Performance Testing with Shawn Arent | KoopCast Episode 29

What is going on trail and ultra runners? Welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always. I'm your host Jason Koop. I appreciate every single last one of you tuning into the podcast today. This episode has really been inspired by an aspect of my coaching career that I have found both fascinating and frustrating all at the same time. And it is the plethora of different performance tests that athletes can get. Most athletes are going to be familiar with the standard lactate threshold and VO2 max testing that can be done. We've done these things for decades. We do them at our lab here in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but it seems that every year there's another wrinkle to the test or there's a new test that's out there. Heart rate variability starts to become a thing.

More recently tracking blood bowel markers through services like inside tracker has become more accessible to athletes. And to be quite honest with everybody, it's hard for me as a coach to keep up with all these different types of tests and which ones provide the most value to athletes. And so to get a little bit of a better fix on this question, I brought on the podcast today, Sean aren't who is a professor and he's the chair of the department of exercise science at the university of South Carolina, which just happens to be the top ranked program in the entire country. He is also a fellow at the American college of sports medicine, and he's the current president of the ISSN or the International Society for Sports Nutrition. If everybody remembers a few podcasts ago, I had Nick Tiller on and we discussed a recent position paper that the ISSN put out on nutrition for training and racing for single stage ultra marathon events. If you have not had the chance, go ahead and check that podcast out. It was a big one. It was three hours long and we had a lot of fun with it. But Sean is also the 2017 outstanding sports scientist of the year as determined by the NCSA or the National Strength and Conditioning Association. He comes to us with just a huge breadth of knowledge in this area

of performance testing. He's worked with obviously endurance athletes, which is what we're going to talk a lot about today. But he's also worked with soccer teams, the NHL, major league baseball, collegiate level, professional level, high school level, MMA fighters, just a huge range of athletes, which gives him a depth of information to draw from to determine what tests are valuable for athletes and what tests can we really just kind of take a pass on. I found this conversation really fun. It enlightened me as a coach and it definitely informed my coaching practice to a great extent. I hope all of you get a ton of information out of this. I hope that you get insights that are immediately actionable for your ultra marathon journey. So sit back, kick back, have some fun.

Here's my conversation all about performance testing with Sean Arendt. I don't need to tell you this, but it's in sometimes in the soccer and any of the cutting sports, a highly developed aerobic system with a lacking musculoskeletal structure or power structure is a really deadly mix. I mean, there's a lot of soccer coaches and strength and conditioning specialists in that area that just pull their hair out every preseason because their team comes back and within three weeks, there's four ACL tears. That was one of the big things when we worked with Rutgers women's soccer when I was there, our biggest thing was getting rid of the injuries, implementing a training program. They lifted, we did a lot of plyometric work. We included the running, but make no mistake about it, with the amount of VO2 max testing, power testing, body comp testing, these are not elite endurance athletes. Their VO2 maxes on the women's side, high end for us, might be mid fifties, 56, 57. So it's not like blow you out of the water, but they also have to be able to jump, right? So what you need is you need somebody that can sprint and recover, sprint and recover, sprint and recover. So, you know, they're aerobically fit, but they're not cyclists. They're not, you know, triathletes. Like the triathletes, we test a different story. When you get VO2 maxes in the high sixties, mid seventies, that's not what we're looking at with most of our soccer players. And our women's team was a top 25 team. You're talking about a final four contender, you know, all these

things. So you're not talking about like a low end team. And those are the averages we saw. Yeah. You did a lot of cool things with that, with that program. And I mean, I was able to follow it. Yeah. I was able to follow it from afar where, where you reaped a lot of success. And I think a lot of the, the interventions and the procedures and the testing that you, that you did there played into a lot of that success. And as you guys know, success breeds success, right? It's a forward feedback loop certainly. And, but I'll tell you what, none of it is possible if you don't work with a progressive coaching staff and you don't get athlete buy-in, right? So you can use all the science in the world. And obviously that's probably a lot of what we'll talk about today is, you know, how much is too much and what's enough, you know? And I think that's one of the things that we, that we contend with is, you know, we'll get, let's say, for example, we submit a manuscript, we'll get critiques about, why didn't you control for this? Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do this? And you're like, you do realize there's a point at which you're, the athletes you're working with will do number one. Then you add in another layer, they'll do number two.

Then maybe you add like a third thing in and they'll do that. And then you hit four and they're like, this is too much. I'm not doing anything, right? So you just, it's that straw that broke the camel's back. So I think that's why we learned to be really selective in the types of measures we, we used and really tried to, um, focus on, on, on the big payoffs, you know, the ones that moved the needle the most. Yeah. Well, let's kind of kick that off a little bit because we are going to use the, so my, my audience is more of an ultra marathon audience and it's an endurance audience, which you know a lot about, but I think for a lot of this, we're going to use some of the team sports and in particular soccer as an analog and then kind of, and then kind of like drop back into the endurance side. So just as a, to like set the table a little bit, can you paint the picture of what that testing arc had kind of looked like within those sports that you had, uh, that you kind of had, uh, uh, domain over and like, where did you start? Where, and where did you end up? And where was like this sweet spot in the middle that you were just referring to? You know, I think what we did first and foremost was, was first thing you have to ask yourself is what's currently being done, right? So you've got this model where, you know, I'm a big proponent of as a sports scientist. And I tell this to my grad students, to anybody that works in our lab, you don't walk in and tell a team, here's everything I can do for you. You walk in and you go, what do you need? Right? Like, what are you missing? What do you feel like is, is your need? Um, because that's how you tailor it to them.

Otherwise you overwhelm them. So first season, for example, the, we picked at the low hanging fruit, there really was no systematic testing program. Um, the tests that were being used weren't necessarily valid tests, you know, in terms of things that we're getting at what you want, there's too much error of measurement and stuff like that. But more than anything, there really wasn't much of a periodization model. And again, I think the thing that people need to understand when you're working with teams, when you're, and you're working with coaches, it's not the coach's fault that they don't know this stuff. Not most of them were not trained in exercise science and physiology. So they're doing, what they've always been taught to do. Right. You know, it's, and I think that's for me, you know, especially working in soccer so much, it's one of the things I love about the sport is the tradition. I mean, it's one of the greatest parts about it, but it's also one of the most annoying things about it.

Because then when you have to try to change something, you're fighting tradition and you, you get that, well, this is what we've always done. So what you have to be able and willing to do is have a discussion and then another discussion and then another discussion and constantly explain why and how we do these things. Right. And getting feedback from the athletes, because you want them to own it. You want it to be a part of what they understand their program to be, not just a one-off test. And so really for us, it was identifying a periodization model. It was identifying testing that wasn't being done and then coming up with a monitoring plan. Right. Assess, don't guess. So how do we track them so that we know what they're doing? And that's where we really got into heart rate monitoring with, with the women's team, with the men's team. Oh man, I got to Rutgers in 2002. I started to work with the men's team in 03 and they progressed into heart rate monitoring that year. So they were well ahead of the curve. You know, but, but as we continued to work with them and realizing sort of what was missing, you start to layer in the important stuff. And then what it does is it allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses of the individual players. One of the hardest things with training a team is you really have a group of individuals, right? So if you apply this, this one overall blanket approach, you'll optimally train some, you'll undertrain some, and you'll overtrain some. That's just genetics. And so when we started to look at it that way, when you start to have a monitoring and testing plan in place, you can really start to get at what the

individual needs are. And then what you can almost start to do is, is put it in buckets, right? So it's not that you have to have a completely different program for every single player, but you start to get some commonalities where it's like, okay, so now these five or six players, we need to do this for these eight players. We need to do this for, as you start to identify deficiencies and things like that. So when we start to put that into place and, and, and, and implemented, um, a more systematic resistance training program, right? Just, it doesn't have to be a lot, especially in season, but even one day a week of good, heavy training was good because there's often this, this misconception in season where it's like, Oh, you don't train heavy in season because you don't want to get tired. That's like saying, I'm not going to do, uh, an oil change on my car. Cause I don't want to put more miles on it to go to the station. Right? Like, so what it is, is it's preventive and it's maintenance at that point. And so you're doing plenty of running, you're doing plenty of cutting and stuff like that, but you need to maintain strength and power.

And so that, that, that input from that resistance training session can be very, very useful to do that. And the first year we started working with the women's team. Um, one of the reasons that we, that we were asked to start doing something with them was they had about five times the national average for ACL injuries. So they were averaging about two a year. All right. And normally it's about a half a year or per season. When you look at it in the first year injuries, even soft tissue were reduced by over 70%. And I'm really proud to say that in the last five years, we worked with the team. We had exactly one season ending injury. And if you can keep them on the field now, is there anything magic about what we did? No, it was common sense, basic science supported evidence-based practice. That's all it was. We just picked a few things and did them extremely well. We didn't get into the weeds with too much. We focused on nutrition. We focused on a testing plan, a monitoring plan, and lifting. That was it. And we didn't have to use every available test there is. We didn't have to use every esoteric monitoring system there is. We stuck to a couple things and just really nailed it. That was the whole point is just get really good at that. And so when we start working with these things, I think one of my most important series of questions we ask when we're trying to put these kinds of things together is see, say, do. Do you see that test, that marker change? If it never changes,

it's probably not telling you a whole lot. If it changes too easily, there's probably other influences. So what do you see it doing, right? So there has to be some visual change in what's happening. The next question though, is then what do you say about it? So let's say it does change. Well, what does that mean? Right? So we see this a lot. We do a lot with biomarkers. My background's endocrinology. And so when we start getting into biochemistry and hormones and things like that, you look at these markers and you go, okay, if it's changing, what would I even tell you that means? Why is it important? Right? We might have a panel of 150 things. Does it mean all hot, all 150 are important? No, not to performance necessarily. So let's say you can actually say something about it. The third most important question is then what do you do about it? Because if you can't take action on it, all you're going to do is drive somebody nuts, focusing on it when there's nothing you can do. And part of that do aspect of it is also who can do something about it.

