Using Elite Athlete Training to Inform Practice with Øyvind Sandbakk | Koopcast Episode 156

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 in this episode of the podcast was recorded out of the adventure van as i am on the road for the next couple weeks for the thanksgiving holiday as well as being in attendance for the running event in austin texas which is a huge industry trade show but despite all that movement the podcast goes on and we have a special one outlined for you today and it's about a topic and a type of research that i am particularly thrilled about on the podcast today we're going to discuss all about how the elite of the elite train what the research has to say about that and how you can apply that to your day-to-day training on the podcast today i have one of the authors of a recent paper ovid sandbach all the way from norway the title of this paper is training characteristics of world-class distance runners and integration of scientific literature and results proven practice this is an open access article in sports medicine and the link to that will be in the show notes and with this research what they actually did is they analyzed a number of endurance and distance runners actual training process this is not a superficial strava dive these are

actually research scientists diving into their training programs and very and i think very importantly eliminating a lot of the athletes that have served doping convictions in the past they are looking at their training figuring out how much volume what type of intensity how much intensity what their training frequency is what sort of adjunctive types of training that they're doing like strength training or cross training trying to summarize it all and then also making the connections back to what the scientific literature may or may not say about that type of training i encourage everybody listening to this podcast to go and check out this particular piece of research i found it absolutely fascinating because it directly informs us on some clues to what we can use to actually work with athletes and derive things from elite athletes and not just copy paste what they are doing how to apply it to a myriad of different athletes under varying circumstances i really appreciated this conversation with ovind he is an extremely smart individual and also happens to work with a number of world-class athletes himself across multiple different disciplines and i think you will find throughout the course of this podcast that our love for coaching and helping athletes improve very much shines through and gets to the heart of what we try to do each and every day as practitioners so with that as a little bit of a backdrop i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with ovind stein bach all about how the elites train and what you can learn from it

first off thanks for coming on the podcast um i'm excited to talk about this paper that you're involved in but i think before we get into it properly and just so the listeners can kind of know a little bit more about you and and and the research you do why don't you give just give everybody a quick background on who you are and what you do and how you got involved in studying endurance athletes in the first place yeah it's kind of i grew up as as an endurance athlete myself so i was um i was mainly a cross-country skier uh as a kid but i was also running so i did some athletics but then i i really tried to to be as good as i could as a cross-country skier and uh and was also yeah i think i i finished when i was 24 25 so then i was um i had in parallel done my my master's degree so i combined studies and skiing and i i wasn't pretty well level um i could do some world cups uh when on the national quote here in norway and and and was kind of top 10 in in norway um at the senior level so so that was not so bad but um but then um i decided that um i had to take pursue another career i i wasn't able to reach the world top as was my was my dream at that time and then i i was very lucky because i was very quickly after i i finished as a skier i was asked if

i could help yeah coach some athletes um and also i was allowed to work with the national team in cross-country skiing and be kind of a helping coach there um then i i started working a bit for the olympic committee um and at some point they asked me if i was interested in doing a PhD so then then i started and i i didn't know what a PhD was go ahead and do it so yeah i thought that it looks interesting and i i kind of i i wrote my my master thesis and i liked that and i did quite well so i thought it might be something interesting and of course if you're allowed to study what you love what you've done your entire life and then try to understand kind of the mechanisms behind kind of some of the world's best endurance athletes and why they what are the demands of their performances and how do they train to reach those performances that was that was a dream coming true for me so so so that was that was um the start uh i was quite quickly finished with my pz because i had passion for it and and i was never working only with research i was always coaching coaching athletes working a bit for the olympic committee with some testing of athletes and at some point started writing coaching literature for the norwegian ski federation um and then i could kind of combine the practical work with athletes um

doing research on these athletes and also at the same time trying to implement my research into the to the coaching literature so for me that was um it felt meaningful uh and i kind of i thought that maybe this is my x factor in sport i can try to bring science into sport and the other way around take the the questions from the athletes and coaches and try to answer a few of them so so that was that was that was really fun this is why this is one of the most interesting reasons that i wanted to bring you on the podcast because it's it's rare not that it's exclusive or anything like that but it is rare that you find PhD level researchers that also have either a direct coaching background like yourself but more importantly more an extensive one where you've worked with olympic level athletes and you've designed their training and you've seen what training works and what training doesn't work because as you you know very well uh articulated applying the sports science to an actual individual can sometimes be a far cry from the actual sports science itself or from what the research is actually is actually indicating or telling you getting that application piece in many cases is is is the is the most difficult uh part of it and i think this kind of leads into one of the discussion points that we're going to have about this paper is is okay how do we take this and how do how does the audience and how do we as coaches actually apply it to to our athletes so the paper that we're going to discuss that you're

