Polarized Training for Ultrarunners with Stephen Seiler, PhD | Koopcast Episode 63

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have a real treat for you runners out there on the podcast today i have the incomparable steven seiler PhD otherwise known as the godfather of polarized training if you've been paying attention to the endurance world over the last several years you've surely come across this notion of polarized training or sometimes referred to as 80 20 training polarized training is a concept popularized by steven where training should be designed such that 80 of it is in the low intensity domain something ultra runners are quite good at and 20 of it is in the high intensity domain and we see this training distribution play out and elite athletes and recreational athletes alike steve has been on countless podcasts and has given i can't tell you how many presentations on this topic as well as the topic of what intervals are quote-unquote best for endurance athletes so much so that i wanted to use this time with steve and zoom out a little bit for this conversation instead of getting into the minutia of if 45 second intervals are better than three minute intervals or if one minute intervals are better than eight minute intervals steve and i discussed the practical big picture application of it all and

it was an honor to have this conversation with steve as i have respected him for many years and use countless amounts of his research in my book as well as in my coaching practice and he has influenced many many others in the exact same way so here it is let's get right into it here's my conversation with steven seiler brings us up a really good launch point to to start out with the athletes are obsessed with what is going to give me the best bang for the buck like what is the singular workout structure or singular architecture that i can do to make the most out of my time and we see this at the elite level because they're looking to maximize the last few percent of performance but we also see this at the like the recreational level as well because they're limited by time predominantly uh they've got work kids other roles that they play in life and things like that and i feel like a lot of the research that you've self-professed to be bored with um that's come out over the last several years has started to hone in on some i'm not going to say the answer but some like some plausible combinations of things that could be better than others when we look at the entire scope of endurance training well yeah i mean i i have i've given a lecture uh on i've called it a is a tribute to maslow a kind of a hierarchy of endurance

training needs and it kind of flips on the head the this popularity contest that you're referring to and that is the the single best predictor of performance is just training time uh up through a pretty big number of kilometers or hours per week so there is no getting around that there is no shortcut to you know if you if you want to be a really good marathoner or ultra runner or rower or whatever you got to do the work uh and five hours a week is better than three and eight hours a week is better than five but not as much better it's not as much of an additional improvement as the jump from three to five and so you do have this law of diminishing returns no doubt about it and so most people find themselves on a place on that curve where more is still better whereas way out at the elite level they're they're at a place on that curve where that's a very touch and go proposition of whether more will actually be better or we'll push them over the cliff you know so but for most of us uh more is better if we can you know do it manageably without getting bonked on the head by our partner or whoever you know so that's that is still but and then so you know what i tend to say is more is better

but then then in that volume of you know getting stuff done doing the work then you need to find some appropriate distribution uh and then we start talking about intensity zones right um and so the all the evidence that i am able to find and see is that most of that work should be at a at a you know a fairly moderate intensity meaning you know below first lactate turn point which is you know that's that's uh the home field advantage for the ultra runners they do a lot of that already but even uh the elite middle you know the elite distance runners the 5k specialists the rowers who race for six minutes it's still true for them as well that most of their training is at sub-threshold intensity so we have found that this is a very robust recipe that is not very specific to competition distance or duration i guess is the you know duration is what matters so from at least four minutes five minutes up to five hours pro cyclist six hours this basically the same distribution is what we see the only thing that changes is just some what are the key workouts like you know the how do you use the high the hard sessions how do you distribute those you know if you're marathon type doing a prep those

hard sessions may look more like threshold work if you're a uh 3000 meter runner you know then they're going to be more like uh vo2 max intervals so that kind of thing but but hard easy 80 20 those kinds of concepts from fundamentally seem to apply across that entire duration spectrum so now then the question would be for your audience okay but when you talk six hours you're just getting to the you're getting to the starting line now you know because that's where where you know that's upper end of of my world in terms of you know high performance endurance sport six hour stages and cycling right right or you know you know i guess you can go out to ironman triathlon triathletes and they're doing eight hours eight and a half in that range and that's so that's the spectrum that's within that range that's relevant to world championships olympics and all this stuff and then you guys begin and then we begin so we're gonna we're gonna get into some of the what that intensity distribution looks like and what that intensity should actually look like but i think before that just to set the table for the audience a little bit i think we need to walk through a little bit how we can define intensity across that the entire spectrum of and we'll leave it into the endurance realm because once we get above the once we get more intense than the typical endurance realm it starts to get even more complicated

than that but every single year that i've been coaching in this i'm going into my 20 some odd year 21st or 22nd year of coaching it seems like we've added an intensity range when i started when i first started out there were three intensity ranges and then there were five and then there were seven and then there were nine and then there were 13 and on and on and on and i can't keep and i can't keep track of him anymore and whenever i come back to high performance physiologists i always ask them i'm like is this practical is having this many divisions of an aerobic intensity really all that different it's just silly i mean silly is the the kindest word i can find for it uh i gotta be honest with you you know and so you cannot i i would challenge any physiologist with a with any letters behind their name to tell me how in the hell they're they're dividing that cake up into eight or 10 or 12 slices or 13 in terms of distinguishable reproducible physiological changes that distinguish zone 7 from 8 from 10 from 12 forget about it i mean you know if i was italian that's what i'd be saying forget about it uh the best i'm able to do physiologically and if you go to the research literature um well and that the

thing is i know that the people you're talking about with these 12 they're not the ones that are publishing because that's just not getting published that you don't ever see in the research literature 12 training zones right you see it in practice right you see it in so with coaching and with athletes for sure right so that so let's be clear to and and with with credit to my research colleagues they're not they're not doing that stuff uh generally in the research literature you will very often see only three uh aerobic zones meaning between the lowest intensity you would use in training and maximum oxygen consumption in that range which covers from let's say from 50 percent of vo2 max to 100 percent of vo2 max generally that cake gets cut into three zones uh and the reason that's true is because the the distinguishable physiological changes that we're able to identify consistently is this so-called first lactate turn point and second lactate turn point and those also can be identified as pretty much the same points using ventilation measurements so-called ventilatory threshold measurements um so then you've got lt1 lt2 and vo2 max as your three typical lab anchors right now there's some there's some wiggle room on defining lt1 and lt2 but you know it's not it's not as big an issue as republicans

