Mighty Mitochondria with Iñigo San Millán | Koopcast Episode 73

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and for those longtime listeners of the podcast you will absolutely recognize the fact that i love to bring on guests that can blend the worlds of sports science and coaching and particularly those sports scientists that are at the very top of their game that work individually with athletes i feel that that is a very rare combination in today's world of athletics and i can think of no better example the pinnacle of that than the guest today inigo san milan inigo has coaching chops beyond any guests that i've actually had on this podcast and that's saying a lot he has been an advisor to many of the professional cycling teams over the course of his career as well as the individual cyclists themselves and in 2020 he was the coach of the tour de france champion tad a pokagar which is the pinnacle of that particular sport and anytime the coach reaches that particular pinnacle their sport and gets to work with an athlete it should absolutely be celebrated but inigo also has this rare capability and rare talent of also being one of the most influential people in the world when it comes to cancer and

cancer metabolism and he uses his knowledge of sport science of sport science and how elite athletes work to better understand how cancer works which is an absolutely fascinating area for anybody to study during the course of this podcast we talk a lot about his particular testing protocols that he uses on elite athletes as well as how he's able to use elite athletes as this model of perfection the ferraris and the formula one cars of their particular fields and apply it into the cancer domain it was an absolutely fascinating conversation i hope to have inigo back on the podcast again and again and again and i'm honored and humbled that he would come on the podcast today to share some tidbits of information so here we go i'm gonna get right out of the way here's my conversation with inigo sammilan i see your yellow jersey in the background i want to pass on my congratulations uh oh thank you yeah with with it's i mean from from coach to coach i mean that's just one of the most amazing things in the world and i know that you've been giving you've been getting a lot of kudos over the course of the past several months so you can get some more from me it worked i think that uh yeah just uh yeah it's just it was it was a good one i have to admit yeah so uh but also yeah we you know rogerichs didn't have a

his best day either right in the time trial so yeah all the planets were aligned that day well those three weeks right that's the right a lot of a lot of people don't realize that it's a lot of racing to get to that point yeah although it does come down to and you've been involved in cycling long enough to understand this it always comes down to you know an hour or three worth of racing you know out of the 80 or 90 hours total um at the end of the day it's all four or five critical things that happen over the course of those three weeks yeah exactly yeah yeah it's three weeks you're just chasing that one day right i know right you can't you can't you can't just boil it down to one day for sure part of the reason i was requesting this now and not a little further on in the summer is i know based on your schedule that april may june starts to get really really busy for you yeah it is oh it is ridiculous and and i i have like three jobs now so it's at the university where we're wrapping up uh different uh research studies at the same time and it's been really uh cutthroat and then with uh uh with team you know it is it's never ending you know uh because we are already i'm not even thinking about today's races i'm thinking about the to the friends i was just speaking with today and

we're preparing the pre-to the france training camp already we have to finalize the place the reservations the roads uh uh i'm going i'm flying on sunday to to brussels to do uh wind tunnel with italian monday um i'm flying saturday on tuesday and then from there we go to past country so we're there's a lot of things to prepare so i'm way behind schedule well you'll get caught unfortunately you have a really good athlete that you've got your hands on that can that can uh probably cycle by himself right yeah it's it's it's always a good to work with you yeah um as i kind of sent you over in the outline like i've been really fascinated with your with your career and obviously it's taken off particularly as of late i mean any anytime you have somebody like a tour de france winner or an iron man winner or an olympic gold medalist or something like that all of that athletes uh support system kind of gets put in the spotlight but the reality is is like you've been involved in these two what might be perceived as very different worlds for a long time elite endurance sport in particular cycling and then cancer research and i've loved the way that you have woven those two worlds together from mainly from an academic perspective in looking at and using elite athletes as a model to understand

disease as a model of not perfection but but optimization and i might be putting words in your mouth a little bit but for the listeners to kind of like understand like who you are a little bit maybe i think it would be helpful if you explain like how you got there and in what this framework is of using elite athletes to understand this particular cancer disease model well yeah thank you for the opportunity uh appreciate it so my background is in physiology i although i started in in the sports medicine field um um you know i i decided to to really i was very fascinated by everything really to metabolism and physiology first physiology and this is where i uh i went to the school of medicine and and that's where i did my doctorate in physiology so i'm a physiologist by training but um um um and and and more and more the physiology field has evolved uh into more um because of the better tools that we have nowadays to understand physiology it has led us to um cellular physiology and metabolism cellular metabolism by bioenergetics and especially another mitochondrial function and this is what i i i i was very very very interested very passionate about it and uh i had great mentors and i i i i read um and i learned tremendously from uh dr george brooks who is he's been you know 25 years ahead of all of us

in this at least and um so anyways uh i was very interested in all this so that uh and and somehow i i because i was working in a sports medicine clinic i i i i got involved also in athletes and that's when i started to apply these methodologies and knowledge with athletes and and and i was lucky to understand very well how the body works in these elite athletes um who are the the ferraris or lamborginis or cars right is the gold standard right so when i came to the school of medicine um 12 years ago here in colorado from from spain that was what was that was before uh that's where i was exposed to uh to many different chronic diseases and i started to interact with uh a lot of uh researchers and clinicians in different areas from cardiovascular disease type 2 diabetes icu patients cancer and that's why i started to understand a lot about um about these fields right so um and what i saw right away when i started to look at the metabolic response of of of many uh patients with these chronic diseases is that they were in the opposite metabolic pole of what elite athletes are and and i always have thought that it's difficult to understand imperfection if you don't know perfection in the first place and what i understood what i was continuously in my interactions with uh with many researchers and clinicians in different diseases that you know everybody's stumbling upon mitochondrial function cellular uh function right and and and

