Polarized vs Pyramidal Training with Luca Filipas PhD (Jan 2022) ⎮ Koopcast Episode 154

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop in this episode of the podcast is a about a topic that i find i find this probably the most fascinating out of any of the things that i get to talk about on a daily base and it's probably the area that i've done the most research on and that is training architecture you all have all heard these buzzwords like polarized training 80 20 training pyramidal training lactate threshold training vo2 max training and i really feel that one of the lost arts as a coach is how to order these in the right sequence in order to elicit the most adaptation for an athlete so to answer the heart of this question i brought on the podcast way back in january of this year luca felipe's who just published one i think one of the first and i was i will say that this is probably going to be one of the more critical papers in this area where he looked at different types of training and how they affected athletes make no mistake that i think that luca is going to be a superstar in the coming years because i think he has the right attitude and framework and he's looking at the questions that we want to have

answered as coaches and athletes this podcast is a re-release because i am out on a project with an athlete throughout the course of the fall and winter and i'm unable to record but the information contained within this podcast is absolutely priceless priceless because i know a lot of you out there are thinking about how to structure the year coming up based on what your goals are going to be so with that as a backdrop i'm getting right out of the way here is a re-release of episode 113 about polarized and pyramidal training with luca felipe's 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 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 yeah 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 in sports and exercise science and now i'm working as a researcher at the uni milan 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 uh athletes so luca you're one of those rare people in the space that does research and 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 ask 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 yeah 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 of 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 you say so 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 test 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 so that's why i i try to to bridge this gap between um uh science and and practice and try to to to to um each uh uh i say 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 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 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 a 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 the intensity distribution and the 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 um intensity below the first ventilatory threshold

the second zone 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 um signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling training is spent in Zone 1.

So for a recap, in polarized training, Zone 1, volume in Zone 1 is greater than volume in Zone 3. That is greater than volume in higher than volume in Zone 2. And in polarized model, the time in Zone 1 is higher than the time in Zone 2 that is higher than the time in Zone 3. So just a rough example, a typical polarized model is, for example, 80% of the time in Zone 1, 5% of the time in Zone 2, and 15% in Zone 3. And pyramidal training intensity distribution is 80% in Zone 1, 15% in Zone 2, and 5% of time in Zone 3.

So this is kind of an example of what polarized and pyramidal training intensity distribution means. And before we go any farther, for the listeners out there that aren't familiar with the 3-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 3-zone model as most basic. There's a 5-zone model, which we'll divide it a little bit differently. There's 7, and there's 7A, B, C, D, and then there's all these colloquial names for it. But the way that you're defining Zone 1, Zone 2, and Zone 3, that is progressive throughout the intensity spectrum. So Zone 1 is easy, Zone 2 is quote-unquote medium, and Zone 3 is hard.

And I think the way that, well, actually, we can go through the actual workouts, I think, to kind of bring this to light. So a Zone 1 workout for the subjects in this research would look like what? It would look like 67 minutes at around 4.30 per kilometer. Easy for these athletes, because they're good athletes. Easy for them. Yeah, yeah, easy. Between 4.30 and 5 minutes per kilometer. Okay. Zone 2 workout would look like what? It would look like intervals like continuous running, like 50 minutes at 3.40, 3.45 per kilometer, or intervals, like four times seven minutes at around that pace.

So 3.40, 3.45 per kilometer. So interval work around, I'm going to relate it to race pace, right? Interval work around 10K to half marathon pace would be roughly what would encompass that intensity range. Yeah, exactly. And then Zone 3 would look like what? Yeah, Zone 3 would look like basically intervals, faster intervals, like 12 times, two minutes at three. It's around an intensity between 5K and 10K speed. So for that athletes was like 320, 3.15 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 3.15, 3.20 for that athletes. Yeah, most people would describe that as a quote unquote VO2 max interval, right? Even though it might not elicit actually VO2 max, but it's close enough 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, and we look at pyramidal intensity distribution, there's a lot of Zone 1 work, easy.

There's a medium amount of Zone 2 work and a medium amount of Zone 3 work, but more Zone 2 work than Zone 3 work. If you go to the polarized model, there's a lot of Zone 1 work, very little Zone 2 work, and more Zone 3 work. So that's the name polarized, right? 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 the brilliance in this whole study design. And 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. Because they don't want to do their own thing, right? They don't want to do whatever the research design is.

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 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 the training over this 16-week intervention. Why don't you take the listeners through what those four cohorts were doing during the 16 weeks?

