How to Track Training Load with Max Paquette, PhD | Koopcast Episode 55

trail and ultra runners. Welcome to another episode of the KoopCast. As always, I'm your host coach Jason Koop. And on this episode of the podcast, I have biomechanics researcher and coach Max Paquette. Max is an associate professor at the university of Memphis. And he recently produced a series of papers all about training load and the different ways we can track and inform training using these different types of training load. Most trail runners will track miles and they'll track vertical in order to determine training volume. But tracking training, particularly for trail runners, should not be limited to strictly tracking volume. Trail runners should also be tracking training load, of which there are several different flavors and they all attempt to quantify not only the training volume like miles and vertical, but also the intensity of training into a value or score. These systems range from Bannister's TRMP system, which is a heart rate in a time-based system, Training Peak's training stress score, which I use a lot and Strava's relative effort, which is formerly known as suffer score. But tracking training load is not as simple as it appears to be. Cardiovascular load is different than musculoskeletal load. Running 10 kilometers hard is markedly different than running 10 kilometers easy, even though the mileage is exactly the same.

So we dig into all of this in this interview. And I have to say, I learned a lot and I hope you do too. So let's get right into it. Here's my conversation with Max Paquette. One of the reasons I wanted to get together with you is because, you know, you're, you are a scientist, you're a researcher, but you're also a coach. And I always find the people who can blend both of those worlds really fascinating because it's not everybody that can do it. We meet coaches that, that don't have a good grip on sports science. And we meet people in the research field or in academia that just can't, can't figure out how to like work with athletes or make it translatable to athletes.

So the ones that do both, I always have a keen kind of, kind of interest in how did you fall into that dual role just from you, from you personally? Well, yeah, I was, um, I was a runner, uh, at the university of Guelph in Canada and I ran, you know, a bunch and I was just loved running. And while I was a runner though, I always got, I was always interested in both the science behind training and injuries and things like that. And then of course, also the science and the art behind coaching. And, um, so I've always, I always picked my coaches brains about coaching. Why are we doing these workouts? You know, why are we doing them at this, at this time of year? Um, you know, and then, uh, what was the science brought behind the decisions. And then when I got more into science, I would, my professors, you know, okay, why would, you know, a coach make you do this? Or why would an athlete want to do this at this, you know? So just trying to kind of marry everything together. And, um, and that, you know, I think just asking those questions over time sort of really leads to more questions as, as you know, and, and then you're like, well, you know, maybe I could study these things. And when I finished my master's degree, you know, I, I wasn't sure I wanted to do a PhD, but then when I realized that I'm from Canada originally, and in Canada, it's pretty rare for people to be able to focus solely on running, you know, science as their primary research area, just because of the funding modules and expectations, uh, funding model, sorry. And then, uh, but then I, you know, I realized in the U S there are lots of

sports science or, you know, exercise science programs, PhD level and biomechanics focus, physiology focus. So I went down the biomechanics path, um, you know, which turns out in addition to physiology really works well with coaching, especially from an injury standpoint, but also from a monitoring of, of training standpoint. So then I got really deep into the biomechanics stuff. And then I almost got to a point where I was, I was feeling out of touch with, with the real world, if you will. Right. Like we're doing this in-depth analysis, these fancy models and this and that. And I kept thinking back to my running coaching background and thinking like, this is really hard to translate to a coach. Right. Um, and it's not like science always has to translate to coaching and application, but that, that didn't make me happy in that I wanted to do research that could then be, you know, discussed with the coach and how to apply that to daily training and return to running or rehab and so on and so forth. So that's kind of how it got me. That's what got me where I am.

Um, that kind of process. You mentioned this, this, this aspect that we're going to jump right into it and just cut out all the normal chit chat of asking questions. And then those open up more questions and those open up more questions. Cause you always, you don't know what you don't know. Right. And every time you go down one of those things, it seems like a rabbit hole. And one of the things I was really keen to talk to you about is this piece of commentary that, that, um, uh, that you produced along with, uh, Chris Nypierre, Richard Willey, and, uh, Trent Stellingworth. And it's all about quantifying training load. And I went through the same thing. I was a runner, right? We're all runners. And the first thing you do when you're a runner and you get a training log is you start logging miles as a quantification of training volume. Right. Right. Exactly. And, and since that time, this, this notion of training load has started, has started to come to the forefront. And I feel like it's been this like golden goose in running cycling and triathlon that coaches are trying to ever elusively chase, like how high can they push their training load, what the right type is, what the acute to chronic ratio is in order to, you know, predict or prevent injury and all these other things.

And you produce this really insightful piece of commentary that kind of tore apart training load in this way that I had, I had always thought about, but I couldn't, I couldn't as eloquently put it into words as you did. So what, what, what was the genesis of that? And then we're going to go down and talk about the different ways that we can actually quantify training load. Oh, well, thanks for the kind comment about the, uh, eloquence of the, of the commentary, but, um, yeah, I mean, the reason for it is what you just described is just, you know, everybody does it. Everybody does mileage. Right. Um, and that's one of the things I always asked about was like, why, why are we so caught up and obsessed with mileage? I mean, what does it mean from a, from a mechanical standpoint, from a physiological standpoint?