and not getting many answers and this is what i was wondering like well maybe from what we have learned from athletes we can develop or or or or understand better all their diseases so so this is where i started to to to get very involved into this and specifically to cancer um you know there is one thing is called the warburg effect right that is the first transformation of a normal cell into cancer cell um that otto warburg discovered in 1923 uh noble laureate he was a hundred years ago ahead of us right so he already described that uh it's it's a it's a it's a metabolic reprogramming that that a normal cell suffers where they start utilizing a lot more glucose for energy purposes and also produce a lot of lactate and uh that the lactate production was what what struck warburg not necessarily the glucose production it was the lactate production why in the world they lactate so anyways the whole the whole purpose but but he didn't have the time i mean the technology 100 years ago to understand this very well right although in concept he was already a century ago and he even already before even glycolysis was proposed which by the way glycolysis was fine was finalized by uh um mayor hoff who was uh his mentee right um um with emden the end and may her pathway that's called so glycolysis so before even glycolysis was discovered

he was already proposing that there was a mitochondrial dysfunction in cancer uh an injury of mitochondrial uh uh respiration so anyways uh upon the arrival of genetics um the uh everything related to cancer metabolism uh was buried disappeared gone and there were effect as well um and uh and that was in 1953 and the whole thing of cancer uh shift towards uh genetics and this is when uh um uh well everything was about genetics for 50 years right until recently uh you know genetics we know that hasn't solved hasn't cured cancer and it hasn't uh helped us to understand much about the biology of cancer and even uh watson who discovered dna who's still alive he's saying now that um the efforts to to understand cancer through genetics have been quote uh remarkably unhelpful and if he were to do it all over again he would look into cellular metabolism so so anyways and and long story short so i could hear that that's where the whole word brief came back to life right and a lot of people start to talk a lot again about the word perfect and and obviously i started hearing about it but i thought it was a genetic state and i'm not a geneticist i'm not an expert in genetics at all so i was like that's not for me i'm not going to read it but one night i said okay this is the word we face time to to read about

what the hell is that and when i read it i said wow this is not genetics this is metabolism and this is the subject of my doctorate thesis however in in exercise physiology or in physiology in general we don't call it the word we said we call it aerobic glycolysis or cytosolic glycolysis right and that's why i never connected the dots of word perfect so anyways i i i started to read about it and uh obviously i i was the whole night without sleeping and i said wow you know like i think i i can try to put some of the pieces of the puzzle together because yeah the the word we affect um again that was the subject of my doctorate thesis but i did it in muscle and the players are identical right the difference in the muscle are perfectly regulated whereas in cancer are all over the place so i tried to to to uh to try to explain so for seven months i was working you know in the middle of the night um you know like until very late putting together the draft of of what i would try to put the pieces of the puzzle together and come up with an explanation of what the word brief it was and uh in the purpose and when i finished that i went to to my colleague and mentor george brooks and i said hey i think we can explain the word we're effect give it a shot and so we we we polished that the first draft and we we finally published it and we believe that we have at least attempted and and given a reason and a

purpose to to to explain that the word we're affecting cancer from lessons learned from exercise physiology so this just dawned on me and ago that you will probably be the only person in history all who knows 50 or 80 100 years from now you might be the only person in history that has coached somebody to a tour de france victory as well as had seminal contributions in a medical related field in particular cancer i mean i i think i just think that that's remarkable to to have have an impact in both of those worlds which a lay person would look at as not as interrelated as they actually are and in a lot of ways i i think that like you've leveraged your knowledge of of this specific type of metabolism and we're going to get to athletes because that's going to be our our main audience here you've been able to leverage that in an uncanny way so much so that like you have a really specific testing protocol that you use with a lot of athletes including tide that is i would say it's it's it's it's it's it's indifferent for most of the lactate threshold and vo2 max protocols that are out there why don't we start to run through that a little bit and why you use this specific testing protocol with athletes and why do you think it's so valuable as compared to the typical three to four minute stages that we see in other tests yeah no thank you that's a great question so yeah when i when i first started um uh you know we were doing everybody you know we're including me we're doing the classical

three minute incremental tests um and and working with professional cyclists and i remember one professional cycling team i i i see that using this protocol the the best cycling in the in the in the team who who was a podium uh to the front podium meloki you know he was one of the worst guys on the team obviously a very good cyclist tested very poorly and and and and one of the top cycling i mean and and and and and and and the best cyclists and in this protocol was an average cyclist right so obviously you know as a scientist you cannot translate this information and tell a world-class cyclist that he sucks right obviously if something was wrong right they they they so that's what i i decided to to to change the protocol and and and and the problem with these protocols is that specifically to cycling right there's a very short protocols and they're in absolute watts so someone who is 80 kilos they're always going to do it better than someone who's 60 kilos always right and this is why these protocols didn't work and this is why also uh athletes in general they did not believe in these protocols because as the lucky told me and his others told me i said hey every time i do a one of these max tests i suck and everybody tells me that how in the world i can be a second so obviously i said there's something wrong with how we're doing things right hold on one second i think we need to back up a little bit so the the typical test that you're describing and this is still the test that they

use at the olympic training center which i'm sure you're uh which you're which you're familiar with is a graded exercise test and it kind of doesn't matter whether you're doing it running or cycling this setup is the same you'll start out at a at a certain workload that the that usually the practitioner determines and it's usually an easy workload and you will increase the speed if you're doing a running test or the power if you're doing a cycling test by a fixed amount yeah in a in a professional cycling setting setting it's usually 50 watts is what we see and you're increasing that you're increasing the workload 50 watts and on the running side it might be like three tenths of a mile per hour or the equivalent amount of of seconds per mile 40 seconds a mile or something like that every third every three or four minutes so what you're what you're describing is a short stage is three or four minutes and then that increase will keep on going going and going going going and then depending upon the type of test either they'll break for the vo2 max portion over or or they'll just take them to volitional exhaustion in the athletes that that's the that is what we'll call the classic lactate threshold and vo2 max test now what you're describing what you developed is different because everybody's saying that they suck yeah i saw that there was not discrimination and the well it was discrimination but the the undesirable way right uh if you're a lighter cyclist you would never be good at this test and if you're heavier cycles you will be the best so what i did is like okay

