, we'll bring you back on when that comes out. So let's get this more back down to practical stuff. Right. And I want to first start with your practice within the athlete that you're working with, um, which might be slightly different than this audience, which is predominantly ultra marathon runners, but we'll make that translation as a second step. But what are you doing either differently, or do you have a higher focus on now that you've done this research and you've kind of studied the landscape a little bit more specifically with your athletes? Like what, what specifics are you kind of like taking away from this and saying, you know what, I'm going to do more of this and less of that. I think, um, this study, uh, basically just confirmed what I was doing with my athletes, uh, before.

Um, so, um, uh, I think I just probably, um, understood, understand that, um, uh, the specific, specific intensity of the race is just really, really important at the end of the periodization. So just doing, um, a couple of weeks of really specific, uh, race specific intensity at the, at the, at the end of the periodization is really, uh, important to, yeah, to make the athletes ready for the competition and, um, get the athletes, uh, in the right shape for the competition.

That's maybe the most, uh, uh, take home message that I have for myself. And I think for, for the audience, yeah. Yeah. As we said before, you need to, to modulate carefully the intensity through the periodization because the intensity is the marker of the shape during the periodization. So if you do too much intensity at the beginning, then it's kind of difficult to, to arrive in a good shape at the end. Or just, um, you have like, uh, uh, uh, um, speed, uh, I don't know how to say in English, the speed of the, the motorcycle, uh, in your, in your hand.

The throttle, the throttle. That one. When you, when you, when you, um, um, um, get your intensity higher, you have the, you can go full gas and your athletes grow up with the, with the shape. When, so you have the power with the intensity, the, the ability to, uh, really, um, modulate the shape of your athletes when you want. So I think it's important just not to go full gas from the beginning. Otherwise, you have not enough intensity at the end to arrive at the good shape in that trace.

Yeah, you have to modulate it. I think that's the word that I was picking up on. And as this design actually shows, even in a 16-week intervention, if you're at the same intensity the entire time, yeah, you might not improve. But even if you modulate the intensity, and I would be willing to guess, you can tell me if you have a difference of opinion on this, even if you almost took a randomized approach. Where two weeks you did this type of intensity distribution and two weeks you did that type of intensity distribution and just kind of like flip the coin, you know, at the track, you know, every week to see what you were doing. And that would probably elicit a better result than just doing the same intensity distribution over long periods of time because you're constantly stressing kind of different systems at that point. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. And another thing that we can discuss and we can also investigate in the future, and I think it's a really, really cool topic. I think we need to understand how much recovery do you need after a training block to get the adaptation. We did three weeks on, one week off. So one week, three weeks, high volume and one week of taper, three weeks of high volume and one week of taper for the 16 weeks. And so it's interesting to understand when you need to taper in your periodization after two weeks, after three weeks, after four weeks.

Or another question, interesting question for the audience could be how many sessions per week do you need to taper after three weeks or after four weeks? Because if you train two times, probably you don't need paper after three weeks. If you need four times, you need taper. Who knows? And that's another question that probably it's interesting to look at during the next few months. Dude, I've always thought this three to one design, I'm not knocking you because I know you've got to like standardize it in the research. I've always thought this three to one design. So three weeks hard, one week easy is just lazy. Like there's maybe a little bit of physiological basis for it across mainly the, we'll call it easy intensity domain.

Once you start to do a lot of workouts outside of that, and then you incorporate strength training workouts and things like that. It's just, you can't find a physiological basis for it. It's almost, it's almost random. Yeah. And I can, I can say something more about this spoiler that I said before. We are doing a study comparing what happens if you taper during a week or if you distribute the same amount of load during the other. Block style training. Yeah. Block style training is what you're describing. Yeah, exactly. You distribute the training load in an uneven manner. And so the way, so let's just take an aerobic phase and you can tell me this is close or not.

And you're doing, uh, I'll make the math easy on me. You're training five days per week and it totals 10 hours, right? So two hours a day. So in your evenly distributed model, you're doing exactly two hours a day, five days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or sorry, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, take Friday off Saturday, Sunday, all two hours. In the blocked group, you would do like four hours on Monday, three hours on Tuesday, one hour on Wednesday, one hour on Saturday, one hour on Sunday. So it still adds up to 10 hours over the course of that entire seven day period. You're just, you're just lopsiding the, the, the volume in this case, but you could do the same thing with overall workload to be concentrated across a few days. Is that generally what you guys are getting at? Yeah. I love it.

I love it. This is the stuff that I want to come out because we've theorized on block style training versus evenly distributed training for a long, long time. There's a lot of good research that's done out of Norway on cross country skiers where they've used block style interval training where one week they'll have four interval workouts. The next week they'll have two, the next week they'll have one, and then they'll have a recovery phase. And that, that is an interesting question to answer to where there's been a lot of really good preliminary research on. But like you said, stuff that, that needs to happen kind of more long-term I'd be super fascinated with. So you got to promise me, you're going to give me like the sneak preview of it. Since you're like teasing it so hard on this podcast, we'll bring you back on and you can like release the, release the results. This has been great, man.

It's the first time meeting you. This is really fun. I appreciate your outlook on things. Where can the listeners learn more about you and your research, either on social or over the web? Yeah. Yeah. On all the social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or research gate. So wherever they, they want, but I think I'm more active on Instagram. If they, if they have Instagram profile, I am more active there. And also on Twitter, I publish all my articles. So if they want to, to, to check my profile, feel free to check it and follow me. And the links to the handles will be in the show notes, but for those listening, what are the Twitter and Instagram handles?

Yeah. Uh, it's Luca Philippas, uh, on both. Perfect. Easy. Just, just easy. Just name and surname. It's, uh, really, uh, not so common. So I have no other, no other. No underscore at backslash one, two, three, four, five. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, man. Thanks for coming on, man. We're going to bring you back. Once the rest of this research comes out, good luck to you with it. And, um, you're contributing a lot, man. I think that you've got a bright, bright future ahead of you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for the invitation and thanks for the, for the, uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For the compliments. Yeah. Yeah. As you say. That's awesome. Thank you. All right, folks.

There you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Luca for coming on the podcast today. And as I mentioned from the intro, I think that this is one of the most important questions we have to answer. In the sports science and the research world, because it is extremely practical. What should I do tomorrow? What should I do over the course of the next month in terms of my volume and training intensity distribution? And how is that going to ultimately affect me as an athlete? So go and give Luca's work, some support, go follow him on him on Instagram. I guarantee you, you will hear more and more from this individual as the years come along. Thank you to all the listeners out there. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends, share it with your training partners.

If you have a coach, go ahead and share it with your coach. I think that these are really important questions that coaches and athletes need to have with each other. You can also give this podcast a rating or review on, on Apple podcasts. I'm always very appreciative of those. It helps this podcast get out to a much wider audience. That's it for today, folks. And as always, we will see you out on the trails.