And the answers I always got from coach, it was always, well, you need to run mileage to be better. And, uh, or you need to run X amount of miles to be able to run whatever, right. It's, it was always about mileage and thresholds and specific targets. And I just, it didn't make sense to me because I kept seeing runners, you know, distance runners, you know, so like 5k to longer basically, or 10k longer. They, some people would run, you know, a ton of miles and, and be good. Others were on 10 miles and not be good and not improve or be tired and beat up and vice versa. Right. Some would run 40 miles, 30 miles and be really good. And others would run 30, 40 miles and not be good, you know, not have enough. So it was clear to me that, you know, mileage wasn't it. It wasn't the, the, the predictor of performance, you know? Um, and I think, uh, because of the history of sports science and training monitoring, uh, across the world in various sports, so team sports, cycling, uh, other, basically any sport you can think of and any tasks like pitching, for example, and baseball, uh, uh, cricket, bowling, for example, all these different sports, soccer, football, uh, lacrosse, so on rugby. Um, the, the concept of training load has been used for, you know, since the, you know, probably fifties, sixties, it really kind of came into prominence in the science world in the sixties, seventies with Carl Foster and Eric Bannister. Um, but it, and it's trickled into endurance sports, uh, you know,

uh, uh, rowing has been one that's been, that has used training loads for decades. Cycling has been using, you know, different measures and just distance, right? So in cycling, obviously it's about wattage all the time. People are obsessed with wattage. So we could have that conversation separately. Um, and so, but in the last probably 15 years, there's probably been more discussion around training load and RPE and including heart rate and other measures to quantify running. Um, and you, you know, I think one of the things that's important to, to, to think about is, um, you know, a lot of coaches, so you mentioned, you know, coaches are chasing this and I'm not sure coaches are in general are chasing this. I think it's being sort of forced down their throats.

And as a result, coaches have to sort of react, react to that. And, and, and like, okay, what do I do with this? I need to figure this out. I need to, I need to make it work. Right. Um, and I think the way that it's marketed or pushed out is not quite, um, that useful, or at least, um, it's intimidating to a lot of coaches, right. You got to use training impulse or TSS or this or that. And, you know, acute chronic workload ratios and all that. Um, but without, without justification typically. Right. So the whole point of this commentary was to really kind of step back and give some context as to what's going on, why it's important to do this and provide some examples and comparisons of if you only do this, here's what you're missing. Right. And, uh, and that was the whole purpose of it. And then we, since then published two, uh, new, uh, experimental, uh, sets of data on this exactly comparing, you know, week to week changes and, and recreational runners and then recently, uh, in high school runners. Um, so that's, you know, we wanted to, we wanted to just kind of change the thinking or at least contribute to the change of thinking and primarily focused on North American coaches. I do want to say that, you know, Aussies, Brits, you know, uh, Europeans have been using these metrics in terms of endurance sports and running as well. Um, uh, probably a lot more than North Americans. And I get a lot of comments from, uh, Euro coaches and all, he's like, we've been doing this forever. Like what's,

what's the big deal. Right. I was like, no, I agree, but spend enough time at a U S track meet and you're going to hear the same thing all over again. How much miles do you ride? You know, all these same things. So it was really targeting those North American based coaches. And I, when you mentioned that, I kind of go back to some of the original, like some of the original ways of doing this, you mentioned Bannister's, uh, trim score and also training stress score, which was developed by Andy Coggin and Joe, and Joe Friel. And I had this really insightful conversation with Joe Friel not too long ago that I had just remembered. And he told, and he said, point blank, if I knew now how training stress score, which is a way to monitor training load. If I knew now how training stress score would be adulterated into what it has been as this like, and I'll be all of training, I would have set it up completely differently. And his point coming from it from a, from a triathlon and cycling background was that his model and the trims model was using what I would describe as cardiovascular load as this dominant force. But that's not, that's essentially what you're saying is it's not just the cardiovascular load. There are all these other components. So let's roll through first off, let's go through trims and TSS first, and then we'll kind of roll through these other like variants of load that we can start to peel apart.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all these different measures. So trims and TSS are measures of training load and they all operate in the same concept, which is you're combining some measure of external load and think of external load as factors that would contribute to the forces being applied to the body. Right. So miles, mileage would be an external load. Minutes would be an external load because the idea is that if you spend more time doing something, you're being exposed to more loading, right? Just logically. Things like, you know, step count, things like, you know, you could have more fancier metrics or estimations of force, you know, accumulated force, impact or shock based measures. And I use these terms loosely, but typically acceleration based, right? So axial or along, along some segment, typically the tibia or the heel, you know, peak amount of acceleration, those are all measures of external load, right? Pace is another measure of external load, right?

And then there's, those are combined with measures of internal or physiological load, or as you mentioned, could be considered cardiovascular load, right? So heart rates really, really, really, really popular, right? Because nowadays, a lot of the good watches actually have the heart rate monitor on the wrist, which means you don't need a heart rate monitor around your chest. Then we have more fancy measurements like blood lactate, for example, and then all these actual physiological bloodborne type things. And then there's the more simple approach, which is rate of perceived effort, or RPE. And that's a measure of internal load, because you're rating how you feel and the way you feel. It's not just, you know, oh, I feel great today. It's a beautiful day. You know, it's nice that I feel happy, right? It's more so about how what you're perceiving your effort is while you work out. And that could, and that encompasses sort of like sleep, any type of daily stresses, you know, or life stresses, like family issues, finances, work, you know, all these things, relationships. And also, you know, how hard you're working. Like we all know, like we all have different thresholds, right? Like, I have, I know, I know my threshold, okay, if I feel this way, and I can't really describe it. But if I feel this way, I'm like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to slow down, right? That can be hard to quantify in with using fancy tools, right? Because we all have our

own limits, right? So RPE is great that way. Because first of all, it's specific to the person. And people use it a lot to measure internal load. And people argue that while it's subjective, you know, like, a six out of 10 is different for you and me, and I 100%, it's subjective, but it becomes objective when it comes from you and you use it consistently, right? We can't compare our PEs, but who cares? I don't care to know how my training compares to yours. I want to know how my compare my training compares to me, right? Week in, week out, month in, month out. So that's really the value there. So again, TSS, TRMP, they all work the same way. It's just combining some measure of external load and a measure of internal physiological or cardiovascular loads.