we need to to improve this and what i did was normalizing in in terms of watts per kilogram right so that you would do your workload at each fair is normalized for everybody so everybody is doing the same based on watts per kilogram and that that's that's when the tests start to be more fair right uh then what i did is that i i i made the stages longer right to 10 minutes so the first the first stages you know i i realized that you know when you're in very low intensities uh five to 10 minutes is not not going to make much difference because of that intensity the the cycles in this case it can be for hours yeah so it was a waste of time and we don't want to be an hour and a half because these protocols end up being like an hour yeah especially in the world-class house so what i did is like to do just five minutes which is enough uh um to get in steady state uh and then when they hit about three to three point five watts per kilogram i increased to 10 minutes and what i wanted to realize then is like to see okay you know first if we do one minute increment as many people do or two minutes increments if the chances are very very high chances that the lactate which a lot of things seems that a lot of people were not doing either just be too much and ready from the ventilatory threshold right but lactate is a key aspect to understand cellular metabolism so what i would see is that in these protocols if the short protocols are likely you get is probably from one or even two stages before

right so it was not matching so i wanted to see what there's when you reach some steady state within a within a step let's say five minutes i think it's reasonable to a minimum right but definitely 10 that's where you can see uh you're you're you're for sure that the lactate you're getting is from that same step and then what i wanted to see is also not only that it's like how i wanted to observe the athlete at that intensity so for example in a two minute a two minute protocol right two athletes finish that step with let's say three minerals of lactate right so the conclusions would be oh they're they're the same here right right but eight minutes later one athlete is still at three minerals and the other one is maybe at seven so that's when you start discriminating and see that well this is this exercise this power output or this uh speed is not sustainable you know for this athlete whereas for the other one is absolutely sustainable so that's when you start understanding the athlete better and and that's when it discriminates and yes when you apply that protocol that's when the lucky was by far the best guy on the team and he can ultimately prove it on on the road as well right yes and this is what i've seen with with ever since right and we see it like with today if we had done that like that for example we do like a 20-minute protocol which is very

common in cycling and um yeah and tally is not one of the best you know uh he he is the best in the world probably with five hours in your legs right you can do 20-minute effort but also bad if you do just like a full-time 20 minutes uh big guys you know they're they're probably gonna hit him you know but this is what when you do the protocol that i do now he's from a different planet well i'm glad that you went that that you took the time to go through that because all too often in particular for this audience they will think about doing one of these physiological tests and the outcome that the outcome of that test they tend to like compartmentalize or trivialize into a little box where they get their VO2 max numbers and that's it yeah and particularly with the test that you've designed i think one of like the ingenious parts of it that you that that you started to describe is that the test itself is really it's a microscope into the athlete's internal physiology and you're looking at it on with a really heavy uh microscope into the bioenergetics right how they're metabolizing substrate in particular lactate and what their mitochondrial function actually looks like to set this up why is that so important in sport why is that a differentiator between the really good athletes and the average athletes yeah that's a good question also so this is why i also started to

realize that VO2 max it's a number that i haven't used it in 25 years to be honest you know it doesn't give as much because this is this is my day to day you see enough two athletes who have a very similar VO2 max um regardless of the level professional or recreational and and and and they do they both have the same VO2 max and one is way better athlete than the other one so there's gotta be something at that more cellular level right more of the metabolic efficiency and in fact now after all these years because i've been used to doing this but i never had the time to kind of put it together and find out so we're going to publish this soon because we have a cohort of 200 a whole number of 240 something athletes of different categories yeah and looking at the relationships between VO2 and VO2 max both VO2 at each step and VO2 max and lactate for example and the correlations are are moderate to poor right so there's not much correlation but anyway this is also explains what we have observed all these years but that's what i wanted to get to about hey what the hell is happening at the metabolic efficiency so i started to look into uh stoichiometric equations looking at co2 production in o2 where you can you can understand something that um it was done a long time ago you know uh um by um uh francis galeno

uh no gosh i forgot who was i forgot right now and i apologize it was in the 1800s you start to look at that respiration looking at co2 and o2 and then it was written it was resurfaced by by frame with these equations and you can then um um have a good understanding of how much fat and carbohydrates you're oxidizing and um so i started doing this in 2006 and um and asker dukendrup from the netherlands he was doing it as well at the same time uh for research purposes and he wrote a lot about it and and uh he's a great scientist and i was applying it right um but a lot of people thought it was a waste of time you know but yeah you know like uh it was very laborious right and uh because you have to go minute by minute and look into the excess heat and look at the equations it was very laborious but it was very helpful um and now yeah 15 years ago is what a lot of people are doing now looking at the substratulation because at the lowest you understand better what is the metabolic efficiency and that's what we see the athletes they they oxidize tremendous amount of fat whereas others they don't or others they they oxidize tremendous amount of carbohydrates in grams per minute so we have to increase and adapt their diet right and this is what i in fact i did already in 2008 where i was looking looking