an author on the title of it is is training characteristics of world-class distance runners and integration of scientific literature and results proven practice and i want you to kind of first off before we dive into it too much just explain to the listeners like what is the paper about and how did you become how did you initially get involved with it yeah it was um i think it's kind of from from my point of view i was um looking started with cross country skiing as i said and then then we went um i was i was very lucky because i i i love doing this so i went from pg to becoming a postdoc to getting associate professor and at some point also being being a professor at the university being allowed to spend my whole day with fantastic pg students and and and bring up kind of similar studies across different sports so we looked into many different sports it was kind of from cross country skiing to nordic combined into biathlon we did that pg students on cycling we are now working a bit on triathlon and then along the way i was also all the time working a bit for the olympic committee olympiathoppen and then i got some good friends thomas who's the first author on this paper um espen tönneson and and steven saylor and we got good friends and we started to really think that we should really try to make a new approach on on how to

understand um the demands of of training to really talk to the best athletes in the world look into their training look into how they progress uh with that training and and um kind of try to to see these unique insights from training practice um and then of course contrast it towards the scientific literature um so so that was a journey we and then we started with sprint running actually in athletics we've done a few studies before then we went into middle distance running and then we did this one on on long distance so we kind of tried to cover all running distances in this this project so so that um there was a fantastic work with thomas aspen and steven uh we have quite complementary ways of looking at things and and um and uh yeah so that that was that was the idea and then we we took this a little bit from other sports sports as well integrating what we call scientific literature and result results proven practice um so so yeah i think um i think that was um a cool start and uh but then we of course uh we looked into what we found in the scientific literature we tried to um summarize that to review that in in a good scientific way but then we also wanted to understand what the best coaches and what the best athletes

are are doing and and how they prescribe and perform their training so but we couldn't find much of that in the literature so then we had to go out there and and we looked at kind of non-scientific but publicly available um training information uh from from kind of podium contestants from international championships and world marathon majors um it's kind of these kind of from the websites runners universe sweet elite running science let's run runners tribe etc this is typical we can call it libraries of information written by top athletes and coaches uh we also looked into books and searched the internet to really try to find out everything we could um from this available information and that's no trivial endeavor i mean you kind of like glossed over yeah we went to this website we went to this website we went to that resource we went to this resource most people think that sleuthing out somebody's training is kind of the equivalent of strava stalking where they look at you know their strava profile and they can pull out okay so and so did you know 200 kilometers this week 160 kilometers last week and things like that like this is a big i just i'm kind of gathering this just from the way that the paper is actually written and then doing my own internal back calculation of how that actually mechanically works i'm guessing that it was no trivial effort to go and find a find the

training information itself that's that's no trivial effort just in and of itself like where does it actually exist for any particular athlete and the second thing is actually making sense out of it and what i mean by that is is like just simple things like what are the volume intensity that these athletes are training at right if we see an athlete do one kilometer repeats on the track well what intensity is that at is that in the severe domain is it 90 of vo2 max is it a certain pace and trying to determine all that i'm just one i'm very appreciative of the effort but i i want the listeners to understand how you're getting at this data as well so can you peel that back just a little bit more in terms of how did you actually go about dissecting all of these different athletes training programs first off how did you select it for the athletes and then how did you go about dissecting what they were actually doing yeah now first of all i have to say kind of to acknowledge thomas haugen and aspen tönnesen who kind of did i would say the main filtering of data so they digged into they spent uh weeks of searching for this um and and then it was a little bit easier for me and steven who couldn't kind of get the information and start analyzing it um but uh kind of we had kind of some filters it should be kind of podium athletes or at the podium at this um in olympics world championships or at the this world majors marathons

then um it needed to be kind of in in english or that so we can understand it so of course we might have missed some um information due to that um and then of course we we needed to we banned all doping all athletes who have been doping band uh or coaches of those athletes um and then we we just started to first of all you ask about intensity it's kind of it's so many different ways of kind of talking about intensity so we kind of tried to we developed kind of our own intensity scale and then we when we in some of the cases when there were no information we tried to contact them and get more information about what actually does this type of intensity mean so we could really uh interpret the data correctly when we were not sure then we just then we could only conclude on volume we couldn't conclude on intensity distribution in some cases in other cases we felt secure enough we got enough background data description of the the intensities and the type of sessions so we could really put them into kind of a zone um so and very often we it's a little bit easier in in running than many other sports because then of course you normally you have also their their speed on different types of intervals and different types of sessions so when you know their

performance level and you can calculate kind of the speed they have on different sessions related to their 5 000 or 10 000 meter time it's kind of you can back calculate pretty well what type of intensity they use but but this is this is one of the as we also write this is one of the limitations the lack of a common framework uh ice intensity zones and terminology we also have the prescription execution difference which is one thing is what you describe prescribe and the other thing is what was actually done um you have of course training logs so it's kind of secondary sources of information it's not data that we collected ourselves um it's of course a few training groups that are quite dominant in this because they have logged the training they have been open about how they train and there's a male dominance so it's there are clear limitations and we we really try to take all these limitations seriously and also the kind of the bias of kind of uh the fact that unsuccessful athletes might might have done the same yeah so it's these things that you just need to be aware of and then you try to summarize it um for each athlete and kind of draw out kind of the common features that we we see are similar in most athletes and also to highlight where