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. The two first cohort were polarized and pyramidal. That's did for the whole 16 weeks, both in one case. So polarized group did 16 weeks of polarized training. The pyramidal group did 16 weeks of pyramidal training.

And the other two groups mixed polarized and pyramidal in two different ways. The pyramidal to polarize did the first eight weeks pyramidal and the last eight weeks 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 training intensity distribution that they did during the first eight weeks and the last eight weeks. Participants were randomized in the different groups.

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

Right. How are you measuring? OK, 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 end of everything. Yeah. We basically tested them for VO2 peak in particular. Velocity speed at the 2 millimoles blood latte threshold and velocity speed at the 4 millimoles blood latte threshold. 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 heart rate, something like that, and blood lactate. But we had also performance measure like speed at the 2 different threshold and also speed during the time trial or just time to complete the time trial. OK, 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 thresholdy, 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 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 8. Yeah, yeah. And it was really difficult because also we wanted pretty well-trained athletes. Yeah. Just to give a number to the audience, they are around 15, 16 or 16, 30 in the 5K.

So, not, yeah, high professional athletes. But, you know, it's not so easy to have 15. Yeah. They're good. They're good athletes. Yeah, yeah. 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 a 14-minute 5K runner, they kind of know, you know, where it is even in the ultra running spectrum. 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 make a difference between all of those groups.

Because I think it's important sometimes to have this kind of athletes because when you read some papers, you read, oh God, you have 10% of improvement. It's kind of impossible in this type of athletes. So you read, okay, with this intervention, you got 10% of improvement. But when you train real athletes, you know that also even 0.5% of improvement is really high. So yeah, that's why I think it's more important in the future to have also really to have studies with real high level athletes. Well, in a lot of ways, 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 really big difference. 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 structure. No, you're probably laughing because you've seen 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-y 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 400s and stuff like that.

And roughly over these kind of eight-week chunks that you mentioned. And so, 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 do 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. So, fundamentally, VO2 peak pace at the different lactate thresholds, a 2-millimolar threshold and a 4-millimolar threshold. And then 5K time trial, which is kind of the ultimate performance metric there. So, what were the results at the end of the day, at the end of this 16-week intervention? Basically, we had an improvement in all these four groups.

So, we had an improvement in performance and also in relative VO2 peak and especially an improvement in the two – the speed associated with the two lactate threshold. The improvement was not so big, just around 0.51% of improvement in all the groups. But we noticed that the group that improved the most was the pyramidal to polarize. Exactly what you said about the collegiate athletes. They've all got it right. Exactly. But we started exactly with the same hypothesis.

We thought that starting from pyramidal to polarized could have been the best 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 is going to improve the most given what you were measuring. So, why was that specifically a hypothesis? Yeah, because you know as a coach that the real guide for the shape of an athlete is intensity.

So, modulating intensity from the start of the training program to the end, just picking the intensity, just guide the shape from a low shape to the top shape at the end of a training intervention or a training program. So, basically, I think that it's not volume that guides the training program, the training – the shape increase through a training program. But I believe that it's intensity. And that's why, yeah, many athletes train exactly in this way. So, just trying to reach a good volume during the first phase of the season and like in the base period.

And then they try to keep this volume or even reducing a little bit and trying to keep up the intensity through the periodization to keep the right form at the right moment. Because a typical, I think, I think of mistake that sometimes coaches do is to have a really high intensity at the beginning, since the beginning of the periodization. And that, I think, is kind of difficult after that to guide the shape through a periodization in the right way and know when you have to pick exactly for the competition.

So, I think, is kind of difficult for the best way. So, I think it's the best way for training 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 athletes through the periodization. Basically, this transition is because when you train harder, you get more cardiovascular responses and cardiovascular stress. And this cardiovascular stress is an important marker for increased shape through a periodization.

So, if you keep the cardiovascular stress low, your athletes don't get fit. If you increase the cardiovascular stress, for example, doing interval session, high intensity training, VO2 max intervals, you increase your shape almost immediately. After a few days, you know, as a coach and probably the audience know, if you are doing just base training and then you start doing a couple of intervals, after that, you realize immediately that you are in a higher shape. It doesn't take much.

But if you have to work with different intensity domain. So, let's say a marathon or even an iron man triathlon, which would even be longer than that. 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 conclusion would have been completely different, completely different. But the only thing that doesn't change to me is that the increasing intensity should remain. So maybe for a marathon or for a ultra marathon, you have to start with more pyramidal. So I think even more volume in zone one, less in zone two, and maybe nothing in zone three.

And then start progressing the intensity, the increasing intensity, but maybe arrive at the end of the training program with a full pyramidal training intensity distribution. Classical pyramidal, I think, could be an option because you know that if you are running a 5K time trial, you are doing a zone three. It's in zone three. So that's why it's kind of specific training if you 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.

So that's why I think it's even more important for, of course, 5K time trial going from pyramidal to polarize. But I think maybe for marathon runners, you can arrive at the end of the periodization with a full pyramidal or kind of equal volume in zone two and zone three at the end. Just to pick. I think it's one conclusion that can be translated to different disciplines. I think 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 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. Exactly. And from a from a training perspective, you know, this is one of the advantages, I think, with coaches like yourself. And I'll put myself in this category 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 an athlete's 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 VO2 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 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 polarized and 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 we're 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 say. So, yeah, I 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 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 what I would call the field of practice across all of the different sports. And now it's kind of flip flop to 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 apply research, because when you when you what you mentioned. So the the rise in high intensity, high intensity interval training prescription 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 continuous 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, low intensity session, high intensity session, just what has happened in the real life. Well, it's the same thing with the low intensity stuff now, right? We're going off on a tangent, which 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, 10k running, cycling, triathlon and things like that is driven by this. 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, an 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 kind of situation. So 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 I think. And I can't spoil something. We are trying to do a 52-week intervention this year just to try to bridge again the gap. But in cycling this year, I cannot spoil more, but we are trying to do a 52-week intervention in almost 60 cyclists. And we are trying to do an intervention that maybe can answer another question. I cannot spoil 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 have just started.

And we try 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, which might be slightly different than this audience, which is predominantly ultramarathon 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 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 this study basically just confirmed what I was doing with my athletes before. So I think I just probably understood, understand that the specific intensity of the race is just really, really important at the end of the periodization. So just doing a couple of weeks of really specific, race specific intensity at the end of the periodization is really important to make the athletes ready for the competition and get the athletes in the right shape for the competition.

That's maybe the most important take-home message that I have for myself. And I think for the audience, as we said before, you need 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 arrive in a good shape at the end. Or just you have like a speed. I don't know how to say in English, the speed of the motorcycle in your hand.

The throttle. The throttle. The throttle. Okay, yeah, yeah. That one, when you get your intensity higher, you can go full gas and your athletes go up with the shape. So you have the power with the intensity, the ability to really 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 race.

Yeah, you have to modulate it. I think that's the word that I was picking up on. You can't, 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, just kind of like flip the coin at the track every week to see what you were doing. 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. Yeah. There's maybe a little bit of physiological basis for it across mainly what we'll call the easy intensity domain.

But 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 random. Yeah, and I can say something more about the 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, let's just take an aerobic phase and you can tell me this is close or not.

And you're doing… 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 lopsiding 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, exactly. 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 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 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 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. On all the social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or ResearchGate. So, wherever they want. But I think I'm more active on Instagram. If they have Instagram profile, I'm more active there. And also on Twitter, I publish all my articles. So, if they want 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. It's Luca Philippas. On both. Perfect. Easy. Just easy. Just name and surname. It's really not so common. So, I have no other. No underscore at backslash 12345. 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 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 compliments. Compliments, yeah. As you say. That's awesome. Thank you. All right, folks. There you have it. There you go. Thanks to Luca for coming on the podcast way back in January.

I always really appreciated that episode because it actually informs me as a coach as to what to do on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis with the athletes that I work with. I hope you all enjoyed listening to that episode again. And that is it. That is it for the guest takeovers as well as the re-releases because I am back in the United States and I'm back behind the podcasting desk as of this week. So starting on Thursday, November 24th, Thanksgiving, actually. I don't know why I timed it like this. But Thanksgiving week, new episodes of the KoopCast are coming back. I've got a ton of great guests lined up, a lot from the research field. And in addition to that, I learned something during this takeover period.

I'm going to incorporate some new formats from what we learned and the feedback that you guys gave to me over social media. So expect a few more wrinkles in terms of the guests and the panels. And now we put together some of the dialogue that you guys are used to listening to on this particular podcast. Much thanks to AJW and Stephanie Howe for taking over the podcast in my absence. They did an absolutely fantastic job. And judging from the feedback that I got, you guys loved it as well. But here we go. We're going to continue on starting next week. And as always, we will see you out on the trails.