into all this looking into grams per minute of carbohydrate oxidation in athletes uh i saw that specifically in endurance athletes uh i saw that the current guidelines back in the days uh they were probably not not correct because the current guidelines were uh calling for 30 to 60 grams per hour of carbohydrate right and i was scratching my head and like this this doesn't make any sense to me so i i i i i started to say okay let's we have to go 80 to 100 grams per hour um and i remember that yeah i was very highly criticized by doing this you know because it was crazy uh humans yeah humans can't absorb that much the whole nine it's impossible and and um and and i remember going to to ask her to can drop uh and say hey ask her like i'm i'm using this and i'm i think between 80 100 grams is what they should have in events or three hours or so but people think that um this is a crazy idea what do you think and i remember he told me i'm working on some concepts and i think that about 90 grams is what i would recommend so it was very reassuring to know that the top guy in the world was also aligned with this the funny thing is like 12 years later you know many of these people who were criticizing this concept now they're giving conferences throughout the world and writing guidelines saying that it's not 80 to 100 is 90 precisely so uh but anyways but it it definitely works uh so but anyways all this came

up from doing these methodologies otherwise i would not realize i didn't realize that that was that that was part of the story because you were almost reverse engineering it from what you were seeing on the bioenergetic side asker came into it from this is what the gut can absorb right this is what we see from a from a from a glucose and fructose transport side of things and then coming up with the magical and very precise 90 grams per minute number but you were almost taking it from the like the other side of the equation from from what i gather yeah i mean i i i i'm not as smart as uh uh asker nobody and and yeah exactly so i i i just have to come up with that and yeah he he has definitely um taught us tremendous some information about the the transport of those carbohydrates uh and um yeah it just came from a different angle more practical because this is what i was doing i was not doing looking at this for research purposes i was doing already for for applications with athletes yeah right i wanted to see and and back then i was working with i started working that was a year later i worked with i started working with gardening team yeah and uh that's what i started to implement these methodologies 80 to 100 grams and we took it to the to the friends and uh yeah it worked quite well no ga the stress obviously you have to do it correctly and and train the stomach in some cases but yeah we've been very successful into even even way more than 100 grams per hour uh for sure for sure and it works but you have to do correctly but

that's kind of the approach that that i had back in the days well and so this brings up a really interesting part and first off i remember very vividly in my coaching career making that transition from a 30 to 60 grams per hour recommendation to a 60 to 90 that that was a marked transition because that's a that's a lot that's a lot of that's a lot of carbohydrates and we were primarily relying on what i would call asker's methodology or his rationale for that in terms of this is what your gut can tolerate as long as you have the right combination of carbohydrates but since then one of the things that has evolved is this this notion to try to to train your body specifically or try to induce training protocols very specifically around how to enhance mitochondrial biogenesis and you met you mentioned earlier that you know we can take we can look at this a number of different ways we can look at elite endurance athletes or good fat oxidizers from the get-go we can look at what they you know what they can eat and drink from a dietary perspective and i was wondering what your thoughts are specifically on how trainable this is and if if we can enhance mitochondrial biogenesis what are the like what are the heavy hitters in terms of how we can actually enhance that in order to improve performance yeah so that's a great question and and so so going back to to to the the surgery realization that's where i developed this

methodology between directs and look at mitochondrial function and metabolic flexibility it's just by looking mainly at spot oxidation and lactate because both are mitochondrial substrates right during exercise glucose is not a valve on trucker to know mitochondrial function because glucose can be oxidized into in the mitochondria via oxfos or reduced lactate right in the cytosol so it's not mitochondrial dependent however thought during exercise has to be oxidized in the mitochondria and lactate is oxidizing the mitochondria as well in the adjacent is mainly producing the fast twitch muscle fibers and travels mainly to the adjacent slow twitch muscle fibers although also george proofs discovered the mitochondrial lactate oxidative complex where lactic can also be oxidized within the same muscle fibers in the mitochondria through a specific transport of anyways the whole thing is that that has allowed me to understand you know exercise intensities and understand mitochondrial function so when it comes to mitochondrial biogenesis my humble opinion the only way to improve it is by training mitochondria not by restricting food and and fat which is the approach that many people are doing right you'd restrict carbohydrates or

or calories so the mitochondria get bigger right there's no proof scientific proof of that there are a few studies showing that there's an increase in expression in pcpcpcpc1 alpha right which is our main precursor of mitochondrial function at the rna level right but the fact that you have an increase in the genetic expression expression that doesn't mean at all that you're going to produce a protein that is going to elicit you know that mitochondrial function and i always put this example if you are if they lock you in a hypoxic room with very little oxygen for an hour right your heath 1 alpha levels are going to go off the chart right but you're not going to come out of that room with a five points higher hematocrit or two points higher hemoglobin right um so that that's not enough so this is the same thing so a few studies came out with this and uh since the rna and our mrna expression was higher uh from from you know for example carbohydrate restriction people thought right away oh this is going to increase my kind of biogenesis and this is what the whole concept of of uh of um train low in carbohydrates right some studies showing that definitely you know also there's not that's not a case there you know and a colleague of mine um his nutritionist from our team is working on a study now on these concepts and he's showing that uh it

doesn't increase uh that mitochondrial function so this is what um uh this this is why we're seeing but but but what we're seeing is that all these many of these people doing restriction of carbohydrates um they yeah they get into an overtraining state um uh which i'm sure you have questions about that but it's usually detrimental for for training well and that's when when i kind of like back into the argument that's where i've always come at it from a coach is that okay maybe let's just say that all of the genetic expression that you just mentioned let's say we can fast forward 10 years and that and that actually comes out of the end of the tunnel that yeah okay that genetic expression does lead to an improvement in in in mitochondrial biogenesis let's just say let's just say theoretically that that that is that that is the case although the evidence is pretty weak in your example of the hypoxic uh environment is a great one i'm gonna steal that from you by the way i'll give you credit for it uh but let's say that that that is the case still the increment the improvement that you're going to get from that even in the best case scenario by restricting carbohydrates getting some additional mitochondrial biogenesis from that intervention a pales in comparison to what you do just by training hard training is the heavy hammer in the room and b can carry negative consequences with it as well and so it might be a one up five down situation exactly and it's not worth it as long as the