Because there's a lot of things in a team sport in particular, where you're not in charge of your training. The coaches are, they set the practice. So that's where the coaches need to be on board. And we were so lucky to have such an amazing coaching staff to work with. So when they're on board and they're willing to modify practice and travel and all these variables for the good of the athletes, because they see the benefit, now you can actually do something with it. You provided actionable insight. Well, you're speaking my language on the, what do you do about it and how complicated these tests can, can, can be, because I can't tell you how many times I've had athletes that go out and get blood work. Either they decide to do it on their own or one of their friends, you know, convinces them to do it. And they come back with this 200 point panel of which, you know, maybe three or five of those things are actually useful and, and, and the long run.

And that's another big key of it, right? Right. The long run, like you have to do testing at a, at a certain frequency. And we're going to come, we're going to come back to that because I do want to take advantage of your, of your background specifically in this area to, to, to discuss it because it's, it's becoming a hot topic for endurance athletes. And I also know team sports athletes as well, but let's back up a little bit and go over some of the other monitoring things. You already mentioned the blood draws that you do. What other things are you doing to monitor the athletes? So first thing we start out with, so I'll look at that two ways. Cause I also consider repeated testing monitoring, right? So it depends on frequency when we're working with a college athlete, for example, you know, we get a lot of, why don't you test this more often? Why don't you do this? Because of time, because when you're testing a whole team, can you get them into the lab?

You're not doing it in the middle of the season. These, these players are playing two games a week. Plus they got to practice once everything gets going. So what we did is we came up with a four point plan where we would get them right before preseason started right at the end of the season, which I actually think was one of our most important time points because it told us why we ended the way we did and really allowed us to assess what was done right during the season and what maybe we could have done better. We tested them again when they came back from winter break to know what to prescribe for that spring. And then we tested them again at the end of spring to see what progress they'd made and where we should expect them to come back in the fall. Right? So now we had these benchmarks. So that to me was part of monitoring, systematic testing. Then we relied, especially early on, very heavily on heart rate. Because for me, so heart rate and GPS often go hand in hand, but for example, in team sports, you know, I've really seen this, this heavy emphasis on GPS data and things like that. And that's fine and dandy. But the problem is it doesn't tell you how they're responding to that load heart rate does. Right? So you get that internal and external metric, right?

Like how much quantity wise work is being done, distance covered sprints and things like that. But I want to know how they're handling it. So what we did is we relied on heart rate first and foremost, and then layered GPS on top of that, rather than going in the other direction. And I've seen a number of pro teams, especially in the English Premier League, that had started with GPS and have now integrated heart rate, realizing there was a big piece of the puzzle that was missing. Right? So really heart rate and GPS were our big everyday monitoring tools. So everyday in training. And then the reason we started moving into biomarkers is you quickly realize that what heart rate and GPS get at is your training load, not your life load. And so when you start to look at accumulation of stress and recovery or non recovery, that's where we started to use the biomarkers systematically roughly once a month to actually see what this accumulated effect was of life. Right? Because stress isn't just what happens in training. It's what happens in the rest of everything else going on. And when it works with college athletes, you got classes, relationships, all this stuff. When, you know, we had done a study with triathletes and, you know, we, you know, you got guys that are working full time and trying to be a triathlete.

And, you know, it's like work, train, work, train, work, train, and it just, it adds up. So that's where our monitoring really focused on those main things. And then one of the most simple ones, as funny as it sounds, is simply asking them how they feel. You know, I will say I'm not, for an individual athlete, I, we've used RPE quite a bit, right? If I'm working with like an endurance athlete, how hard was that? How did that feel? I'll tell you what I generally found in a team setting, that is awful. Mainly because they lie because you get a scenario, well, because you get a scenario where they're like, they don't want to sound like they're weaker than the rest of their teammates. So they're like, Oh, that wasn't that bad. They don't want to lose playing time. And more than anything, they don't know what you're going to do with that. That's why, you know, one of the things that, you know, kind of our catchphrase was blood don't lie, you know, where, you know, that's not something you can fake per se. And, you know, tell me, Oh no, no, my hematocrit is great when it's not, you know, so little things like that. And so, but still asking them how they feel. What we found is that our monitoring data led to far more honest conversations, right? So we didn't just stop at the data, data are numbers, man. You got to interpret it. You need context. So now the next question is, Hey, how are you doing with this? You know, and I think that opened up and when it's their own data, ah, those conversations get so much better because they're like, wow, that's me you're talking about.

Like now I'm starting to understand. And especially when we work with female athletes, understanding energy expenditure, understanding how much you need to eat when you can quantify that for them. And they go, wow, I need to eat that much. Yeah. I'm not fueling enough. And so there's some really useful lessons that come out of that from an education standpoint, which I think is a huge part of the battle. Well, and it seems like, I mean, you're doing, you're, you're doing what we always teach our coaches to do is you're kind of alchemizing all of these different inputs. So the external training load, the GPS data, the internal training load, the heart rate data, what's going on biologically with the, uh, with the testing and then some sort of session RPE type of rating. And then you're adding the human component of, okay, what does this actually mean for this athlete? Do we need to push them a little bit harder? Do we need to rest them? And in a team sports setting, can they, can they play the next game? Do we need to limit their minutes? All of those types of things. And I really appreciate the integrated approach to it because when we look at this in, in, in endurance sports, all too often cumulative training load, either determined by a power meter, uh, on the bike or determined by GPS stuff, uh, uh, on the run has become this, you know, it's this big, big shiny object on the other side of the hill that everybody's trying to go to at the expense of everything else. It's like they put the horse blinders on and they forget, okay, how did I feel every day? Am I sleeping correctly? Do I have a lot of work

stress, life stress and things like that? And it seems like you guys have like systematized how to do that essentially. Yeah. And I think what, what's so important, and I think endurance sports are notorious for this where more is better, where it's like ultra marathon runners. Come on, exactly. It's right in the name ultra, right? Yeah, exactly. But I think that what it comes down to though, is realizing that there's a point of diminishing return. I am, I am not of the opinion that we train with the minimal effective dose. The reason is you get minimal results then. So you're not going to win a lot with that. But where I find minimal effective dose to be an important concept is when you also understand maximal tolerable dose. At what point do you see a downturn and a breakdown? Your training zone, depending on what you're gearing up for, when you're trying to peak, what your capabilities are, falls somewhere in that range between minimal effective and maximal tolerable.

And the more you can push towards maximal tolerable, the more you're going to push the system. And, and you know, one and 2% at the high ends starts to matter to sort of your average, almost more of a recreational athlete. You don't necessarily need to push that one, 2% if it starts to take away from the rest of your life, right? Where that, that extra hour on the trails or whatever might not have produced what you thought it produced. Yeah. I've seen a trend in team sports in particular, two trends. One is I really feel like what people are calling a sports scientist is really what I would call a data analyst. Right. A sports scientist can put context to this and understands the athletes. A data analyst crunches numbers and goes, oh, they're doing too much. Based on what? Have you talked to them? Do we know what else is going on with them? You know, so you need to apply context to it. The other thing too, is I think sometimes in this whole notion of training load, we've almost gone the opposite direction where we go, Ooh, don't train them too hard back off. Right. But there's this, this, you can train hard and train smart. Right. And I'm a big fan of smart training. And that's where the data come in to help guide that. But at the end of the day, you could chase numbers. You can have these targets, you could want to do it. But if you happen to feel like crap that day, that's important information, you know, so it's not just about, and then, and then it's a real get, you go, Oh, well, you know what? I didn't sleep well last night. Oh, you know, I got like five hours of sleep. I've only eaten once today. I really need like now it starts to tell you where

your better performances come in. And that, you know, because there's this tendency and I know I was this kind of athlete because this was the mentality too was if you're not performing well, what do you do? You train more. Right. And then you quickly, when you, when you get the knowledge behind it, you start to understand, you're like, that actually might be your first indication you're training too much, you know, rather than more, more, more, more. We actually, I got a good story for you. We had, when I was working with the men's team, men's soccer, we had this one player who perennially had come in out of shape in his previous years, comes into his senior season. He, he was a machine. Like he had clearly done his off season work finally. So he goes on a tear to start the season. Well, anyway, we're looking at training load. We're looking at his heart rate and you know, you start to notice that he's not really getting up to speed and the coach is going, Oh, you know, here we go again. He's back to where he was before. He's lazy. And I'm like, you know, I don't think that's it. So we looked at his heart rate data and you realize there's really no peaks and valleys. What he's doing is he's just chasing the game. He, he's so tired at this point that he's like a steady state to try to just run the whole game because he can't sprint anymore. So what we realized is he had worked so hard to get himself ready for the season that he had already peaked, right? He had come in to be able to be ready for the season where most of our guys would be mid season because that was it for him.