we find really big differences between groups and sometimes we found kind of two different types of directions of for example marathon runners have a very different way of building up their their season compared to um uh a track runner on 5 000 and 10 000 meter so and i want to talk about how some of those how some of those differences played out fundamentally just to kind of recap this for the for the audience you're taking a high quality group of individuals world-class distance runners you're running their training through an analysis to determine fundamentally how much they're running the intensity distribution they have and then what specific workouts they're doing and then in essence you're cross-referencing it with what does the literature say about those particular topics and where does it match up and where is it where it might be unsupported or unknown and this is part of what i find fascinating about these types of of of of of of of research projects or of of research papers because you're taking what people are actually doing who are winning races right or performing very well at the world-class level and you're saying these are the things that are based in evidence these are the things that are that have no evidence for them and here are things that might actually be contraindicated to what the evidence is actually showing

and in addition to that as you just mentioned the comparison of the distance runners versus the marathoners here here's how it's actually different and they could be just as equally successful so with that is a little bit of a backdrop i think there are a lot of learning lessons that the audience can kind of can can can take from this that they can apply to their own training i want you to take the floor for a little bit and you promised me off air that once you start getting rolling you can't stop talking so this is your chance to shine my friend i want you to start at a very high level and go over what things did you find when you were looking at these world-class distance runners what are the what are the main findings from this huge endeavor that you undertook and then we can then after we go through that we can both put our coaching hats back on and we can say how are we going to apply this to athletes how the people that you work with the people that i work with how are we going to actually take this information away and do something with it yeah i think i think that's really interesting and and that that's an important point you take up there because of course the data that we take out or cannot be it doesn't provide kind of mechanistic insight or generalizable findings we just show we describe what uh are the main patterns of what the successful athletes are doing um and also the variation there are different paths towards success which is kind of it's normally what i what i say about

research is that when people say that yeah there's a big gap between research and practice and i say yeah then we have a problem because research is basically only trying to describe and and understand the real world so and that's basically what we do here we take the literature with more kind of generalizable mechanistic findings and we take the real world and we try to bring it together and see kind of where does kind of what where does the the hand fit the glove and where do we have a problem um and it might sometimes be a problem in practice that there are possibilities to develop further but very often in the literature because i think the best athletes and the best coaches they find their way towards success it's kind of uh and when you find enough athletes in a in a given pattern it's a quite big chance that they have um they do quite a lot right and and then we should try to learn from the real world we should try to build new hypotheses which would try to test them see if they survive and and then suddenly we merged kind of research and practice together into a very fruitful collaboration um and it provides discussion so so i think this is this is kind of what we try to do here and and um and i'm not an athletic coach i'm i'm coaching myself a bit uh as a recreational runner i like running because uh it's not so fun to go skiing

for me because i've been a good skier before and it never feels good anymore but running i can feel quite quite quite well with limited amount of time so perfect you're our audience by the way that's everybody who's listening to this i'm audience of this podcast no but we can start with um some of the best uh athletes in the world that we described here and um of course if we split kind of the training into the of course they have a some kind of preparation period and then of course you have a transition towards the competition period um and and what we find is of course that in the general preparation period it's kind of it's a focus on on high volume to kind of build some kind of aerobic foundation um and then you see kind of towards kind of the the specific preparation period on what the focus is gradually shifting towards kind of a higher volume of specific race pace intensity and this is a bit where we see the difference between kind of 5000 meter runners and marathoners because of course for a 5000 meter you you may mainly kind of build your foundation to more you call it threshold sessions and volume and and with a little bit inputs of high speed running along the way but then you kind of gradually increase a bit kind of high intensity training because that's what you that's what is specific for your your race pace but for the marathon runners um of course there's a difference between

those who come from shorter distances who really needs to kind of build their the ability to endure um the marathon and those who are more kind of have lack of speed resources because they might even build speed resources speed resources a bit earlier and then transition into their kind of specific race pace intensity that is actually uh below threshold and so it's kind of it will be a different periodization pattern because you you build the capacities that you bring into the race pace and it's very often done a little bit different between marathon runners and and uh and track runners now which is which is quite quite interesting but you you kind of go from building the foundation to being gradually more um more um towards what you're going to to race on the speed that you're racing on and and i think of course the more you train kind of when you increase race pace intensity you might have to either train a little bit less or you need to reduce intensity a bit on the easy training in order to have sufficient resources on the the race pace intensity so that's also a pattern you see but you kind of if you look at to the kind of periodization models that is described in the literature it's kind of is a little bit more i would say a rapid changes in this period here it's kind of for most of the athletes they they they include all types of capacities throughout the whole year but

you it's kind of it's a gradual change in instead of kind of you go from this block to this block and even some of the marathon coaches call it a block special block or whatever it also there you see this this very gradual change and i think it of course has to do with that you you want to just shift focus from maintaining some capacities to developing and you can't develop all type of resources at the same time you need to prioritize and then you say that i just do enough to maintain these type of capacities and i develop these two and then maybe you you reduce gradually some of the basic capacities and you increase the other ones um and that's kind of it's just this fine gradual changes and i think then you can stay injury free uh you kind of get the gradual progression um but enough stimuli to go from maintaining it to developing it i think what you're just what you're describing let me let me let me start with kind of the not the opposite of it but how a lot of people i think falsely miss or people kind of misrepresent how some of this uh intensity architecture actually works out so there's a strategy that that that that is that is prevalent and i think it's a little bit of a false dichotomy that you either have to use a mixed intensity periodization so throughout the week you'll do two or three different types of focus intensities vo2 max intensity lactate

