Using Subjective Feedback to Drive Performance with Natàlia Balagué and Lluc Montull | Koopcast Episode 155

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast and i am back i am back as your humble host my name is Jason Koop if you have not been paying attention to the podcast recently i had two of our coaches overtake the podcast in my absence when i was out on an athlete project for the last several weeks thank you to coaches stephanie howe and ajw for taking over the podcast in my absence those episodes were absolutely fantastic and sometimes hilarious i had no idea the direction that they were going to take i gave them complete control and autonomy over the topics that they wanted to discuss and who they wanted to bring on the podcast and you all the audience gave me a lot of great feedback in my absence about how much you actually liked those episodes and i'm going to take that as a lesson moving forward incorporate some more voices on this podcast particularly to provide some context and commentary to a lot of the research topics that we end up talking about on this podcast so thank you thank you thank you to those two individuals steph and ajw i could not have done that without your help you guys did a great job taking over the reins in my absence but i'm back and i'm back to talk about a topic that is very near and dear to me and

something that i have constantly studied over the course of my coaching career and that is how do we monitor athletes and determine if they're getting better worse and what to do next from a training perspective you guys know you long-time listeners will know that we've had a lot of people on this podcast to discuss this very topic most recently we had cyan allen talking about the wearables and marco altini talking about heart rate variability and on this podcast today i wanted to bring on co-authors of a brand new opinion piece in the journal sports medicine the title of which is integrated proposals of sports monitoring subjective outperforms objective monitoring the two individuals that we're going to be talking about this with today are luke montuel and natalia belag they both have put together an incredible opinion piece on this that really integrates all of these different aspects of how we should look at humans as complex adaptive systems and integrate both objective and subjective types of monitoring in order to facilitate athlete progress i love this topic because it has had a very dynamic arc over the course of my coaching career and i have not switched back and forth but i've definitely changed opinions on this as i have grown and developed as a coach and we talk about that a lot during the course of this conversation so buckle in i'm back here we go here's my conversation all about subjective and objective monitoring with athletes and what you can do to make the most out of it with luke and natalia

thank you guys for coming on the podcast i've been really excited about this uh for a while and um i this paper caught my eye i don't know i think it was probably several weeks ago and i really didn't get a chance to dig into it because i was on this big project in europe and finally when i got the chance to dig into it as i was mentioning to you guys off uh off air it really encapsulates a big arc of how i've treated my coaching practice where when i initially started coaching we we wanted to rely a lot on a lot of the devices and objective measures to try to quantify recovery and training load and even the cardiovascular load and the amount of kilojoules somebody was you know burning and during the workout and things like that like we wanted to do that because the technology and actually the ability to monitor it was relatively novel it was relatively new and it now looking back on it retrospectively that pendulum swung very far on that side of the spectrum on that side of the objective spectrum and it's gradually been kind of like coming back but the forces that be because the technology kind of keeps getting better and better and more accessible uh and easy and easier to use this objective versus subjective uh feed these objective versus subjective feedback tools are always going to

have are always going to have kind of a push pull with with coaches and athletes and so i lay that out initially because it's i think it's a very practical paper for both athletes and coaches to to to to look at and really think about how they're gathering information as opposed to just gathering the information and then figuring out what to do with it afterwards so that was my catalyst in in in really getting engrossed into the paper but i want to ask from you guys's perspective and either one of you can can take the lead on this what was what was your catalyst for trying to tackle this kind of really comprehensive sports science subject well i i will a bit introduce myself not much but i've been exercise physiologist teaching exercise physiology to university sports science students for almost 40 years so this long experience and in the beginning i was just copying what these programs in medicine were dictating for physiology but soon i realized that this well not soon a bit later let's say but mainly when i was in touch with all these ideas from complex systems i realized that really this was not the type of information and the type of education that sports scientists needed and then we changed a lot and in fact now it is much more focused on what we call physiology of complex adaptive