I think for the audience out here, that's a little bit more of a lay audience, or they're not in a high performance setting with access to like physiologists and coaches and things like that. The two that they're going to be the most familiar with, and I'm going to go in least familiar, least familiar, least familiar, to most familiar, is Training Peaks' TSS, of which you've got a few different flavors, right? You can take the TSS, you can take heart rate TSS, run TSS, and things like that. Or what was formerly known as Strava's Suffer Score, which now they call relative effort. They finally drop that Suffer Score moniker after you. I've never heard that before. Oh, yeah. Well, Strava's so popular in running circles that it's hard to get away from it.

And we coach athletes on Training Peaks' platform, so they get access to both of those. But they're inevitably always on Strava anyway, and they always want to know what this number is, like how this number is generated. And when it was called Suffer Score, it was for sure. I know it's funny because I've had this conversation with the folks at Strava before and after they've made this change, and they're basically, yeah, like, yeah, we got too cutesy with the names here. Like, we needed to think about this a little bit more. But when it was called Suffer Score, there was a different, like, almost like a badge of honor that was associated with a higher, kind of a higher score number. But in any case, all that's doing is just remodeling trimps. It's using heart rate, if you're using a heart rate monitor, or it's using power, if you're using power meter for cycling, and just assigning a points value to it. But inevitably, in my estimation, and this is where I want you to jump in as well, one of the inherent flaws with having this one number determine training stress, whether it's training peaks aside as training stress score or Strava's side using their relative effort. Yeah.

Is it's trying to alchemize all of these different things that are going on in the body, all these internal external loads and things like that into one singular number. What's the issue with that? Yeah, if you're trying to, and it's funny, we've had a couple of social Twitter discussions about this. And, you know, if you use a measure of RPE, for example, combined with minutes or duration to calculate training load, you know, is that valuable in terms of predicting injury risk, for example, right? And the answer is probably no, honestly. Same thing with all the other, you know, TSS and trimp and all this. I mean, I'm not, I'm not that familiar with exactly how all the TSS scores. I know there's a lot of TSS scores. There's, I've seen like running, swimming, heart rate, trim TSS.

And as far as I understand the trim TSS is what I've described, which is an external load, I think pace or distance or something times heart rate perhaps. And then the other ones I'm not too sure about, but I think the trimps one is probably the more complete. But something like that, which is really a training load score, I know heart rate times minutes or duration. It doesn't really tell you within an athlete, you know, what that athlete is experiencing from a, from a, from a force standpoint. So biomechanical or cardiovascular, you know, as you discussed, so, so cardiovascular would be more like the physiological response, heart rate, heart rate's great for that. Heart rate in minutes. Perfect. From a, from a biomechanical standpoint, or what and how much force over time an athlete is experiencing. Now you have to, you have to know more about how the athlete moves, right? So even if you use minutes or miles for runners, uh, and in, in the ultra world, and especially ultra and especially ultra trail world, where we all know that any mile is not the same, right? So if I go run a mile on one or 50 miles on one course versus 50 miles in a different course, the, the forces at the same pace, for example, the forces applied to me are completely different, right? So those, this is where it gets more complicated. And I think the wearable technology world is starting to make some strides and quantifying these biomechanical metrics a bit

better for each runner. Uh, one of the thing that I, one of the values that I like quite a bit is step count, you know, number of steps you take now, of course, between people, each step doesn't mean the same either. Right. But I think it's still better than just mileage or minutes, because if you and I go for a run and you consider cadence, right? Steps a minute. Well, if you go run 10 miles on a trail and I go run 10 miles on a track, we're going to move so differently. You're going to take more steps on the, on the trail because you'll be out there for longer one thing. Right. And you're going to take shorter steps because you're on the trails and you don't take long loping strides on this, on this, on the trails because you could basically kill yourself, you know, coming down a cliff or something or, you know, stepping in a hole or whatever. So, you know, you shorten your step and you, so you take more steps per, per time period, but also you're going to slow down because you got to run 10 miles on a trail, whereas a track, you can be a bit faster. So now you're spending more time taking more steps.

So, um, I, with a, with two 10 mile runs, me on the track, you on the trails, you might take 4,000 more steps than I will on a 10 mile run. And that's, those are things that we can't measure when we only look at 10 miles. Yeah. Right. And so that's when I think the biomechanical load becomes interesting way. The simple thing is steps because all our watches give us a cadence and some of them, some of the watches give you total step count per run as well. Yeah. You illustrated this really well in the commentary and I'll, I'll link to the commentary in the show notes. Uh, but in particular in table two, where you took a 10 kilometer run under three different conditions, an easy run where you're just fresh, a recovery run where you're really tired and then 10 by 1k repeats in track spikes. And you tried to, and you were the point with that table, and you can correct me since you're the author is to really illustrate how all of these different ways that you could track training load. We're not just different, but could be markedly different in each one of those conditions.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. If you were just looking at, at, at distance, it would all be the same. It'd be 10 kilometers, right? Yep. Yep. So, you know, without knowing any better, you could be a coach, especially like younger coaches or just getting started and they're just assigning miles because mileage is convenient, right? If I say go run four miles, I mean, it's that easy, but between like within a week, you know, among the different sessions that you can, you complete, you know, one mile is often different for a number of reasons, but also between runners, you know, again, to the example I just gave with you. So that, that example was different environment, but also different person. Um, and you know, the assumption that every mile is the same as, as erroneous and, and could lead to a misrepresentation of what's really going on. And as a result, what the adaptation might look like, uh, after the training block, for example. Yeah. I, I, I remember when this piece of software called Burrata came out, are you familiar with that at all? I, so I've, yeah, I've heard of it. I haven't used it or, or, or really been exposed to much, but yeah. Yeah. So you'll, you know where I'm, you know where I'm going with this. So when that came out, I distinctly remember all of our younger coaches who had just gotten into coaching and been coaching for two or three years, they started gravitating towards it. And the linchpin for the listeners out there that aren't that familiar with it is that it, it gave you a periodization framework based off of training load and where your athlete's training load currently was and where you wanted it to be six months down the road,