So what we did is we went the, and God bless Bob Riasso for having the foresight and the willingness to do this. We sat him for like four straight days and just let him rest. He went out and scored two goals that weekend, you know, and then we did the same thing on the women's side with two of our top players. When we saw what their numbers were coming back at, we just took them some training away. We left them in games. They went on a tear. So that's where that, that willingness to step back at times becomes so important and not thinking they're lazy, but realizing that they've put in the work. And sometimes because of that mentality, they do the work for other people too. And so what happens is you have to be aware of them. Yeah. And a lot of times with really good athletes, sometimes they can just handle higher chronic training loads. Absolutely. At the expense of their performance, but they really don't realize what the performance is until they get into like the hot, heavy situations where they're competing against the best of the best. Have you run into this with your athletes where you, you, you realize, and I started looking back on this. So many of them think that being tired is a natural by-product of being an athlete. In other words, they don't realize they exist in this state of fatigue. And then you start to talk to them and you feed them, right? And they actually start eating and all of a sudden they go, Oh my God, I feel good. But they literally think, well, I'm tired because I train hard and they don't realize you don't have to be broken down all the time.

Yeah. I, I, I do find that. And I find that it's a, it's kind of, it's, it's a line. I wouldn't call it a fine line because training is always a get worse before you get better proposition, particularly, particularly in the endurance sports. Like you do, you do have to induce, you do have to induce a certain amount of fatigue and then back off and then you get better and kind of like follow, follow those cycles, but it can't be too much. And athletes and especially really good athletes, they kind of, they have this site. It's, they have this really interesting psychology where they kind of crave that level of fatigue because they are associating it with getting better. Right. Right. And I think, you know, what's interesting is you put them in this scenario and you actually help them understand what it feels like to feel good while they're doing this.

The other thing too, is one of the other reasons that I, that what we've been working on from a research standpoint is identifying markers, psychological and physiological that appear before performance downturns, because, you know, we often talk about overreaching and over training. And one of the hallmarks by definition of those is a performance decrement. Here's, and you know, you having been an athlete, you understand that not just working with athletes, but having been one, there is a lot you will gut through. In other words, you may feel like complete crap, but you find a way to get it done. And so one of the things that often shows up first is how they feel about doing the same performance before that performance ever starts to turn down. And if you ever really want to put this one in the test, work with a fighter, because when you're working with a boxer, an MMA guy, whatever, like their willingness to deal with pain, but yet they still get the job done.

Right? So they'll still, Oh, wow. You know, your VO two max was the same. It was before. There's no performance downturn. You're not overreached, but it turns out it felt 10 times harder, but they chased the pain. They're like, I'm okay with it. I got to a maximum. And so you start to realize that things start to feel harder before they show harder. And I think that's an important distinction and something that we need to do a better job on the coaching and science side of figuring out how to pick up before we get to the performance decrement. Yeah, we've got, well, so first off the leading indicator for performance decrement, that's been the Holy grail in all sports for the last 30 years. You know, I mean, we do, we have great trailing indicators, but we have very few good leading indicators to try to try to predict those things. It's usually more confirmatory than predictive, right?

It's like, performance deteriorated. Oh, you're over-trained. Hey, can we find this before it happens? That would be wonderful. It's funny. You mentioned the MMA fighters, because I have done some, some third-party consulting with them. And the trend that I've noticed in that group, and I'm by no means on the inside of this, this is just observational, you know, anecdote for what it, for what it's worth, is a lot of the really high quality training groups and gyms, they're trying to lean on some of the technology that will provide those leading indicators. And a big one right now is the Omega Wave system, which has been around for years. I don't know why it's all of a sudden considered new again. But it, in essence, it takes the decision out of the hands of the athlete.

Yeah. And that sport, that's kind of needed. I mean, they need that from a medical perspective, right? Like, hey, you need to stop the fight now. Like they rely on the doctors on the side of the ring and stuff like that. Training, they have to do that every day. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's funny, you bring up Omega Wave. So here's why we haven't done a lot with HRV, right? Let's wait. Before we dive into that, let's, let's like, since we brought this up and there's not going to be a lot of listeners that are familiar with Omega Wave, why don't you give a big like spiel on, on how the whole thing works? So basically what, what a lot of these technologies, it's not just Omega Wave, but it's a good example. Yeah. You've got Whoop, you've got Polar that uses this, you've got the aura ring and stuff like that, that are relying on what's called heart rate variability. So I got to be honest, we could do an entire show on this, on just HRV because it's such a complex topic. But here's what we're going to basically boil it down to.

If you look at an EKG output, right? So somebody's electrocardiogram, what you'll see is peaks. Those are the, the, the R waves, right? So you've got a P and then you've got the QRS complex and then the T wave. The R is the big peak. So what we're looking at with heart rate variability is the distance from R to R, right? And so you'll often also see it as R to R interval, right? That's, that's what they're talking about. When your nervous system, the autonomic and nervous system, so sympathetic, parasympathetic, when it's operating sort of optimally, you actually get a lot of variability between those peaks. And the reason that variability is important is it, it allows the system to handle whatever's thrown at it, right? So now it can change in any direction to handle the stressor. Now that's a really simplified version of what that variability represents, but in general, you know, when we'll look at these high frequency and low frequency components. So typically if you look at the high frequency and, and, and, you know, it's expected to represent sort of autonomic activation.

And then when we're looking at like the low frequency, what we're finding is separating those out, isn't so clean because actually the, especially on the low frequency side, it contains some sympathetic and parasympathetic, right? So they kind of compete with each other a little bit there. So it's kind of embedded, it's challenging, but the really dumbed down version of this that I think is the unfortunate part is high variability, good, low variability, bad. So if your variability is low, you're over-trained. If your variability is high, you're ready to train. So here's the catch to that though. Well, there's many catches to this one what's high and what's low, because this is really relative to your state. So in order to actually get an accurate representation of higher and lower variability, we need to have you in a true baseline. So where are you at in your training cycle?

When you start to use this to establish your normal, because think about it. If you start to, if you start to look at this while you're in or going into a bit of an overreach state, because maybe you're getting ready for a race or something like that, are you really getting your baseline at the right time? Debatable. The second part is how do you standardize it? I've done quite a bit of work with Major League Baseball and I remember I was talking to a baseball coach one time, an athletic training staff, and they're talking about one of their pitchers who would come in, they were using Omega Wave and they say, yeah, you know, when he comes in, it's the weirdest thing. Like his HRV is low, we're like, he's not gonna be ready today. Then he goes out, he warms up and all of a sudden it's high again. So we think the warmup is like helping them. And so my question was, I said, well, let me ask you this. I go, you test him when he gets to the clubhouse, right? When he gets in. Yeah.

How far is his drive? Hmm. Not 20 minutes. I go longer on days with traffic. Oh yeah. Some days there's traffic. So you drink coffee? We think so. That you don't know what his HRV is. You'd have to get this as soon as he gets out of bed before that stuff's happening. But the other problem too, is when we do try to use this to guide that day's training, the problem is HRV changes throughout the day. Now, that being said, what I am in favor of is when you track this over time, right? So I think one of the challenges is if an athlete uses HRV day to day to gauge what that day's training is going to be, I personally don't think we have enough evidence for that. I don't think there's enough guidance for how much harder or easier that training session needs to be. But also realize one of the reasons HRV is used is because it's a sensitive measure. That's also one of its downfalls. It's so sensitive to other things that a meal can change it. Yeah. Right? Just a slight shift in sleep and stuff. So what I prefer is as you see it change over the course of days and maybe a week or more and you see a consistent trend, there's a good warning sign that we need to look at what's going on and it should lead to more questions. But I personally don't think by itself, it can tell you enough about that training. I've worked with athletes and I've done this myself where my HRV might suggest, oh, today should not be a hard training session. That'd be a bad idea. And I, and we have one of the best workouts, right? And then vice versa, depending on what else is going on. So, so Omega wave basically gets

at that. I think the challenge with some of the HRV data and I've seen it presented is in many cases, you may have kind of how we were just talking about the performance and whether it's confirmatory or predictive. A lot of times with HRV, you'll get these data. I saw some data presented from one of the national teams in a different country, basketball. And they were talking about how they traveled to England for this tournament. Um, HRV was low. They didn't perform as well in a tournament where they performed well. HRV was higher and you go, okay, how much of that was travel? And oh, by the way, what do you do about it? Right. So now are you going to just not play your team because HRV was low that day? That's where I think we get into the weeds with it. Yeah. To me, it's a tool in the toolbox.