threshold intensity endurance intensity all kind of in the same week you either use that model or you use a block style periodization where you're doing all the same kind of specific intensity and and what you're describing is is it's always a little bit of everything but it's more tuned towards one side or the other as the season develops if you are developing your speed resources to use your vocabulary more of that mix will be on the faster high intensity side if you are developing your endurance capacity more of that mix is going to be on the endurance side so it's just it's changing the recipe so to speak that weekly recipe of how much intensity is done at or what intensities are done and how much of each of those intensities are done versus this false dichotomy of block periodization or mixed intensity periodization which is too broad like it's just too it's too easy of a of a two-part choice you know yeah and maybe in some sports you can do a little bit more of these blocks than in running because i think with the mechanical load that you have in in running it's you should be very you need to be very careful on how you transition during these periods of course a cyclist or a skier can probably kind of change training more kind of abrupt because they kind of the the legs tolerate it you don't get injured um and the heart and your lungs they will kind of survive anyway um

if it's smart to do it is a different discussion but it's at least you you can do it and here's the here's the i'll present like the counter argument to that that i hear a lot in the space and i've presented this counter argument as well in different contexts is that especially at the elite level the those athletes tend to require more of an intensity focus in order to get the desired adaptation because they're so good it doesn't just take one workout worth of stimulus or stimulus stimulus or a few workouts of the same stimuli to achieve the to achieve the overload so the proponents of doing a lot of a singular type of intensity whether it's block style training or however you want to kind of call it are going to kind of especially for elite athletes we're going to kind of lean on that argument that because those athletes are so good they need more repetitive stimulus in that area and i'm wondering if anything in your practice or in this this research endeavor can can help answer if that's a correct way of thinking about it or not it's at least kind of in running i wouldn't i wouldn't dare to do that i don't think it's smart i think you can do it and maybe kind of i've seen some new tapering studies where they kind of have five intervals to kind of have a block of intervals and then you reduce and and reduce load a bit to to

kind of get into have a tapering towards an important competition it's it's possible to do it but i think my personal experience is that um if you have athletes who has have had little intensity have a lot of volume but little intensity then kind of over several years of course adding a bit intensity will give a new stimulus and you can get them up we also have athletes for example the we did actually several case studies um one of my my pg students guru ström sulle followed uh 17 years uh of of training uh day-to-day training from the world's most winning winter olympian marit björgen i remember this study and and kind of she got kind of by intensifying her training she got a little bit uh increase in in performance and intensified it more and then it started to drop she came into a period of non-functional state and then um bringing her back then the main focus was actually the opposite to actually reduce the intensity increase the volume and have more of the the bring more of the high intensity sessions also into moderate intensity i think that was very complementary stimulus for her um she maintained healthy she could tolerate larger volumes probably a larger total load no how you how you how do you define that yeah um and and then she got

kind of a very sustainable performance it wasn't kind of one year of success it was kind of years after years after years of sustainable success and then i then i thought a little bit about it what what is the key why when kind of much of the literature says that um if you want to bring the best ones to be even better you need to bring more high intensity because that's they need that to develop further and then we very often see the opposite we actually see that having larger volumes but when we see athletes who improve by increasing their volume you concurrently see that the quality of their key sessions are also improving if you increase volume in a way that makes kind of makes you tired and makes the the quality of your key sessions down then you then you have a problem so you should never increase load or volume more than your that your key sessions are extremely well done um we are actually working on a training quality as a one of our keys that will come out a few papers on training quality what is that and i think when when people ask me what do you think should i train more high intensity i say you should train a lot of high intensity but i don't care how many sessions it is but how many good sessions can you do how many high quality sessions can you do um and i think that's the key you don't if you train a lot of medium good sessions if you do a block of 10 high intensity sessions and

only three of them are kind of uh if you roll the dice it's a sixer and then several of them are are a tree um then you actually learn the body to do specific training on a low quality and i think you want to provide stimuli that makes the body adapt to that stimuli and then the stimuli needs to be good it needs to be high quality stimuli if you want to get a high quality adaptation and if you give the body a lot of low quality uh stimuli you will probably adapt to that too that's probably you know you're you're kind of touching on one of the things that i've probably changed the most over my coaching career and that's just the frequency of the high quality sessions i've just generally kind of not drifted markedly down but maybe by 10 or 20 percent and it's all an effort it's kind of a two-fold effort one is just the one that you mentioned i want the quality to be high quality and then kind of leave everything else on the table but the second thing is is is i just find that from like a sustainability standpoint when you look at multiple years in a row if you just take a little bit off of the top in terms of what they can sustain maximally from a frequency standpoint you get so much more because the frequency is improved over the course of many years there's not as much injury there's not as much illness and that's just as big of a training impact in fact maybe a bigger training impact than