nine months down the road, whatever timeframe you were working with. And it built up, uh, it built up a periodization scheme based on those two end points. And our younger coaches gravitated towards that because it was a way for them to easily look at an athlete's training program and go, okay, they need to be at, you know, 120 CTL points or however they were defining it six months from now. And my point to them was exactly what you were just mentioning. Not all of that load is equal because you're, you're, you're basing it off of one single metric. Exactly. And that's so, so important. The main message for coaches in these three papers and that started off the commentary is just that is, you know, consider other things. And I do want to point out that, you know, for coaches who work really closely with athletes, smaller groups of athletes, you know, and I've, I've, I've constant communication and sort of back and forth with athletes who basically are able to monitor the athlete without actually using a number, for example, that can be quite, or as useful. The issue becomes when you're online coaching or have 40 runners you're, you're meeting with, you can't possibly know how everybody's feeling just by, you know, seeing them every day or, or, or, or seeing their miles that they post online, you know, whatever the platform you're using. So, you know,

again, I want to point out that a lot of coaches do this very well without numbers, right? It's just little signs that they can pick up on. And I think for in the trail world, I think that's even more important because it, every, every issue I just mentioned is amplified on the trails because the terrains vary so much because the intensity of the, the outcome of a run at a specific pace varies so much. You can do two, the same two runs, the exact same pace on different courses, same distance and be absolutely trashed after one and not after the other, right? Just because of the environment. So I actually think that again, the trail world, the ultra world is, is this is even more important to, to, to use metrics that are individual to you, um, and not focus on just sort of, you know, a black box type approaches that just spits out estimations. I had, so when I first started getting into coaching trail runners, I, and I still, to this day have the hardest time convincing both coaches and athletes to get further and further removed from prescription and analysis of training by miles.

Yep. And instead just go to time-based and I can't, I lost a lot of like content deals because I wouldn't, I wouldn't write training programs because in, in miles, I would have to do it in time and based on vertical and, in, in RPE. Yep. Just because of what you mentioned, it was so, so problematic to say, okay, you're going to run five miles and you're going to run five miles, but this five miles has 2000 feet of vertical change. And this five miles has 200 feet of vertical change. Like those are two really markedly different things. Or think of like a, a wet dirt trail versus a packed down gravel path. Um, so that's what I mean about like, I've coached people who are like, Oh, I did my long run today.

And, um, and the pace was really slow. And, and, uh, but you know, I, I always prescribe minutes for, for longer runs and easy runs because the, the, the purpose behind that is, you know, if I say go run 60 minutes or one hour, um, even if you go slow, you'll still be out there for 60 minutes. But if I prescribe eight miles, um, which again, there's no problems with, with run, there's no problems with prescribing mileage at times, especially for, for those who are racing a specific, you know, distance over a specific course, like a marathon, for example, like a road marathon. Um, the only issue is that when a person is beat up, like really trashed and I say, go run eight miles and then they slow down because they're so tired, they might be out there for 70 minutes, right. As opposed to 60 minutes. So that to me, that extra 10 minutes to be pounding out there for, you know, the extra, for extra 10 minutes, which is an extra, you know, almost 2000 steps. Um, I, I, I, I don't feel there's, there's much value there. So if we were to let, let's put our brainstorming hats on, maybe we can get some venture capital funding to do this. There's not a lot of money in what, what this is going to be.

So let's not get our hopes up too much, but let's design a coaching tool in a training log tool specifically for trail and ultra runners. Yep. What would the, like the hero metrics be that we could, that we, that those, that would be the must haves, the must haves within the tool itself that we want every athlete and every coach to prescribe stuff by and track stuff. Ooh, that's a good, that's a good question. That's a good discussion. I think, you know, I, like I said, I think you have to start with, with prescribing minutes. Um, you know, that's the, that's your starting point. I think you want to make sure that from a, from a physiological adaptation standpoint, you want to record RPE, which at this point, this is, you know, uh, final third training peaks. They all do it right. Strava even does it now.

It's taken them a while to get around to it though. That's the funny thing. It's the easiest thing to record, but they don't, I don't know if, if a Strava combines them though, then you can report RPE, but I don't think it combines them. You can, you have to kind of opt into it and what it'll, what you can opt into is it will basically take the precedence of heart rate in that relative effort. So, so previous to that, it would take power and or heart rate, but you can, you can force the change and make it RPE. So for trail runners though, we know, so obviously from a performance standpoint, a trail runner never, uh, never, uh, you know, bails out of a race because their heart rates too high. I mean, I mean, unless there's some, you know, issue going on. Right. But the reason why people, trail racers are limited is because of their, their legs being absolutely done.

Right. So we are trying to then quantify, you know, how much, uh, mechanical load their bodies is undergoing. Right. Um, so in that case for trail runners, you almost want to use certain measures of biomechanics, right? So shock or, um, you know, impact of some sort, whether that's using a foot based accelerometer or an initial measurement tool that can then, uh, give you some measure of, you know, what is the external, uh, uh, force or external forces acting on you throughout a training session. And as a result, training block or training week or training cycle, um, to really kind of figure out, yeah, you covered, you know, 500 minutes this week, but you know, next week you also have 500 prescribed minutes, but are they going to be similar? Right. Um, are you going to change how you move? And as a result, load your body more or less. And, and that then allows the coach to make adjustments moving forward to say, okay, well, look, let's, let's try to figure a way, a strategy to, uh, minimize loads. And that might mean let's go to a flat, you know, flat training surface or, you know, less, um, less treacherous terrain, if you will, to try to give you some time to, to adapt to that load the last two weeks, for example. So I think I would say for, for, uh, trail runners adding some measure of individualized or specific biomechanical measurement or metric,

I think that would be even more useful. Um, I think it's useful for all runners, but particularly useful for trail runners because of that, because it's hard to quantify what a mile means or what a minute means in a trail runner. Yeah. Can I stop you right there for one second? Cause I think this is a good point. Is that the ultimate application for the stride units and the run scribe units and things like that? These, these like, you know, accelerometer pods that are sitting on people's feet right now, that now they're trying to bake into the watch that were initially designed with the promise of delivering in quotes, running power. Is this biomechanical aspect of it, the better utility for those things? I think a hundred percent. I, I still don't understand the obsession with power.

I really don't. Yeah. That's another conversation you can, I can, I just, I, I, like I get it from like angular power and cycling, right. That's, that's objective. It's from a physics standpoint, makes sense in running. It's just, I, I just don't see, I just don't see the, I mean, I might be proven wrong. I just don't see the obsession. Why, why people are so, you know, hell bent on making this power a thing. But I do think that load in general measured from these sensors can be useful. Yeah. Also, of course, given or assuming that one there, well, most importantly, and this is probably an unpopular opinion, but most importantly, more so than validity that they're reliable. Right. Right. I think scientists are hell bent on validity, which is obviously very useful when you're trying to come up with thresholds of force or, you know, torque or impact G's or whatever.

But when you're trying to quantify changes in training, we're looking for week to week percent changes. So as long as the, the, the, the, the tool is reliable and you know that they're always going to give you the, the, the same metric if there's no changes, that's really what matters. Cause I'm, I care about percent changes, right? Like how much more are you doing this week versus last week? I don't really care what the amount of it is, right? The magnitude. I don't care if it's a hundred G's versus two G's, as long as the, the, the, the week to week change is equivalent. So I can compare that week to weeks. Right. So that I think companies, the companies should focus more on that aspect of reliability, but also marketing it as a monitoring tool, not just for injury, but just for, from a training standpoint and, and for coaches to know how much, you know, external mechanical load runners are dealing with.

You and I are on the same page with that because I mean, I remember when stride wasn't even to market yet, I went up there and I was begging and pleading with those guys to not call it running power. And you know, there, I wasn't the only person that was saying that I'm not like saying anything that's like super enlightening or I'm trying to make myself sound smart, but I was begging and pleading for them to not, to not market it as a quote unquote running power meter to do something more along the biomechanical aspects and figuring out load and velocity and things like that. But yeah, I didn't get a vote, obviously, but I totally agree with you. That's a value. So we've got time. We've got biomechanical load is something that, that trail runners should be monitoring, which is not easy in the current environment. That's not a very easy thing to get a fix on outside of having one of those devices. Is there anything else a trail runner can do? Yeah. In terms of monitoring?

Yeah. Yeah. That particular aspect. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think in the absence of a, of a tool that can measure on a daily basis or on a, on a session by session basis, I think there's ways that people can then test, you know, not necessarily lab based, but using tools that might not be that runners might not be able to use on a daily basis, but like you can do some, you know, one or two, two tests, you know, under different conditions to get an estimate of, of how it is that you move and what are the forces that your body is experiencing. And then you can kind of use that. You can kind of use that to, to estimate what it is that you're going through based on step count. So for example, if, if you and I go on the track and run at different paces, right. You know, slower to faster, let's say four different speeds.

And we measure the forces, the vertical force that is being applied to the bottom of our feet while we run. Right. So you should get a fairly linear increase as you increase speed, right? As you increase speed, you should get a little more force per step. Well, then you can kind of, and that'll be, so the speed would be on the, on the X axis of a, of a, you know, one of those scatter plots from high school, you know you've got this X axis, Y axis should be force. And so as you increase speed, it should go up, which makes sense. You know, like the faster you run, the more force you're going to experience. Well, you can use that to kind of then figure out for you, you know, at different paces, how much force are you experiencing? So you can then use that on a daily basis, right? If I'm out there running, uh, at eight minute pace, I can kind of look at my own personal curve for force measurement. And it's okay. I, this is where I fit on this curve. And that's about, you know, 3.2 times body weight at this pace, for example, um, on the trail, it's a bit harder because, you know, inclination and so on and so forth, but you could come up with your own metric of, well, this had X amount of vert, this had, uh, this type of surface. So you might be a little less force on a softer surface and a little less force uphill, but more force downhill. Those tend to cancel out if it's a loop, for example. Um, so you start putting those factors together and you might be able to use some one or two time measurement testing sessions, and then using those with your data, you know, with your own watch status or step count, for example, ultimately trying to estimate what each of your step means, right? Is it three times body weight? Is it five