It is not the tool, but it is a tool, but I think you need to understand what you're trying to do with it. Well, anytime you're boiling down something as complicated as performance or recovery in this HRV set to one metric, you're going to go a foul. You can't, you can't, and I, and the Omega wave systems and whoop does this to a certain extent. They try to like alchemize a few different variables together to come up with a, with a score. And that's, that's better than using a single, you know, a single metric. But at the, but at the same time, it's just, there's bigger context. There's always a human context to it. And I think that the athletes that need to be told, Hey, you need to back off. Sometimes the numbers can be an excuse to that. Like, and the coach can point to that and say, Hey, listen, you're telling me you're tired. Your last three workouts were crap. And something from some heart rate variability monitor is also telling us that you're not good to go. You need, you need to chill out today. Sometimes that like that, that accumulation of information becomes meaningful, but in and of it by itself, I just bang my head against the table that like rule their hard workouts or easy workouts by that one single metric. And the one thing I don't like, and that I honestly never use, but I understand, I do. I, so here's the thing. I understand the intuitive appeal of boiling stuff down to like a readiness score. I totally understand that concept. Here's the problem.

Your whole day matters 24 hours. Right. And so some of these systems, like I think Whoop does this. They mostly base what they consider your recovery on your sleep. Right. And what your HRV is in relation to that. Well, here's the problem. When I was working with baseball, you know, Whoop, it was an MLB and look, don't get me wrong. I think there are some values to their product. I don't mean to bash it completely by any stretch of the imagination, but I think we have to be careful what the conclusion is because what we're finding, and I was flying back and forth to Phoenix for spring training. So I was wearing one because I needed to know what the athletes were doing. And I quickly realized that if I was, if I took a red eye and I slept the whole five hour flight from Phoenix to New Jersey when I was living there at the time, it registered no sleep because I was sitting upright. Yeah. Right. And so my recovery index was awful. Well, then the problem is when you're working with players who spend a lot of time on a plane or a bus and they are getting this metric given out to them the next day, it can mess with their heads. Yeah. And then the other fun one is, oh, by the way, you got to remember to recharge it. So now if it dies while you're sleeping, the battery, it's registering, you got four hours of sleep instead of eight, you've got this recovery index that's completely cute. Oh, and here's the other thing. It didn't take into account what they were doing for training because they wouldn't wear it in a game or practice. So now what really is your recovery metric there? Right. So don't get me wrong. Sleep. One of the holy grails. Like if we can, I would say in most cases, most athletes are not over-trained or under-recovered. And I think that if

we focus on sleep and nutrition and things like that, we would solve a lot of problems. Those are the big movers. But when you get the details with HRV and stuff like that, it's like, it's a part of the picture. Please don't make that your whole picture. Yeah. Sean, I've had, I think now three previous podcasts where this whole over-training versus under-recovered thing has come out. So it's all like, I don't know whether it's confirmation bias or what, but it's the same message time and time again. I'll add two pieces to that and then we're going to switch topics a bit. First off, I mean, as you're aware, you've already pointed out a few anecdotal cases. There are even more in sports like cross-country skiing where they've blinded the athletes to their heart rate variability scores and they go out and win like world championship medals, you know, and they should have been resting that day. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it, but I think that the take-home message is for everybody out there that's using any of the heart rate variability type tools, and there's several of them out there. Yeah. Oh, there are. Yeah. You have to use it in concert with other things in order to determine training outcomes. And in context, right? So it's, you can't lose the context of it and you just, you just need to understand that while you want it to be simple, it's not. And so the more you can do to standardize it, the better it's going to be. Look, your data conclusions are only as good as the data themselves. So garbage in, garbage out.

And so if you're not doing a good job of collecting the data and being systematic and coherent about it, I don't know what conclusions you're making. So again, yes, you can include it as part of the bigger picture. But again, if it's the only outlier and everything else is going well, you kind of have to question what the data are. And you know what, I don't want us, especially in sport, especially in a sport like ultra endurance, I would argue when you start to look at, don't get me wrong. There is such a massive physiological gift with the goes with being able to do those kinds of things. But I would also argue that mental toughness and resiliency is probably one of the biggest single predictors of ultra endurance success. Cause you need to be willing to suffer and handle for that long. It's a very unique sport in that sense. And I'm lucky. So my wife, she was a former IFBB fitness pro. And now she was actually, she's just done her, she's done 30 or, or more marathon distance or longer, but even talking to her about going from like physique athlete to endurance stuff, you know, the, the miles and what you're doing for like a 50 miler and stuff like that, like that is mentally demanding. Like it's its own world when it comes to that. And I don't want to take the psychological aspect out of that at the sake of just a bunch of numbers. Well, and some, sometimes the training is intentionally like we're doing psychological training today. Absolutely. Like screw the, whatever data we're getting from it or whatever my recovery score is the day before or whatever, maybe not screw it, but let's like, like minimize the context that it provides. There's absolutely a, a, a time and a place and also a phase for that

psychological training. The other thing too, is you want to race in an ideal state. You don't always want to train in an ideal state. You need to, for lack of a better way of putting it, you need to suffer once in a while, right? Like in other words, if you're always optimized, then what adaptation is occurring? So, so being in a less than ideal state, not all the time, like you don't want to be run down all the time, but you know, sometimes on some carb restricted days, sometimes on these longer days where it is, you're not your best day, but these are the things you face. Sometimes we need to look at that as part of the training program so that you can race optimally, right? So you want to make sure you fuel appropriately on those race days that you're ready to go and that you've got all the rest you need, but yeah, there's, there's something to be said for, for being comfortable, being uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so we spent a little bit of this podcast talking about like stoplight systems that tell athletes what's good, what's bad, kind of what's indifferent.

One of the ones that has started, that started to emerge in the last few years is blood work and just getting blood biochemistry back, getting blood markers back and looking at that and going, okay, what is going on with the athlete? Are they in this reference range? What are things looking like over time? And I pulled up one with one of my athletes this morning. They got a commercially available, um, uh, uh, uh, blood, uh, blood test. And part of the, um, part of the increase in the fascination with this is just the accessibility, right? You could, you could always go and get a CBC with an iron profile with your doctor, but the fact that they can take that and kind of in, in the, the commercial companies can kind of skin it, so to speak, and put nice graphics on it and make it appealing to the eye and try to make sense out of it has, has definitely, has definitely increased athletes interest in it. But when I, when I look at it and I have not looked at nearly as many of these as you have, but I've looked at a lot, I always have to go back to my little purple blood testing manual, which I'm sure you've got in your office somewhere. It's a little spiral bound, you know, two inches thick. And it's like a little four by four manual and flip through it and go, okay, like, what is this telling me again? And I'm looking at this with one of my athletes this morning and they're like, there's 75 markers on it. Yeah. And I just have to take a big, I just have to take a big, deep breath because the athlete has all these green and yellow and red dots by each one of the markers of which now you have to go through and going through your,

your earlier system of tests, say do, right. We have to do something or not with all of these. I want to know what, what are like the heavy hitters for you in this context? So let me address one thing real quick, which is norms, right? Cause we talked about, are they in ranges? Yep. Yep. We don't necessarily know what that is for an athlete because normal doesn't apply. And so now that being said within ranges is something very useful as a metric to, to start to get a, uh, you need to start somewhere, right? But this is often where I think we go a little bit of ride with blood work, especially if you're using it for monitoring is it needs to be frequent enough that you can detect changes and do something about it, but not so frequent that you just get a bunch of noise and it's invasive. So this is where I think ideally like every three to five weeks can be very useful when I'm working with an athlete to figure, you know, that out. Um, but what we also have to realize is change is important. So it's not just, are you, so, you know, and I can give you an example of this. We, especially working with female athletes, we would start to see some iron values drop, right? In preseason. This is very concerning.