squeezing in one last hard session or something like that which is something that every endurance runner has been tempted with at some point or another yeah but it's this is like you know it's i think training is like playing chess it's kind of it's two things you need every every time you kind of do a move it needs to be a good move but um it should be a good move for the next two moves it should be you kind of you should be able to think 10 or even 15 kind of moves ahead because every move will influence the next move and you have some kind of opponent and that is your recovery and you need to play kind of you need to think about several moves forward and you need to be aware of what's what's your opponent that is kind of is school jobs kids whatever you have in your your life that is actually challenging your recovery and your ability to to do the next move and and if you think like a chess player and you put them together so that kind of the the different moves that you do they fit together uh you've kind of think long term and you're able to predict a little bit how your opponent will move then you will probably win the game now what a brilliant analogy i'm gonna steal that from me by the way i'm gonna i'm gonna use that at some future point in time okay so we talked a little bit about training architecture and how you found this changes within the elite athletes let's get to some of the other training components and you can take them in whatever order you want but volume

intensity adjunctive types of training which you highlight in the paper such as strength training and cross training and things like that what what else what else from your perspective jumped out as remarkable when you were kind of crafting this paper yes you you can say that kind of if you look at the track runners i think the volume of kind of this sub-threshold endurance training throughout the preparation period before they start intensifying a bit that is that is something i think that that that is key sessions because then you can do a lot of volume at pretty high intensity um and it's sustainable because you can do it quite often um and and you can it doesn't hurt you too much but you you can also do quite a lot of volume in it so kind of for for track runners during the preparation period i think these sessions and then to put them together in in a good way um um is is kind of the other key so you're able to sustain the high volume uh to approach 180 200 kilometers a week and then at the same time then have very good of these these sessions um and then i then i think it's kind of there are inputs of the race pace training throughout um also the preparation period but you don't overuse it you're kind of careful on how often you do it um then you look at the the marathon runners that might introduce depending on the characteristics of the athlete i think that's important you these typical training principles that we have everyone knows you need

to do the gap analysis what is your capacity and what is the roof where where do you want to be and of course if you lack a bit of speed you need to do that early enough because when you come to the the specific periods if you do 40 kilometers kind of with gradually faster speed and maybe marathon uh speed at the end then you just need you don't have time for so many high intensity sessions you need to you you need to be that takes that that kind of kills probably two key sessions um because you need to do these uh these specific so then you need to do your your speed workout a little bit earlier in the cycle and then it's it's all about kind of how you build up kind of the speed that you need or the aerobic base that you need and then you are able to bring that into the to the race pace but um but i think for marathon runners you would have different you see larger variations than for track runners that are more heterogeneous as as a group marathon runners come from marathon or they come from 1500 5000 and they have kind of prototypical career arc right they just gradually move up in distance so i think um i think i think that's that's that's important for people to to um understand that and then of course uh i think for all of them you see kind of three three days a week of kind of the the heavy days i would say uh and then

you have easy days so it's also my our view is a bit that you have the heavy days and you have the easy days um i think that's partly probably that when you mobilize the body for a hard day i know also here in in norway now with the inge brikson so jakob who has his 1500 5000 meter runner he's both olympic and world champion um and and and they also they normally do kind of this day with double threshold they call it two times uh threshold sessions and now everybody wants to do it yeah but i think you see pretty much the same in other athletes it's just they have maybe some of them have a little bit longer thresholds instead of splitting it up in two they have longer threshold sessions or they combine kind of a speed session and the threshold session or but you have kind of the heavy days and you have the easy days and maybe that's a mental thing that you can kind of have a little bit of what we call micro paralyzation or yeah uh but also but but also i think when you mobilize the body it's kind of you could take advantage of that also on the second session and then when you demobilize you can rather have an easier day and then you mobilize because you probably felt yourself when you had a good session in the morning and you mobilized and you kind of were had a little bit tension throughout the day you can even have a good you kind of you you feel that i i could do three sessions today would be no problem but then you

would be dead the day after but when you're mobilized you you can you're able to do a lot i want to touch let me just interrupt you just for one second i want to touch on an aspect that you just mentioned in terms of the heterogeneous nature of some of the athletes training and how that is driven you said something that i think is worth pointing out to all athletes and that is at times the reason that athlete a has a different periodization than athlete b especially at the elite level is because they have different limiting factors athlete a's limiting factor is the last two kilometers of a marathon athlete b's limiting factor is their speed and so therefore because those two athletes have these limiting factors which become very apparent at the elite level because you always get exploited wherever your weakest link is at those type in those types of races they need to train for that appropriately and typically it's by doing by trying to round out those weaknesses essentially as early as possible that's not indifferent from any other athlete out there from any normal recreation level athlete that is you know looking to undertake a marathon or ultra marathon or anything else that or anything else of those of that nature is you're always going to be limited by whatever biggest limiting factor that you have whether it's the miles you do your aerobic capacity or the fact that you know you're injured or you know whatever it is a physical physiological reason or even a