times body weight? Which would be really high, of course, but you know, it happens in some people. And from a, from a trail running perspective, we're kind of over obsessed with tracking vert vertical, which is, you're not in the trail running world. Like you hear the word vert, you kind of get it, but we're, but it's obsessive, I think in the wrong way it's, it's obsessive from a targeting standpoint. So I want to do 10,000 feet of vertical. I want to do 20,000 feet of vertical and things like that. Almost like a, almost like a mileage target. What you're saying is that that's a component of the biomechanical load. And that might be a better, that might be better utility for that, for tracking that particular training metric. Yeah. I mean, going uphill in general will reduce the amount of force that's been applied to your body, right? But because you change how you run. So when you go uphill, you might run on your toes more. And so that of course increases the load on your Achilles tendon or calves. But it does reduce the load on your quads, right? So, so you can start even like micro managing or, or micro monitoring muscle groups, right? And this is important in runners coming back from an injury, obviously. So if I'm coming back from like a patellofemol pain injury, then of course, or patellofemol injury, I'm looking at reducing loads on my quads, of course. So I might be doing a little more uphill stuff. If I'm coming

back from an Achilles or calf injury, I might be minimizing uphill stuff and so on and so forth. Right. So it's not just the force, but how you're moving that might move the load to your Achilles, to your quads, you know, and so on. Yeah. I've always considered, uh, trail and ultra running to have like four disciplines, right? It's walking. We call it power hiking because we don't like saying walking. Yeah. You don't like the term walking. Running on flat level terrain, running uphill and running downhill because they're just so different. They're all, they're obviously linked by the cardiovascular system, but from a biomechanical standpoint, there's such different forms. That's interesting. Yeah. That's it. That might be what's would be different about a, a, a trail running monitoring system is almost quantifying percent of downhill at different, at several paces and then percent of uphill at several paces and percent of flat ground, you know, at different paces. I think that, that obviously changing the load, change the load on the body, obviously. Well, from a, from a training, from a training specificity standpoint, I can tell you what I do is I look at a race that an athlete's doing and I quantify it across those four different disciplines, just in, from a, like a total gross amount. How much time are they going? How much time are they spending running flat level? How much time are they spending running uphill? How much time are they spending, spending running downhill? And then how much time are they spending walking? And I try to match those disciplines, those quote unquote disciplines up as much as possible. It's not, you know, exact or

one-to-one or whatever. I try to match them up as much as possible, particularly in the last like two to three months of the whole, of the whole training cycle. Yeah. And I think, you know, this always doesn't apply to the track because on the track it's always, you know, flat and, and, but in cross country, same thing. Like a lot of coaches, oh, this, this course is really hilly. And, and, but so people do a lot of uphill running, right? But people tend to miss the mark when they forget about the downhill parts. Cause they think it's free. Yeah. The downhill part is damaging. And I think a lot of, a lot of people don't understand that running downhill is way more damage than running uphill, especially for the quads. Right. And so you almost have to match the amount of uphill running with the amount of downhill running. Um, if you're not ready for it to be, it can be, uh, it can beat you up quite a bit. Well, it's almost like the cardiovascular and the musculoskeletal loads are inverted. And that's kind of the way that I've always thought about it. Like running uphill, it's a high cardiovascular load and a relatively low musculoskeletal load. And then running downhill, it's almost the opposite. It's a super high musculoskeletal load with a very low cardiovascular load. It's exactly right. Exactly right. So you have, you know, you have to consider both directions of course. And typically I don't know of any courses, unless it's an actual vertical course where you're running up a mountain or down a mountain, you know, out or, um, a, uh, point to point, but typically in loop courses, you, you know, you go up and you come down at some point, you know, you have to. So, um, anyway, that's kind of

the, the way I would look at it for sure. Like, like yourself. Okay. So so far we've got, we've got two, we've got two things to monitor in our trail and ultra running coaching tool. We're not going to get a lot of venture funding behind this. If that's as sophisticated as it gets, cause that's what it's all based off of. It might work really well, but it's not very sexy. Well, I think the biomechanical aspect does cover that downhill uphill stuff, right? So as you go downhill, the biomechanical measurements would go up probably, um, especially if they're foot based or something like that, but on the way up, they would go down. So you can monitor that based on these, right? So you'd say percent of X amount of force is 30% of a lower force is 30. And then the rest is all pretty normal force. So you can kind of use that to guide, you know, almost the force exposure and training, if you will. Um, that might be the fancy, sexy sort of platform or, or, or pitch, you know, that, that you might have.

Yeah. All right. Maybe we'll raise a little bit of money, but it's, I mean, from, from talking to you, Max, I can't help, but to think that everybody is doing it at least a little bit wrong. And what I mean by doing it is monitoring training and prescribing training because I can go to any marathon training group. I can go, I can pick up runner's world or at the fricking seven 11 around the corner from me right now, irrespective of the format, I'm going to find training that's prescribed in miles. Yep. And one of the things that I'm hearing from you is that that is so different or the load that comes as a consequence of those miles is so different depending upon the situation. And we're, we're putting too much emphasis on that one particular metric.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was the whole message, you know, in these papers and, and we, we, I think we show enough data now and enough sort of theory behind the concept and, but it all boils down to this, which is, which is, it's never foolproof, like nothing, no metric, no approach to quantify training is always going to be perfect. Even if you're using something beyond mileage, whether it's trims or, or, or, or, or TSS or, or training loads of different, you know, input measures it's never perfect. And that's where I think coaches need to, to, to, to, to, to, um, come to understand that, that they have to still do the work, you know, you still have to be a coach and you still have to be perceptive and observant and communicate well, um, and not just rely on numbers.

I mean, that's the biggest mistake. And I think that's where all these tech companies fall apart. You know, the plan is great until you actually have to work with human beings, you know, in theory, in practice, it sounds fantastic, but when it comes down to it, you're working with complex, you know, uh, uh, organisms and human beings. And, uh, it's not, you know, none, very few of us are full-time training and which means very few of us are full-time recovering. Um, and so no, no amount of training peaks or final surge or Strava or this and that will account for yard work in the afternoon or, or death in the family or, um, you know, other psychological issues you're dealing with. Uh, those are the things that the human being aspect and the, the one-on-one, the relationship between a coach and an athlete is invaluable. And until it, and, and, and I hope that no wearable tech company is marketing their, their tools as like, this is it. You plug that on, you hit play and then you, you get numbers and you use that, you know, as the, uh, as the Holy grail kind of thing, because that's just silly.

Well, the recovery space is inundated with that. I'm not, I don't, I don't, I kind of make a little bit of a separation between the training prescription space and the recovery space. Oh yeah. But without naming, without naming names, there are some players in the recovery space that are labeling whatever they're pitching as the Holy grail for recovery, which is, which is obviously a big aspect of everything. But as you mentioned, doesn't take into account or poorly takes into account at the very best, the life stresses, the death in the family and things like that. Yeah. And, you know, so then we take a step back further and the overarching issue isn't even wearable technology, it's education. Yep. Right. You, people want the, the instant gratification, the path of least resistance, the, you know, anybody, everybody's an expert, right? That's what people want, you know? And in, in the, in terms of sport and the, you know, the sports science world, whatever, you know, sports science might mean for some people look online. There's a lot of experts in sports science, a lot of experts in sports science, but what does that mean? Does that mean they, they spent, you know, a hundred grand on equipment and now they have all these data and these tools and they call themselves sports scientists. The best sports scientists don't need tools. Honestly, it sounds, sounds crazy, but a lot of it is just talking with, with athletes and coaches and coming up with solutions that don't necessarily require tech, you know, it's

understanding the human body, the physiology, the biomechanics, the, the, the skill acquisition, the nutrition as, I mean, all of that is, is sports science and can all be done fairly well without tools. So anyway, so that's where it gets frustrating because, because humans want, you know, to be expert, they want to have the fancy shiny things that it takes away from, from what we can do is when, when we can use our brains and knowledge. Yeah. The best coaches that I've ever interacted with know how all of the tools and widgets work and sometimes very intimately so, but end up using very few of them. Yeah. Yeah. I think there, there are many scenarios where you can use a tool to, uh, confirm what you believe is happening objectively, but there are more times where you don't need that tool to do that. A hundred percent. So what are you doing in your coaching practice now? How are you prescribing, how are you prescribing workouts? Yeah. So I, you know, uh, my, my coaching, uh, I coach mostly, um, like junior level athletes. So like, you know, the 20 year olds and younger up to like grade nine and above, I, I, I, I tend to be a firm believer that, you know, really intense specific training, you know, before high school is, is not really necessary. Um, so I, I will, I will work with some kids that are in grade eight, for example, um, mostly on things like

basic strength and multi-directional movements and some mobility and just helping them, you know, sort of move, uh, uh, you know, in certain ways, I won't say, well, because it depends on the person, of course. Um, but in terms of prescription, uh, I'm a big fan of prescribing minutes for the reasons we've already discussed. Um, but also often it's just, uh, you know, it's, uh, you know, daily prescription will be minutes, but, um, I won't use numbers to prescribe efforts. Like I won't say a two out of 10, I'll say, okay, I just want you to go, you know, nice and easy today. There's no need to push the pace, you know, whatever the pace ends up being, that's the outcome. And so be it, but just nice and easy, you know, uh, relaxing sort of not relaxing, but, uh, fairly smooth and an easy day.

Um, and I will use paces sometimes if it's necessary, like if we're doing tracking rules or something, of course you use paces or at least ranges and paces. And I think that's important. I think once you start prescribing very specific paces that can have a disastrous effects, especially if an athlete's not feeling it that day and they can't hit the paces emotionally, that can be, that can beat themselves up. So I like to prescribe a fairly large range. Like I remember having an athlete, they were doing, um, thousand meter repeats. Um, this is a senior in high school, uh, on a gravel loop around a lake. And, and, um, I think the range was like 30 seconds. It was like 320 to like 350 or something. And the kid's like, what is that? I was like, well, that's totally different.

Yeah. Those are totally different. And then if you're, if you're not feeling great today, we'll just, we'll keep it at 345 to 350. If you're feeling great, we'll see what happens kind of thing. But the point is, you know, you have to have a goal. And I like to prescribe goals of a workout. Like, you know, you're, this is not supposed to be a hard session, you know, or it's not, it's not, it's not supposed to be all out kind of thing. So, but these terms can be frustrating for some, especially if they don't know what you mean. So it goes back to what I said earlier is clear communication and giving instructions that are, that the athlete can relate to and understand well, you know, but it's a simple, I mean, it's simple, but not hard, right? It's time minutes, as you said, and then a verbal description of hard, medium, easy, like some. Yeah. What do you mean? Yeah, exactly. And I, and I think people often are, get caught up also in paces because they need to know what pace. Well, it depends. Like pace to me, pace is an outcome, unless it's a specific thing that you're looking for, right? Like on the track from doing, if you're doing 200s and you're trying to achieve a certain thing with a specific athlete, you might give them tighter paces. But if you're doing a session, that's meant to basically, increase aerobic sort of capacity, you know, that depends on the day, honestly, like same thing with like thresholds, you know, people use heart rates for threshold, which I agree with, unless that day heart rate is crazy high for whatever reason, then it doesn't quite work. So, you know, you have to be able to adapt, like someone's, my tempo pace is five minute pace per mile, like every

day. Yeah, exactly. How do you know? How, like, how does that, you know? So it's about understanding how to adapt the paces, you know, and how to adapt the, you know, based on effort. So that's the thing, like, if you prescribe effort, the pace will change, which is fine. You know, unless you're trying to hit a specific pace, but sometimes, you know what, today you need to suck it up, you know, we're going to push through these and get the paces down. But other days, like, look, it's early season, or it's late season, you know, it's the extremes where you can, you have a lot more range, in my opinion, you know, in the middle, you can look at it. Let's get some work done today. It's going to suck. You're, you're supposed to be tired at this time. And let's push through it kind of thing, but you have to be able to adapt that. And that's when the knowledge of, you know, physiology biomechanics comes into play.

Yeah. The, the micro dissection of, of intensity ranges, whether you're doing it by pace or by heart rate or power on the bike has just gotten, it's just gotten out of control. And I keep coming back to the sentiment that your body is not that precise. It's not exactly, it's not close. So if you're telling me that you're a cyclist in 220 Watts is your zone three X one threshold, whatever you want to call it, or 155 beats per minute is your anaerobic threshold. It's not like that every day. There's a myriad of things that can affect that. And your body is just not quite that precise to give it that level of, uh, that, that level of scrutiny from an intensity perspective.

Exactly. And anyone who believes that the human body is predictable, uh, is missing the mark, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Back to my barata example earlier, where you've got nine months of training laid out for you. It's like, really, does that really ever go to the plan like that? Come on. Exactly. Okay. So we're going to leave, we're going to leave athletes with keep it simple, prescribe things by time and effort, right? Or more, more by using effort. You can prescribe using verb, verbal instructions that then give a range of efforts, right? Because to me saying today, once you run a three out of 10, like that's almost worse than saying eight 32 pace, you know what I mean? Like, you know, cause like, Oh, I feel really bad. Like, how do you even gauge that? How do you even gauge it? Okay. Well, this is a four. Okay. I'm going to slide down. Okay. This is a three. Oh, this is a two. I gotta go faster. You know? So it's hard to, you know, but you know, you might say a two, a two to five effort kind of thing, you know, not above five or something, you know? Um, but again, that's that specific instructions and communication with the athlete needs to be clear off the get go.

Yep. And as you know, as a coach and I'll, I'll profess to this as well, there's no substitute for good communication. It should always start. It should always start with that. How did you feel? How did the workout go? Not what was your heart rate for this? Yeah. What's your pace? What's your heart rate? Yeah. I mean, that's, that's going to be stressful. A hundred percent. Cool. Yeah. Awesome. So Max, where can people learn more about your work? I'll link, uh, in the show notes to all the papers that we referenced, but where they can, where can they interact with you and learn more about what you're doing? Yeah. I mean, you know, I think like a lot of academics and sports scientists, I think Twitter is a good platform for that. I think there's some good solid exchanges on there and, uh, a lot of dissemination of information. So that's probably the best way. Uh, and, uh, my, uh, my, uh, uh, tag is, uh, at biomech max. So just, um, yeah, pretty straightforward. And I think it's a lot of good discussions on there. Isn't it awesome how that has unfolded?

Yeah. I mean, it's cool. I mean, I, I, I was, I was reluctant to join Twitter or at least spend time on Twitter and sometimes like, okay, enough Twitter. Like I need to just, you know, get off the Twitter and do something else. But, um, you know, I think it's, it's really sort of bridged the gap between, I think, uh, especially in the sports sciences, maybe not in like biochemistry or, you know, genetics, but in, in, in a, in a field like sports science and exercise science and biomechanics, where a lot of the work is applied that relates directly to, you know, athletes and coaches, it's really bridged the gap between, between the, these two areas. And it really opens up lines of communication, even with clinicians. I think that's, that's really been useful. I a hundred percent agree with that because whenever you can bridge the, like I said earlier, it's rare that you have coaches that are also like legitimate sports scientists and do research and produce commentary and things like that. So the fact that there, that there are not that many people who do that, if you have a medium that connects all of those people, it's just so valuable.

I mean, I can remember, you know, way before Twitter even existed and we got physical journal, journal articles, we would have our interns go and like copy off the, you know, the relevant discussion points for the month from whatever journal. And then we'd get all on it. We'd get on a conference call with people, you know, and it was just, and that was great. There were, there, there were a lot of awesome things that happened because of that way of disseminating information and then trying to communicate and learn from it. But the biggest thing is, is we were always like one year behind, you know, it's just took so long to get all that together. And now it could be really instant, which is cool. So, yeah, it's, uh, it's certainly has, has done that, you know, and luckily journals are moving away from the print versions and it's mostly just all online now and luckily. And, uh, um, but I think, and also a lot of people are sending information via, you know, these podcasts and infographics and things. So I, I, I certainly urge any sports scientists listening or people that are involved in sports scientists to, to like, to, uh, agree to do podcasts and, uh, infographics and contribute because nowadays, I mean, that's the way to share things, you know, a hundred percent.

Yep. All right, man. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Yeah. You guys go check out Max. He's a good Twitter to follow for sure. I've learned a lot from, uh, following you and seeing, you know, kind of what you produce on that platform, both, uh, on the, on the journal side of it and then also on the social side of it. Awesome. Thanks. And there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Max for coming on the podcast today. Really appreciate your time and your expertise. I learned a lot with that. I hope you guys did too, by listening. If you think that your training is better served by weeding through some of these complicated variables of training load and training volume, and you want somebody to help you make sense out of that, we have a coach that is right for you. Our team of ultra marathon coaches is unparalleled in the industry, and we are always taking on new athletes that have audacious goals. So if you're interested in that, hit me up on social media, or you can go and see any of our training packages at train, right.com as always. Thank you guys for listening. Appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you, and we will see you out on the trails.