versus democrats to put it that way it's it's it's much narrower okay and how can so some athletes will be familiar with just a standard incremental uh incremental exercise test and having those tests done on them but for an athlete out in the field that's trying to trying to figure out where those physiological anchors will be for them the first lactate turn point the second lactate turn point practically how can they internalize that yeah the the first one i would say is a pretty decent um surrogate or proxy is just the talk test uh you know if you and i'll even make it i'll give it a double a double test one is you should be able to talk while at that and to say sentences i'm not saying talk for two hours i'm saying but you should be able to speak three or four sentences comfortably to a person running alongside you and not feel like you're out of breath because basically the talk test is a proxy for a ventilatory test they're trying to say is ventilation under a reasonable control are they hyperventilating if they're starting to hyperventilate then they'll have trouble talking and ventilation is one of those things that changes when you pass that first threshold so it's kind of just a uh a poor man's ventilation ventilation test to do this talk test now the other uh proxy that i use a lot is and i tell

people that if you're well ventilated meaning you know you're you're getting airflow and you're drinking then once your heart once you've warmed up and you you found you you've been exercising for say 15 to 20 minutes your core temperature is stabilized you're in your rhythm then your heart rate should pretty well stay flat at whatever that heart rate is for the next hour next at least 45 minutes meaning that gives you a you should have a fairly flat heart rate without what we call decoupling where that heart rate is just drifting up up up if that's happening if your heart rate is drifting after 15 20 minutes then chances are you're above lt1 okay i had i did a workout just two days ago 48 hours ago i did a purposefully did an 80 minute threshold session 82 minutes um and my heart rate you know i i was i know my lt1 i know my 60 minute power and i was on the upper end towards 60 minute power and heart rate just slowly drifted upward the entire time you know and i that's what i expected and it's super reproducible but when i do low intensity sessions heart rate stays flat as long as i'm not fatigued from strength training the day before or something so this is the good surrogate measure is just looking at that heart rate response talk test plus heart rate flat heart rate put them together they give you a pretty

good idea am i in that low intensity zone if heart rate's drifting up and you're starting to uh feel like it's not so good to talk then that's a then that's threshold and then when you're above the second turn point well you know that generally you know not sustainable super hard right you know we're talking minutes instead of an hour we're you know you're counting the clock and and time just really slows down once you get above lt2 that's that's one of the easiest things is you're looking at the clock if you're doing a session and you're at that intensity your head is really struggling to to count those seconds because they feel like they're getting stretched so to to kind of basically summarize this we've got these three ranges the first one can be categorized as easy and where ventilation and heart rate is not going to change based on duration as long as you're hydrated and you know you're yeah well let me just slow you down there it eventually it will yeah but the rate of change it's quasi steady state but i want us to get into that quasiness later because that quasi aspect is super important if you're an ultra runner yep so that's the first that's the first range second zone or range is where things start to get uncomfortable heart rate's going to gradually increase and it's not or it's not an intensity that you could sustain for much more than you mentioned you did an 80 minute session there but 90 minutes is kind of typically what we would

consider the upper limit of what you could sustain in that range but it's um it's getting uncomfortable the third the third zone the red zone in your color scheme is something that's extremely uncomfortable it's only it's only sustainable for minutes a few minutes several minutes at the at the very most and you know you're in that range ventilation rate is really high and it continues to increase second after second minute after minute and as you mentioned you are counting counting the seconds down for which you can stop and cease and cease exercise intensity you're counting minutes at least i mean it it depends again where you are if you're just above that second turn point versus if you're way above but if you're just above generally one of the things you'll see is in any of the if you get above that second turn point then eventually your heart rate will get up to max yep perfect okay it'll just keep climbing so but that may be you could see this in a fifth in a 5k yep right you know you would you would see pretty much heart rate max at the end of a 5k whereas at the end of a 10k it'll probably heart rate max you'll be at maybe 95 98 percent of heart rate maybe you won't be quite to a 100 percent even by the end of a 10k yep you know so it's subtle but yeah i would say it's either you're counting seconds or you're counting minutes but you're definitely counting yeah for sure um and i think it's also worth pointing out that

all three of these ranges the easy range which is the green range the middle range just yellow range and the red range which is the harder range or the severe domain are all aerobic these are all these are all within an endurance discipline they are all aerobic intensities the the the energy that you're metabolizing you're doing so through aerobic sources absolutely you know they're this idea of the anaerobic because some people would call that second turn point the so-called anaerobic threshold uh i'm going to call that bullshit that that is just wrong it's a it's a very poor name because it implies something that's physiologically wrong uh it's like the aerobic metabolism stops and something else starts and that's just wrong 100 agree with that and we could go on for another two or three podcasts on that it's all about in this entire range up to 100 it's all about oxidation oxygen that doesn't mean there's not lactate production that doesn't mean there's not glycolysis and you know but it's about driving the motor with oxidation with oxygen okay so now we've got this three zone intensity framework and what athletes are very curious about is how can we manipulate intensity and time at intensity to maximize the adaptive response within however we can kind of contrive intervals you already mentioned

earlier that volume is going to be king essentially up to a certain point but that point is really high even amongst elite athletes five hours is better than three hours and eight hours is better than five hours as you mentioned earlier but when we have like an iso time situation athlete can only train 12 hours a week for whatever reason right they're limited by time they're limited by injury or whatever they want to be able to organize the intensity within that 12 hours in the smartest way possible and predominantly driven by your team out there we've tried to contrive all of these different interval situations eight ways from sunday 45 seconds on 15 seconds easy one minute on what did you do laughing because you know you're talking you're talking to sports sciences okay thanks to me guys like me yeah i i know i hear you um it's a great question what you're asking and it's a fundamental question that doesn't get asked in the right way because we tend to chop things up into interval training or this but it's it's really about the the mix uh that's what you become a champion with is is not the one epic session or the one magic session but the the hundreds of sessions in a year and how they're kind of how they're flowing together um and so well 12 hours that's a that's a pretty nice amount of time to be able to work with a lot of people would ask me that question if they only had five hours you know and then it

gets even trickier but anyway you go what i would say i would say look what i don't want to do is fall into the trap of letting every session start to look the same because that is the most likely regression towards the mean you will see is that person who does have 12 hours a week or 10 hours a week that's and let's say they train five to six times a week they have one off day you know then then that's starting to sound like two hours a day every day right um and if i say well i've only got five or six and it's one hour a day every day and that's probably more even more typical right of 35 year olds with three small kids and in a job and all this stuff um and so then that's the first thing i'm gonna say is well what we're gonna try to do is avoid falling into that black hole where every session becomes kind of a you know it ends up often being yellow zone right okay if you've only got an hour uh if you've got two hours a day that'll kind of that'll tend to help keep you from being able to do that but you'll still have a tendency to be doing a lot of work at the same intensity so that what i'm gonna start to do is start to really say all right you know i'm gonna try to get you to do if you're an ultra runner for sure i'm gonna want at least one of those sessions to be ultra long or longer you

know i'm gonna and and i'll pay that account by reducing the duration of another session so instead of two times two i'll say give me a three hour plus a one hour okay because then i'm going to start stretching you in the duration direction on at least one of those weekly sessions and maybe two and then then i might uh i might try to push you if you're really preparing for an ultra and you're on 12 hours a week and that's your time budget then i might try to say all right uh the next step in that progression i'm going to try to get you to give me uh either saturday or sunday two times two you know where now i'm gonna i'm gonna squeeze together two workouts they're not one four hour session yet but that's two hours lunch talk with the kids do some requirement at home and then go two more hours you with me yeah so what you're saying is the first step is to take that volume and manipulate kind of the density at which it happens during the week and in that and in that way what i just wrote down was three plus one is greater than two plus two i think so yes that's that's and that would be i would say this for a cyclist i would say this for a marathoner not necessarily three hours of running for them but you know i'm saying right right i'm gonna try to stretch because again let's go back to

our two fundamental tools in training is intensity and duration right and so we tend to we tend to try to use the intensity hammer to all too much so it's a very well-known tool well we're comfortable with that tool and we tend to pound harder when things don't go well uh but the other hammer is a subtle one but it's it's extension so every i one of the things i often say to people is every time you train you're asking yourself this question to what do i do what am i doing today am i intensifying or am i extending does that make sense yeah 100 i'm trying to am i trying to is the purpose of this workout to extend my durability or is it to intensify my aerobic capacity because and ultimately both of those are are valuable but for the ultra runner the the real room for improvement will will be on the extent on the extensive side more than it will be on the intensification side yeah and we see so i'm gonna try to create room for that we see a lot of coaches and athletes they try to peanut butter spread their volume out in this effort of consistency which that hammer gets there that drum i'll use that analogy since you're using the hammer analogy earlier that drum gets beat a lot right you need to be consistent you need to do a similar thing day after day and that's what produces champions and blah blah blah but what i'm hearing from you and i i wholeheartedly agree with this i've written a lot about it

is that one of the after you've maximized your volume or figured out what your maximum volume can be as a byproduct of logistics or training or whatever after that finding out a way to distribute that volume in an efficacious and uneven and or lopsided fashion would be the next kind of step in your hierarchy of needs for a for an ultra runner am i encapsulating that correctly yeah absolutely and and and this is where i think can you have to look at the scale of the of the consistency right yep you know consistency has scales and so yeah i agree that consistency like this year because of corona i try i personally traveled less than normal i usually do and i was more consistent in my professor training you know the the which means i'm not really training but i did manage to train 10 hours a week this year um five i hit 500 hours and that was because i was able to be more consistent consistent but even within that consistency it ranged from seven to 14 hours a week if that makes sense so it depends on the scale you're looking at and now within let's say if you're using a week as your as your as your as your um micro cycle i'm not necessarily sure that's always the best thing to do but let's say it's seven day cycles yeah you're going to be roughly consistent in how many hours a week

but you don't want to be consistent at the day-to-day scale right because that's where you get in trouble 100 i'm 100 at the weekly scale the monthly scale but don't try to be consistent at the daily scale because then you will very likely move yourself into a stagnation kind of equation where you're just you're just putting in the numbers but you're not actually extending or intensifying to to get real progress yeah and you've brought up this really this really important concept related to this and a number of different talks that i've seen you in and by the way you are everywhere i did before before i get on uh podcast that's a good thing i don't know that's a good thing or not but i just i have to i have to mention it because it's coming up right now in my effort to do a little bit of research with any guests i go and i see where they've given you know lectures and podcasts and things like that i had too many to go through with you that were just within the last quarter just within the last three months so i don't know how you have time to do it all but you are absolutely everywhere i really appreciate that yeah it's well like i said this year has been pretty special just because of corona and working home and and digital everything so uh the only thing i can say is the lead time or or the the time it takes to do you know usually if i were to give a an hour lecture in in venice it venice or uh another uh wherever uh there's at least four days three to four days right travel travel but now it's