scheduling type of type of reason and i i want the listeners to really take that to heart when they're thinking about designing their own training and not just copy pasting some sort of training program that's meant for everybody really taking a good inventory of what your strengths and weaknesses are and where your limiting factors might actually be and putting a bigger emphasis on those limiting factors or disproportionate i guess emphasis on those limiting factors in order to improve your performance i wonder if you have anything else to kind of like say to that through the experience that you've had looking and observing and working with athletes yeah i think this is important and i it's kind of it's a typical question for uh endurance athletes it's but should we do strength training yeah exactly when i start by asking are you strong enough first of all we need to do a risk analysis how how large is the risk for getting injured so at least do enough kind of risk risk risk reduction uh strength training here is one aspect uh the other aspect is you need to be stronger um and then of course we have kind of the good example of uh Paula Ratchcliffe who was kind of she had a V to max of way above 70 at the age of 18 but uh she was kind of weak and then one of one of the things she did was to then of course run a bit more volumes when you run more volumes it's probably smart also to

maintain your strength or even develop your strength because only doing endurance will not make you stronger so um so then maintaining muscle mass and strength to strength training increasing the the volume of running and then you saw kind of her increase in in or reduction in vo2 cost for for a given speed she was much more economical runner and then also her her career was better and better but her view to max didn't change and that's kind of but but you can have other athletes they don't have to do strength training at all because they're strong enough maybe to reduce injury risk but they kind of that's not a limiting factor um and that's why we shouldn't kind of conclude on such things is strength training important for endurance running it's kind of it depends i like that answer so you opened up pandora's box and you talk about this in the paper a little bit what what did you find in observing these athletes in terms of their strength training programs i mean you kind of just alluded to it a second ago by saying hey you know this athlete doesn't this athlete doesn't paula did it these athletes might you know not do it over here but what what did you actually uncover by looking at their uh by looking at all these training programs and then you can kind of bridge that to what does the literature say about are they doing it correctly or not or do we even know yeah i think if we seem to practice it's kind of i would

say it's three reasons for doing strength training one is to kind of avoid injuries um maybe most important actually uh the other factor is for i would say if i should use a theoretical word i was probably say kind of um energy transfer um people talk about kind of core and stability and whatever i call it energy transfer because you put down you bring some forces down to the to the ground and you want those forces to accelerate you forward that's basically what you do it's kind of it's newton's second law uh that should accelerate you in the opposite direction of where you apply forces and then of course if you kind of um have maybe supplemented your running by some some athletes might need some help uh to or that part of their strength training can help that energy transfer um and i think that's what also probably makes you more economical through strength training and then of course the the third aspect is if you want to be stronger in your specific muscles and then it's probably a good mix of of some specific um maybe you start a little bit semi-specific with squats or yeah things like that in the beginning but then more and more specific um types of um of strength training for the legs um and uh and maybe even on one leg

because that's then you get to step up and these type of exercises but of course this is kind of each athlete needs to do what you say their um characterize their capacity find out what they need um and then of course a short continuity so you're able to bring that strength or that uh ability to to transfer energy into your running when the competition period starts so it doesn't help you to get stronger but if you're able to transition strength to better or more economical running then it's um it it has an impact and but this is a tiny bit of the program it's it's not many hours um a week anyway so it's kind of some of the spices that you put on on um on it it's not it's not the main course well and also what the what the paper suggests is that we were just talking about earlier about how intensity design or peer and or periodization is somewhat heterogeneous amongst elite athletes this is even more heterogeneous this is even more there's even bigger discrepancies in the strength training side because you literally have the polar opposites i'm doing something or i'm not doing it right both ends of the spectrum and kind of everywhere in in between and i'm wondering if you have if if do you take anything from that

like when you when you see that amongst a very a very small sphere of elite athletes and within one component of their training granted it's not a big component but within one component of the training some of them are doing it and some of them are not doing it what like what do you take for what do you take from that as a coach and as a practitioner yeah the first thing i would do is that i if i kind of was working with an athlete on a on a high level um and that was not doing any strength training i would kind of i would not say that okay you got good without strength training continue that and i would really say hmm hmm maybe we should start challenging that athletes and really find out uh was he or she good despite despite it yeah yeah or is there kind of a tiny bit to to improve through that can we provide a new stimulus that makes kind of the small extra change or is just the capacity and the technique and everything look good without and then of course you need to kind of start thinking okay should we then at least do something to avoid injuries um but i would normally say that um i think strength training has a role um and i think it's um it's worth doing something but you need need to fit it to the profile of each athlete um so i i don't i i i i would i would probably say that all athletes should do some strength training

it's just kind of there are different needs um and then of course i think also the literature is quite pretty good on strength training it's basically yeah i think more plyometric training and more explosive training is kind of related is is effective in running compared to cycling where more kind of concentric slow motion uh with high high load uh strength training can work and that's due to the different kind of movement patterns you need to do it specific to the running movement pattern you need to do it twice a week to get any progress and you can do it once a week to or one every 10 day to maintain it that's basically what the literature says and more than two times a week is very seldom the possibility because you then it will take away some of the important uh energy from the endurance training so so i think it's kind of i think the literature in on elite athletes with two times a week to develop one time every 10 seven to 10 days to maintain is is not far away from what i've seen in practice yeah that that that's good to know and a lot of listeners will take heart to that i always come back to the always come back to the same conclusion which is this is neither here nor there with the paper is that we just use bad vocabulary when trying to describe this i mean you you mentioned that you can do strength training for three primary reasons the programming across those three reasons is going to look