systems so we conceive uh our organism in a totally different way we have left machines aside so okay this approach of classical cybernetics thinking on all these processes linear processes and uh control of yeah control of computer metaphor uh and ideas around how to conceive the human organism to move to a complex systems ideas with the properties of complex adaptive systems which are mostly ignored in exercise physiology and this has obviously many consequences for training and for practitioners in general so coaches are more usually more interested on what to do than on why to do it and this is a big problem nowadays so as soon as something new as you have said arises from technology they like to use it thinking that this is a better solution for and sometimes they they neglect that uh this can be yeah misleading the trading and this is not always the best um the best way to take so i think that that um well technological companies of course are center are centered on their economic benefits and

will always have new um artifacts to use for uh easily for making more easy this task the the the question is if this is needed at all and in this sense i would say definitively it is not that is a perfect setup and i think we're going to peel apart a few different pieces of that but i want to give uh luke a chance to chime in as well like how like how did you initially become interested in this well i mean i finished my my PhD like in may of this year uh and this PhD was directed by by natalia and when i when i met natalia um some years ago i started to to get interested in this type of topic you know to understand uh athletes and and the sport and all these phenomena related to to the complex active systems and she opened my mind and at the end of this uh uh thesis uh period um we thought to write this paper um to to discuss you know this this topic of of monitoring uh to discuss also these limitations of the um these tools that are increasing more and more um and more every day and they need to they need to yeah to to be rethink no i will need to to rethink about um

um what and why they they are used and also we need to to reevaluate the potential of subjective monitoring and that's why we start with this paper to to discuss this integrative uh um potential no of the subjective monitoring in front of the objective monitoring to make you think athletes coaches but also scientists of course it's one of the things that natalia mentioned that really just resonated with me is is that coaching and coaching and training especially endurance sports for for whatever reason and i don't think this is actually limited to endurance sports i think you see this a lot in the strength power sports as well a lot of the practice is generated from this copy paste type of mentality and the majority of that is driven from the top down so here's what these athletes do at the olympic or the international level or in in the the prototypical case in endurance sports here's what the kenyans and the ethiopians do and let's translate this down to whatever level it is the collegiate level the recreational level even kind of the the the beginning level and while there's value in doing that because they're obviously successful at least in part because of what they're doing right there's just that's just a part of it just what they're doing there's obviously natural ability and luck and all these other things that go into sport what it fails what it fails to

with the real failure of that copy and paste mentality is the ability is it takes away or it mutes the ability to think for oneself and you're automatically translating something that somebody else has done and linearly applying it in a fashion where you think it's going to apply to apply to everybody else and you highlight this this this failure of linear thinking a lot within the paper the original way that i was thinking about it was when i first started coaching the thing that became very prevalent in the early 2000s was the ability to try to track and monitor training load so we're going to quantify this in some way either with a trim score or with a power meter using training stress score and there's all these there's you know all these different ways especially in the endurance sports tech to actually do that and what ended up happening from a coaching and a training perspective is we ended up taking that very simplistic that very simplistic load that we were trying to quantify with athletes and trying to extrapolate it into the entire training plan and then extrapolate it into the adaptive process so much so that the the the predominant like training tool that a lot of coaches and athletes use today and this is the one that we use because i think it's the best it's called training peaks

they very erroneously and egregiously in my opinion synonymously use these two terms chronic training load which is a which is a representation of six weeks of this uh training stress score that they've kind of coined so to speak they synonymously interchange that word with fitness and even when you log into the tool today you'll see chronic training load and fitness used in a synonymous fashion and it is not the amount of training load that you have is not completely equal to the fitness that you're going to reap from it and i think it goes back to your two earlier points this this fact that humans are complex adaptive systems and you can't simply synonymously equate training load to fitness and the linear relationship of the increase in that load to their to their future fitness so anyway you guys highlighted that in a much more global a global example which i'm going to let which i'm going to let you all take the lead on but the reason that it resonated with me is because i had this very visceral experience of where us as coaches we fell into that trap we fell into that trap and saying okay we need to get our athletes chronic training load as high as possible because we're thinking erroneously that that that is going to equate one to one in a linear fashion to their to to their fitness and even to this day i got a new athlete just last week and he was asking me well how do i increase my fitness line