training structure is there that's the way i've always looked at it as a coach yeah exactly i 100 percent agree i couldn't agree more that uh yeah it's a lot of effort and yeah it usually has more role consequences and undesirable consequences and i've seen unfortunately many careers destroyed by this you know really brilliant cyclists or runners or triathletes or swimmers um whose careers were destroyed because they someone told them that oh if i reach three carbohydrates i'm going to increase my mitochondria and i'm going to be more efficient and yeah and this is why i i i i want to be an advocate for this you know because i've seen many careers destroyed by this and i'm not necessarily by no means advocating that you need to have carbohydrates by no by all means there's a time in place right the days that you don't train much you don't need carbohydrates uh that much obviously the trends that you that the days you train a lot you need a lot of carbohydrates you know but restricting is not usually my modest opinion a good idea from my experience as well so you're not having any of these professional cyclists go out and do bonk rides or you know fasted training sessions or any of this other stuff and this has become like a training topic du jour amongst a lot of endurance athletes i mean cyclists fall i'm gonna say pray to it like i'm automatically biased against it but we're both in the same camp cyclists for athletes and in my world of ultra running in particular because we take everything to the 10th degree or the 100th degree we see a lot of these training we see a lot of these training

interventions and i've always looked at it as something that not only is not beneficial but in a lot of ways can be contraindicated to improving performance like you just mentioned yeah i agree and and this is what i see you know that a lot of people they get over trained uh they get catabolic um and their performance just takes a diet you know um i've heard about some success stories um but i have never seen them with athletes that i worked you know um and in fact you know i i've been i all the time i get emails from people from around the country in the world you know uh being in this hole uh because of restricting carbohydrates during training you know they get over training fatigue and they can't turn it around so this is one of the things that i'm not supposed to take care of these people right uh because they should not be in that place in that situation in the first place but uh yeah it happens all the time you know and um yeah so i i think it's a problem and i think it's it's lack of information information or or sometimes as as we know right it's like there's a new tendency uh in the sport that comes all back and forth all the time and and someone needs to sell that book or that tendency to get new clients uh supposed to do that the the right stuff based in science and experience and evidence so when you talk about training the mitochondria to improve it i mean you're literally saying we need to

overload this system in order to produce more of them just like we would think about overloading a muscle and a strength training uh from a strength training perspective or overloading the heart from a cardiovascular you know training perspective is that literally the way that you're looking at it is like almost the throughput right of substrate that you can push through the mitochondria that is the genesis for the improvement yeah and and this is what we know that exercise right is that is the only medication where we know to improve mitochondrial function because you need to stimulate it right but but uh and this is what i've been learning you know and i keep learning um uh is that what what is the intensity necessary to improve that mitochondrial function and this is why i developed this also surrogates of mitochondrial function like phytooxidation and lactate which have allowed me to understand uh quite well the intensities and the durations and the frequencies necessary to improve that mitochondrial function which is what i've been applying as as the core uh of my training methodologies and that's what also i'm doing now to uh with populations with chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes or or even cancer where i'm incorporating this and even icu patients uh to improve their metabolic uh function so okay let's get in let's get into that a little bit because i want to talk about training zones and training ranges and for the listeners out there i had a really good uh podcast with somebody who i know

you that you're probably familiar with steven seiler and we talked about all different ways to how to contrive different training ranges you you have you have the fascinating opportunity of you've got two very good pieces of data from the athletes that you work with in order to help design training ranges the first one of which is the test that you just mentioned and the second one is the day-to-day training data from the power meters that you can use to kind of re recalibrate that and both of those are incredibly in the once again my audience is not going to have a degree much of a degree of familiarity with this because they don't the because the concept of a cycling power meter it's just not unless you've actually coached somebody with it it's it's really hard to relay how powerful it can be in terms of looking into what's going on but i want to first i want i want to for i want the listeners to first understand how you get to design training ranges and then have a discussion on if we don't have those tools available what are the potential surrogates for those what are the potential replacements to try to get the athletes in the right like training pockets so to speak so let's start out with first with like how you how you arrange those training ranges yeah so the way i i contemplate coaching is looking at our trainings about bioenergetics right it's like what are the bioenergetics needed for different sports

and and also i i one thing that has helped me tremendously is that over the last 25 years years i've been involved in in almost every kind of sport and there's always a lot of things that you learn from other sports i love that you can bring i love that yeah and i keep learning i you think sometimes that you start working with football players football teams american football and uh you think that oh man yeah these guys are in the stone age right and in general they are but but it's another conversation you you can you can learn a lot you know and and i've been able to learn a lot you know about different different methodologies they do for training they're like whoa this makes sense and you take it to to cycling for example right so that that cross thought between sports has has helped me a lot to to try to understand more the the the the needs for the bioenergetics of each sport as well right and and what's going on so anyways that's kind of how i how i how i how i approach when i when i'm working with that with an athlete or a person where is your bioenergetics as a as a triathlete or as a runner right uh or as a 1500 meters or a society so if you're in a sport where you need to uh deploy all the bioenergetics you need to stimulate all of them right and this is how i see things so for example a key bioenergetic piece is to improve fat oxidation and lactatease capacity so this is where you need to stimulate mitochondria and this