four hours yeah 100 and i think that has resulted in more density uh you know or there we go density i love i digress okay so one of the things that you have brought up is that a unit of time at a particular intensity is very different depending upon where that unit of time occurs within the exercise so an hour running at an easy zone one pace is way different at the end of a three-hour activity a three-hour run or even a two-hour run as it is one hour at the very beginning or doing an hour onto itself explain to the listeners why that is so much different and why we need to take that account in training well and i guess that brings us back to this issue of steady state because there's this tendency to say yeah if i'm at low intensity i'm in a so i'm in a steady state my heart rate is flat my lactate is flat now well yes and no it's true for about an hour but if you keep going what happens let's let's it's a war of attrition your body is slowly breaking down you are becoming glycogen depleted you may be becoming dehydrated depending on how good you are at drinking you your blood glucose is going down your muscles are there is literally physical damage to the eccentric loading so there's a slow but sure uh damage resulting and we can actually measure that with creatine kinase release

and things like that so there's a lot of of of attrition there's some damage there is fatigue there's energy depletion all of this is happening as you run even at low intensity even at a below the first lactate turn point and as muscles fatigue as the muscles you're using to run at 12 kilometers an hour whatever it might be or fatiguing then your brain to maintain that same pace your brain has to recruit more muscle it has to start tapping in to additional so-called motor units it's calling in reinforcements because the efficiency of the muscles that were were being recruited that first hour that efficiency is getting lower they're becoming less efficient they're fatiguing so it costs more oxygen to do the same running speed so there's a lot of things happening and one of the things that we're that whole set that durability you can put that all under this term durability so one of the things that seems to happen with extended training over time is the athlete becomes more durable meaning that this attrition happens more slowly they're more efficient they use glycogen more slowly they just are able to that second hour is not as much tougher

as it is for the beginner who goes from hour one hour two right i've i'm in good grief boy when i started cycling again i i saw it i could just see it in the data how how much my heart rate drift decreased it just stayed flat or longer and i felt better at the end of the three hour ride than i did when i first started to do a three hour ride so this is a durability issue and this is one of the things it's i guess for the ultra runner it is one of the key adaptations you're trying to achieve over time is push back you know keep pushing back that monkey that that attrition monster that's jumping on your back and just starting to make you feel like this is a really dumb idea why am i doing this you know because of the the fatigue you feel in every part of your body the attrition monster i love that i'm going to coin that and give you credit for it in some way i just used two seconds to make up that term because it's the best i could come up well and you know in the 400 meter we always used to call it say the monkey was jumping on your back but here it's we'll call it the attrition fog or monster whatever but it's it's it's maybe not quite as heavy but it does sink in on you yeah and part part of the reason that we have to use these kind of like this clever vocabulary is because it is not described very well in the research literature we have very good and robust ways of describing power at four millimeters of of of lactate and

lactate threshold and speed vo2 max and things like that but this durability concept we keep making uh references to things like cardiac drift and decoupling but at the end of the day we're just taking stuff that has been studied in other areas and extrapolating it to the ultra distance events and i'm i'm still not can i'm still not convinced that we have good ways of just of like completely describing a what is going on but the more important thing for the athletes that are listening to it is b what to do what to do about it yeah well i think you're completely right you know and i do think that still ultra running is on fairly unexplored territory from a pure sports science physiology standpoint it's changing it's changing yeah it's slowly but and of course it makes sense that it is difficult because you agree if it's hard enough to get people to come into a lab to run for an hour and so sports science you know we we struggle with this this uh dilemma of the laboratory need for very strict control versus trying to be do things that have external validity and application to to out in the field and and good you know most of the lab stuff is is applicable within about the hour duration

range but then it starts to fall apart you know because that that threshold power or pace that you have it is not what you have after three hours yep you don't have that anymore you don't have that threshold power or pace and you certainly don't have it after eight hours you know so it's a new ball game and all those numbers you collected in the lab after a 15 minute warm-up and an incremental protocol and you were done in an hour well good grief uh throw them out the window they're they're just not there 12 hours into a 24 hour race or whatever well even something as simple as what percentage of vo2 max can you sustain for a hundred mile race which we know really well at the marathon distance at olympic distance triathlon ironman triathlon like we can we can narrow that down pretty closely the best estimates that we have at the hundred mile distance is anywhere between 30 and 70 percent which is completely meaningless like it's like we've got to get it better than that that's another whole other and i guess it also depends on how you may how you define it because probably in those kind of races there is there are pauses you know and so you're what's peak speed what's peak intensity because then you're starting to talk about a duty cycle yep yeah right there's still what's my work nature yeah there's a still keg nature to the kind of a work rest nature yeah 100 okay there's there's lots of stuff to deal with let's go back to our to our tools in the athletes toolkit so

we've got the volume tool you know we need to maximize that we've got the distribution of volume tool and we know we need to concentrate the volume on certain sessions as opposed to peanut butter spreading it we still have this i think i feel like you're dodging the question like our politicians do daily we still have this intensity question in terms of from an ultra running perspective they can choose to do our an hour long tempo interval they can choose to do 45 second intervals they can choose to do three minute intervals and things like that we know that we need to do different ones right throughout the course of the year i think everybody can kind of agree on that we don't want to go out and do two days you know two days out of the week one hour tempo ad nauseum that's you know nobody's doing that anymore but we do know that or we should try to figure out from from any sport perspective particularly in ultra running which types of these combinations of workouts might be more or less valuable can we say anything to that based on the literature and reasonable extensions of the literature um well to be honest with you the first answer i would have to you is guys it doesn't matter as much as you think it does uh all every time we start to go in and do any kind of real good um meta analysis on interval training for example it then you end up with it's a big soup it if you do the work and so within the interval

spectrum i tend to tell people if you're reasonably well trained then i'm going to recommend to you that your hard sessions where you're in that zone three area should be in that 30 to 40 minute total accumulated duration that you're going to collect minutes or a collect sounds easy accumulate minutes and and the way you do that the research suggests that really it is not too important it could be you know it could be two minute intervals it could be four minute bouts eight minute bouts but you want to accumulate enough work at about nine somewhere around 90 percent of maximum heart rate so it may start at 86 7 and it may end up at 92 during the workout and you're going to accumulate minutes and and and if i'm the coach i'm not going to have any problem with my athlete with we kind of mix it up you know like my daughter her running she's a runner her bread and butter workout is four or five times eight minutes four times eight 32 five times eight 40 and she and and and nowadays we basically say you don't get to go above 90 i want you you know i don't want you in that fit that highest intensity zone because it's too costly and the and you don't get the bang for your buck is actually is not there so we tend to and we've seen this in elite performers in cross

country skiing and rowing and running that there seems to be if you're talking about sweet spot uh and i hate that term because it's so misused and so misunderstood but if you're talking about attractors or typical places that i'm going to say that two very reasonable intensity spots in a polarized model would be about 65 65 65 and about 90 one of the ways that i've always viewed this is once you design a workout architecture such that it's going to eclipse that 90 mark the goal of the workout should be to maximize the time that you're exposed to the intensity and it's in a certain way not that the not that not that the difference between like 90 and 95 doesn't matter but it's the the volume of time matters more than the absolute amount of intensity and and so so anyway i just go back to when i'm favoring when i'm looking at how to design workouts and things like that i'm typically trying to favor the ones as long as we can eclipse that 90 that 90 mark i'm typically tending to favor ones that can maximize the time at exposure yeah and i think that's reasonable and it's it's also about um sustainability which i know is a terrible i mean it's a well-worn

expression but when i talk sustainability for training sustainability for training i'm talking about the ability to come back day after day and do the training because then we're back to that consistency issue uh consistency of being able to get up day after day and do the work well if you do a heroic epic interval session on on thursday but it just kicks your butt and you're not worth the crap for two days after that well then what do we get what was the net gain yeah whereas if i have you back off just a little on that interval session and say leave one in the tank yeah or put put a 90 governor on the engine well now i'm getting consistency i'm getting i'm coming back to that consistency idea because you're able to get up the next day and do a run not a hard run but you're able to you know keep the motor turning you're keeping the stimuli happening that's one of the most typical errors i see in athletes that are really you know they double down on intensity and they say man if i can just gut out the you know the hardest interval session ever that's going to give me progress and often it does not yeah and in terms of that exposure of time maybe i should kind of clarify that the lens that i'm looking through that is typically on the order of several weeks not one session so if i can accumulate like 60 minutes of you know 60 minutes of time at above 90 percent i would rather have an athlete be

able to do 50 minutes or 45 minutes twice in a 10-day period versus one one 60-minute session in a 10-day period because the total amount of exposure for that period of time that 10-day period of time is greater and i feel that that drives a greater adaptive response right i think i think that's uh that is kind of a what should i call it a self-organizational principle that starts to emerge from elite athletes who train a lot they start to understand this they in over decades we've seen this and i think this is why we see some of these intensity distribution patterns that we've that i've reported you know that it's not um feed it's based on long-term feedback of trying to find continuity and the athletes figure this stuff out over time right uh and and so some of our absolute best performers in the world that we have data from you know all-time great cross-country skier all-time great rowers this is this is very typical is that they're accumulating they're accumulating minutes they're not in a five intensity zone model they're doing very little training in that fifth zone right that highest zone it's just almost not happening except in races right exactly well it's there it's still there yeah absolutely absolutely and which is the crazy thing right because we have this we have

this uh we have this phrasing kind of stuck in our head of use it or lose it that if you can't train at that intensity you can't do that intensity in the race right and that and we find that that is actually not the case even at the highest of levels yeah it's it's it's ridiculous it's not true i'm sorry uh i feel comfortable saying that after looking at this data for 30 years you know it's it's not true right in fact it's it's a it's a dangerous presumption uh because it it does tend to push young athletes down the wrong path that they think that that if they don't do these these super hard sessions they don't get progress a good story along those lines was i was told by a cyclist related to a former tour de france winner cadel evans who's a australian he's an aussie and cadel he won the tour i guess he's about 42 now he's been retired a few some years but cadel he won the tour he's one of the greats i mean and at a time when he was on the pro team these young cyclists were you know they're at a camp you know and and training camps are very common in the in the in cycling and they're going to do these intervals and but evans is not doing the program he's not doing these tough intervals like these young bucks are and so they're like what's up with this you know

why he's the best of the best and he's not doing the hard session the way we're doing it and so one of the youngsters had the audacity and the nerve to actually ask him you know it was like you know you pete you go you ask him you ask him so eventually somebody said okay i'll ask him and so cadel you know you're you're an all-time champion in that but you're not doing these intervals like we are why not and he says he says well you know mate uh it's a long season and i've got to be ready in july we're in january and and so i'm i'm pacing myself you know and so he was just he was at a point in his career where he understood the long-term process yeah and i think that is and he wasn't trying to you know he wasn't turning every uh every problem into something he was going to hammer with intensity right and we see that with a lot a lot of athletes that have something to prove right that they they tend to use these kind of more sexy approaches to training where they're using that intensity hammer a tremendous amount um let let let's get into the weird sport of ultra running a lot now because we know it's a different we know that the the the that the performance is it's just a different proposition than we see even in even in stage race cycling which tends to be who can make it over the first climb and then who can make it over the second climb and who can make it over the third