different depending upon what the goal is not even not even like the individual variance the individual difference is outstanding but just what you are doing from a load perspective set rep combination exercise selection how much total load that's contributing to the entire week and how you need to kind of avoid some of the uh some of the negative consequences of doing it too close to your next hard session and all this other stuff all that looks just just wildly different yet we call it all strength training and that's what constantly befuddles me because just going back to your earlier example that if you're doing it from an injury prevention perspective just call it injury prevention training you know and then if you're training for strength then call it strength training yeah but you can on the other hand say that kind of being strong um being stronger might also make you more maybe because if you look at the literature this type of i think we described something like we had resistance training we had uh was it circuit training with body master resistance core strength stability and plyometrics i think it was something like that we described um but you can even say that resistance training that makes you stronger will also have reduce your injury risk because you and and i think the literature is is more i'm not an expert in injury but um uh if i interpret uh the literature correct i think um you have more proof

that kind of heavy strength training is reducing injury risk than than this type of uh core strength stability and or kind of the yeah mickey mouse type of things that you do well certainly there's a that's also an interesting discussion that as well yeah certainly there's a venn diagram overlap there but i guess my point is my point with it is is is i've always i've always thought that the way that you describe something something and then the words that you use should actually describe whatever you're trying to achieve with that that's that's that's neither here nor there okay we've batted this around for a lot let's try to get down to like the really practical pieces so did you uh in working with athletes did you do anything different after uncovering all of this from the training that you analyzed and then comparing it to the literature and and you can answer this in two ways either either what you did differently or what you think that the normal everyday listeners like you and i are listening to this podcast afterwards what should we take away from this in order to inform our own training i think it's kind of for me it's not one paper doesn't make me change anything because uh i'm very lucky i'm allowed to work with good people and i do many papers a year uh and i learn from that and i learn from the people who i work with on those papers and and then also the athletes it's kind of a

mixed there so when i do change but but i take some i try to take out some key lessons from each paper um and from each project that we work on um some of the things that i i would really if i should kind of lift up something um that i take away from this but also kind of i would also say what we don't find in this paper because this is kind of the programming of training and the type of sessions and it's very kind of and then it's it's it's kind of i could i could probably find 200 athletes who did exactly the same but didn't succeed yeah and then then it's kind of then this thought makes me thinking kind of why this these athletes succeed and i think of course the foundation of their training is pretty easy it's a high volume of low intensity training it's combined with decent running at kind of moderate intensity as a foundation gradual more race specific training yeah at least for track runners it's three heavy days per week um it's probably one long run uh this is pretty basic it's kind of it's done like that from the 60s and then of course a little bit fine-tuned uh the the the chess players are getting a little bit better uh along the way they mix things a little bit better together uh but then again it's kind of i always think kind of what makes um a good uh it's kind of makes makes makes athletes great instead of

not only good what what differentiates them some genetics of course but i think the ability to learn how to do good sessions and and and how to do these good sessions kind of you should hunt the good sessions the key sessions should be good um and it's it's kind of two ways one is it is focusing on the key sessions how do you kind of optimize them uh mentally technically physically to build up good sessions in your preparation how you execute them and and how you kind of debrief and learn so you could the next session is even better this is a learning circle and i think the best athletes unconsciously or consciously hopefully most the good coaches are able to bring them into a learning culture where you kind of at some point it's just part of your dna uh as an athlete that you you kind of you you hunt these good sessions you debrief you optimize the factors that wasn't good enough and and suddenly it's just what you do um so so so building up these good sessions and i think kind of intensity control to have control over intensity and speed makes you learn it's not that you always should kind of use your lactate it's a little bit doesn't matter if it's 2.5 or 2.7 but if you build up your database you you kind of you learn how to do the good sessions and you learn how to prepare for the good sessions you learn

how what how you should puzzle together your training to get the good key sessions you you you at the same time you have control of your speed as you know if you progress on the capacities that you should develop and and building up that kind of system i would call it the learning system that the coach and athletes they learn together and they can do these small manipulations with their life with their preparations with their execution and with their with the learning they do from each session i think that's that's kind of what you should that's the mindset that you need to build here here's a really practical way that i think anybody in the audience regardless if they're an athlete or a coach can can take that to heart is when you're programming out however you're programming out your workouts whether it's two weeks at a time four weeks at a time kind of whatever look at it first through the lens of what days are you going to put the high quality sessions on and don't anchor them in the calendar as like immovable objects but make everything else orbit around those hard workouts and try to set them up for success just from a structural from an architectural type of standpoint try to set those up for success the most even though it might not have the prettiest i'm going to work out on tuesdays and thursdays harder tuesdays and saturdays

harder whatever sort of routine program that people kind of get them get themselves into because to your point maximizing those hard sessions become so important that you need to put the highlight on them naturally from a focus standpoint but also from a just a just a programming standpoint and then when you go through the week for the especially for the normal people who have regular jobs and regular lives and their works their work and life stress is usually three or four acts of their workout stress right because there are the variants in it it's three or four times the variance of a workout stress because you go out and you do an hour run that's not that much harder day to day right but you have a super stressful day at work the kids are all up at night the variance and that stress is actually going to be quite tremendous so then as you're practically rolling through things making sure that you're going that you are in fact actually going into those sessions with all of your ammunition all of your resources possible in order to maximize them i think that that's part of like the coach athlete relationship to where you can really start to when you really can start to optimize things simply by moving things around the calendar to fit what's optimal what's optimal and what's not because it's easy to go into a regular endurance run a little bit behind the eight ball because you've got bandwidth but if you do it on one of the harder sessions you're working at a higher percentage of your capacity and therefore any sort of ding that you go into that hard workout with or any sort of deficit that you go into that

hard workout with is just amplified because you're so close to the ceiling on that or you're so much closer to the ceiling on that on that particular workout so to leave the listeners with a pragmatic you know point of view on this is put the highlight on your hard sessions and do it by when you very first put them on the calendar make sure that they are in the best position possible to succeed and if you need to move them move them because you have bandwidth in your like most people should have a little bit of bandwidth in their calendar to move stuff around but it's worth it it's worth it to extract the value out of the workout well i agree i think we write this in the paper as well it's kind of the best athlete seems to build the training around three key three key days a week or plus minus and then and the other factor that you get out of this is kind of that because i always say that people are too obsessed by input that's too obsessed by their training program i'm obsessed by output and it's kind of you need to get effective your training you need to to um to follow and see that you get that effect so by having these kind of key sessions standardize them a bit have a kind of um uh yeah maybe it may be a set of kind of standard sessions that you have then you every week you can kind of control how you respond to the load and and if you kind of get the progress that you hope for and you can then adapt so kind of focus on your output

and and and take it take it seriously and and and adapt the training so you get get the progress that you should get and then sometimes it's not the training that is wrong it might be your life because you need kind of i used to say that your training philosophy must fit your life philosophy and that's also part of what you say when you talked about kind of look at the characteristics of an athlete and then you can kind of see where they have uh the largest possibility to develop but i think it's also a mental thing um look at the the life of your athlete to look at the life philosophy the personality the mentality uh because uh i think kind of one of the kind of one of the stimulus that we we often forget uh and i think this this comes back to kind of the what you say that be prepared for your key session a good key sessions make it provides mastery it provides good feelings it provides this kind of it's kind of like uh it's it's kind of hormones going crazy afterwards because you feel so good um it makes you happy some someone call it the runner's high but you also have the post runners high and and i think that that also makes an effect it makes yourself confident it makes you feeling mastery it makes you positive

emotions about your training and and and i think subsequently those hormones that you then produce will make you recover more rapidly and get the larger effect from training compounding impact that goes beyond physiology yeah or it influences physiology or influences it yeah very good and and and i think it's kind of it's it's kind of the other thing that i would say to people listen to your own body it it tells the truth i normally say so you do what is right for you today not to do what you think should be right for you but today but you should do what is right because this honesty is so important because if you want to get the effect you need to do what's right today and and the body very often tells you the truth you don't get better kind of forcing true if the body is not responding and very often it's it comes from life stress it comes from other things and training the reason why it doesn't respond so then you you probably need to adapt i think that that is a brilliant place to leave it my friend um this was chock full of a lot of information and it helps me out selfishly in how i think about coaching and and training athletes and doing what i do as a profession so thank you very much i thank you for your work and all the group on this paper's work because i know there's more to come from it uh anybody who is interested in the paper i'll leave a link in the show notes to it go and check it out it is definitely worth a read it's quite fascinating

but where can people find more about you and the work that you do and perhaps get in touch with you yeah if you search me up on a mad or research gate or i'm even on facebook and twitter i try to post some of the the uh the uh papers that we do and the work that we are working on and i think uh yeah on my papers my my email address is also there so i can i can send you some info so you can put it out perfect i'll leave links to that in the show notes thank you for coming on the podcast and once again thank you for your work thank you all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to ovine for coming on the podcast today and batting around some of these interesting training topics surrounding what we should actually glean from the elite athletes training it is something that is off debated and off discussed because let's just face it it's one of those topics within media and within podcasting that just gets a lot of eyeballs but i do think that all too often we tend to over idolize and over copy paste what some of these elite athletes do are doing to the detriment of the athletes that are trying to undertake those training practices themselves there's always something that you can learn but the correct context of wrapping things around it is really what the key is also thank you to the listeners this podcast would not

exist without you this podcast is coming to you unadulterated and unencumbered by any sort of financial entanglement through sponsorships so you can help this podcast out by sharing it with your friends and your training partners and i'm just now reminded that literally i'm going to step out of my van in about 10 minutes i'm going to head over to the running event in austin and a number of those companies are going to try to hit me up for sponsorship and i will say no to every single one of them in order to maintain that commitment to you the audience that this podcast will contain nothing but unadulterated and unfiltered information that is free from any sort of entanglement that comes with having sponsors on the show so thank you guys for keeping this podcast alive and kicking and thriving it means a lot to me when i hear stories of other athletes and other athletes come up to me in the community with something that they have gleaned from this podcast that helps better inform their training so thank you thank you thank you so much that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails