Lessons from Nike's Breaking2 with Brad Wilkins, PhD | Koopcast Episode 44

trail and ultra runners what is going on welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is all about lessons learned from nike's breaking two project on the podcast today at brad wilkins PhD who is the founder of the nike plus sport performance laboratory as well as the head of the nike breaking two project and i realize that a lot of the listeners out there are going to be familiar with nike's breaking two project it created a lot of drama and controversy in the running world and i want to focus on none of that what i want to focus on is the listeners i want you all to take something from the lessons learned from nike's breaking two project that you can apply to your training and make no doubt about it a lot of times when we have these types of projects that are solely focused on elite athletes there are things that are relatable and translatable to all different types of athletes and i think nike's breaking two project was one of them irrespective of what you think about the whole spectacle of things so i hope you guys that are listening out there today get something from this conversation i had a lot of fun

with it and we're going to get right into it here's my conversation with brad wilkins PhD all about lessons learned from nike's breaking two i want to kind of go back to your breaking two experience which we we talked a little bit about um within our coaching group but i think to broaden the discussion out and probably to like introduce the listeners to kind of who you are why don't you just very briefly go over what your role was with that project and like kind of how you were involved at all the various steps yeah so i directed the scientific portion of the project the in its entire excuse me in its entirety and so i was responsible for putting together the team i built the team brought people in that were external to nike as well as built the team within nike and then with that team organized the overall strategy how we were going to go after this and and then implemented that strategy so i was the director of basically the whole scientific portion of this and so it was a good three and a half to four years of my life of kind of putting this thing together from the ground up to the actual execution on the day

and so people you know i guess the public sees like this year-long build-up um but for us it was several years before that and so you know putting together this team and and and in a leadership role and also being able to be involved in the execution on the ground on the day and the day-to-day stuff was quite rewarding one of the you know probably the most rewarding experience in my career so far outside of some collegiate things and getting my PhD and those kinds of more personal stuff but as far as you know things that i've done in my career was one of the most rewarding for sure and so how did that how did that work did nike come to you did they put out like an rfp and say we need we need somebody to like spearhead this massive project that you know there's a 90 failure rate probably associated with it how did that work we failed at that one right yeah right but and so no i was at nike at the time and um i was directing a lab um what we call nike plus the sport performance lab and which was doing a lot of work on modeling performance we were doing a lot of mathematical modeling um that put data into nike's digital electronics products and and out of that work we had a lot of

predictive models and things like that and we're working with external partners that had a lot of predictive models so as this discussion of hey what if nike could you know go after this big concept of breaking a two-hour marathon i was involved in some of those initial discussions and i was able to go into these meetings saying hey look this is physiologically possible and we have the math that it says that this is physiologically possible we can collect the data and understand if we can find a human that can do this and and and kind of bring in all the different scientific components to them and say like this is possible this is how we would do it if we had the if we had the capability or the possibility of going after this and and so they said sure let's try it and that was kind of the beginning right and so we were we were like okay let's let's go after this and and so we set some gates and we set some strategic planning um to be able to go after this step by step and so that's really how it started was there was a few people i'm including a guy by the name of sandy bodekker who had been at nike for a very long time he had a lot of administrative kind of pull within the company and so having his voice was very important and my boss at the time matt nurse who's the vp of the nike sport research lab he was

a big proponent of it and um and so when i when i came in and our team came in with this plan um then those voices collectively were able to kind of say push it through the company and and it progressed slowly at first through through through the process i guess of if if you can call it a process um of how these things get done at a company like nike but from your perspective this was like not a not so much of an athlete driven initiative but almost like a scientist and a company driven initiative where you know you can we can even go back to the mid 80s right when uh dr michael joiner kind of put some of the original math together and said yeah this is you know 158 whatever is is is possible but but from your description it's a bunch of people in a room scientists biomechanists physiologists and things like that saying hey this is possible let's go find the right athlete put them with the right technology give them the right conditions and let's see if it's possible that's exactly it so a little bit of background mike joiner was my mentor at my from my postdoctoral fellowship so i know mike quite well um and and and know of his work and his predictions and and so part of what we did was taking that those models he developed in the 90s and and added to it the last 20 years of knowledge that we've gained um and and and absolutely yeah it's a bunch of people in a in a room saying like the

science is there let's go see if we if we set all the context and we are able to set the conditions and do all those things that you just described you know is is this let's take it from the page of a published journal and see if we can do it in real life that that literally what it is what it was and it started with just like you said let's go find the athletes so that was phase one was let's go test a bunch of athletes and see if they have the physiology and based on these models and and uh and see if we can find that person and what did that pool look like because it ended up being three people how did it start though it started we have data on i think 18 um very very good runners obviously because this was a nike project we had to stick with the nike pool of athletes and so we were criticized for that and i get that criticism and but that's just the nature of the beast and so so yeah anywhere from young really good 5k 10k folks that may have not done a marathon even and so do they have that physiology and maybe don't have that mental baggage that comes with running a marathon and all the way to you know elliott and and sirsene and those folks who were much more established and so we we worked with

managers and with with other folks from these athletes teams and and got them to come in to do a bunch of of testing um and and looked for these physiological characteristics that that we felt were the most important um just to kind of define that person and from from my understanding it was a constellation of those physical characteristics it wasn't just like one or two like you had a team of people not just you or one other physiologist you had a team of people looking at several different things and saying okay this person's got a whole lot of a a whole lot of b a whole lot of c maybe a little bit of d all the way down the alphabet athlete two has different shades of all of those of all of those different flavors athlete three blah blah blah and then you're collectively coming to like a like a human decision like okay we're gonna pick these three people yeah that's exactly it so if you go back to mike joiner's original models it was maximal oxygen consumption so work capacity max vo2 it was the ability to sustain a certain pace for a long period of time in the 90s they talked about that as the lactate threshold now we know it's more like a lactate turn point or what we call a critical power critical velocity and in in critical velocity and running um and the final one is is running economy so how much energy does it require you to run at a given speed for for a long distance

so that's kind of what those original models were built off of then we also looked at things like just what was the athlete's willingness to go after this big idea if they were hesitant if they didn't really want to just jump in and eat and say yeah let's go for it and then those kinds of things came into our minds too and and then there were some other physiological variables physiological characteristics and we did some did some work in the chamber like what was their sweat rate things like that and just that was less less to make the decision but more to understand how much fluid they're going to lose and things like that um so we did really focus on those three main characteristics and then these other ideas that were a little bit more squishy that were you know does this person just have that mindset and the good example is um one time we put zersonated essay on the treadmill and we wanted to collect some oxygen uptake data and so how much oxygen is he's consuming and we wanted to put him at 21.1 miles an hour because that's the speed that he would have to run a two-hour marathon right and so so we said hey it was early in his training early on in the whole program so we said hey would you be willing to get on here and we want to collect some data and the first thing that he said was how long do you want me to run it wasn't oh no that's too fast it's still early in my training it's just like how long do you want

me to run for 10 minutes half an hour an hour like we're just like oh no just just like six minutes but that was that's an example of the mindset of like how long you want me to run for yeah it wasn't there was any questioning there wasn't any you know hesitation it was just yeah i'll i'll run that fast how long you want me to run for the next thing i want to get into is one of the things that i felt was you you just mentioned the athlete right the athlete's willingness is extremely important and one of the very unfortunate things that i thought that got lost out of this out of that whole initial project was the athletes because so much focus got put on the shoes when did the shoes actually come into the mix because you mentioned this was a long process three or four years athletes came into a little bit later but a group of people getting together in a think tank you know it's kind of the first part of it and obviously running economy out of all those variables that you mentioned was the it was that ended up being kind of the hero variable that you were able to influence the most that you and your team was able to influence the most when did the shoes start to come into the mix and and was there like a light bulb that went off that said ah not like now we've got it we've got something that affects this to a certain degree to which it seems more plausible so yeah it didn't really happen that way so going back a little bit so i mentioned i was involved in some of these early discussions around hey what if we were to go after this big idea of breaking a two-hour marathon

there wasn't an issue discussion in those meetings at that time and at the same time there was discussions around hey what if we could build a shoe that could reduce running economy that would allow somebody to run a two-hour marathon so these were initially very different discussions i was involved in hey what if we could set the conditions independent of a shoe to for nike to go after this one of the reasons why at a company like nike this was able to happen is because these two conversations converge where this group of people that was building a shoe came together with this group of people that was thinking about hey let's set the conditions to do this and now nike has this great story of a product that's involved in this large initiative that you know going after this big idea so that's the that's how it kind of came together and the shoe came together with with this larger concept of running a two-hour marathon so running economy obviously is a very important variable in an athlete's or runner's ability to to run fast for long distances and so a lot of things can affect running economy wind resistance can affect especially at those speeds we're talking about you know 13 you know 21k an hour right so it's it's there at those speeds

wind resistance can have a big effect so can running a really sharp turn running up a hill all these things are obviously going to increase the energetic costs to run at the same speed and and your equipment your footwear can can definitely affect that as well so we my team looked at the problem of let's put all these things together wind resistance running sharp corners making sure the course is flat and the shoe and how does that collectively decrease increase the energetic cost to run at 21.1 kilometers an hour so that's how we approached it but then you also had this team that was they focused on that hero part of the shoe that was that was contributing to this greater picture of reducing running economy and nike being a shoe company is is gonna make that the hero right they that that's you know one could argue if that's good or bad but i would argue that this project would have never happened if that didn't happen because night you know a company like nike is probably not going to get around you know get behind it if they if that that value return wasn't necessarily there that might be harsh but you get what i where i'm coming from totally and so so we so

it was really this kind of bringing these two big ideas together and i'll agree that that at the end of it both from a criticism standpoint as well as uh you know this was the reason why it was done the shoe became this hero but it was a collection of everything the athlete being the most important piece of that puzzle um and then everything else we did well we did as far as controlling the conditions as much as possible you know making sure that they weren't running tight corners blocking wind resistance with pacers in front of them you know those those those factors collectively is what got us so close in in that attempt and what enabled elliot to eventually do it yeah and i got i go back to my original kind of my original proposition with that question was was that there's an athlete at the end of the day that still has to run that fast it doesn't matter what they've got on their feet they don't run a barefoot running around corners not running around corners whatever you still have to have an athlete at the end of the day that's physically and mentally capable of producing such an effort you're absolutely right and there's a part i think it's in the documentary the the national geographic documentary right before we're about to go do this attempt right and they have me saying literally that like we can be criticized as much as people want to criticize us but at the end of the day a human

has to run 21.1 kilometers an hour for for 42.195 kilometers you know for this to be for this to happen we're not pushing or pulling them like they physically have to do it yeah in this constellation of the fact that the event itself was unlike anything that the running world has really ever seen before in terms of the nature of all of the different things that that you all were trying to deliberately contrive to create this extremely conducive environment combined with nike and all the baggage rightful or not that comes along with nike and the spectacle around it had this like weird just concoction of things that was just kind of ripe for criticism but i don't i don't want to kind of focus on that because i know you've been through that and i don't like to beat up the scientists about this kind of stuff because that's not your role you know i'll make a quick comment about it it it seemed contrived and literally was contrived like it that was the whole point yeah was answering the question answering the question can is a human capable of running you know 42.195 kilometers in under two hours that was the question that was what we were trying to see and we we broke a couple of traditional marathon rules to be able

to do that but we but that was literally what we were trying to go after now there's a lot of baggage and packaging that had to happen around that totally but that that was our that was our intent and our real purpose well and what i want to start to drill down to which is another area of expertise of yours is what's translatable for everybody because it's not like okay i like people can watch this and get inspired absolutely and absolutely that happened there's but there's a lot of product innovation in footwear and in nutrition and in other areas that stops with that starts with the top down they look at here's how we're going to make elliot kipchoge a few percent faster in order to do this amazing thing or who whatever other athlete that you're looking at and sometimes those techniques and products are relatable to the general public and oftentimes they're just not but i think in in either one of those cases there's something pushing the product down to everybody else whether it's for economic gain or you know what or whatever the other motivations are you guys had this specific aim of enabling this athlete to attempt to break a two-hour marathon but if you take off take off the nike hat and just put on like everyday athlete hat what's translatable in those situations to the everyday athlete

somebody that's going out they're going to run the boston marathon three and a half hours they're going to run an ultra marathon in 24 hours like how do we take those things and make them relatable to the average person specifically from breaking two um outside of the footwear and i took my nike hat off a couple of years ago and one of the things i think that people miss that is can become crucial is just really clear and focused planning so we did that we we we set these we set the context for for what would enable this two-hour marathon but you also if you have no control over the context specifically you can still plan and control as much as you can like my my hydration strategy my nutrition strategy for all of that knowing what the average temperatures are in boston during the boston marathon knowing what knowing what your your how much water you're going to lose that's really easy number to get you take your body weight before you train and your body weight after each training run and that is exactly how much total almost some some percentages off but for the most part that's how much water you need to stay hydrated during the during the marathon so just knowing exactly what all those numbers are and going in with a really clear plan from a pacing strategy to a hydration strategy to what's the

temperature um and and adjusting for all of those little things that's can be super powerful and and if nothing else just giving the confidence that i have this plan going in and i think that is it's underappreciated to be able to have this context as controlled as possible um when you're going into these things in some cases you do have more control like you can pick a race if you want to you run a pr marathon you want to run a you know as the longest 24 hours in an ultra you know those kinds of things you can pick something that has more optimal average temperatures that has a course that is conducive to your running style has you know has some things that are going to give you the benefit so you know going up heartbreak hill is not in boston is not a is for some people is not conducive to their fastest marathon so picking something that's you know if if your goal is to run your fastest possible marathon i get going to boston school but that might not be the place that that is going to happen so where can you find something that allows you to have a little bit more control so those are things that i learned from braiding too that i think are very transfer transferable or translatable that that people don't necessarily appreciate so much another part of that question is that i think is that is i think

is important is that sometimes it's harder to change small percentage points in the elite athletes than it is for an everyday or more average runner meaning that what it takes for me to change 0.5 percent in elliott that could be three percent or five percent in somebody who doesn't have as much room to change as elliott you know elliott doesn't have that much room to change right where an average runner has a lot more room to change so the impact can actually be significantly greater um in some of these manipulations i'm not saying this shoe or something like that really is five percent in an average versus three percent in elliott but but there are factors that you know are easier to change because there's just so much more room to change for somebody who's more of an average athlete other variables it's more difficult but but there are a lot of things um training responses dose response from a load standpoint that you actually could get higher outcomes in somebody who is less elite than than say elliott is yeah we always have to remember that when we're reading literature and sports science and evaluating how valuable the intervention was particularly related to who the who the cohort of people are that they were actually studying if it's a recreational untrained group yeah they should get 10 or 15 percent improvement from whatever intervention that you did if it's an elite cohort and they got one percent

you better be doing a backflip over what you just did absolutely agree and you you know even within a study like looking at what that percentage change is due to an intervention you have to take into account where they start right if they started a very different level then that that that delta change is is could be very very different it depends on the variable though so if you look at something like sodium bicarbonate as a organic aid that actually it seems to help more elite athletes better than it helps at least from an acute appointment performance standpoint um the more average everyday athletes because those elite athletes can push themselves hard enough to be able to produce the hydrogen ion that needs to be buffered by that ergogenic aid where an average runner may not really need that increased buffering because they're not working hard enough to to to require that amount of of buffering the hydrogen ion so so it depends on the variable but you're but the point's absolutely taken it just depends on where they start yeah and uh it's interesting that you also mentioned the planning piece of it from breaking two and i also remember watching the inios 159 project both of those documentaries when i looked at that through my coaching lens the one thing the biggest thing that i came away with was yeah we

need to put a lot more time into planning out all these variables they might not all be meaningful at the end of the day or they might not be meaningful to the same extent at the end of the day but we can look at all of them and say okay these are the five or six or eight or however many things that we actually want to focus on that shouldn't be an excuse to go through the entire inventory from the get-go and i'm guessing just by watching that that there's three or four or five times more things behind the scenes that you were checking the boxes on that didn't even make it to the documentary absolutely so there's two kind of answers to that question or comments to that so we look at things from a 80 of the impact can come from 20 of the variables kind of perspective meaning if we just focus on these 20 then we can have this massive gain right so we absolutely did just say these five things are the most important we have to nail those those are critical yes there are 20 things that we would love to be able to control but if we control number 18 and don't control number two this thing's gonna this thing's gonna fail but if we control these five these over here yes we would love to have them work great

but less important than these critical factors because we knew we could get 80 of the way there just from these five variables so you're absolutely right and going in and say what are those four or five critical things even for somebody just starting out what are those two or three critical things that i have to nail i have to get right for me to hit my goal and spend 80 of your time on those 20 of things yes and then there's other things that can cause disruption but not necessarily critical to success and so we definitely approach this problem from that standpoint because there's there's a you could you could go on forever of checking boxes yeah that's true these five we said critical so and just worked really hard to solve those so we we've gone through this like kind of revolution and footwear technology especially when it comes to to to road running and although the the primary audience for this podcast are going to be trail trail ultra runners i think there's some lessons learned what's going to come next in endurance sports because these seem to kind of like go through waves you know you can remember you know 10 years ago where even carbohydrate supplementation wasn't really all that uh well understood i guess is the best way to put it and now it's

de facto so now we're we're starting to see better shoe technology across all of the different brands and really focusing on how they can improve running economy what do you think like when you put that you know what's next hat on what do you think is next down the line you know you're right there's been a lot of advances in nutrition and i wouldn't say advances more so than just understanding and application like translation of what scientists have known for a while and i think a big part of that too is looking at periodization of nutrition so being able to stress different parts of the of the biochemical pathways metabolism and at different times that could that's interesting kind of trend or progression that i think is starting to happen now similar to what we've been doing with periodization of training for the last 50 plus years and so so there's that um i really think that you know there's a big big data push right now right and it's been progressing over the last five to ten years i think that it's happening a little wrong meaning that most of the companies that are building systems or building platforms or building devices are going after the masses and and even when they're

asking questions like how are these populations behaving using the term big data for an individual that means a lot less what the individual needs is how do i respond and behave in this context of the world for me to optimize my performance so it's it's a lot of little data meaning i'm just new more data that's individualized for me that does that allows me to describe the context of how i respond to my environment to my thinking to everything around me to perform optimally so i think that that's some low hanging fruit for data companies or other other for people to start thinking of hey i want to collect these data but i need to do it from the perspective of how do i respond not you know trying to ask questions about how the population responds to different things and so because you know how do i respond to heat stress how do i response to a given training load how do i how long does it take to recover from that training load and that allows me to personalize and optimize for me and i think that there's some low-hanging fruit right there that could actually take some pretty big leaps and bounds for for people individually to to to have some pretty big gains just because again it's kind of controlling this context

right but understanding me and how i respond in these specific environments and situations that could allow me to take these big leaps forward and that includes nutrition and cooling and some of these other kinds of more technical kind of approaches but if you're just taking some nutrition plan and you have no idea how you respond or how that impacts your specific performance then it almost doesn't mean anything so the more you can manipulate and apply it specific for you is is going to be the biggest impact i you know i i completely agree with you that we're approaching a lot of that problem backwards and i've got two examples of where we've like corrected that and where i think we need to correct it so where we've corrected it in my opinion is altitude so it wasn't that long ago where the altitude was like one of the de facto ways to train and we didn't or we underappreciated the individual responses to altitude and we had this blanket recommendation okay you're going to go up to 8 000 feet you're going to live at 8 000 feet and then you're going to drop down to 3 000 feet and train there and while that is still used to a great extent amongst a lot of athletes we're definitely a lot more choosy with which athletes we actually use we have them go through you know some sort of battery of tests pre-altitude exposure we monitor them during and if they have a good experience we'll repeat it and if they don't have a good experience they might change something or not repeat it but those are like lessons learned from we had all this data from a population level to say that

live high train low works but we took it down to the level of the individual and kind of customized how we implemented it where we haven't learned that lesson and this is the best example i can come up with this off off the top of my head is with blood biomarkers where we'll take a blood draw from an athlete and we'll compare it to a reference range of a healthy population which is insane like that that proposition of saying okay i want this elite athlete to go in get their blood drawn we're going to run a whole battery of tests you're going to take three tubes of blood we're going to find out everything cortisol levels vitamin d you kind of name it and we're going to compare that one single athlete to a reference range of healthy people that's comprised of healthy people is absolutely bonkers to me yeah so because it means it means nothing until you understand how that impacts you individually right just because you have a you know a reference value that might be considered a little low in vitamin d like that could you could be at the high end of your you know response curve um to that concentration of vitamin d and that might be a bad example but yeah it's so you have to measure outcome variables outcome variables outcome variables and link them back and not just correlation but cause and effect to these changes in blood markers so there's outcome variables that are performance related or highly

performance predictive that has to come from cause and effect from those blood biomarkers and we haven't there hasn't been the studies to really do that on a population level i would argue let alone at the individual level so much right because you're right the reference values are unknown and i'll agree with the altitude example you know 20 years ago from a population basis we grouped people into responders and non-responders 100 i totally remember that and now we know well we've done a lot of work on this and is that just because you're a non-responder once doesn't mean you won't be a responder the next time you go up and just because you're a responder once doesn't mean you're going to respond every single time you do a live high train low kind of protocol so understanding how an individual responds in a specific context in a given period of time based on baseline data based on where they start based on what their training responses are like there's a lot of different things that will impact whether or not somebody quote-unquote responds to altitude by the way just by with one marker and that's an increase in in hemoglobin concentration so there's a lot of other markers buffering capacity that you know other kinds of things blood volume changes that could be happening at altitude that could be either

beneficial or detrimental to somebody's ultimate performance so understanding the interaction and the integration of these different variables is something we're just kind of getting to yeah and i've said this on previous podcasts before the whole altitude thing has always kind of miffed me because one of the things that's underappreciated about most of those study designs is the athletes training is incredibly controlled during the altitude intervention it's if you're not if you're if you're if you're not like equating for that somehow like just doing the same training intervention in the same environment with the same people the same time of year it's like well all those things could just be affected by better training absolutely and i would argue that the training is not individualized in those studies meaning that you're going to have people that are responding or not responding to a given load very differently and based on their individual response so you just don't know if they were not responder to the training yeah not a non-responder to the altitude yeah so those those are all important things and it gets back to this idea of response to the individuals and understanding that better so okay so here's here's the zillion dollar question right if we can solve this today you and i we can go into business tomorrow we can sell it to all the athletes what are the things that you would look for to create those individual responses is it so is it like a phenotype like

fiber type distribution is it a certain genotype is it looking at the training response the previous training responses to things is it looking at some other physiological property of the athlete like what is it like how can you actually individualize those things that is the zillion dollar question if i'd figure that out i would be in this so it's all of the above so the way i think about this is that you have the athlete in the center right if you think of expanding circles athlete is in the center there are primary variables that are associated with a performance an acute performance on that day things that we talked about during breaking two are probably some of those primary um variables for endurance sports maximum oxygen consumption running economy sustained right you know those are some of the as well as some cognitive motivation um variables that are primary then there are the next circle out are secondary variables things like how hot it is is it is there are you at altitude you know other kind of biomechanic variables that actually impact running economy those are secondary variables and you can spread that out to tertiary and quaternary variables and the who knows how far up these circles go um of things that are interacting in different ways to impact these primary variables and so first thing we need to do is define those primary variables for each specific context

that you're going to perform in an endurance performance you can probably define them quite well and then you have to define what secondary tertiary etc and then you have to understand the data how all those things interact to ultimately dictate the impact on these primary variables right so we have to nail the primary variables first i think we're getting close in some ways in some context but we're don't even know how secondary variables always impact those primary variables for a specific individual so it's going to take data to understand those interactions for that person not for the population necessarily because we can do that you know you can take a million people with wearing garment devices and you can get that on a population level if you ask that question it's much much harder to look at the interaction of those things on those primary variables for each specific individual and allow them to make some behavioral change in their training and their nutrition you know all these other factors that might be influencing so yeah nailing those primary variables would be first um and really understanding them and then going out circle by circle and looking at how are all these data factors influencing each other and those primary variables so it's it's not a very easy problem to solve but that's how i would approach it

yeah i mean i can remember when i first started coaching like i would definitely lean on like what what we would refer what we were just referring to as the population side information more and now i lean on more of the individual response side that's just been a big like transformation in my whole coaching career where first i would say okay well here's if we were just talking about training volume right just to keep it really simple here's the training volume here's the training volume that a lot of other people that are using so i'm going to apply some version of that to the athlete that's how i would coach 20 years ago when i was 22 years old or whatever now i would say okay let's look at the individual how have they trained did they respond better to a period of high volume training low volume training okay here's how we're going to base the training off of that and then take in as a secondary factor what the population data would say and you could do that across anything you could do that across nutrition you could even do that across altitude intervention like we were just talking about earlier you could do across heat intervention where you can look at the studies and say okay well it's a six-day protocol but then you could say well how do you do in the heat when it's hot okay and how are we going to design a heat acclimation protocol around how you specifically are adapting to the heat so i just went and i think that everybody everybody you know everybody's trying to make a buck so they're trying to search for like the properties within the athlete that could give those indications i mean even across training volume right they're trying to find okay well this fiber type distribution you know is going to be the thing that high volume athletes have this type of fiber or athletes that that adapt more readily to high volume training have this type of fiber type distribution athletes that you know adapt more to low volume training have this type of fiber

type distribution distribution but then i look at that type distribution but then i look at that and like that's one variable like why would you base training off of one single thing when there's a whole host of variables kind of going on around it that's exactly right and i think that there's you know going back to this primary secondary tissue like there's a lot of products and there's a lot of people thinking about things that are probably quaternary in how you know where it really lies in this you know the circle of importance if you want to call it right and you know so we're selling a product or we're talking about fiber type distribution we're talking about you know some something in the brain might you know influence motivation or something like that so you know those things are you know they're further out than than really the primary factors that should be fixed first i'm not saying they're unimportant once you've gotten to that circle of but but but they're not going to have an impact if you if you aren't solving those primary variables first so that that's part of the part of the problem part of the difficulty is that we're not necessarily we're not necessarily focusing on what we should be focusing on now and yeah fiber type distribution from a population standpoint can very well describe somebody's response to training but i guarantee you i can find you somebody with a high fast twitch fiber type that's going to a fast twitch fiber type that's going to respond to you know a specific load training that you have that was built for somebody with a high percentage of slow twitch fibers so i it just because the population says the distribution is over here doesn't mean i can't find you somebody that's the opposite that that's what i that's the issue that i've always had with those types of diagnostic evaluations that can help drive training

that's the previous training yeah and almost every athlete like some athletes i get it they don't have a training history and you're gonna you're gonna guess and you can bring those things into the mix but if you have an athlete with training history you should be able to look back at it and say okay well here's a period of high volume training here's where you got injured here's a period where you're anemic here's a period where you decided to be a vegetarian and it worked or it didn't work or whatever like you've got this huge training history with most adult athletes before they got into running if we drill it down to the everyday athlete right versus the elite athletes you always have the training history to help inform future practices whether they're training practices we were talking about volume earlier or nutrition practices are you going to go on a you know this kind of diet or that kind of diet like that should be your first information point and then bring in okay we're going to tweak this we're going to tweak that that's the way i've i've approached at least versus the diagnostic piece saying you've got xyz gene so we're going to take a left turn on your training and do all high intensity training because of this one particular genotype yeah i'm gonna go down a rabbit hole please do there's there can be diagnostic information that you can get from understanding genotype or even some phenotypes like fiber type but there are so many factors that can influence how a gene is ultimately expressed or how that expression is changed before some ultimate response happens even a phenotype so epigenetics is getting bigger in sports science now it's like how just because a gene is expressed how is that modified through training or through other kinds of stuff and then ultimately expressing a protein that is

you know very different from the ultimate you know very different from the ultimate or from the beginning that initial gene expression so there's there's a lot of things that can change that along the path and that are environmental that are training etc etc so i don't necessarily looking at fiber type that's an expression so that's further down the road but then there's also how much oxygen is that muscle getting and how much blood flow is it getting is it getting the right you know nutrients to be able to turn over atp at a rate that is required for them to do the work there's a lot of physiological factors that have nothing to do with that fiber type that ultimately can dictate how well that muscle fiber or that muscle group or that entire muscle the entire system is going to ultimately behave and react to a given stimulus so there's so many different factors that are have to be thought of and integrated together that ultimately predict these things and i don't i would argue we're not even close to really translating all the way from a gene to how somebody's going to how somebody's going to perform in a race that's that that's that's impossible to do right now because you just don't have all those those expanding circles that describe every influence and along that pathway i will say too that is going back to how coaches interact with the athletes

my experience has been that the best coaches are the ones who are able to change their thinking and individualize their approach to their athletes and coaches who may have had an olympian olympian gold medalist world marathon champion whatever that that had that individual and think that because they applied a certain strategy and dose relationship for loading and all this kind of stuff for that athlete that it's going to work for everybody else and that is totally untrue that's the best way for those coaches to ruin athletes um because they don't because because those responses or load responses are very individual so if you're not able to do what you're talking about and and individualize again maybe you start with this blanket program but you have to change it and individualize it for that for that athlete as you're learning how they're responding if you don't then then you're just going to be known for that one olympian and not and not a a large group of olympians i want to dig into this for a little bit because one of my good one of my good friends and former colleagues is a physiologist uh over at the olympic training center and i did a podcast with her a few weeks ago her name is lindsey gollich who's who's fantastic and i originally knew lindsey as a coach she came in through our coaching system

i was you know maybe i don't know three four or five years ahead of her or something and i became her her you know her i use it i use this term very loosely boss because she was way smarter than i am for years and she ran her physiology lab and then she made the transition from being a coach working with athletes to being a physiologist and being on the science side of things and trying to inform athletes and coaches of what's going on physiologically so she has this really unique perspective of she's a fantastic coach and has been for many years but now her role is on the sports science side which is kind of where you come from and she has to interface with those coaches and with those athletes and i've had a lot of just fantastic conversations with her over the years about just what you were alluding to the coaches that get it and the coaches that don't that can use sports science to inform what's going on with their athletes and some of them like completely disregard it and even in my experience we've had people we've had athletes i've had i've had this experience now that i'm now thinking about it we've had athletes from other coaches come into our lab do standard lactate threshold vo2 max test and their coach not even ask for the results because they don't care and so i'm wondering from your perspective right from the sports science perspective you've seen a lot of these coaches and a lot of these athletes and all these different types of environments how do you how do they strike the balance between taking information from you and making actionable versus well i've already done this and this is kind of what works

it's really hard and i haven't had a lot of experience with that and because i'm i tend to be a little more bullheaded and just like well if you don't want us to do whatever but that's that's not totally it's more tongue-in-cheek but so i'll go back to breaking two for just a second because when when when when zersene and lalisa and elliot first signed on to do this project one of the big goals that we had was to really integrate and get into their system not to change but to become partners along the path so there was this there was a specific intent to to understand what their coaches were doing learn and have and have a partnership with their coaches and those athletes throughout the journey and the reason for that was just what you said is so that we aren't thought of or we weren't going to be thought of as hey we're the sports scientists we're going to follow this physiology plan and you guys are going to change everything because we're smarter than you are we did that was not how we wanted to approach this we wanted to say hey let's work together why do you do certain things what do you see in the way that lisa or elliott responds and how can we work with you and maybe give you some information about the science that might

help you think and there was some initial like you don't you don't want to listen to you guys but as that relationship grew we really really found that that was the best approach is that you it takes time to trust each other and and have that kind of relationship with coaches so that they can you can you can move things forward and to this day and nikes you know brett kirby at nike is still there he has these kind of relationships with these coaches and athletes much much deeper now than it was even when we ran breaking two because he's continued these relationships and they are using his his knowledge in the sports science and applying it to the way that they think about things in a much deeper level than they definitely did a couple years ago right so that's the approach that i that i've seen work best but it's not a quick fix it's a it's a deep relationship that you have to build over time and it sounds like this colleague of yours probably is taking that approach or or that would be my recommendation is to is to hey i'm i don't know everything you have a lot of hands-on experience with coaching and and how these how these things work and so how do we start building relationship and work together yeah i mean this this goes back to like an age-old adage that i have with a lot of our coaches is the best coaches have the best networks because they're not they're not going to be the

smartest in any one single area there's always things to to learn from other people and other experts in an area and that in the coaches that i feel always like fall behind the eight ball are the ones that just like insulate themselves and they never they never reach out or they never branch out or they don't take advice from other people and stuff like that yeah and there's there's definitely things that people are connected to that you know knowledge that they had from their mentor or their their also their coach that they're implementing they're so ingrained in those concepts that it takes a while to potentially break them out of it um and sometimes you never do but there's other places that you might be able to to start influencing decisions from a sports science standpoint yeah okay let's get back to the prediction business and if covid has taught me anything i'm pretty terrible at the prediction business so feel feel free to make some mistakes here it's totally fine nobody's gonna hold you to it we're not gonna start a business it's gonna be on fire it's gonna be right yeah it's good sex exactly but but we're not gonna we're not gonna you know go out and start to seek investor money off of any of this stuff we're just gonna we're just gonna predict for a little while so we went down this path of the next like the next thing in innovation is going to be is going to be the capability of drilling down to the level of it of the individual what is it with is it with nutrition is it with biomechanics is it with training like what like what do you what's the what's the low like the lowest

hanging fruit in that whole arena that we'll probably start to see emerge you know honestly i you may think i'm you know sidestepping your question but honestly i think it's really some minor integrations of all of the above meaning if you can just even find small connections between you know oxygen consumption running economy nutrition biomechanics and start to put those together and even in in the most minor of connections between those things and how they influence ultimate performance outcome that could be that could be a big thing because nobody's doing that right now right people are saying i'm only going to change nutrition or i'm only going to change running economy or i'm only going to change mechanical factors that influence running economy so if you are able to even find some minor connections that ultimately describe changes in performance or outcome variables i think that can be huge and so those data are being collected right now there's a lot of systems garmin you know a lot of things that have those data but they're looking at it from a mass standpoint they're not necessarily really helping the individual make those connections for themselves

they're trying to but they haven't really cracked that nut yet so even the minor even really minor kind of interactions and influences of these different variables on performance outcomes can be huge does that make sense yeah not sidestepping too much no i'm not sidestepping at all because the the thing that comes to mind which is not a lot of runners or ultra runners are going to be are going to be familiar with this system but we just happen to have some familiarity with it because i i remember seeing this in the early 2000s it's still around um is this system called omega wave and it's used in a lot of like team sports and combat sports where they have to train an athlete across a lot of different areas of their physiology they have to train speed and power and they have to train endurance and they have to train skill and what the system was trying to do is to say okay you're more you're you are more tuned into training skill today or you're more in tune to training power or you're more in tune to training endurance or you need to take a rest day and it was taking we're not going to go through the entire system because that's another podcast it's going to get way too complicated and we're going to get into like electricity and ac dc ac currents and things like that dc potential whatever um but anyway it was trying to take a host of variables i'll leave it at that and alchemize them to a certain extent and say okay here here's what the population should train at but i never got a good sense that it

would ever use it or it could drill down to the level of the individual that was always kind of like left up to the practitioner to interpret although it would give these stoplight systems across any of these different you know training areas that that we could that we could see and that system is still around oh yeah so the thing that i'm less confident is is the predictions of you should do this you should do that you should do that when i say we need to understand the interactions of these variables it's so that we understand the individual responsiveness and then over time are not taking the place of the coach but assisting the coach in individualizing those programs based on those responses so so it's you got to start with tracking just like you talked about with understanding history of your athletes you have to understand how they're responding for a period of time before you're going to be good at predicting and what they necessarily should do so to come out of the box and say because your algorithm says this you should train speed or you should rest is impossible to do you need to be able to understand and maybe it takes a couple of months to this dose response to all these factors or as many factors as you can and the integration of them to then be able to say

here's what you should do based on your previous data we don't have we don't know enough about the specific acute response relationships to really make those predictions out of the gates we have to understand more chronic dose response relationships for each individual to then get to a place where we can actually predict so that that would be my um yeah i guess kind of summation of those thoughts to some degree part of the problem is is that companies humans don't have a very long attention span so two months before you can make a prediction that's ridiculous like you should be able to do that tomorrow right so that's part of the problem is that we don't necessarily event invest as consumers and definitely companies don't allowing somebody to have that kind of or requiring somebody to have that kind of investment before they get good at predicting what you should do or not so you're now back in academia and you've got willing grad students and PhD candidates and things like that to conduct this research what does that look like so i'm actually in the undergraduate only institution but i do have i do have students that are going to be involved in my research and um so just started school so we're

and this is my first year at this university so what i'm really doing right now is in this land of covid trying to figure out how to build my lab and and get the kind of questions asked and answered that i that i want to go after and so i'm in the building stages of that and not you know not pumping out data right now for sure because we can't even really collect data in the lab um but trying to build that foundation to to be able to hit the ground running once we're able to collect data but in the like if you had your ideal world you can take a magic wand and say okay let's fast forward 10 years and we built this robust program like like what is the what is the research that was relating to like your what we think is coming next which is the ability to link these variables to outcome performances or training interventions what's the snapshot of what that looks like the research to get there i guess is what i'm asking yeah so my my big interest from a research standpoint is exactly this it's understanding i i have a background in how the cardiovascular system is controlled so how does our nervous system our autonomic nervous system control the cardiovascular system and in turn influence blood flow during exercise and and how may that limit performance so my big areas of research are looking at cardiovascular control and blood flow regulation and how that influences bioenergetics so how we

use energy and get energy for our muscles to be able to do work using these concepts and models that that we even use during reading too that were these critical power models and some of these other concepts that we know are tightly linked to the energetics in the muscle so kind of the relationship again back to how are these variables influencing each other because i can measure these cardiovascular variables i can measure these bioenergetics variables and how do they influence each other so those are the big those that's the area of research that i'm trying to set up at the same time we go back to this idea of engineering and ultimate performance and i use the term engineering lightly or loosely but setting the context of a performance and so how does heat how does energetics how does hydration status all these things how does that influence somebody's performance so being able to apply what we learn in the lab to those kind of contextual environments in other words applying what we learn to help people optimize their performance but at the same time doing those types of endeavors or doing those types of things allow us to ask better questions and get all right how are how are these pieces of data that we saw over here how are they interacting with the data that we have to do how to ultimately dictate how to ultimately dictate how to ultimately dictate how to 얘기를 얘기를 how to 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 얘기를 endeavors or doing those types of things allow us to ask better questions and get all right how are how are these pieces of data that we saw over here how are they interacting to ultimately dictate how our muscles are getting energy etc so kind of playing off of each other where we're looking at

these setting the context of these specific performance optimization questions and and and allowing that to to provide more specific questions that we can then go answer in the lab and vice versa and that makes sense yeah no i so is it we keep coming back to like having all these different variables link up for an athlete what what are the most i want to try to drill this down to like the practical pieces for the everyday athlete what are the big ones like what are the what are the thing what are the two or three things that when an athlete's looking at okay i want to maximize my performance for the boston marathon western states or whatever what are the heavy hitters to which they absolutely have to nail to focus on those big boxes to check or the big rocks to really focus on to maximize their performance yeah the first thing i would think that we talked about a lot is optimizing that dose response relationship for you so when you when you have a specific training load what's your response to that training load both the adaptation so how does it make me better as well as the recovery so how long am i going to be to be depressed from a system standpoint after that load before i bounce back and have that adaptation right so how do i respond get better and how long does it take me to have that response

so that's going to be different for each individual i think that's something that everybody has to nail for themselves and because a given response for athlete a they may in one day be back and be ready to go athlete b might take three days that could be due to age that could be due to training status that could be due to genetics even that they could be due to a lot of different factors right so understanding both the size of that dose response relationship as well as the timing of that dose response and it's not always three weeks hard one week easy which is what we see all the time right exactly it's not like that for everybody so that would be number one the number the second thing especially when you're looking at longer endurance race i think energy and running economy questions are are very important to understand so not wasting any energy throughout those events and making sure that you are replacing that energy or it's very hard to replace all of the energy you just can't ingest that much but you know trying to have some sort of exogenous or outside source of of fuel and to be able to accomplish those is another one but so you know reducing the energetic cost at the speeds that you're going to run for those distances i think is another one that people can it's kind of a low-hanging fruit like making sure you're not wearing heavy shoes or wearing heavy clothes or you know weight is one of the biggest factors

that influences economy of movement so what is your optimal even body weight when you're going to go compete those those kinds of things i think can be pretty low-hanging fruit because you know just a few you know 100 or 200 milliliters of oxygen increase in oxygen cost of running can be you know at the end of a of a long ultra it can be a couple of big max worth of energy right like that that can be a lot so can you reduce that as much as possible and so those so that that kind of dose response relationship energy cost reducing that as much as possible and then making sure that you can bring in calories um i think is another is another big factor so making sure that you're bringing in enough sugar enough glucose enough enough support so that you're not burning muscle glycogen because as soon as you burn muscle glycogen you're gonna stop like we know that the glycogen depletion is the the biggest predictor of fatigue so so if you can have some sort of good exogenous source of glucose you you can prolong that depletion of glycogen and so that would be another one but again that's individualized and so people have to really kind of play with what are you bringing in how much are you bringing in what sources is it glucose fructose is it some combination there's all different types of products out there there are

different combinations so what works best for you you can also train your gut so that you need to practice bringing this stuff in don't just show up on the you know the start line and think that your body's going to be able to bring in high amounts of glucose because it's just not so you'll have to practice that and so just planning that i think those those three factors are probably some of the biggest you know the sheer individual nature of the last piece is really demonstrated this is the you need to get in some sort of nutrition and it's going to be different for everybody i always thought i always think that that's really well demonstrated by the sheer variety of food stuffs on an aid station table in the middle of an ultra marathon because you have everything you have fruits you have real foods you have junk food you have engineered scientific foods gels and electrolyte drink mix and things like that you have salt tablets and pretzels and goldfish and sandwiches and like where else does that exist where else is this weird combination of food and they'll all get taken yeah you know it's what what people have practiced with and what works for them i mean that that and the intensities you know that they're exercising at may not be as limiting as far as absorption of a lot of stuff that somebody would be say running a 10k or even a marathon but yeah they've trained their gut with those things and they've found that it works for them and so those

it's it's an eclectic mix right yeah for sure cool all right we're gonna leave it there i'm gonna let you go get back to the students yeah good luck first week of school second week of school yeah i feel i feel i feel for you guys are you guys are heroes along with our first responders and things like that having to instruct our young people and in in whatever they're trying to get instructed on this time yeah yeah yeah well hopefully we don't have to go fully remote here in a couple of weeks but we'll see we'll see we'll see if the bet holds up yeah exactly well i really appreciate it jason it was fun yeah brad that was excellent appreciate it and there we have it much thanks to brad for coming on the podcast today as i mentioned from the onset i could have taken this podcast in a number of different directions but i really wanted to focus on what are the actionable things that we can learn from these types of projects hope everybody got a lot out of this particular podcast if you like the podcast go ahead and go on over to apple podcast and give the podcast a rating or review really appreciate those writings or reviews or you could just simply share it with a friend that means a lot to me when you folks do that i really appreciate the feedback that i've gotten on social media appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you listeners and as always we will see you out on the trails