And so we'd get feedback from some sports medicine professionals where they'd be like, but it's in normal range. Right. Okay. Um, it was a 72% drop though, but it's in normal range. Mind you, it's like two points above the low end of normal. All of a sudden one week it goes below normal. So three point difference rather than say a 30 or 40 point difference. And also they go, Oh, we need to do something about this. So I think normal ranges can be a bit misleading. The other thing too, is one of the values in a normal range. If I'm working with an athlete, you know, it's funny, a lot of athletes get their blood work back and let's say everything's like green, right? Like, Oh, you're in range. And they go, Oh, this didn't tell me anything. No, it actually told you that everything's operating well. And to tell you truth, you can probably push some yellow in some cases. In other words, maybe you could actually handle a little bit more because of how your system's running. So what are my big movers in that context? One, I love nutritional markers because it's an objective way to get at what's, what's really kind of going on internally with the athlete in terms of fueling, um, and vitamins and minerals. So for example, vitamin D, um, omega three, omega six ratios, um, uh, magnesium, uh, let's see, uh, iron. Obviously that's a big one for us, especially with female athletes and even some of the male athletes, but certainly the female athletes. So those are things that we've learned to rely fairly heavily on because those can actually give you an immediate action, right? Because if you're low in omega three, if you're low in vitamin D, these are things that you can immediately go, here's something that we need to

fix. And here's how we would do it. Supplementation diet, whatever it is. Then from an endurance athlete standpoint, we definitely look at hemoglobin, hematocrit iron, and all of your, your other markers that go with that ferritin and stuff. And so we don't look at them in isolation per se, but certainly that's something we pay attention to because of oxygen carrying capacity. So it's not irrelevant in the slightest. And especially when you start to see drops in some of those, it's a flag. Um, our stress hormones, especially cortisol, and we look at both free and total. I actually think that we're finding some stuff right now that would suggest that free cortisol may be the more sensitive measure of where we're getting a bit of overload and, and really how you're responding to stress. Because keep in mind, especially with things like that, the system doesn't fully differentiate between physical and psychological stress. So if you've got a whole bunch of life stuff going on too, that'll show up and it's a good indicator for what the system's doing. Um, testosterone, estradiol, uh, in females, as well as progesterone. Um, you have to have context of whether they're on an oral contraceptive or any hormonal contraceptive for that matter. In that case, uh, growth hormone and IGF-1, uh, IL-6, we've used quite a bit looking at inflammatory. It's really IL-6 is kind of cool because IL-6 as a cytokine can be both pro and anti-inflammatory, but it actually plays a really big role in glucose metabolism. And so in heavy training periods and elevation in IL-6 may not be

a bad thing, but it is giving you a sense for what the system is enduring, um, from a, from a, from an inflammatory cascade standpoint. And then on top of that, uh, I just had one I was thinking of that I'm totally blanking on right now. Uh, there's a few other things we've used as well. We'll look at some of the immune markers, you know, as well, just to get a sense for, you know, do you have something going on there in terms of your, your, uh, uh, your IG levels and stuff like that. Um, yeah, those, those tend to be probably some of our, oh, thyroid, geez. Okay. So thyroid hormones, especially, um, with TSH, T3 and T4, when you're looking at, especially if you're starting to deal with relative energy deficiency, um, those can be fairly useful markers. And what's interesting is those markers, uh, or I'm sorry, those hormones, especially TSH do have an impact on cholesterol metabolism. So what will often happen is we may see an athlete show up with high cholesterol that you're shocked at. Cause you're like, well, you're so healthy. You run like 30 miles a week. You do all this stuff. Oh my God. Why is your cholesterol so high? Take a look at what their thyroid hormones are. In many cases, physicians don't order a full thyroid panel and they just go to the triglycerides and cholesterol. And if you see these high LDLs, take a look at what's going on with thyroid hormone as well, because it may be an indicator of what's going on, uh, metabolically more so than it is dietarily. Yeah. And I want the, I'm glad you went over all of those because I want the listeners to appreciate how hard the interpretation can be.

Yes. It's not simple. No, it's not. And I, and I, you know, you get a lot of markers and some of them are useful and some of them are less useful and things like that. So this is part of getting a parting, get part of getting a panel. But when you get them back, I honestly don't know how anybody who doesn't do this five days a week for several hours a day makes like make sense and make some sort of actionable recommendations on it. Nor do I understand how any of the automated, uh, recommendations are, are in any way efficacious, except for like the really low, like hanging, hanging fruit that you can tell when people are completely messed up. So like, what is your take on this? Like you see these things and you can give an example or, or kind of like broadly paint your framework. How, how do you apply the interpretation part of it? I need to know what else they're doing. So that was, that's one of the big missing links. And so what'll happen is, so biomarkers to me, okay, let's look at training preparation as a cake, right? So your training and your monitoring of that training is, is the cake itself, right? Then when you start to look at maybe stuff like HRV and you start to look at GPS and stuff like that, that's the icing on the cake, right? Now you're starting to do a little more on top of that in addition to how you feel.

To me, biomarkers are the sprinkles, right? Right? Where it's, if you've gotten the rest of the cake, right? The biomarkers get you that little extra bit. And where I can actually show where we use this is, so when we started with the women's team at Rutgers, um, for soccer, we started with the cake. We didn't start with the sprinkles, right? So we built the basics. Then we would get to a certain point and you look and you go, man, our training load looks good. Everything is normal with what we're seeing. And yet we're still tailing off at the very end. What's going on? What are we missing? That's when we moved to biomarkers. And so that's where it helped us further individualize the data to say, okay, you know what? Training's fine, but there's other stuff going on diet, sleep relationships. So it gives you another point of intervention to identify another objective measure. But if you don't have the other information, I don't know what to change. There was one team I used to work with at the pro level and they didn't really monitor their athletes, but they wanted to do biomarkers.

And then I would get, okay, well, so what does this mean for our sport? And you go, don't know, because I don't know what they're doing. Like you can't tell me what they're, I can't tell you how to change your training or game preparation or anything because I don't know what they're doing, you know? And so it's, it's a useful tool as long as you keep it for what it is, which is that additional layer of information. Don't get me wrong. I think biomarkers can be super useful for maintenance of health, for tweaking performance and for doing these things. But like you said, you have to know what you're doing with it too. And for it to have any actionable value, you have to know what to change. And that's why I started off with the nutritional markers because those by themselves can tell me something to change, right? If your vitamin D is low, if your magnesium is low, if your iron is low, I can now look specifically at how to change that.

But if my cortisol is high and my IL-6 is high, and let's say testosterone is low, then somebody goes, what do I do about that? The next question is, I don't know, what are you doing now? Like I need to know where you're at now and how you're feeling and what's going on because otherwise can we change these hormones? Yes, but I need to know where the point of intervention is in order to do that. And so, you know, I think that, that putting it all together like that, you're right. I think, you know, again, it's almost like HRV, right? Like where we try to oversimplify it. And I know the company, I think it's Oracle. They talk about an algorithm they have, they use artificial intelligence for sort of machine learning to figure this out. And, you know, again, if you're not plugging in all of your training variables and all your other life variables, you got to question how accurate that's going to be. That being said, again, watching how these things change and understanding sort of disruptions in homeostasis and sort of your balance point, those are really useful points. And so you don't necessarily have to be a rocket scientist or an endocrinologist to be able to figure that part out, but you still have to understand what your input variables are to figure out what variable needs to change. And in most cases, it's more than one variable, right? And so I think that's where the rest comes in.

But fundamentally, you're looking at it, right? I mean, you're taking, you're looking at the blood panel and you're saying, okay, here's what's going on. Not letting some algorithm or stoplight based system drive the action. I think that's what I'm trying to get at. It's a, it's a, it's a human driven outcome, not an algorithmic driven outcome. At this point, I would absolutely agree with where we're at technologically. Yes, that is 100% true. Because the other thing too is, you know, you have to be really careful if you get sort of an outlier marker where it's high or low. And, uh, what if everything else is normal? And so then you go, does it matter? Is this your normal? And that's where we go back to what I said earlier with got to know when you're testing baseline, right? So if you really want to know, if you have system disruption, you need to know what system normal is too, for you, not just normal ranges, but where are you at your best? Because then you can base everything off that.

And when you're working with an athlete, I'll be the first one to tell you, I don't know when that is because they're constantly in something. So do you get them coming off a break? I don't know. Is that when they're really at their best? Do you get them when they're peaking for a championship? I don't know. Physiologically, is that necessarily when they're at their best or if they push the limits? So you don't get them right after a race for a baseline, you know? So, so I think it comes to a point where when you have a stability in your training, that's probably about your best benchmark for where your quote unquote normal is. And then you can base your changes off that a little bit. And again, I wouldn't get too caught up in the noise with a couple points here, a couple points there. Look for swings in this, you know, and look for things that might indicate, especially with thyroid, for example, maybe thyroid and cortisol are giving you an indication you need more fuel.

You know, maybe you're under fueled in this. If you start to see a lot of inflammation and markers like that, you might go, Ooh, Hey, you know, am I getting sick? How am I feeling? Am I doing too much work? What can I do to further my recovery? And if you see shifts in some of your anabolic hormones, especially more chronically, then that's something to pay attention to because it might suggest an under recovery component that, you know, some rest and recuperation might go a long way towards helping you. Yeah. My, my personal, uh, my personal stick that I use with this and you can, you can tell me your opinion on it one way or the other is that unless something is really far out of whack, I need three sets of reference points to really gauge off of anything outside of like a couple of the nutrition markers that you're referring to earlier. You can, you can kind of like spot check those and go, okay, based on one test, we can, we can do this. But if we're tracking any of the longitudinal stuff, I need at least three to even start. And even then it's like, well, I don't know. It's like, it's only been like four months.

Yeah. The problem is, is, you know, um, four months in some athletes career can be an eternity, you know, so we need something. So I would probably say now, and again, I'm saying this from the standpoint of somebody who has with what my PhD was in and the research we do is in endocrinology, I need at least two, right? Like I, you know, one, like you're right. If it's a big outlier or it's like one of the big drivers where you go, Holy crap, what's going on with you? Like that's a red flag. But with the others where you're kind of like borderline, cause I actually dealt with this with some of my grad students, God love them because they get so into this. And so they'll, they'll get some more athletes stuff back and they're like, Oh my God, look at this. And it's like, yeah. So they're kind of borderline. Everything else has been fine. Watch them one more time. Don't overreact because you don't want to be, you don't want to cry wolf either, right? You want to go to the coach to change their training when you know, you need to change it.