is what i came up with the whole zone two thing right that's kind of like i have the zone one which is recovery not much happens there right yeah i i tell athletes uh either take an off day and i force them to take an off day uh and another day of the week doing a recovery day which is a coffee ride you know or you know coke right if you want to go and have a coffee with your friends it's a it's it's more mental thing but nothing you're not going to see maybe any energy systems by doing an hour easy um you know for the most part uh but the zone two is what i've seen uh where you improve that this this fat oxidation and lactate cleanse capacity by far so that's where i'm and since those are surrogates of mitochondrial function that's where i'm from the liver of that zone too which has worked tremendously well for me and and and more and more i see because i get messages from coaches and athletes throughout the world that it works for them as well so that's one piece the other piece is the whole uh glycolysis right this is the the high intensity the the turbo which is this is where where races are decided right or competition i decided in many sports so you need to have a good turbo a good like glycolytic capacity and uh and for that there's a series of glycolysis you need to have a higher glycolytic flux and function and enzymes and that's something you need to stimulate as well right and and this is what i call the zone four right uh this is like your threshold your lucky

threshold you will this is when you have the highest stimulation before entering a a a maximal effort due to max effort right with then you get closer to a anaerobic uh effort right so this is what i think that a lot of things happening there that must must be stimulated and then zone three is more like something in a transition zone if you will right and this is what we see clearly also with that fighting carbohydrate oxidation uh zone two is usually that the fat max that's where you oxidize the most fat because you're still recruiting the type two muscle fibers which mainly oxidize fat right and and you're not recruiting as much of the of the fast twitch muscle fibers and therefore you're not consuming as much carbohydrates so that's why you have the fat max in the moment you start recruiting the the fast twitch muscle fibers you start uh you're easy why you're recruiting the fast twitch muscle fibers you're recruiting because you have a higher uh metabolic demand to synthesize atp it's a higher exercise intensity right and therefore yeah with fat you can you can synthesize a lot more atp right but uh it's going to be a longer time to synthesize it whereas when you go at um at higher intensity it's not about how much but how fast and that's why you you make a switch from fatty acids to glucose you synthesize significantly lower amount of atp much faster and this is why you activate the fast

twitch muscle fibers and this is why you see the switch in this metabolic testing where the fat max disappears and it starts plummeting the fat oxidation and the glucose increases right and eventually the the adductor for glycolytic intensity it's all the all the all the um um all the substrate comes from glucose and there's no fat oxidation right and this is what you know it this is this is how i i look at the bioenergetics and from there i i translate all this um data that i get from the metabolic test into training zones right so i established this and also i obviously do with this with lactate that correlates very well with everything right and that's what i did translating this into training zones uh to to target each of the different bioenergetic components uh training zones are based in on heart rate based on power output based on speed right uh based on um and what's a growing machine uh even even we can do with with swimmers uh there's like a tap device right in their in their cup and then uh you know you can you can do that in the swim flow where you can say okay you know this is x amount of beats per minute in in the not in the heart because they cannot look at the heart but in this tap device you can program it and that's where you can go stripe by stripe you know stroke by stroke

and uh and you can follow the pace so this is kind of how i i i set up the training zones but let me understand this a little bit more clearly because a lot of the listeners will be familiar with the typical zone one through zone five construction and the way that that happens is typically there's an anchor point and i'm emphasizing and intentionally because it's usually a singular point it's functional threshold heart rate functional threshold power some lactate threshold pace or lactate threshold power it's usually some point some point and then the zones one through five or one through seven or one through 21 they seem to get more convoluted every year that i'm a coach there seems to be three or four zones added especially on the cycling side but most of the time the way that that construction happens is you find that point and then you extrapolate the zones and the ranges for each one of those zones around that point and around percentages based off of that point correct me if i'm wrong but what i'm hearing from you is is you're looking at this bioenergetic continuum as a whole and saying this this is the bio energetics at this heart rate or power output and i'm going to assign zone one to this this is the bio energetics that that is going on at this heart rate or power output and i'm going to assign it at that you're looking at it almost like through the whole continuum doing it that way as opposed to anchoring it off of a singular point am i understanding that correctly well um yes but i

also maybe i didn't i didn't explain myself and i apologize but um yes i look into this but i also look into these transition points okay which which mean there's a metabolic mean to that so for example the fat max right this is this is where you can translate it into a heart rate and these usually coincides with the first inflection point of lactate right uh away from um uh resting levels right um and usually coincide so this is a metabolic um event where you're you are uh simulating the fast twitch the slow twitch muscle fibers to the fullest right before the the the fast twitch muscle fibers are predominant got it so that bioenergetics and this is where in the slow twitch muscle fibers we have the highest mitochondrial number and this is where i that's used to stimulate into the fullest right uh then the other point that i look a lot is into like when fat disappears completely right fat oxidation and and that's where the predominant fuel is uh carbohydrates and at the same time that coincides with that second inflection point of lactate which traditionally we've been calling like the lactate threshold right um and it makes sense because fat disappears completely because the predominant fuel is carbohydrates and the mandatory obligatory byproduct of carbohydrate or glucose utilization is lactate

so that's where you see a lot of lactate production and this is why you know that there's a lot of glycolysis there and that's that's another point uh and this is how i i go around that i construct the the turning zones the other thing that we know is that blood lactate inhibits lipolysis so when you have a higher blood lactate concentrations uh lipolysis is inhibited so that's why you see that there's no fat and this is exactly what we see in the metabolic testing with two straights where you get to a high lactate concentration fat disappears uh and this is how around these points too which are metabolic events um represented by energetics that's how you construct training zones i think the important point with that is there are points plural versus a singular point which a lot of people will say okay well let's just determine the athlete's lactate threshold and we'll take 110 of it and make this range and we'll take 95 of it and make that range and that becomes a singular focus you're looking at this continuum of biological events bioenergetic events and say we're going to define the ranges by all of these events kind of in concert with each other almost yes exactly and also looking at what the specifics so for example the controversial point of the lactate threshold maximum lactate state state or ventures rate threshold you know or ftp right um there are many many uh ways to describe it but um you know there are many ways