climb and then who's at the top of the tourmalet or whatever there's a totally different physiological proposition in those races versus this durability which tends to be very low intensity and how long can you sustain not having that intensity drop off um what types of outside of trying to build a tremendous amount of volume what can ultra runners look towards in order to be able to extend this concept of durability that they're that is oh so important in the sport well let's think about it where where does the attrition where does the fatigue and the damage happen one is at the muscular level where you just you get literally muscular damage and and so an example of that is i have a colleague that was working down in uh qatar at the aspire academy and he he was doing some ultra stuff but in in qatar there's it's just flat as can be and so he does an ultra and he doesn't do very well for his standards and he and he says he realizes i need more eccentric loading i need more downhill running you know where am i going to get that because there's no hills and so he starts running up and down the stairs and high rises and just that he drops 30 minutes off his time the next the next race you know just and he's able to play tennis the next day with his kid after an ultra just by bringing in the the the negative

you know the downhill running because it just is clearly adaptive in a way that is extending it's making him less susceptible to the damage and the attrition so we know obvious i think string training i think pretty you know some significant climb not only climbs but downhills probably have an adaptive effect that make the legs more tolerant of and more resistant to the the damage that's going to occur as the the race wears on during an ultra run uh obviously in and i i was at a presentation or a conference back in 15 and i remember uh mia uh he's one of the guys that does good research on ultra athletes and he was discussing this that so far you know we haven't maybe seen the best east african runners try ultra but so far it looks like there's at least a little bit of a difference in the morphology of the best ultra runners that they have a little bit more quadriceps muscle mass uh they're not just necessarily the thinner is better and maybe that's to help spread the load of all you know and he was looking at these athletes that do a lot of vertical meters you know up and down but something about it there is research showing that string training helps

eccentric loading helps you know so i would have that part of it you know i want to keep you know just making that muscle as resilient as possible to the repetitious loading and because that's what's gradually going to beat down that athlete and their stride shortens and that for one reason just because the muscle of the muscle damage during the during the during the run and then then the other huge issue of i think is fueling uh it's it's gastrointestinal training uh and that's not my that's not my research world but you have to be able to get in food you have to tolerate a fairly high consumption of calories of of carbohydrates for hours you have to tolerate your your stomach has to tolerate you know it's having to do a lot of work which normally doesn't happen during endurance exercise we normally what happens normally we're exercising and the brain basically shuts down blood flow to the so-called splatonic region which is just the intestines so that it can be re-channeled to the muscle the body makes decisions about blood flow distribution you know short-term gain versus long-term needs less kidney blood flow less less blood flow to the intestines and so forth and that works if you're running for an hour

right but if you run for six or nine or 12 uh-oh wait a minute i gotta i gotta have some of both i've gotta have a functioning gastrointestinal system this is where you start to see some athletes just handle it better than others but it's trainable right uh eating learning how to eat what to eat what your eating cycle your drinking cycle is i think that if i were going to go into ultra distance that is definitely one of the areas where i would become an expert at least on myself you know i would become a you know and i think it is individual to a certain extent of what do i tolerate and and how can i move a lot of carbohydrate through my body so that i keep uh fueling uh as long as possible because yeah you're in fat burning modus i get it but you still need some carbs you know you still need some your blood glucose can't fall too low uh and you need to be hydrated you need to stay hydrated and we know that that the nutritional components absolutely affect this durability concept even at shorter durations like the three hour duration four hour duration earlier you want to go through some of the things that you've done personally and then also that you've kind of like crowdsourced through twitter to demonstrate that well yeah uh definitely one of the biggest problems the biggest things that we see with athletes is they

don't they they dehydrate uh they don't ventilate well if you're stuck indoors in cycling because of covid and that there's been a lot of indoor cycling and that if you're rowers they tend to sit on rowing machines and and rowers often are pretty big bodies and they produce a lot of heat they have trouble getting rid of heat so they sweat like crazy you can imagine an oxford rowing club where there's 15 95 kilo chunks a human and they're and they're and they're sweating like crazy well you can just imagine what a bad environment that is for uh you know keeping keeping ventilated so we've done some indoor studies were like four hour rides and versus two two versus two times two and and clearly uh keeping the drinking schedule makes a difference if you don't drink heart rate drifts up if you don't drink you are contributing to the collapse of your system and by collapse i mean that you're slowly deteriorating uh functionally because when you don't drink you ultimately decrease blood volume so your heart's having to go at a higher heart rate to do the same cardiac work you're just you're just debilitating the body's ability to sustain itself through because of dehydration so hydration matters uh it helps prevent the decoupling or it reduces the rate of decoupling that heart rate drift and let me tell you people say well

who cares if my heart rate's going up it doesn't matter well yes it does because it is a speedometer in in almost every case when we look at heart rate if your heart rate's high you're stressed right if if i'm sitting right here and i'm nervous and my heart rate's 110 then i'm not in as good a place as i would be if it was 70 and it's the same situation if you're out running and your heart rate has drifted up 15 20 beats it's not for nothing that has happened it's because your body is more stressed to achieve the same workload so that decoupling does tell us something and one of the things that helps reduce the decoupling is just good hydration and good uh intake of you know it keeping the calories in as well so partly it's the fluid but partly some caloric intake as well well and you've even measured your heart rate during your ted talk i remember going through that so you're definitely stressed definitely stressed there huh were you at threshold i think that's what everybody wants to know is what lactate turn point were you at at your highest point during that i don't know if i had much lactate but i sure as hell had a lot of cortisol pumping okay let's get into what you're studying in the lab uh because we we talked about this a little bit it's either going to be on air or off air depending upon where i decide to cut in but you you're doing some stuff at university that might be important for ultra runners why don't you describe what that looks like right now well we've talked

about the fact that the the research literature is kind of overly weighted towards studies on interval training right high intensity what's the magic what's the the flavor of the month on your interval prescription and i've contributed to it a little bit i've done i've published some interval studies so i'm i'm guilty as well but what given that i've also published quite a bit of work on intensity distribution and i've and i've said repeatedly that the bread and butter for endurance athletes is that you know that low intensity those low long sessions well then we start getting into the question yeah how how low is too low how long is too long we start asking questions about the prescription of those low intensity endurance sessions right and so that's what we're i'm trying to pursue now through some research is to say okay you know where how does intensity how do intensity and duration interact in that low intensity range and and and i do believe that that's the reason that when people say yeah professor siler uh what intensity should i be at for the low intensity sessions and then i my answer is always well sir it depends are you going to be there for an hour two hours or four hours right because 50 percent of vo2 max for one hour is probably not a sufficient stimuli but 50 percent of vo2 max

for five hours may be a heck of a stimuli right 70 percent of vo2 max is probably pretty darn hard for three hours but if you're only going out an hour then that may be appropriate it's still if it's still below threshold so i think there's that's why you it's you can't give a a blank and a blanket answer on this side this question of what's the good what's a good prescription in the low intensity range and particularly i do think that there are these issues of saddle time or time on your feet that you need to consider it's not just about developing mitochondria it's also about adapting the muscles the joints the tendons to the repeated mechanical loads so that's part of the a big part of the training process for the ultra runner and that's one of the reasons why i'm going to want them if i'm the coach i'm going to want to do those four hour slogs you know four hour sessions where you may have some walking involved on the hills or whatever i'm going to still want them to do that because that's good preparation for what they're raised i've always thought that this this how easy is too easy question is lazy on two fronts first is the obvious one right you're trying to get to like the minimum amount of exertion that you can get away with the second way the second way that it's that the question is lazy

is because whenever you're talking about exercise prescription you have to have both the volume and intensity components defined in order to ascertain the answer so to your point of yeah sometimes an exposure of 50 percent of vo2 max is not worth it for an hour but it might be worth it for four or five or six hours absolutely so we we need to remember that there are both there are both there are two sides to that coin in terms of what is best there's the intensity side but there's also how much time you're actually exposed at that the intensity is absolutely important well or i would even go farther and i'd say any discussion of intensity is absolutely meaningless without a discussion of duration because you know intensity is is is one dimensional and it only takes on meaning physiologically when you start multiplying it times a duration that's why we have so-called pace or power duration curves 100 100 okay so this is the era of crowdsourcing a lot of i was going to use the word research but i think that might actually be the right word which you've done a really cool job with i mean i i've really appreciated what you've been able to do on twitter just in terms of galvanizing the endurance community to to to to to find information about different training protocols particularly indoors what's next on that front for you like what what do you got kind of like cooking in the back of your brain that we

can bring out of this podcast and help you plug oh well it is there's a delicate balance and i think we're this is challenging academia and challenging research because of ethical issues because of you know normally for those who are not in my world if if we're going to design some laboratory study where we're going to have people come in there's always these thankfully since the end of world war ii there have been things called institutional review boards which assess the degree to which we are any researcher is exposing other humans to unnecessary risk uh risk of injury risk of undue pain all of these things so every study on humans has to be evaluated by some review board and and this is part of our job you know to make sure we've dotted the i's and cross the t's and we've got all of our security issues in place you know whether it's covet 19 related now and risk of infection blood all these different things you know every these studies whether it's master's study or PhD program that we all all of them have to be done that way well now with crowdsourcing we've added some some problems some challenges because if i recruit 50 people and and they're between age 20 and let's say 50 then i'm having to you know i they're all over the world

and what happens if one of them gets sick or has a heart attack while they're doing the workout that was actually going to be steven's data am i at fault is my institution at fault so i'm in kind of this you know i have done some of this stuff and and i am in these discussions because we're all facing this we all see or we all a lot of sports scientists are seeing tremendous possibilities in crowdsource research because we can do things that are practical we can do things that have direct relevance to training practice we can increase the sample size so that we get the variation we start to be able to say things about that better than we can do with a set with a sample of 10 people in a lab now i can have you know 100 people that do something for me via twitter but we've got to just make sure that we find the right balance between the the value and the the quickness and the and the directness you know the direct translation to practice through crowdsourcing and then make sure that we don't get anybody hurt that that i as a as a scholar don't um get moved too fast and i've had a tendency to do that you know i i've i've just you know because you're enthusiastic about it yeah and i and i want to know the answer and i want you guys to i want to be able to help tell people the answer so uh so that's my what i would share with

people that are listening is just that yeah i think crowdsource research is a tool i ask questions but but but i've kind of done a lot of this recently without expecting to publish some of those things because if i want to publish it then i have to go that low that slow route through the institutional review board in norway i may have to even go through a national review board and so then i'm probably not i'm going to slow down i'm not going to do certain kinds of studies as crowdsource just because right now the institutional review boards don't know what to think about it yeah yeah so it's but it's still a good tool the way that i've kind of looked at it to your point of having a good tool it's an it's an enhanced way of evaluating anecdote right we have all these athletes that are out there training in the field if we can take that huge mass of athletes and give it some shape it a little bit and give it some direction we can glean information from it it might not be as precise as a research study might not be as well controlled as formal research and things like that but we can still at the end of the day we can still glean information of it just like we glean information we have to carefully glean information from anecdote and from story and things like that i've always viewed kind of what has transpired recently predominantly over twitter and you've been a big a really influential influential driver of this as just another way that we can glean information from athletes that are actually doing

things in the field and to your point it's really practical because it's what they're actually doing it's not an over-contrived setting yeah so don't get me wrong i i'm going to use it and i would even argue that there are different levels yeah one level is just purely passive where something like um strava or the concept to rowing and agometer all the all the world rankings there's just just publicly accessible databases and that's just you the person has basically said this is free game because i put my data out there well that's not too problematic at all even for the institutional review boards and then the next level up that i've gone to has been to do things like questionnaires i can quicken i can get a thousand responses on a questionnaire in three days two days on twitter that gives me some interesting perspective on how people think how people use what's what's typical practice and that's that's low risk that's not hurting anybody that's you know and then we move into that next level which is to have people if i say to them like i did last uh march april i say hey you're stuck inside anyway you're on the bike you know uh why don't we agree on a little bit of protocol here you're going to do a four hour ride you know and and so we did that kind of study where i just had them do something they were going to do anyway but we can we kind of

controlled the parameters used google forms used some bespoke software we created and it worked it worked great but it wasn't a training intervention it was just saying what are the responses how dehydrated are you getting how much is your heart rate drifting and things like that and that's that gives some answers that are useful in training but then the the next level that we're starting to see and that i have a couple of PhD people that i'm interacting with in different countries that they are going full-blown they are organizing intervention studies training interventions and their one is using uh trainer road they have a cooperation with trainer road a an application there that is helping them to recruit athletes into this this randomized trial where they're going to be training in different you know using different training methodologies so that is you know and and we're talking you know the goal there is maybe 200 300 subjects yeah that's huge it's big to do a training study because that's never been done in uh you know we've never had that many well-trained people doing a training intervention in a lab-based study is you just can't do it i've come pretty you know the best i've managed is do a multi-center trial with three different locations and we had about 70 yeah and that was that was rock and roll that was big yeah that was hard yeah but but this this approach with digital data and all that i do think it's part of the future toolbox and you're going to see publications that are going to use this

and the corona this pandemic has only thing it's done is accelerate that development yeah well i'll tell you what you want to do it on ultra runners we're pretty game for torturing ourselves so if you want to come up with some sort of protocol throw it out there you'll have a thousand responses i guarantee you i'll be more than willing to help you out with that actually that you better be careful there because that's an interesting idea i will i'm serious i have the software to play with that issue so i've been i work with oh we'll have to talk off camera or off off mic yeah for sure and i'd love to do that i always put my money where my mouth is trying to support research and get people involved in it because there is there there there there's a gap uh when we go up to the ultra distances in fact i had to look this up just the other uh the other day when i first started working with ultra runners that that year there were a total of six papers that were published in that domain six that's nothing so well it's a couple of long i've looked a little bit at the data you have a guy named biot connectel from switzerland or beat or biot i'm not sure how he pronounces his own first name he's done a tremendous amount of stuff but very much of it is based on big data looking at databases looking at correlations between different test results and performance and you can glean some information from that for example you you can find out that well it helps to have a low bmi meaning

you you're lean and and don't weigh very much that's one of the best predictors of success but that doesn't help us very far so to move beyond just the kind of the superficial characteristic stuff and into some details it's about the training process i do think it's going to take some kind of it'll probably take a crowdsourced approach because you just you can't do interesting you can't do four hour runs in the lab so but if i can if i can cooperate with someone like your athletes and we can say all right let's agree on that over the next three or four or two months you're going to run three different long runs you know that last two four and six hours and we're going to look at in that in duration range how is intensity changing yeah now that would be an interesting question you know and that's just the first thing i think of is just moving out to that range that is more relevant for your athletes than for typical uh 10k runners you get people that participate in that 100 because we're doing it anyway and we want to know the and we want to know the information i have no doubt about that maybe between the time that we record this and the time this comes out we can brainstorm a little bit and i can put it in the show notes or in the outro uh but if not people will just have to hound us once the podcast comes out about what are we going to do and then we get into this is this is where i get ahead of myself because my brain is like going fast but then immediately the other the other part of

my brain which is tied to an academic institution says well this is good enough this should be published which means i need to go through irb i need to go through the in the review board process so that all my t's i's and t's are crossing so that so i've got this like there's fast steven and logical slow steven and they're competing with each other all the time i'm so glad we got a we got to peer into your any inner psyche because my inner inner schizophrenia well i could tell you i could tell you this steven as somebody who's followed your work for over well over a decade i don't even want to go back that far because that'll date both of us well well well over a decade and used a tremendous amount of it in practice i'm very appreciative of it i know we kind of made fun of all the different contrived iterations of what that research has actually looked like but it's appreciative because we we i can i can prescribe something and have a reasonable degree of certainty of what the outcome or what the physiological outcomes of it is going to be and it's because of all of that nuance and yeah it might not be all that different between this prescription and that prescription but at least i know it's made a big impact on me and i can tell you across our entire coaching group we have 50 coaches across our coaching group that type of research has made a big impact across the board running ultra running triathlon cycling you name it in the endurance disciplines it goes without stage and i'm just

thrilled to to get into your inner psyche just a little bit at the very end of this podcast so i'm very appreciative thank you well thank you it's uh it makes it meaningful to do the work when i know people are actually able to use it yeah and it is absolutely all right see we're gonna let you go uh any final words that you have or any uh places that we can direct athletes to find a little bit more about what you do well you know i like you said i'm kind of all over the place just because there has been some demand but i do have this twitter account which is just my name and then i have i actually have a youtube channel which is kind of scary to say uh it's awesome by the way it's awesome oh my son would disagree you would say well you're such a you're such a meaningless uh youtuber dad you know because you don't even have anywhere close to a million followers you know so it's information it's information heavy let's put it that way it's very so for my little niche i think maybe there are some people that could benefit so so yeah i try to put out some stuff on training there on youtube and then and then there's a continuous dialogue going on on twitter so you're an awesome twitter follow i really like i said i really appreciate your work thanks for coming on the podcast today and we will sync up offline and try to come up with some sort of crowdsource project one way or another that'd be great awesome all right and there you have it there you go much thanks to steve for coming on the podcast today

as i mentioned from the onset you've not only had a tremendous impact on me but also the endurance community as a whole we are all very appreciative for the knowledge base that you have provided to both coaches and athletes and i promise everybody we're going to get something crowdsourced on twitter in terms of getting some research out there for the ultra endurance community so go and give steve a follow on twitter his handle is in the show notes he's always a good follow for a ton of knowledge across the entire endurance spectrum thank you to all the listeners appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you that is it for today we will see you out on the trails you