Not at the, yeah, you know, maybe, um, especially if their other metrics have been fine. And so again, that's why, and again, you know, even if I can say, give me two time points and I'll get a better sense for where they're trending. Um, that's in conjunction with other information. So it's still not just based on the biomarkers. That's what their training load, their performance, how they're feeling, all that stuff. And so again, where, where we found the biomarker piece to be so useful more than anything is opening dialogue with the athlete to have a legitimate conversation about why might it be like this? Because you might find, I got a good one for you. I almost forgot about this. So we had one of our athletes work, we were working with, um, she comes in and, uh, over the first two to three blood draws, her iron just sequentially keeps dropping. So we start worrying about disease or, you know, Hey, what's going on. And, um, you know, her, her endurance was shot.

She just couldn't finish a game. So we're like talking to her one day, we're like, man, how are you feeling otherwise? What else is going on? And in passing, she happens to go, well, I don't know. I really thought, you know, going vegan before the preseason would help me be lighter and faster. And we went, Oh my God, wait, tell me about this. And so she hadn't really looked into it. She didn't understand what might happen to iron. And the reason we tagged this too, was because her Omega three was dropping a bit. So it was, but again, it opened that dialogue because what people need to understand is it's not that athletes are stupid. That's not it at all. It's that sometimes they don't think to tell you certain things like they, to them, it's sort of a passing, whatever. And to you as a coach or a scientist, it's the Holy grail where you went, Oh my God, you just gave me the piece of information that I didn't have that makes all of this make sense. And so, but again, it opened up that door of conversation. And that to me is one of the best parts. And I think for you as a coach, for anybody listening, being able to have that dialogue about what these results mean and why they change and what you can do about it and what it means for you, you really start to get at the core of what we need to be doing for the athlete and understanding that health and performance are not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

And I think when you start to realize that, because if you can stay healthy, you're going to get more miles in too, and you're going to do a whole lot better. Yep. The instruction that I give my athletes when they, whenever they have the commercial blood tests and inside trackers has been a popular one in the last few years is go and do it. Let's plan out the frequency that we're going to do it once every six weeks or whatever it is. When you get the results back, call me first and don't look at the red light, yellow light, green light stuff until you call me. Because instantly, as you know, athletes will look at it and go, Oh, well, I need to make this yellow thing, green because yellow is not as good as green. And then you make this red thing yellow, and then I'll make it green. What I love, well, I think one of the reasons I love researching athletes, working with athletes is they're so competitive. Yeah.

Right. And so funny story. So what we started to find with a couple teams is that sleep trackers actually started to do the opposite for them because what would happen is they would get competitive with each other in terms of who was getting more sleep. And then if they couldn't fall asleep right away, it would stress them out because they were going to lose who got better sleep. And so they would compare their scores and it created more psychological distress, not less. It was the craziest thing. But, and I think that's when, when I see people, you know, that in research for sure that don't understand the mentality of an athlete and don't understand, for example, I'm really proud of some of the research we do in a real world setting in season with teams. And then when you get some reviewer that comes back says, why didn't you control for this or why not have an intervention group? And you go, you do realize that you can't do that because if you've never worked with a team or an athlete before, if anything changes for the negative for them, it's probably your fault in their mind because that's the one thing they added. So your whole study goes right out the window of all of a sudden they go, I don't want to do this anymore because it's messing with me. So there's, there's, there's limitations on what you can manipulate, especially for how long. And I would also say, especially for things that you do, the research that, that people like me can do in an actual real world competitive setting gives you far more information than something that's contrived in a lab on a regular basis because you actually integrate the role of competition and, and training into this too. So, so there's a value in both. Don't get me wrong because we need the mechanisms in

the lab. We need to understand that, but there's a lot of stuff you can do in a more ecologically valid setting that gives us a little more information into what actually happens with an athlete in that situation. Yeah. And I mean, speaking to some of the points that we were mentioning earlier, I've always viewed that, that with any of these monitoring components, you get a twofold value. You get the social value of opening up the dialogue with the athlete. And then you also get the, whatever, whatever technical value that you're getting out of it, whether it's a physiological variable or biomarker or whatever it is, sometimes one outweighs the other, but you're always getting both and you can't overly leverage one or the other. No, I agree. And that even comes, even as we get outside the biomarkers, but even a performance testing, right? If we get into VO2 max ventilatory threshold, lactate threshold, maximum lactate, steady state body comp, it's useful for tracking, but it's also useful for programming so that you have them going at an intensity that they can sustain understanding when they're able to push those levels and what's being, where the payoff is coming from. But again, it's all about having that conversation because it's not just about chasing numbers. It's about what those numbers mean in the context of the productivity of your training and recovery. Yeah. It's so funny. I have this like love hate relationship with doing LTVO2 testing.

So we have, we have a commercial lab here in our office here. And so we see, we see very, very good athletes, very high end athletes, world-class athletes, but we also see a lot of, you know, weekend warriors and things like that. And because it's in a commercial setting, we have to, we have to blend like the efficacious value and the entertainment value into one product. The athletes, they don't care, right? They don't care about the entertainment value. They want to know like, what does it mean for their training? And are they going to win because of some information that's cleaned from the actual test, but in a commercial setting, you have to, not that you would disregard the like meaty, here's what we're going to do for your training perspective. You have to, you have to have some component of the entertainment value. And the most hilarious piece of it is part, part of our output that we give our athletes, which it, it kind of racks and stacks them in terms of what their VO two max is compared to all of the other sports, softball, soccer, triathlon, which is complete, like it's completely irrelevant from a training perspective, but you have to have it in there because it satiates the athlete's curiosity in some way, For sure. It gives them an anchor point. Like they understand what the, what the ranges are.

Cause we find this, you know, it's interesting working with athletes to body composition testing and how so many of them have such a misperception of what a body fat actually looks and sort of feels like. In other words, you know, they think that, you know, we'll have female athletes, they might come back at like say 20% body fat, which by all standards, health wise, performance is great. And they're like, oh my God, that sounds so high. And it's like, no, that's actually like really good. And then the other, the other end of it is when they get these numbers back and they go, so that means what, so for me to get to like what 17%, I'd have to lose like, what, like probably 12 pounds and do the calculations. You're like four pounds, four pounds of fat. And they're like, oh, you know, so it's the education that goes along with that and giving them an anchor point so that they have a frame of reference, I guess, as much as anything else and, and, and helping them understand that that's not the be all end all. And like when we work with, um, especially like power endurance athletes, one of the, the two main reasons we, we, we include body composition, the big one is tracking muscle mass, because if they're losing muscle mass over the season, we worry because we go, what are we not doing to maintain that, right? How, how much breakdown is occurring that we're not recovering from. So muscle mass is actually our big driver. The second one too, is within sort of a more optimal range of body comp. When we start to get to the higher levels, what we're more worried about when, when they start approaching the higher end of what might be ideal for them, um, would be injury risk, just because now you're carrying extra weight that maybe you don't need to. And again, within reason. So

we're not talking like, oh man, you're like 23% body fat. That's not going to work. But like, if you have a power endurance athlete, that's, that's pushing like 30 or 34% body fat, we do worry about that because of the added weight that's coming down in a movement. And again, this is not to hold people to like physique competitor standards. That's not what we're talking about. We're simply trying to gauge progress and use it as part of the overall fitness profile. It is not the be all end all. We don't want to create eating disorders, but I find it very useful to have a legitimate conversation and focus on muscle because it really helps them understand how important that is for function. I want to talk, I want to talk a little bit about how you execute that training because there's a, there's absolutely a huge performance context to trying in trying to get that right with an endurance athlete, whether cyclist or, or runner or even an ultra runner. But I feel that a lot of, a lot of runners and a lot of recreational weekend warrior types of runners and elite runners, some of them are afraid to do it because it's like the boogeyman, as you mentioned, like they, they, they don't want to see that number. And for whatever reason, there's like a site, there's like a psychology that's wrapped around it, that there, that there's going to be some negative outcome associated with it. So in your setting, how do you, how do you go about preparing the athlete for the test and then communicating what the results can actually mean to them in, in, in,

in, in like a healthy way that they can, that they can like take into their training? Yeah. So one thing we always clarify to them is, um, not everybody's going to operate optimally at the same body fat, for example. Right. So there's different ranges. Genetics play a big role in this. The reason we're using this is just to help them dial in certain things, make sure that we have them dialed in from a dietary standpoint, when possible, uh, identify places where maybe we could make a better impact, especially if we realized, wow, they have pretty low muscle mass. And this is something that, that we need to work on with them. So to me, it's, you know, it's funny because I'll see, and I've had some dieticians say this, they're like, you know, we don't want them to know their body fat and, and that'll just freak them out and stuff like that. But these are the same athletes that can go step on a scale and the scale is only giving you one number and that's weight. And so to them, kind of like we said earlier, where more is better when it comes to mileage for a lot of these runners, lighter is better, you know, and that's not always the case. And so the other thing too, is that measuring body composition can help you. And I use this term very loosely, but weight cycle in the right way. So it's not that you're going up and down in big ways, but you may perform your training, uh, in a, in a given range of weight and body composition. And then if you're trying to peak for an event where you do need to be a little bit lighter, if you're looking to move faster, it'll help you do it in an educated way so that you don't overshoot that. We also use this quite a bit kind of going back to our boxers and MMA guys. There are ones that I find body comp really useful for because I need to know how much