let's say we stick to lactate threshold for example is your lactate threshold or or or functional um uh ftp right functional threshold power is for what for 10 minutes for five minutes for 40 minutes or for one hour yeah and this is where you throw a wrench into the whole thing right because when you do a marathon you're doing your marathon or your maximum lactate status state yeah you're doing your marathon and your threshold whether whether it's uh or quite slightly over two hours or it's three hours or it's four hours when you do a marathon you do a pace that you know that if you increase it like slightly bit you're going to blow up exactly right which is exact same concept when you do like a a 15 minute effort at your lactate threshold right you know that if you increase five watts you're going to blow up yeah right so this is the same concept it is that the uh the um yeah the intensities are different so so this is why the thing when people tell me yeah my lactate threshold is this or my ftp is that i said for what yeah exactly five minutes or for 40 minutes yeah and so the way i like the way that this is working out because the way that you describe this we've got a huge running audience and they're probably spinning their heads right now with all the cycling jargon but one of the i think one of the really important things that you mentioned is that working with all of these different sports gives you insight into the primary sport group that you end up working with and what i found fascinating with working

with a lot of cyclists not nearly to the level as you have obviously but because we generally have more what i'll say powerful tools to give us insight into what's going on yes we can take that knowledge and extrapolate it when the tools aren't as when when the tool when the tools aren't nearly as sophisticated nor are they as as as precise and trail running is a great example of that where we can't rely on pace it's hard to rely on heart rate just for a number of different factors that is going to be go beyond the scope of the scope of this podcast but a lot of athletes will want to wonder okay how can i get into these correct bioenergetic ranges when i don't have metabolic a metabolic testing be a really smart person to interpret that metabolic testing and see a tool that i can use from a day-to-day training perspective like a power meter that can tell me that i'm actually in these ranges like how how's somebody going to figure it out when they don't have those tools available to them i know that's a great question as well and and i mean when i get asked that question you know i give up an old school answer and and to my best knowledge um if i didn't have any of these tools i would i would try to understand very well the sensations and what happens uh what is the response of some uh signals of the body to these uh metabolic stressors so one of them is respiration right so um you know that the harder you breathe that the more actions

you need to to to to use and and that means there's a higher metabolic stress right so and i know it's old school but um wearing a heart monitor alone is not going to do much because you know you and i can can have the same heart rate and be the same age and uh you might be fully uh like politic and unglical it right so different metabolic states so heart rate doesn't give you a whole lot um the whole 220 manage your age doesn't it has never been even uh uh proven scientifically even you know it's observational but anyways uh but the breathing i i pay a lot of attention to that um and in fact i mean i've done i've done so many tests myself right and i was before testing others i was my own guinea pig right um so i know myself very well so i guide myself through my breathing sensations right so the whole thing is like if i'm if i'm breathing very easy and i can keep up a conversation with you at this pace i'm probably doing zone one right if if i'm if it's taking me a little effort you know to to talk to you um i i so i we can keep talking but with some effort that's probably your zone too right if you barely talk in poof you have to cut cut your breath you know every fourth fifth word uh you're away from your zone

two your problems in zone three if you can't speak at all definitely you're in zone four right um and if you're yeah if you you're at your eye cross right here zone five or zone six right but those are simple things that obviously it's not as as real as or as accurate as doing in that laboratory test but to be honest even it looks like old school it's it's just real uh or as accurate as it can be without tools and going back to your your protege uh tade i heard and you can confirm this if this is true that on the key time trial where he won the tour de france he didn't have any data available to him he he couldn't hear the radio coming through and he wasn't he didn't have a power meter on his bike is that true i absolutely yeah and we decided the night before we said hey let's not use it let's go for it so we we have um we have a software you know where we can look into the the very precise power output that you need to do for every single section of the time trial and we can build and model it and predict and uh and we could we could use it but we decided not to for for a bunch of reasons uh first of all is that sometimes power meters they're not very very extremely accurate and especially when you use in this space specifically we have a road race i mean a road bike for the first part and in the client we have a second

mic so we we're working with two power meters and it's difficult that both read perfectly so imagine that the software is telling you that oh you need to go at 380 watts and you go at 380 watts but maybe it's reading five percent off or three percent off it's a big deal it's a big deal so you're actually going at 365 or 370 so you're losing time or maybe it's the opposite imagine that yeah you're going 380 and actually you're going at 400 or in your walk right so that's where like we we decided no no no and and and with today when we train we do very very millimetrically you know everything is very well measured day by day by day but when it comes to the competition we went old school because um we we had a good conversation the night before and say look today you have nothing to lose uh the second uh position of the the tour is secured whether you blow up or whether you do a good time trial or not you're going to be poignant and be that you're going to have the young jersey right so let's go for it and that is that that's the thing too that's his mentality you know for this he's a beast out there you cannot tell hey today you know take it easy here he's gonna go for it as we see you know when he goes he goes and in the race he transforms and that's what he did he had nothing to lose and he said okay in the flat section i'm gonna go for it and and maybe i can get to the bottom of the climb and and have a

much faster time than uh roglitz right and and that when roglitz gets that reference he's gonna freak out and i'm gonna mess up with his mind right and that's exactly what happened and then if i blow up i blow up but if i don't hey maybe it works and he didn't blow up and roglitz blew up mentally and physically it's the other thing you know a lot of people say oh he did an amazing time trial but unfortunately for rugby it's he did his worst time trial in years too right so it was both right but it was not just that they did a fantastic time trial i mean roglitz was like six or seven that day you know where he should have won it or be second right that's that's the whole thing you know i saw another coming from one of the jumbo guys from van eyart um where uh he he he he was kind of surprised but you know he he went up there with a time trial how can you climb you know with a time trial and think that you're going to be faster than someone who did a very fast uh uh climb i mean change your bike and use a climbing bike you know that's that's not possible and and also the other thing too is that we had prepared that time trial that they had gone to the place in in july and uh you know we did a recognition we did two times on the same day one just to recall the the place and second you know time trial speed right and we practiced uh the change of bike several times so we really