right which is this little blue line on the kind of on the training peaks chart and so then i had to go into this whole you know lay person's view of it's not synonymous as fitness and things like that so anyway so i want you i want to keep you guys's perspective on on that the fact that humans are complex and adaptive systems and we can't necessarily take one or even several variables and start to equate them to how they're going to perform on race day or even what their fitness is going to be representative of when i would say that um this idea about machines uh has many wrong assumptions over simplified and wrong assumptions uh one is that we are independent of our context and we are not so we we are always thinking about the performer environment system so the impact of of this personal uh internal environment and external environmental and context is very important but also the dynamic nature of such context so such internal and external context are changing all the time right so this interaction makes that i mean we cannot fix uh any value any quantitative value uh as we can do with machines that have their maximums they are tops we can decide about let's say thresholds

um if this point is reaches its critical value is rich then this is happening and so on so this is typical machine behavior but we are not that so we have totally different properties first it is that we are very much depending on the on the context and and we can we cannot ignore this uh although another is that we are non-linear systems we have non-linear non-proportional responses to the inputs and that we self-organize so we do not need to any prescription or from internal or external against to say what how we should respond so we have pleiotropy degeneracy properties so we have a full amount of properties that are that are ignored totally ignored and are playing a very important role in these things so for instance these ratios workloads fixed i mean for who are they are they are um relevant for which person for a mean it is any person i mean for this study i mean um so this is not the way to to deal with uh adaptive complex systems so

simply it is too much simplified and needs to be updated from the theoretical point of view first so these beliefs these um this lack of confidence of coaches on self-confidence on on their methodologies also is based on on low education so in fact they they are very much based on experiential uh knowledge but not on scientific knowledge not on updated knowledge and then this is very much affecting our the athletes and and i think this should be changed so now we are cooperating with a professional doctorate in limerick that we it is for innovate and for helping coaches to coach together with making their careers together with uh this doctorate doctorate professional doctorate so thinking at the same time that they do the things updating their beliefs their assumptions and so on so i think this is very important these profiles of coaches that are also skeptical and all the time thinking how to improve how to develop themselves and not just relying on their experiences on experiences on successful uh practitioners which is out of uh practitioners which is out of i mean it is too simplistic 100 luke you want to jump in there

yeah yeah i want to say that uh even technology is developing you know by big data that can integrate many variables along the time um as natalia say uh we are non-linear and if we are non-linear we are unpredictable and for example uh after collecting the heart rate of an athlete during the whole season in a determinate condition an algorithm could probably define more or less which is the heart rate in the same condition however it would be impossible to exactly predict the dynamic response of heart rate or any uh uh other um psychological biological response uh in a precise way um for that reason it's necessary that athletes and coach contextualize values of objective monitoring and then use them as goal standard you know as a as a linear um tool in that way and we've seen exact like countless examples of this the one that i wanted to bring up was heart rate right there where if you track an athlete throughout the course of a year it's i'm not going to say it's impossible but it's extremely difficult to pinpoint what heart rate they should be training at for what physiological zone throughout the year because there's so much context as natalia mentioned uh that's that's associated with

that that you can't that you can't quantify or is at least very difficult to quantify the context piece of it becomes really important i think when we talk about actually like real people who have a lot of variables around their lives and the one that the listeners will be familiar with to further emphasize natalia's point um that we've talked about a lot on this on this podcast is just the concept of a training camp so when we bring just our normal everyday athletes that work for a living they're the breadwinner they work 40 to 50 hours a week at kind of whatever desk job that they have when we bring them into our training camps that they come to for fun right they come it's an enjoyable activity for them they either triple or quadruple their volume over the course of a three or four day period they'll do two weeks worth of volume in three or four days and the the relevant point there is the only way that they are able to do that is because they've changed the context of their life right they've gotten rid of their nine to five job to the extent that they can they're in a different environment where all they can do is kind of eat sleep and train and if you were to lay that training program out on paper without the context of the athlete going to a training camp and things like that it would just look absurd right everybody looking at that without the context behind it would say 100 you're going to get this athlete hurt or over train or injured or

kind of something this is dumb right this is it's absolutely dumb yet time and time again and i've not had one single person despite hundreds hundreds of people coming into this camp ever get hurt from it they all have a superior adaptive response even when you consider the total training load which is the more important part for athletes anyway they have a superior uh training response and it's all due to the to the context now that's an extremely polarized example of how context matters right normal life into into a training life but there are all these other different like nuanced levels of where that context matters as well and luke to your point it's i don't know if a machine can learn that right because it's it because it is it is on its face infinitely complex i would add to the physical context the social context as well so we don't we never behave the same in a social in one social context in another social context in life so it happens the same so the fact to train together and so on so has many also many effects and which what is key point here for highlighting the the relevance of subjective monitoring is the fact that we are made of trillions of intelligent pieces so we trillions of cells we behave in an intelligent way which are able to

perceive which are able to decide and to uh and are able to act you know accordingly so and and that they have to work in signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling signaling So imagine how intelligent we are. So every small piece of us is intelligent. So, and this will never be, well, I cannot say this, but let's say that artificial intelligence is very far from it. It is made by screw-trues, cables. I mean, these pieces are not intelligent for now. So we are far more intelligent. However, we should believe it and we should be aware of it and we should exploit that.

And we should even be aware that we can learn in addition. So not only that we are so intelligent, but we can learn. So imagine how, I mean, far away we are from machines and how much we can trust on these integrative possibilities of our intelligence. So this is absolutely privileged, exceptional. So it is pity that we don't take advantage of it. In my personal monitoring process with athletes, I get this automated email anytime an athlete completes a workout and it gives me a summary of basically what they call the hero metrics and then their post-activity comments. And it's in that order.

I get distance, average heart rate, elevation gain, you know, power, if it's a cyclist and things like that all in one screen. And then below that, and I'm emphasizing the word below intentionally, the second part of that, of that, of that summary, that workout summary are their post-activity comments. For years, I have lobbied to get those flipped because I want to see the post-activity comments first, the subjective feedback. And then I want the objective metrics second, because that's the way my brain prioritizes them. Or that's the way, and it didn't always used to be like that. I used to always just think, how many kilojoules did you do? What was your average heart rate? Okay, let's figure out things from there. But now I want it flipped. But before we get into this too, so I guess what I'm saying to tell you is you're speaking my language with that.

Before we get into this too granularly, though, I want to set this up. Because the listeners are going to be a little bit unfamiliar with what the real difference between subjective and objective monitoring is, and what the advantages and disadvantages of both of those systems are, so that they can ultimately internalize for themselves. Or if the coaches are listening out there, how are they going to monitor training for their athletes, and what should they put priority on, and how should they actually do so? So let's set it up from a framework perspective first. And you guys can handle this, because this is the beef of the paper that we're talking about, and the links to that will be in the show notes. I'll let you guys kind of take over how to orchestrate this, subjective versus objective, and how it should be meaningful to coaches and athletes.

Okay. I will go first with that, as we said, one of the main properties of complex active systems is these nonlinear dynamics. But these nonlinear dynamics emerge from the multilevel interaction, as Natalia said, from cells, tissues, organs, and also the interaction with the environment. And this can be reflected, for example, when some muscles compensate differently among them, when we have fatigue, or when we are recovered. And this change, the theoretical assumptions and the methodological data analysis techniques, well, more than change, these techniques and assumptions should adapt to these properties.

And objective monitoring is not actually ignoring these kind of properties, as we said, and cannot provide an integrative tool of integrative information of this system. And in contrast, subjective monitoring is at the moment the most integrative tool that we have and compressed the multiple dimensions, physiological, psychological, sociological dimensions of the complex active systems. And this information should be used for coaches, for athletes to co-adapt, to co-design the training process. And we have to start from revaluating the potential of subjective monitoring and educate athletes to enhance their awareness, to be able to detect change of the organism, change of the environment, that can affect their health and performance states.

And in this way, coaches should break with rigid and static planning, spritizations, and accordingly, do not rely only on objective data. And as you say, this objective data should be complementary to the subjective information of athletes. And for that reason, athletes should actively participate in designs and adapting to adapt the training of every day and every session. And yeah, we have to use these perceptions as the most valuable tool to co-design and co-adapt such training processes. Let me kind of propose something that I know there's going to be people listening to this or like screaming into their car audio systems or their headphones or whatever it is.

And because one of the pieces of criticism of objective feedback is that it includes the user's bias in it. If I feel if I tell myself I feel good, I'm feeling good. And there can be a division, right? A divide between what the objective data is saying and the athlete is actually providing feedback on. And we see this all the time. And it's it means very simplistically put in like heart rate variability data where we can see heart rate variability tank. And the athlete is saying, hey, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I can I can kind of still train. And I want you to to kind of walk through how users and how athletes and coaches can kind of reconcile that because it happens all the time where these where these two monitoring systems, not that they are all going to agree all the time because they're because they're multifactorial, they're multidimensional.

But there's this there can be this fundamental divide between the feedback that you're getting from an objective standpoint and the feedback that you're getting from a subjective standpoint. And the critics of overly using subjective feedback will say, well, it's inherently biased because of the user's experience. So I want to I want to know what you have to say to that. Of course, beliefs are very much influencing also our physiological responses. 100 percent. Yes. OK, so you really believe that monitoring system is helping for you. So I think the outlet should use it. I mean, you cannot change the idea of impose the idea of subjective monitoring to an athlete that has never been trusting on own perceptions or trust better what this testing monitoring is saying.

So we should, I mean, help them to develop this interoceptive awareness slowly. I mean, it's a process. It's a process where they will gain autonomy and they will be able even to co-design their training. But for now, what they do, they are copying as we are all doing when we start. They are copying and if they don't have a coach sensible to these things, they cannot evolve. So they cannot become more self-responsible, autonomous with higher self-awareness or interceptive awareness and able to really monitor their training on the basis, exclusive basis of this subjective monitoring.

This is the final point. So I think we should respect everyone and respect the type of monitoring that is helping for everyone. I mean, they have different beliefs. They have different experiences. They are very different, in fact. So obviously, it is rare that they converge in one solution. It is much normal that they find personal solutions and explore them in order to find their best in every moment, which is not always the same, of course, because the dynamics is changing the context as well. So, and perceiving is embodied.

So we perceive when we act. So in fact, it is good. They explore many possibilities because the perception is nourished by all this. And I mean, this is the way, not fixed way, not fixed receipts. We are not going to tell you this is good, this is bad. This is adequate or inadequate depending on the context. I mean, and many things can be adequate, not just one. So this is also important to take into account. Well, here's the approach that I've had to take as a coach because it's become, it's been so, it's been proliferated, right?

All these, all the objective monitoring systems and training quantification systems, they're just everywhere. Is I don't fight them. I try to put context and education around them. Instead of just saying, oh, no, no, no, don't do this. I don't want you to have an aura ring. I don't want you to have a whoop strap. I don't want you to monitor temperature, heart rate variability or whatever. And Natalia, to your point, it's okay to go ahead and monitor it. If you believe that it's valuable, let's go ahead and monitor it. And it's my job to contextualize it and then to educate the athlete around it. But I will say it is not easy. Like I pull my hair out weekly because it's always something new. There's always some wrinkle and it's always a lot of, I don't know. Like, I don't, I don't know.

I don't know what the right answer to this turning yellow and this turning red and this turning green and trying to mold all those indicator lights into an action. Sometimes I just don't know what to, how to make sense out of it all. The point is also that views on the objective information, this hides the subjective information in some way. Or we can forget the outstanding possibilities of the subjective information. Starting from what we say, you know, that subjective monitoring is the most integrative information that we can have. And we have to re-evaluate these and educate athletes to enhance their awareness. Then we can use also objective monitoring as a complementary tools because there are like some pathologies or some symptoms that maybe we are unable to detect or we are not trained sufficiently to detect that objective monitoring can provide.

And this is the, well, is this, this balance that I think that we have to, to found, but we have to start from re-evaluating more the, the potential of subjective information. There's, there's, there's this context that's, that's predominantly, uh, used in the objective world. My colleague, uh, Mark, Mark Raltini, who I've had on this podcast, and I'll leave, I'll leave a link to that, uh, podcast as well in the show notes that he, that he would, he would certainly say this at this point in time is that if you have garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. If you're taking in irrelevant information on the output side, you're going to get irrelevant information on the output side of things, garbage in, garbage out. But the same is true subjectively.

And as you guys mentioned, it's a skill to be, it's a skill to be honed, right? And if the athletes hone that skill, well, it can be a very powerful complimentary piece. And all of these pieces are complimentary pieces of information. They all compliment each other, but it can be a very powerful, uh, uh, a powerful complimentary, uh, piece of information. And it gets more powerful, the better the athlete is at it. So I would want, I'd like to hear from you guys's perspective, how would you counsel athletes to get better at providing subjective feedback? So they either, they can interpret their own training notes or their coach can better interpret their own training notes. And I'm totally asking this from a selfish point of view, because I'm trying to get athletes to put better subjective information into their training log that I can use.

And sometimes I, I just don't have the best way to articulate it. So how would you counsel athletes on that? I think that athletes do what they learn from coaches. So it's all our fault anyway. You are very keen. You are a key agent in the context of the, of the athlete. Okay. So in a very natural way, when you, you change your way of thinking, they will change their way of thinking. So you don't need to make any effort in this sense. It's like parents, they should not say what to do to the kids. Simply they should do it. And then the kids learn it. That's it. It is. So we are like this. Okay.

So complexity matching. I mean, even in conscious way, these changes are produced. So you are very important for your athletes. So if you take care of yourself and you use for taking care of yourself, this self-regulation of your health, for instance, I mean, you are teaching them without this idea to impose nothing, but you are teaching them of what is better for your health. Because we are talking about athletes. But this is not important just for athletes. This is important for the whole population. I mean, the whole population have so many possibilities to self-regulate their health state.

I mean, but we have not been educated for it. When we go to the doctor, they say, okay, I prescribe you this and this. You should do this and that. And that's it. I mean, they see you, for instance, once a month or every two months. But you are with yourself 24 hours. I mean, you know yourself better than anyone else. So you don't need to go to the doctor to ask how I am or go to the monitor to ask or to the clock to say if I slept well or not. I mean, what are we doing? I mean, we are losing our main properties. And we should move from this direction and really potentiate, not just with athletes, with the whole population, this idea that we are able to self-regulate in a very personal way, which is very individual.

I mean, what is good for you is not good for another person. And what is good now for you won't be good in a few years, for instance. So this needs something very much with these capabilities of integrating online all these dimensions and so on. So this needs this potential to do it in an accurate way. Well, many athletes will identify with what I'm going to call mental skills or mental tools of awareness and self-regulation. And deploying those mental skills more in real time. And that's typically the context that a lot of sports psychologists and mental coaches will will.

They won't directly take it, but it's the ones that the athletes usually interpret it as as something that they're deploying during their activity during the run. I need to learn how to lift this bar correctly. Right. I need to learn how to regulate my effort in real time. But what you're saying is and add some nuance to this or correct me if I'm on the wrong on the wrong track here. What you're saying is, is those same skills of awareness and self-regulation can also be used in an after the fact monitoring capacity to help facilitate not only contextualizing that training session, but also to help facilitate what can actually come next. So it's a real time skill during the activity. But then it's an also after the fact skill as well that can that can be deployed for future use.

Yeah. And not just mental. I mean, it's not just in on the brain. This intelligence is in our body. I mean, all our cells are acting in an intelligent way. So this perception is not just mental exercise. I mean, this, it comes from all our body and we should and it's embodied perception. So not mental perception, just but embodied perception. It just not take some few senses. No, no, no. We are full of these receptors in our body. And I think as much we are aware of it, we become more aware that we are so much intelligent and we have so much capabilities.

We can improve that. We can learn from it. We can use every action, every experience in our life to improve, to learn from it and become more intelligent. So in this sense, it's not a question to leave it to the psychologist. I think coaches should have potential to integrate different dimensions and should integrate all those dimensions to become good coaches. And pity that they are not aware and they are not self-confident enough, not so well educated to be more confident on their knowledge and capacity to integrate knowledge.

So needed for coaching. It's not that. I want to peel apart. Go ahead. Go ahead. I want you to jump in here. I just want to add that this evaluating process of subjective information is not in a short time scale. It's not only you cannot do it in one session or in two days. You need probably months and years. So you need to start. It's better to start from childhood, not from when you're learning about your body, about your mind, about your environment. And this is the best way to start training the people from their early stages.

And then when you improve these values, then motivation to feel this change of perceptions changes also. And then your attention and your perception will increase and will improve this subjective monitoring. You know, the long-term approach of this, I think, is extremely important because it's something that demonstrating improvement or the attempt to demonstrate improvement in an objective sense is usually rather easy and trivial. Right. Right. Your lactate threshold power was here in January of 2020, and it was there in January of 2022.

And we typically extrapolate that to you're more fit and we can leave that argument for later whether or not that is the case. But Natalia, to your point that it can be improved upon, doing that in a subjective form is actually quite hard, but you actually can do it. I mean, I have athletes that I've coached for four, five, six, seven years, and I can look at their post-activity comments from four years ago and compare them to their post-activity comments now. And you can absolutely see when you look at them in whole, and that's an effort, right? That's a lot of reading, right? A lot of reading and thinking about what they actually have written. You can actually see the transformation in that format. And interestingly enough, this just happened to me yesterday. I didn't even think about it until, Luke, you just brought it up. I've had athletes who have given podcast interviews about their training, not to me, but to another host.

And it's markedly different from two years ago to where it is now in terms of how they interpret and how they explain how their training is going and how their season has gone. And some people would call that maturity, but I would call that just self-regulation and awareness, to use our earlier pieces of vocabulary, of what's going on and the improvement in that. So to kind of wrap all of that up, I think the listeners can, I hope what they can appreciate is that these things are A, important, B, an improvable skill, and C, all you really need is to sit down after your workouts and try to add some sort of subjective context to it.

Whether it's writing a paragraph or, you know, using, you know, some sort of training application or something like that, that becomes an integral part in the process if you do it consistently. Yeah, but also in this way, subjective measures, you know, as rating of perceived exertion and other measures that try to put a number. Right, right. The objective, subjective measures. Yeah, this also has some limitations because sometimes it's kind of difficult to express even in worse, the own perception of the multiple dimensions. So, yeah, this way, the education, it's also needed for athletes for helping them to express their feelings as best as possible.

And we're getting back to the pragmatic point of this. Where would you have athletes start? Because you guys know, and you're an endurance athlete yourself. I know that you know these people. And Natalia, you've been doing this for a long time, right? And you have run into all different types of athletes and coaches. You know the athletes that go in and they punch their watch at the beginning of the training and then they punch their watch at the end of the training and then that's it in terms of how they're monitoring it. I probably did that this morning on my run, an effort of full disclosure. But if they want to start to incorporate this style of monitoring, like what advice would you have for them to just start? They recognize that it's important.

Where do they at least start? What's like the lowest common denominator to get the ball rolling? I think it is good from one side to understand that there are some misconceptions when trying to connect values of lactate, for instance. You mentioned that, you know, this lactate, it looks like who knows what. But then, I mean, this is when we understand our body as a network of embedded networks, is it important a quantitative value of a molecule to related cause effect with our performance? I mean, this is a wrong understanding of how our body works.

I mean, we cannot go from molecules and we cannot explain what's happening at action level through behavior of molecules and quantitative values of molecules. I mean, our system is full of synergies at many levels that compensate all these values, possibilities to compensate these values. So, I think, first of all, I think these assumptions should be broken from one's all. I mean, this is wrong. And this is probably due to this science in exercise physiology that has promoted this idea of cause-effect relationships and so on among bioenergetics, especially in your specialty, you know.

So, it's an energy problem. Come on. You cannot reduce this reductionist point of view to all this performance to the amount of energy or to lactate. So, first of all, it is to break with this. It is education on this and why. Why it is this? How is our body really behaving? How it is acting? How performance is reached? How we get injured? How and when this understanding changes? I mean, it is more easy to start, you know, changing their views on feeling differently how their body works. Not thinking on the lactate or malactate, my heart rate and so on.

No, tell them at 160 beats per minute, you can die from heart attack. So, what is 160 or 110? I mean, this is not the main point. We've been relying very much on this and exercise physiology has helped on this, but this is very limited. Really, it's a very limiting way of thinking. We should go ahead and understand better that our organism is something else. And it is not the simplicity of cause effect from a molecule. But this is also, I mean, reinforced by medicine and reinforced by pharmacology. I mean, as much as all depends on molecules, intervening on molecules is a solution.

Okay? Okay. But then the benefits keep on. I mean, this is working a bit this way. I mean, network physiology of exercise. If you like to read about this a little bit more, you can put network physiology of exercise. There are several open access now articles or chapter where this idea about how our body works is totally changing. And I think it's more close to what really is. I mean, as a theory, it's a bit more closer to what we are than a machine. So, recognize the complexity and try not to make it so reductionist. Right.

That's what I'm hearing for you. Yeah. I know. I get it. Yeah. I would also like to add, related to your question, to give some, like, pragmatic advice to coaches and athletes. I think that it's interesting for athletes to explore their perceptions in different contexts, like in cold, in hot, in altitude, in different intensities, different recoveries, eating this, eating that. And able to detect the change of how they feel and how they respond to that. And this is the best way to train your perceptions and to feel, okay, today I'm not good for doing that in intervals that we're planning.

Or today I can do it because I'm feeling good. I'm feeling motivated. So, this is, yeah, one of the ways that we can enhance this awareness and be more precise in our perceptions to explore different contexts. So, look at the differences and how you react to those differences. I think that's a good way. It's a good way to start because it's initially the simplest, right? I was like this when I was hot and then like this when it was cold. This was yesterday. This was today. Those compare and contrast is a good door opener. Yeah, I'm following a rigid plan. So, today I have to do this and it doesn't matter how I feel. I have to do this. Well, we have to discuss about it. So, yeah, maybe you can start with the applied intervals.

But if you don't feel good, you have to stop or just doing for like postponing for tomorrow. Well, in endurance running and endurance sports being such a routine endeavor, we go out and we do 98% of the same thing day after day after day. It actually offers kind of the best compare and contrast, as you just mentioned, right? Because of that routine nature. So, I think that that's a great way for athletes to start. That's a great place to end the podcast, you guys. Thank you for writing this paper. As I mentioned earlier, the links to it will be in the show notes. Thank you for your work that you've done in this because it's made me think a lot about my coaching practice. And I think a lot of, I hope a lot of other coaches and athletes, it makes them think and recognize that we are complex systems and we can't simply reduce it to pace and power and miles per week.

And Natalia, to your point, how much lactate is flowing around in our blood at points in time. So, thank you guys for what you do. And I hope to bring you guys back on the podcast at a future date. Thank you. Pleasure, Jason. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jason, for your invitation. All right, folks. There you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Luke and to Natalia for coming on the podcast today. I love this topic. It is one that is very near and dear to my heart and something that I've continued to focus on as my coaching career has developed. And I also think it is something that athletes can get better and better at in terms of making sure that they are including some type of subjective feedback within their training and feedback process.

I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed getting back into the podcast groove, although this is the first one that is going to be released after my recent hiatus. I have a number of podcasts that I have a number of podcasts that are already booked that I'm already super excited about, about a ton of contemporary topics that have started to hit the social media sphere and things that I'm sure that you all will be curious about. So this will continue to come in your ear holes every Thursday, a new release every single Thursday with coaches and sports physiologists around the world about the most relevant topics for endurance athletes and ultramarathon runners. I will also be at the running event the week after Thanksgiving. It's an annual running industry trade show in Austin, Texas.

So if you are there, hit me up on social in advance. We can go get some great Austin barbecue or a beer. And I'd love to pick anybody's brain who is out there about what is up and coming in the running space. That is it for today. I appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners. And as always, we will see you out on the trails. We'll see you next time.