weight can we legitimately cut? What can we bring down from body fat? Cause I'll tell you what, that last week before a fight, when they're trying to make weight, it's not coming from fat, that's water, right? So I need to know what kind of lean mass I'm working with and stuff like that. But the other thing that we we've done with our fighters is we want them, especially for about the last four or five weeks of prep to train at about the same weight they're going to fight at, not what they're going to weigh in at, but what they're going to fight at so that they get used to holding that weight. So then when we do a weight cut, we're aware of where we want to bring them back up to. Cause the other thing you don't want is you don't want that fighter to overshoot the weight they've been training at. Cause now they feel a whole lot heavier and slower in the ring, right? So there's this balancing act. Same thing with a runner though, is if you're used to training at a certain weight and then we gradually taper you down so that you're sort of at your lighter and faster and only need to hold that for a set period of time, we can cycle back up at times. And I think it was a Trent Stellingworth actually had a phenomenal graph of Hillary's data over her running. And there is variability depending on the time of year, the event she's trying to get ready for and all that stuff. So where body comp becomes useful in our mind is again, as another tracking tool, not as a freaking judgment tool, right? And that's what's important. And we, we make that clear to the athletes. This is not about judgment. This is about helping you dial everything else in the same way we look at your VO2 max numbers or your vertical jump or your speed. This is just a part of that profile where we can say, Hey, all systems check, we're good. Or,

Hey, here's where maybe we could do a little bit better. You know, and I think that, that message by and large has worked very well, but it's that willingness and ability to take the time to have that conversation so that they understand what it means. And, you know, I see this sometimes at the college level where they're like, Oh, we don't want to do body comp. It's going to cause all these problems and whatever. These are the same athletes that can go to the local gym and get their body fat done if they really want to. And you know what? They're probably not getting good information. So I'm a big fan of headed off at the pass, make sure the information they're getting is from you and it's the right information so that you can help them digest it and understand what it means and then help them work with it in terms of, of, of making the most out of it. So yeah, it's a funny one for me because you're right. And especially in the endurance sports, we know with everything that just went on with Alberto and stuff like that, and the criticisms about the low weight, that's just a bad idea. You can't run in that depleted state, but this is why we say lighter is not always better, but if you understand and monitor what you're doing, you can really help these athletes optimize what they're doing. Yeah. And I think one, one of the, the, one of the kind of pieces of collateral damage with a lot of these horrific stories with female athletes and the over-focus on their body weight, which make no mistake about it, they're horrific and it's, it's terrible. And it's quite frankly, as a

coach, it's lazy coaching. Sure. When I look at that, I'm just like, really? Like that's the tool you're going to use? Like, come on, you gotta be better than that. But part of the collateral damage is now, I think that people are afraid of some of those tools that were demonized and body weight and body comp, body comp is absolutely one of them where you can't, you can use it as an, as you said, an evaluation tool, not a judgment tool. And if you're looking at it through that lens, it can be a thing that you can bring into the fold as a piece of information that can help an athlete out, whether they're elite college recreational, it doesn't matter, but it's the context. And you know, the other thing I would say too, is if you do the testing frequently enough, there's an accountability factor, but the other thing too, is it does help you dial in where they perform the best. So for example, I've heard coaches say, you know what, you'd be a lot better if you're about four pounds lighter. Where are you getting that from? How do you know that?

Why four pounds? Why six pounds? You know? And so it's one of those things that if you've got body comp data to go with your training and you actually can, because of your other metrics, you know, when your athlete is performing their best, that now becomes part of your fitness profile for optimization. And you know, cause you might have an athlete that maybe runs her best at say 16% body fat rather than 12%. That's useful information going forward. And it may have to do with what that indication is for her for recovery. Or you've got a guy who you see over the course of the season starts to lose muscle mass. And you know, that speed has now gone down to maybe their endurance has gone up, but the speeds they can carry it in certain areas are not as good because they don't have the supportive musculature. Hey, guess what? Let's dial in our training and our nutrition, because now we're actually getting a measure of how this is impacting you physically.

So again, it's all in how you use it. And it's too many coaches and athletes, unfortunately, treated as a punishment, right? It's a, it's, it's a monitoring tool to be used to chastise somebody or to however they choose to use it. And from our perspective, it's just another data point in the whole picture for who that athlete is. And it's just simply a way for us to gauge the effectiveness of the entire program when you put the whole thing together. So now when you've got the biomarkers and you've got the body comp and you've got your performance metrics and you've got all these things you put together and then, oh, by the way, how are you sleeping? You know, and how are you feeling? Like, again, we're not talking about anything magic here. There is nothing we've talked about that is outside the realm for most people. We're not talking about some esoteric test and, and, you know, having to use as many different pieces of equipment as possible. You know what's funny?

Like when we worked with soccer, there's a lot of tests we can do. We basically boiled it down because of time constraints to body composition, vertical jump, VO2 max, because we can get VT from there. And then on another day we do bench deadlifts and squats, and we'd run a 40. Basic metrics. We could have gotten into lactate threshold testing. We could have gotten into maximum lactate steady state. We could have done wind gate testing. Also, we don't have the time for that. So what we did is we picked the ones that would be the most monitorable over time and then implemented tracking throughout the season in order to give us an idea of what we were doing. It was, it wasn't really that complex. We didn't do anything magic. And I'll tell you what, if you really want to look like a good sports scientist or a good coach, work with great athletes. There's a lot you can do with them that they will make you look really good because physically and physiologically they're just better. So there's, there's no magic there, but, but it is, you know, ideally if we're doing our job, right, we do help them get those extra percentage points that allow them to be the best at what they are, you know? And, and I think that using that as a guiding principle and, and making it about the athlete first and foremost, um, really does help you choose the right things to do after that, because you don't want to waste their time. You don't want to treat them like a lab rat.

Um, but you want it to work for them, you know, and that's why buy-in is so important and you've got to be careful not to ask too many things to the point where they're like, they're good. They're good. They're good. I'm not doing any of it. Right. And, and then that's a, that's going to be different for different people, you know, but it is an important lesson as you're trying to make the right choices. Well, that athlete first philosophy is something that should be carried through everything because you're absolutely right. You're going to choose the right test. You're going to have the right context behind them. And at the end of the day, they're the one that's performing the activity, right? They're running, they're playing the match, they're playing the game. Like they're the ones that are actually out on the pitch doing something about us coaches. We just kind of sit on the sideline and let them and let them do their things. Yeah. And I think that ideally, if you've done your job as a coach, really your best day is the day of competition because you should be able to let them do their thing. Right. You know, with the, with the endurance athletes you work with, when they get out on the trails or they get out on the road, you know, that's that, that's that enjoyment day where you're going to look at it and be like, because you know, in your mind that they put in the work too. So this is their opportunity to really let it go and do this. And so even from a psychological standpoint, that's something that we work with the athletes on is look, if you, if you train hard, if you do your work, if you pay attention to the little details, the competition part's the easy part. That's the fun part because now you've done what you need to do. And if it doesn't play out your way that day, it's not because you didn't do the work. It just wasn't your day, you know, and, and I know I, as, as an athlete, I can live with that.

It sucks. I hate to freaking lose, but I will tell you what I can live with the fact that I know I did what I could do where it bothers me is if there was anything left in the tank, you know, and, and if we do our job right with monitoring and testing and communicating, then what we're doing is we're given the, the athlete and the ability to have a little bigger tank. Yeah. Right. So there's a little more to drain it when you really need it. Well, and I love your comment that you made earlier that all of these things have to work together in order to create better athletes. And, and, and if there is any summary from all of this, like a lot of people listen to podcasts and they want, they want like the one actionable thing that they can take home and do tomorrow, like the one magic workout, the key, the secret or whatever it is. There's anything that they're going to take away from this is that you have to look at all of these things in concert and together with, with each other and with the, with the right context. There is no secret. So, and you know, what's funny is, you know, and I would encourage most people start simple and then grow. You don't have to do all these things together at one time. So if I had to pick like my, my low hanging fruit, besides the training aspect, right? Like you gotta try, you gotta try, right, right. You gotta train tested, especially performance testing. So that you have an understanding of what your capabilities are and start with heart rate monitors. Then you can add in the GPS. And once you get really good at systematic testing to gauge your progress, monitoring your training to, so that you're, you're training in zones that are conducive to moving your fitness forward, then you can layer

in the biomarkers. If you want to start with biomarkers, start with the nutritional stuff, because that'll at least tell you something you can do right away. Then you can layer in the rest. After that, you can start to get as crazy as you want with it. But if you just start with those fundamental ideas, you'd probably amazed at how much it can do for you. But here's the thing too, at the end of the day, this might be the funniest statement we're going to make in this whole thing. There are days and maybe through a lot of your training where you ignore all of that and you just go train, you know, and you don't have to be looking at your heart rate monitor every second of every ride or every run. What you do is you use it to calibrate. You use it to know what it feels like to be at a given threshold, to be in a particular zone. Then check it occasionally to recalibrate, because I'll tell you what, one of the best parts about being an ultra endurance runner, being a soccer player is being outside, right? It's that, it's that environment around you too.

Don't miss that, right? Don't worry so much about the numbers that you forget to enjoy the process, because those numbers will be there for you to download after and then you can go, okay, now, yeah, I was suffering right there. Now I see why. But within certain runs, you might have those days where maybe it feels harder or not. That's when you might check your watch, your heart rate, your GPS and feel, hey, how am I going today? You know what, maybe I do need to back off a little bit, you know, and it helps you pick up on some of these things. So again, use this as a calibration or a systematic check. Don't use it as a second to second Bible for I have to be running this way. I have to be riding this way. Like use it as part of the plan, but don't forget to feel your training too, because that way, when I ask you, hey, how did it feel today?

You can actually tell me, and then we can compare that to the data. Yep. That's right. Data and information should guide the plan, not dig. That's right. Yep. A hundred percent. All right, man, we're going to leave it there. That was a brilliant place to leave it, Sean. I appreciate all of your insight into it. Maybe we'll do another like epic four hour podcast all on blood biomarkers. I love what you guys do. And I love the ultra endurance world because it is, we just had the position stand come out with ISSN not long ago on the nutritional demands and, you know, great group of coauthors to work with on that. But it's, it's an untapped area. And I will say, it's funny to me being around, I think, um, what was eyeopening for me is sort of having been around, you know, other areas of sport and competition. And I'd worked with pro cycling for a while and stuff, but runners are great because runners tend to be like this happy group. Like I remember it was funny.

My wife was working one of the booths for Boston marathon because she was a sponsored athlete there. So she was doing some stuff. So I was up with her and, um, everybody's walking around that expo, like happy, like 26 too. And you look like this is the happiest day of your life. If you ever went to like a bodybuilding show, everybody looks miserable because they're so depleted. But I was like, but it's funny because this is also a group that'll just throw on their shoes and run. Right. And it's a group that I always thought is right for the use of technology in the right way without disrupting sort of their natural love for running and stuff like that too. So there's a way to tie this in. Cycling is always a funny one to me because they love technology, right? Like everything from power meters to, I mean, they love technology, but yet when we had done a study with biomarkers where we were tracking triathletes, they were the hardest group we had getting into the lab because if anything got in the way of their training, despite the results would help their training, it was a no go.

And so we're doing, I mean, you figure at the time we were offering, they were getting like $2,000 worth of testing. Scheduling them was almost impossible. It was like, well, I'm supposed to train that day. And it's like, yeah, but with the stuff we're doing, it would have guide your training. But so there's this mentality there that gets really challenging. And I think we need to find that balance point in there somewhere. For a hundred percent. Don't get me started on triathletes. I coached a lot of triathletes over over the course of my career. It's, and I love them to death. It is a different animal. Interestingly enough, uh, just, uh, kind of for you and the listeners information. So the, the paper that you were mentioning, the ISSM position stand on single stage ultra marathon training and racing. And the reason I can repeat that title verbatim is because I interviewed the lead author, Nick, uh, a week ago. Yeah. And so by the time this podcast is out, that podcast will have also been out for a couple of weeks. So everybody can check that out and to, to fit your enthusiasm theme to a tee, Nick was it. I mean, I, I had to like beat him off of the microphone, you know, he was just so, he was so psyched about it and he was locked down in the UK, you know, he went back there. Um, after all this COVID thing, uh, went down, but, uh, yeah, excellent job on that, by the way, I know there were like 27 authors, 25 authors. It was a lot. And it was a pretty big, again, when we're putting a position stand together, we want to make sure that it's ideally reviewed that people have the input and stuff like that. But, um, uh, yeah, we've had some

good ones come out through ISSN. That one in particular, I thought was pretty cool. Um, just because it was really something that had not been touched on much in a cohesive way in the literature that kind of finally provided some very reasonable guidelines for, for how to approach the nutritional, uh, needs. And especially with all the stuff we're seeing with like fad diets and trying this and trying that sometimes the basics still work. Exactly. Well, you guys did a brilliant job with it. So kudos to kudos to the whole team there. And I know you had a lot to do with that being the president. Um, but yeah, it's, we lean on it a lot as coaches because it's impossible for us to comb through and read all 197 pieces of cited literature. And so like, it's just like, I just don't have the time to do it. And so we have to lean on those position stands and things like meta analysis and things like that a lot more than this, than the, than the single publication, the single pieces of research. Well, Jason, awesome. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, this was fun. Uh, as a quick, thank you.

Yeah. Thanks, man. Uh, as a quick wrap up, where can people find you either at the University of South Carolina or on social media? Yeah. So I'm the department chair and professor in exercise science at the university of South Carolina. Um, so you can email me there. I'll look up our department. We're very proud to boast the nation's top PhD program in exercise science. Uh, one of the top 10 in the world. Um, but then also on social media, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook at Sean, aren't S H a W N a R E N T, especially happy to engage on Twitter. Uh, it's where a lot of the professional stuff is for me. Um, and it's, it's really, you know, stuff like this, I think is great to get out there. Uh, but I'm happy to engage with everybody. And, um, uh, you know, it's kind of why I do what I do, uh, opportunities to, you know, not just live in a silo, but actually get the word out and talk about science. You know, I'm lucky. I just happened to be a jock that happened to be good at science.

So it worked out nicely. What a great combo. All right, man. Appreciate, appreciate the time. We're going to let you go, brother. Okay. Take care. All right, Sean. All right. And there you have it. Thanks to Sean. That episode was a good one. As I mentioned in the intro, it was inspired by an aspect of coaching that I continually have to be on point with, with all these various performance tests that keep coming out seemingly year after year after year. It's not easy to make sense of it all. But I think in a lot of cases, if we return and we keep going back to the basics, the fundamentals of physiology and what works and what doesn't that can provide us with a clear path forward on how to evaluate all these tests that keep coming out. And finally on a, uh, on a personal and a more somber note, many of you listeners will know that we lost a Titan in the ultra running community recently in David Clark, David, he was a prolific ultra runner. He had six Leadville finishes to his name to bad water finishes and a myriad of other ultras in between. David passed away May 21st from complications stemming from surgery to repair herniated disc. And if you don't know David's story, you really should. David was a former 320 pound drug, alcohol, and fast food abuser who turned his life around with food and exercise and eventually became an ultra marathon runner. He chronicled this

transformation in his book out there, which is an absolute page turner comprising of story after story story of these mind blowing benders that he would go on that make every single college fraternity party that you have ever heard of or witnessed look like kindergarten recess and will make you think how in the world is this person still alive? I got to know David after crossing paths with him at the Leadville trail 100 several years ago. And I eventually ended up coaching him for several years. And I also have appeared on his podcast a total of 10 times. But David was not just one of my athletes. He was also a very close friend. He was also a confidant and someone who would challenge my ideals and philosophies on everything ranging from nutrition to politics and life. David's David's impact went far beyond influencing me though. He dedicated his life to the service of others struggling with addiction and depression. His podcast, the We Are Superman podcast, served as a beacon of light for those needing guidance on their sobriety journeys. Similarly, his book served as an inspiration for countless individuals struggling to seek help. And I cannot tell you how many times I would be out on runs with David and out at the drop of a hat, he would be answering some call or text message with somebody who needed help finding a rehab

facility or just another person to listen to. David was also a coach. And I admired his coaching practice tremendously. He would work mainly with folks who needed dramatic changes in their lives, which is a way bigger calling than what I have as a coach trying to improve people's VO2 maxes, or just getting fit enough to earn that big belt buckle. He worked with alcoholics and drug addicts and use fitness as a tool for their sobriety. He worked with overweight people who needed to lose literally half of themselves in order to save their own lives. And he was very successful at this. I remember seeing his athletes at races like the Leadville Heavy Half Marathon and thinking that every single one of these people will probably be dead next year had they not found David to receive guidance and counseling from.

And there's no other service of a higher calling than what David did. And he did it relentlessly, compassionately, and selflessly. So David, I miss you to pieces, my brother. And I remember you telling me that nothing is forever. I remember you saying that the lives we built, the material things that we owned, and even our own running are all subject to be taken away from us at a moment's notice. So we better find happiness from within ourselves. I never thought in a million years that it would be you that would be the one that was not forever. Rest assured though, your spirit will go on. We'll always remember the times that we had with you and the impact that you had on everybody's lives.

You were so kind and gracious with your time and your energy and your spirit. And for that, my friend, I thank you for all the times that we had together. David is survived by the love of his life, Courtney, and three magnificent children. If you want to learn more about David's work through any of his podcasts or any of his books, go to wearesuperman.com. And there's also been a GoFundMe page set up in his honor. Appreciate the heck out of you, David. I'll see you at some point up on Hope Pass for another run up the trail.