prepared for that time trial and so he knew every corner every area and um so it was not just random that is it a good friend i don't know we we knew that of course i'm so glad i got to hear that story straight from the horse's mouth i hope the listeners appreciate that the most fascinating thing to me in the whole or or or deal and go is you have an athlete that is at the most like this is the like could be the height of their career he could go on win five more tour de francis who knows right this could be the most pressure-packed event of his entire career he's been training in an incredibly meticulous scientific way all the way from the training ranges to getting the physiological testing to all the recon that you just mentioned is picture perfect precision yet on the on the deciding day and everybody knows it's the deciding day we say you know what we're taking all this technology we're throwing it out the window and we're just saying go as hard as you can and win like i just love i just love that concept because it shows the beauty of sport and kind of going back going back to like our original conversation of we can have it's awesome to have all of this information to help tailor the the training for athletes in terms of training ranges and time and intensity and volume and all these things that all these buttons that we push as coaches but at the end of the day athletes still

have to go out and do the work in this case at the end of the day the athletes still have to go out and compete right they still have to compete absolutely and this is the beautiful the beauty of the sport and the beauty of the champions you know champions that come out in these situations or in all sports like so many examples come to my mind you know like you know the famous uh um final of nba i forgot what you with michael jordan you know everything was precisely and i'm sure they have the statistics and they have and and leading into that game they did train very well they they did they practice and practice and practice the techniques but it gets to the game and and jordan said hey i'll take care of this today just give me the ball give me the ball i'll take care of it right and this is what we see also with that ronaldo for messi in soccer and or we see with uh um um gosh i forgot um um tom brady right yeah you know he's like hey hey guys just give me the ball give me the ball i'll do my magic today this is one for right this is what we're seeing the beauty of the sport that these natural champions that come out in in the most unexpected ways i love it i love it put me on the bike that's all you need yeah exactly we're gonna leave it at that i i can't tell you how much i i appreciate your time like i said i've been enamored with your career way before all of this tour de france hoopla like you you're you're you're one of the outstanding people in the world and one of the very few sports scientists that can take their intimate scientific knowledge and blend it into coaching which is not easy and you realize how difficult that is as well like coaching and science

so it's those are two hard worlds to to kind of blend together and obviously you found a really good way to do it and the success is the uh is is the proof of all that so thank you thank you thank you for your time we'll have to have you back on again once your schedule clears up towards the fall or something like that well thank you i would love to and i appreciate your invitation and and yeah i mean this is something that i keep learning every day and and the more you the more you learn the more you know and the more you do you realize that you to keep learning and and yeah it's the other thing too is that you know you need to fail you know i i have had a lot of failures too right and this is like why you keep learning and and improving and learning from the mistakes and keep moving forward right and um and and and and keep learning you know and and you know after 25 years uh you start getting good at some things you know but more for you know and i mean i can't believe i i am saying this because when you're young you're brave and you think that everything is about knowledge and you know everything right but the older you get as i am now the more you realize that the experience is a big factor right i know more now from the experience and from the knowledge probably because you get to see a lot of things right and make a lot of mistakes but when you're young you make mistakes and don't realize right and and later and you know you know later on in your career say oh my gosh i can't believe i was training that way i was telling them to eat this wire or something like that right but and i made my own mistakes when i was a cyclist i i never got to be a top level cyclist i i i was professional in

the u.s for two years but very low level and and nothing but anyways the whole thing is like i i was one of the top amateurs in the basque country before coming to study my undergrad in the u.s but i was very good um but i didn't know how to train i over trained i overcooked myself i didn't know how to eat i made so many mistakes as an athlete and and i and and this has helped me a lot all these huge mistakes that i made i see this happening in so many athletes now right so this is what has helped me to to to understand from my own mistakes and still i keep learning every day and as the more tools that we have to measure human body the more we understand and this would be the way it is you know and and 10 years later from now i mean we look back to today and say oh my gosh we were thinking about this way that's the beauty of all this i can't believe we were recommending 30 grams of carbohydrate at one point i love it you always gotta learn that is spoken like a true coach and a true scientist that has been in the game for a long long time 20 years from now we'll be saying stuff that i can't believe we're you know i can't believe we designed this this way we'll look back on this podcast we'll both look like idiots i'm sure so we'll have to run it we'll have to run it back really quick before before we go you're an awesome twitter follow i i i learned a lot from your tour yeah from your twitter feed where can people find you there i'm sorry what's your twitter what is

your twitter handle where can people find you dr inigo and i'll include uh links to that in the show notes as well some of the relative or relevant research that we went over thanks again i really appreciate it well thank you very much i really appreciate it jason and yeah congratulations for your podcast and uh the work you do which is crucial right to to uh to send a lot of uh of the information you gather from a lot of people and yourself as well to the audience because you know you do a great work at uh helping in the education of many athletes and coaches and it's very necessary especially nowadays we're we're more bombarded by a lot of stuff so i appreciate your work oh thank you very much that means a lot to me i appreciate it thank you and there you have it folks there you go i still cannot believe that inigo's and i's paths have not crossed yet we have lived in the same town worked in the same town for i don't know how many years and played in the same pools and yet this is the first conversation that we've actually had and i absolutely loved it so thank you inigo you are welcome back on the podcast anytime you want i'm sure the guests will appreciate it a lot thank you to all the listeners out there if you have not had the chance to do so head on over to apple podcast and give this podcast a rating or review it means a lot to me personally when i see those reviews come through appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails