Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - How To Work Out Less And Get Fitter, The Secrets of Sustainable Fitness, What We Can All Learn From The World’s Best Athletes & Understanding The Stress Load of Exercise with Professor Stephen Seiler #422

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Whether your fitness goal is completing an Ironman race, jogging a 5K, or simply tackling the stairs without getting out of breath, today’s guest has some surprising news on how you can get there quicker, by putting in less – yes, less – effort.   World-renowned sports scientist Professor Stephen Seiler joins us all the way from Norway, where he’s a professor in Sports Science at the University of Agder. Stephen specialises in studying elite-level sports performance. He’s spent years taking a 360-degree look at how top cyclists, rowers, cross-country skiers, orienteers, and distance runners, perform at such a high level without getting sick or injured.   As well as 100 peer reviewed publications, he regularly shares his findings on his YouTube channel and his X (formerly known as Twitter) feed. And, as his research cascades down to people like you and me, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what’s tried and tested in the elite, is equally if not more meaningful for us.   During this conversation, you’ll learn the 80:20 rule that Stephen has observed to be the most effective for performance and health. He explains why hard workouts are a stressor on the body, putting us in fight-or-flight mode – so they’ll increase your risk of burnout if the rest of your life is stressful too.   There are various ways to measure intensity, including lab-based tests. But Stephen explains his simple traffic light method – green, yellow and red – and what it feels like to be in each zone. He also explains his model of frequency, duration and intensity as a way of scaling your fitness up or down, whatever your starting point.   There are all sorts of health, wellbeing, metabolic and performance benefits to be had from staying in the green zone more. It’s something I’m discovering for myself over the past few years and I’ve got to say that I’m feeling fantastic as a result. I absolutely love Stephen’s work and I really hope this fascinating conversation helps get the message out that you can achieve a lot more by doing a little less.  Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Find out more about my NEW Journal here https://drchatterjee.com/journal Thanks to our sponsors: https://shopify.com/livemore https://vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://calm.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/422 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

No pain, no gain suggests that the only way I can make a gain is if there's a lot of pain, which suggests that every day has to be really hard. The logical assumptions that emerge from no pain, no gain are not valid. They're not true. And that's what we have to get away from. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

Whether your fitness goal is completing an Ironman, jogging a 5k or simply tackling the stairs without getting out of breath, today's guest has some surprising news on how you can get there quicker by putting in less effort. Yes, that's right. I did say less effort. My guest is world-renowned sports scientist, Professor Stephen Seiler. Now, Stephen is an American who has been living in Norway for nearly 30 years. He is the past Vice Rector for Research and Innovation and past Dean of the Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. Now, Stephen has spent decades studying how elite athletes

are able to perform at such a high level without getting sick or injured. And as well as 100 peer-reviewed publications, Stephen regularly shares his findings on his YouTube channel and his ex, formerly known as Twitter, Feet. And as his research cascades down to people like you and me, it's becoming increasingly clear that what's tried and tested in the elite is equally, if not more, meaningful for us. During our conversation, you will learn about the 80-20 rule that Stephen has observed to be the most effective for performance and health. He also explains why hard, intense workouts are a stressor on the body, putting us into fight or flight mode,

and thus potentially increasing our risk of burnout and getting sick if the rest of our lives are too stressful or we don't allow adequate time to recover. He also explains his simple but very practical traffic light methods that can help us all identify at what intensity we're currently exercising and what it feels like to be in each of the zones, red, yellow, and green. In fact, there are all sorts of health, well-being, metabolic, and performance benefits to be had from staying in the green zone more. It's something I have discovered for myself over the past few years, and this realization has significantly changed the way I train my body, with multiple knock-on benefits for my physical health,

stress levels, and overall resilience. Please note that in the first hour of this podcast, overall resilience. Please note that in the first hour of this podcast, on occasion, our chat does get a little technical. If you're struggling to follow, please do stay with the conversation, as the more you hear these concepts, the more you're going to understand them. And in the second half, the conversation becomes a lot more practical. I am a big fan of Stephen's work. He is one of the global leaders in this field. And this is a fascinating conversation filled with fresh insights and practical implications. I hope you enjoy listening. Stephen, you have spent a few decades now studying the world's best athletes. Is there anything that the man on the street can learn from them?

And if so, what is it? Oh, that's a great question. And the short answer is absolutely there's something we can learn from them. And then the question is, well, why? They train so much more. But because they train so much more, because they have such clear performance goals, they have learned the art of the long game. They've learned because they're in it over years. You know, the career of an endurance athlete is years of development. So they have to figure out,

all right, how do I create a sustainable program that helps me to reach the highest levels of adaptation, the highest levels of performance and stay healthy? Well, that's kind of what we all are trying to do is how do we develop a sustainable activity process, lifestyle, where exercise is part of it, eating is part of it, sleep is part of it, our work is part of it, but it's sustainable. The stress levels are manageable. And so, we've learned from them, and you can also use the the analogy of the Formula One racing circuit. These big automobile companies,

they spend millions having a Formula One team, and they don't do it out of altruism or wanting to provide the viewers of TV with some extra fun. They do it because it is an innovation arena for them. And five years after they've developed anti-lock brakes or the buttons on the steering wheel, where do they end up? In the family car. Because it scales down. But no Formula One race car has ever been built by taking the family car and saying, well, let's scale it up. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the elite performance is scaled down because they've had to learn how the body works when it's under high demands. And then we can move down. Now, we're not going to train as much, but we can learn from how they're managing stress,

how they're using intensity and duration and frequency, because those are the levers we have in training. How often I train, how long I go, and how hard I go. Yeah. So we have these levers that we can adjust and kind of play with to find a sustainable combination. Yeah. Well, that's what they do.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things you have learned from them is that 80% of their training is at low intensities. I really want you to speak to that. Before you do, though, I think there's a wider point here about endurance that I was thinking about this morning before you arrived in the studio. I was thinking, well, life is a game of endurance, right? These guys are endurance athletes, right? They're training for a marathon

or, you know, the Tour de France, whatever it might be. But we want to endure in our own lives. Anything good comes from endurance. Our relationships come from the long game. Our work performance comes from the long game, right? So being able to learn these principles of sustainability and endurance actually seem very relevant to all of us. Oh, yeah, that's a great point. And we've talked a little bit about some of our heroes like Kipchoge and Kylian Jornet and so forth. And what they share is they share that they have routines. They develop sustainable routines that allow them to be both father, mother, athlete, and so forth.

So that's one aspect. And they have to, you know, they're not different from the rest of us in that regard. These super athletes, they also have to think. So yes, it's all about long game. I often, if I'm given a lecture, I'll say, all right, how many times are you going to train this year? And that number is going to be, if they're regular

recreational athletes, it can range from 150 for the three-day-a-week athlete to 600 for a high-performance triathlete. This is hours a year. No, 600 training sessions. Okay. 600 times, 500 times, they will walk out the door with kit on and execute a training session. So that in itself is an endurance process. You have to have a sustainable routine, right? Just getting out the door 400 times in the year, more than once a day on average for most high-performance athletes. That in itself is, it's long game. You know, it has to be sustainable. What's so fascinating about that, Stephen, is if we think about that outside the athletic arena,

if we think about the workforce across the world, we know that rates of burnout are on the rise. There was a report published recently that 88% of the UK workforce has experienced some degree of burnout over the past two years. Now, I honestly don't know if that sample size is reflective of the entire population, because 88% is a lot, right? But even if it's only 50%, as a society, that says to me, we are struggling to endure in a sustainable way. While you were speaking, I was thinking, yeah, that says we're struggling. In my mind, I use that exact word. We're struggling. And we're struggling to meet the demands.

And that's what stress is defined as. It's not what you do, but how you respond to it. You know, Celia, Hans Celia, who brought stress into the medical lexicon, he studied it for years. He studied rats and, you know, he didn't really study sports. But he struggled with his own definition of stress. But ultimately, it transformed. And he says, stress is not what happens to you, but it's how you respond to it. And so to a certain degree, we can manage things differently

with the same load, you know, the same number of days we have to go to work each day or week, the same number of workouts, but we can manage how we execute them, how we manage that stress, if that makes sense, that challenge. And so that's part of, I think, some of the things we've learned from high-performance athletes is the work still has to be done. There are no shortcuts. And we can learn from that, too. We still got to get up every day and go to work. But there are tools, there are techniques, there is an intensity distribution that we maybe can use that can make that load more manageable. Well, let's talk about this 80-20 rule that you discovered when observing these elite athletes.

And I also very much appreciate that you say that you didn't create this. No, no. Right? You coined the term maybe, but you didn't create this. You simply observed what the very best were doing. That's right. That's exactly right. I use the term polarized. I probably read some book on astronomy at the time or something and was influenced by it, you know. But they were, it was the athletes and the coaches because they're experimental.

When you have a very clear outcome that you have to achieve, run faster for 10,000 meters, that gives you a quite clear outcome. And you say, all right, if I train more high intensity, does that help? If I train longer duration, does that tend to help? longer duration. Does that tend to help? So, the 80-20 has evolved in the crucible of having very clear performance outcomes that you have to achieve, right? You have to run faster than 27 minutes to be world-class in the 10,000 meters now, for example, or you're probably just not going to win an Olympic gold. So, they have these clear outcomes, and it's a kind of a Darwinian process. They can try more intervals. They can try more volume. They can try training three times a day.

And then they're slowly, their coaches, through experience, they're going to settle in on a methodology. And what we saw was is that, hmm, interesting, the rowers and the runners and the cyclists who really don't talk to each other, they've all landed on basically the same distribution. And in my mind, that suggested, okay, there must be some universality here, some universal truth, a self-organizing process. And that's what got me really excited about it. So let's talk about that 80% low intensity, right? Because I believe that if you're not familiar with this research, if you haven't been following your work or Inigo San Milan's work or Inigo Sammeland's work or other researchers in this field, you may assume that if you want to be really fast at running, let's say, that you need to practice being fast at running. Running really fast.

Yeah. So every time you go out, you need to be running fast because that's how you get faster. But I think what your research is showing is that that's absolutely not necessarily the case. No. You know, in Norwegian, they have this expression that you're either making the cake or you're eating the cake, which sounds kind of strange in this context. But the point of it is,

is making the cake is doing the work that stimulates adaptations. And it's a long process. Eating the cake is doing the work that stimulates adaptations. And it's a long process. Eating the cake. You can't eat more cake than you have. And they balance this and say these high-intensity sessions, these hard workouts are costly. Yes, they're important, but you can't do too many of them. And they have to be balanced against your base, your basic capacity.

So they have figured out that, for example, in Norway, they're very good in cross-country skiing, right? And they will say that we need to train about 100 times a year hard, including races. That's their rule of thumb. Now you say, well, 100 times a year, that's a lot. Yeah, but they train 500 times a year hard, including races. That's their rule of thumb. Now you say, well, 100 times a year, that's a lot. Yeah, but they train 500 times a year. Wow. So, but they have a rule of thumb that if we're gonna need to keep our athletes healthy enough

and they're getting out the door often enough that they're gonna end up accumulating 100 hard sessions with a background of 400 more that are low intensity. So that's just their rule of thumb. And it says something about the key is going to be what? Stay healthy. Don't get hurt. Because if you don't stay healthy, you're not going to be able to achieve that frequency of training. Right? So that's the starting point is, is, hey, we've got to be able to get out there every day. And the only way to get out there every day. And the only way to get out there every day is it's got to be sustainable.

And if we do too much hard high intensity, the recovery times get longer, the risk of injury gets higher, and on average, it doesn't pay off. We'll get into defining these intensity zones in just a moment. Before we do that, I want to ask you about high intensity or HIIT training, because over the past few years, HIIT training has become all the rage. And so what I have seen in clinical practice over the years is people who are super stressed at work, have a lot of stress in their home life, a lot of responsibilities, children, parents, whatever it might be. And they hear how good HIIT training is for mitochondrial function, for the aging process, for metabolic health, whatever it might be. They go, right, I don't have much time. So when I have 20 minutes, I'm going to go hard for those 20 minutes. Right. So they could easily, let's say they train three times a week. I have seen people,

I've seen patients over the years who will literally do all of their three sessions super, super hard. And I see them getting sick. I see them breaking down. I see them getting injured. And I also see them struggling to lose weight because they don't realize the impact that chronic stress, chronic unmanaged stress has on their ability to lose weight. So I wonder if you have any comments on that, whether you think that's a problem. We could go all day on this, but, and I'm part of the problem in the sense that I am a sports scientist and traditionally for all those decades that you say that I've worked, you know, what do we do? We bring people into the laboratory and we train them and interval training

is more fun to do as a research project than saying well come on in and you're going to train for two hours low steady state we're going to measure what's happening you know so there is a tendency for sports science to we also want to do things that are kind of more exciting and it's more exciting to watch somebody crumble during an interval session than it is to watch them you know say hi this is cool because most of what's going on for the athlete out in the forest is they're just kind of going, doing their thing or the cyclist. So we have contributed to the problem in the sense that interval training is more popular to do research on. It's easier to get published, you know. And so we've created this little industry

of comparing little details of what's the perfect interval training session. So there's a bias almost built into the system. So it's more fun to do research on high intensity. It's more likely to get published. Therefore, the media are more likely to pick up and disseminate this information. And so we are seeing a small fraction of the work, but thinking that this is what we have to do. That's the whole thing. Right. So we're seeing the part of the big iceberg

that's visible. Well, we're going to change that with this conversation soon. Okay. We're going to try and change that. So let's go back to this 80% then at low intensity. What does low intensity mean? Yeah, in layman's terms, if someone says, well, where do I need to be in this so-called low intensity, which I often, I use colors because, you know, I'm just a simple guy. And green is, you know, green, yellow, red is what I've tended to say. All right, so green zone training.

If they take off running, and it takes a few minutes to kind of come up to speed. Your body warms up, literally. But from about 15 minutes into that run that's going to last, say, an hour, the heart rate should stabilize. It shouldn't just keep drifting up, up, up. It should flatten out. And they should come into a routine where they're just like, they're able to think about other stuff. They're able to be distracted by the flowers and the trees and the bees around them. They're not having to concentrate to maintain that intensity. They should also find that they can talk with a friend. Now, you don't need to

run a long conversation all the time you're running. That would maybe be stressful too, but you can. That's saying something about the ventilation going on, that you can share sentences with somebody running beside you and say, well, did you see the game last night and so forth. So that's another working person's kind of measure. And when they're finished with that one hour of running, they kind of just, let's go eat. Is dinner ready? So they're still hungry.

They're ready to go straight to the dinner table, usually. And you say, well, what in the heck does that have to do with anything? Well, it's an indirect indicator of whether or not they've turned on what we call that sympathetic stress response. Because in that classic fight or flight stress response, what happens when we have to run from the tiger, our body says, send blood to the muscles,

take it away from the stomach, right? We've got to shift our reserves. So appetite and things like that are reduced for a period after a high-stress workout. You can't even look at food for the first hour after a really tough interval session, right? But if you've been doing that easy three-hour bike ride or easy run for an hour or 90 minutes, you can go straight to the dinner table because you haven't turned on that big stress response. That's a nice indicator, but it's one. So flat heart rate, can talk together, and you can go straight to the dinner table after. You mentioned flat heart rates. Not everyone, of course, measures their heart rate

when they're training. So in terms of something that's really practical for people, you're saying a lot of this low intensity work is being done so that whilst you're doing it, if you were with someone else, you could have a conversation with them. Yeah. Yeah. So I think some people call that the talk test, maybe. The talk test. Now, the talk test is not perfect, but it's often no one tool, no one measure is perfect. But when we put it together, there are some people that will manage

to be able to talk when they're working too hard because they're just good at it, and others don't want to talk at all. But that is a nice test that we can add. And so you don't have to measure heart rate, but it can be nice to do sometimes. You don't have to measure lactate, but it can be a wake-up call. You can find out, oh, I'm training. I'm going harder than I thought I was, right? So all of these are tools in the toolbox that we can use.

So people who are interested in health and well-being may have come across this concept of Zone 2 training online or in podcasts over the past few years, right? And there's many ways of defining these zones, right? So let's, I really want, I really, really want this episode to be helpful for people where they can actually start using the principles in their own life, whether it's a 45 year old mum who's super busy and wants to lose a bit of weight and, you know, support her longevity as she gets older, or whether it's someone who is training for a half marathon. I think there are lots of similarities. So can we start off with the three zone model,

which I think is the one that most of the research has been done on. You have just outlined, I think, zone one, which is that low intensity zone. What's the difference between that then and zone two, which in this model is medium intensity and zone three, which is high intensity. Could you maybe explain? Yeah. And this is unfortunate, you know, because, but we need a terminology. We've got to agree. We need a shared mental model as we often talk about. If we're going to say zone two, then we need to know what zone one and three and four and so forth. So, yes, in the physiology world, when we publish, we typically use three zones because there are two demarcations, two physiological events that we're able to measure in the laboratory or even in the field now.

What are we doing? We're slowly increasing the pace or the power on a bike or during running where we have really good control of that. And then say every five minutes, we're taking a blood lactate measurement. We're noting the heart rate. We're asking them what their perceived exertion is, the Borg scale. So we're doing what we call an incremental test. And then we're trying to find this point where flat suddenly there's a break there is a inflection in blood lactate an inflection in breathing in ventilation volume the body is transitioning from one state to another i've done these tests uh one whilst running a year ago more recently on

a bike at the local university and And it's really interesting. Yes, it's great to have all the measurements and you have a technician, you know, doing your blood lactate every five minutes or whatever it might be. But it's that scale of RPE, rate of perceived exertion. You can tell when, you know, you're going up gradually in pace and there's suddenly a pace where you know significantly that you're working harder, even though it might just be a smidgen, smidgen facet, you kind of know. Yeah.

And for those who are familiar with Borg scale, which was invented by a Swedish psychologist, Gunnar Borg, it went from six to 20 in the original scale, which sounds kind of silly, but it was because six corresponded to a 60 heart rate, resting heart rate, and 20 corresponded to 200, a max heart rate.

I always wondered why it was that. I always thought it was peculiar. It was just kind of a scaling based on heart rate. But very typically, when the person doing the test crosses over into the teens on that scale, 14, say, 13, 14, then that often corresponds with that first crack, that first nonlinear break point that we're talking about. Now, Stephen, I want to make sure that this conversation is relevant for everyone,

including people who have no interest in going into a university lab to measure their lactate levels. Which is most people. Which is most people, right. But I think this is useful to really understand the theory of what's going on in the body. Now, you mentioned lactate. A lot of people won't know what lactate is. So I wonder if you could explain that, please. Yeah. Well, our bodies can use different fuels for exercise. We normally use a mix. We can use fat. We can use carbohydrate. Those are the two main fuel sources. And the fat we have always plenty of. Even the leanest athlete you can imagine has essentially an unlimited supply of fat. And it's a very efficient fuel, but it's kind of, it's low octane. If we were talking about gas, It's not going to be the type of fuel that supports the really high intensity, but it's that nice, steady diesel. And then you have the glucose and the glycogen. Well, that fuel source can support high-intensity work, but it is a perishable resource. We drain that tank during exercise.

And when we do a lot of that high intensity with that carbohydrate being broken down, then lactate gets generated. And the lactate molecule itself is not dangerous, it's not poisonous, but it comes along with something called hydrogen, these hydrogen ions. And the pH of the muscle goes down

and that makes it tougher. Muscle contraction becomes inhibited. We have to work harder. So we're measuring the lactate because we can, but what's doing the damage or what is causing this perception that things are getting tougher, I'm having to work harder, at least in large part, it's hydrogen ions that are accumulating. So when we're in low intensity,

so we can have a conversation with someone in the three zone model called zone one, right? Then my understanding is that lactate is being produced by the body, but it's being cleared at the same rate. So it effectively stays the same. It's basically staying within the muscle. So some of it can be produced in one muscle and just go over to another muscle that's working

less. And so we can kind of in-house within the muscle operate. And then when it starts to go up a bit, what's happening is it's now moving into the bloodstream. And that's why when we're measuring it in your blood, you can now start to see it pick up. So low intensity is when you are working at a rate at which your lactate is pretty much the same. It's pretty constant. And that feels easy. That feels that you can have a conversation. And that's where the elites are doing most of their training, 80% of their training. Yeah. And to make things more interesting, because they're elite, because they've done so much training, they've got a lot of talent, that zone for them is big. We've got to keep that in mind, that they can work across a pretty broad spectrum of

running speeds and still be green. Yeah. I think it's a really simple way for us to think about our training no matter who we are. I think that three-zone model works really well. And one of the kind of core messages coming out of your work is that we need to spend most of our time in this green zone. And if we do that, we'll get all kinds of performance benefits, metabolic health benefits, just health and wellbeing benefits, frankly, full stop, because it's a low stress zone as well. So we're not generating cortisol and adrenaline. And I want to talk a bit about the stress response and how it

affects the training, but let's keep with lactate just for the moment, right? I'm trying to keep this simple for everyone. I don't want anyone getting lost, right? So we've got the green zone. That's where we want to be most of the time. Then we've got the yellow zone, right? So in the yellow zone, your lactate now is starting to accumulate at a rate above which you can get rid of it, right? Well, no.

And that's good that you said it that way because that allows us to be very specific. That yellow zone is this in-between state where now, yes, we're producing more lactate. It's leaking out of the muscle. It's getting into the bloodstream and we can measure it. That's when we take a drop. But within a range, it can restabilize.

So I was like at 150 watts, but now I go to 250 watts and I can restabilize, but it's at a higher lactate. Now you mentioned watts there. I know you're a cyclist, right? So for people who aren't cyclists, that's a power rating on your bike.

Yeah, analogous to a pace in running. So basically you're saying that at a certain pace, at a low pace, everything's stable, lactate's stable. And then if you keep increasing the pace, you'll creep into the yellow zone. Lactate will go up, but it can also stabilize. And the reason it can restabilize is because lactate is fuel.

It can be used by the heart. It can be taken up by the liver. It can be taken up by other muscles. So it is a wonderful little two carbon molecule that can move around the body and go where it can be then used. It's not poison. Yeah. Right. So in that yellow zone, what we're seeing is yes, lactate is creeping out of the muscles where it's being produced. But there are other places where it can be absorbed or taken up. And so we can get this restabilization. OK, so that's we often call that second zone, that yellow zone. We call it threshold zone. It's in that threshold range.

It's not a point, but it's a range. So maybe between, for me, I know it's about between 225 watts and 300 watts. So when you're on your bike, your indoor bike or your outdoor bike, and you've got a power meter, you know that you've got the 75 watt range. And if you stick within it, you're probably going to be in that yellow zone. Yeah. But if I'm on the lower end of it, I'm going to be able to do that longer than if I'm on the upper end of it.

Okay. And so for someone who doesn't want to do testing, how might they know if they're in that yellow zone? The mental wellness app Calm are also sponsoring today's show. Do you ever feel like your brain is on overdrive and your mind is constantly racing? The plans, worries and to-do lists can often feel never-ending. Well, Calm can help your mind take a break from the noise by softening anxiety symptoms in the moment and helping you cope with day-to-day stresses. Calm is the number one app for sleep and meditation, giving you the power to calm your mind and change your life. Now,

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of 40% off a Calm premium subscription at calm.com forward slash live more. Go to calm.com forward slash live more for 40% off unlimited access to calm's entire library that's calm.com forward slash live more they should be able to stay there for many minutes, for one thing. So it should, you know, you say, well, that's not very useful, many minutes. But we don't always agree on exactly how many. But it'll be something like you should at least be able to stay there for 30, 40 minutes. And often a cyclist well-trained would be able to be in that zone for a couple of hours. Okay, so this is really interesting. So in terms of paces,

the green zone, the low intensity zone, the zone, which you would say we should spend most of our time in, it feels relatively easy. We can have a conversation and we can probably go on there for hours, two, three, four hours if we had to. Yeah. I mean, for, for most of us running, you're not going to want to run three hours, know but that's not because so much the intensity but you just it's so much ballistic it's you know just a lot of pounding on the body could that be like walking up a gentle incline yeah and but you could do it like people might know if they hike um if they go out for the day with their friends or you know often a family will will go after Sunday lunch for a walk out in nature, let's say. Absolutely. And purposeful.

You know, they're kind of, you know, they're not going to just every five minutes stop, you know, but they would be holding a kind of a steady, good walking pace. And they're chatting and talking about their weekend. That's kind of that low intensity where you want them to be. Yeah. But then when you go up a notch, you can only really maintain that unless you're a trained elite cyclist. And I guess this is a rule of thumb rather than an absolute, but you can only really maintain it for about 40 minutes, maybe an hour, something like that. And then it's too much for you. You would have to slow down. Yeah. Your heart rate, it's getting tougher and tougher

because now it's not a steady state. We like to use that term, that green zone is what we call steady state. Things are pretty flat. But when you're in that yellow zone, it's slowly feeling harder and harder. The body's having to mobilize more and more because you're running out of glycogen,

muscle fibers are getting fatigued and so forth. So it's a non-sustainable intensity in the long run, but we need to do some of it. I'm not saying we don't, but number one, it will turn on some stress responses. It'll take longer to recover from. And particularly when we also go into that third zone, that really high intensity where now heart rate is above 90%. Often we're really breathing. We're counting minutes. Minutes.

Yeah, we're down. I mean, this is the other interesting thing is when you're in that green zone, you can kind of forget the time. You say, oh, wow, I've already done 40 minutes, right? Because it feels quite sustainable. Then you get into that yellow zone, the brain, the mind kind of starts to zero in. You start to scan your body as you're working.

You have to be more purposeful. You have to be more focused. Where in the green zone, you could be talking with your pals. You can be thinking about other things and so forth. The brain can kind of go on autopilot. But there's this inward focusing that starts to happen in that threshold, that yellow zone. And becomes particularly, you know, you really have to focus in the red zone. So let's then progress that up to the red zone.

So this is the really, really intense zone. And lactate, what, is just continuing to go up here? Is that right? That's right. It can no longer be, you can't remove, the lactate production exceeds the maximum capacity for what we call elimination. So then it's just a one-way, it's a one-way trip towards fatigue, towards a point where you will say, I'm done. And is that typically the sort of pace that you can maintain for minutes, maybe five minutes, 10 minutes, something like that? And that's the typical pace where we will break things up into pieces. We'll break the pie up into what we call intervals.

That's when this interval training comes in. And so then the coach or the fitness center will say, okay, today we're going to do six times three minutes. So they're saying that you're going to do little bouts of work for three minutes. They're going to be quite hard, but then you're going to get a short recovery period. You won't fully recover, but you'll recover some. And so it will allow you six times three minutes. What's that add up to? 18.

But if I told you today you're going to do 18 minutes at that exact same pace, you wouldn't be able to do it. So you have to rest. Yeah. So you're now at an intensity that by breaking it up into smaller pieces, you can accumulate more time. Now, why is it a problem

if people are doing the majority of their workouts in the yellow or red, as I believe most people are? Well, because these intensities activate that sympathetic stress response. And lots of research shows that stress response activation can happen because of work demands. It can happen because of a terrible life experience. There's many things that activate the stress response activation can happen because of work demands. It can happen because of a terrible life experience. There's many things that activate the stress response, just so we're clear. But in training, we activate it, and what it tells us is the recovery time from that workout will be longer. And now let's calibrate.

As humans, we're on a kind of a 24-hour cycle, right? We eat, we sleep, we work, we repeat, and it's 24 hours. So if I'm going to do hundreds of training sessions or 150, three times a week, then on average, I need to recover so that I can wake up every day kind of back at the start. Right? I need to be, you know, the car needs to be recharged. If you can imagine that you couldn't charge your car overnight, it wasn't enough time. And every day you walk out to the car and it was at 90 and now you walk out and it's at 80 and now it's at 70%. Eventually, you get to the point where, darn it, I don't have enough battery power.

Right? Well, it's the same thing with recovery. So, on average, we need to be kind of fully recovering in 24 hours. Now, we can have days where we push extra. We can have the day where we do the high-intensity interval session. But if we do it every day, we're going to go into a deficit. We're not going to be able to recover. So that's where this 80-20 comes in, is that we, on average, are keeping our recovery clock sustainable. Yes, sometimes we're taking a little extra out of the bank, but we're able to put it back over the coming days. Yeah, the stress load of training and exercise is something that I don't think gets enough attention.

I really don't. We know that exercise is a great way of managing stress as well. It helps us become more resilient to stress. But at the same time, it kind of depends on, you know, how much are we doing? What's the intensity? How long is it going on for? All that kind of depends on how much are we doing? What's the intensity? How long is it going on for all that kind of stuff? And from what you're saying, Stephen, if we think about these three zones,

green, easy, yellow, medium, red, hard, most of us are doing too much in yellow and red. We can almost make this a two-zone model as well, couldn't we, if we're looking at it just through the lens of stress? I've said exactly the same thing. So you and I should be on the same team here. That's exactly right. But why I think this is so important, we've spoken about burnout, we've spoken about sustainability for life,

let alone for an Olympic medal, right? Just to be able to interact with life week after week, year after year, decade after decade, right? And I know that people are feeling as though they're under huge amounts of stress these days. I see it all the time. And I don't think people realize that their training is often contributing to that stress load. And so I think almost this two-zone model is actually rather beautiful for people because it's like, okay, I'll give you an example. I'll give you a really practical example of this. In the UK, and I know in many countries around the world, there's something called Park Run. I talk about Park Run all the time on this show because A,

I love it. B, I think it's something that a lot of my audience do regularly, right? Which is a 5K every Saturday morning in community. Some people try and race it, some people walk it. But you have hundreds of people in villages and towns across the UK getting together in a local park, completing 5K. The fastest will do it in, I't know 13 14 minutes there'll be a tail walker doing it in an hour it's it's wonderful right what i see happening and i used to fall into this trap was on a saturday morning you turn up at nine and you're looking at the watch you're trying to pb every week right you're trying to get the fastest time you can. And I think many people do this, particularly many people in middle age who are working hard in the week, and it's their way

of starting the weekend, and they're racing the clock every Saturday morning. Now, I'm in my mid 40s, Stephen, and I reflect on this and think, you can't say this as a rule for everyone, you can't say this as a rule for everyone, but I think most people that I see or I have seen in practice would benefit from saying, you know what? I'm going to try and PB once a month, right? On some Saturday mornings, because I've been traveling this week for work, I haven't slept so well. The kids have had lots of afterschool engagements, whatever it might be. slept so well. The kids have had lots of afterschool engagements, whatever it might be. I'm pretty knackered. So I'm going to go and do my park run because I love it. But instead of going for, I don't know, 25 minutes, today, you know what? I'm going to take it easy and do it in 30 minutes. I don't think people, particularly in the West, do that very well. I think ego gets in the

way. I think we're conditioned to thinking that every time we need to PB and we need to push, what's your perspective on that? I agree 100%. And part of me wants to say, what makes you think that you would be able to set a personal record for your all-time physiological performance every week? That's just, that's crazy thinking because even elite athletes who do this as their job, they can't do that. They cannot achieve personal records every week. And that's, in fact, they understand that they have to be so careful to be able to maybe set a new record in a year, one time, right? Because they have been doing this a long,

so the better that parkour runner, I mean, that park runner gets, the less likely a new personal best is going to happen. And that's normal. It shouldn't be seen as a failure. I think it's interesting. Literally this last Saturday, I did parkrun for the first time in a few months. I'm, you know, shifting my focus at the moment. I want to do the London Marathon in April 2024, if I can. And so I'm focusing more on endurance. But I thought, you know what, let me go to park run and do it. But I was very clear in my mind. I thought, no, I'm in a base building phase at the moment. I did a long walking warmup an hour first beforehand.

And I purposely decided I was going to do it in the green zone, right? Which was, you know, not quite- Let people run by you if they wanted. People run by me and not let your ego get in the way when people you know you're faster than are going ahead of you because, and it kind of speaks to what you said earlier about what do these elites have?

Well, they have routines and they have clear goals. So I, over the last couple of years, and I'll give my coach Helen Hall a lot of credit for this, have got very clear on what my goal is. My goal is to try and complete and enjoy, if possible, the London Marathon. and enjoy, if possible, the London Marathon. So therefore, PBing on a Saturday morning at a 5K, given the stage where I'm at in my training, has very little to do at this moment with that goal.

So I can get clear on my goal and go, no, I'm going to get out in nature, go out with my son, see people I see every week there, but I'm going to take it easy but you're constantly being faced by people well wishes the volunteers

people go come on mate you can do it push push or you know I was you know

so I can probably do that my local park run if I really gunned it it's a hilly one in about 22 minutes if I really really

was leaving nothing on the table right but last week i was just cruising at around 28 minutes and i was behind the 28 minute pacer coming into the end and all the volunteers like come on you can catch him you can catch him and it's very tempting to to use that and go yeah i'm gonna catch him and i know i could have well in cycling they have a term for this, and it's called half-wheeling syndrome. And it is, you know, the group ride starts out, and the goal is a green zone ride for two or three hours, right?

Yeah. You know, but somebody in the front gets a little, you know, feeling his oats or her oats, and then someone else says, well, you know, and they sneak a little bit and so it's a half a wheel fast you know they get a half a wheel ahead and now the pace is going up the speed's going up and then it and it just starts like that and then pretty soon the whole group is going too fast this is so common it is it is just kind of in our nature but what what's fascinating is an athlete like kip choge fastest in the world in the marathon

he is also going to be one of the most disciplined in his intensity if he has a plan that today it's a 25k run at this speed it's if someone runs by him he'll just smile and let him go because he knows what he's good for, right? Once a year at Berlin or whatever it might be, that's when he's giving it all. Then he's going to say, now, son, I'm going to teach you, right? Come watch the teacher. But on these other days, most of the time, if somebody wants, if his plan is low intensity, he will, one of the things that makes him great is his discipline, is his ability to park his ego at the door and let them do what they do.

You've coached for years, Stephen, right? This ego piece, I think is one of the reasons why people end up bleeding into the yellow zone and the red zone. I know you've also- I do it too, It's hard to resist. Yeah. But what is it?

Do you know, you've coached, I think, athletes all over the world. Do you see differences in different countries or different cultures? Do you see that, yeah, those guys, they tend to get it? Yeah, I have to say, I learned a lot moving to Scandinavia

because I think they did have this understanding that the endurance athletes, the cross-country skiers in particular, they understood this idea of long, easy sessions and building in that. If I want to take a sport that I feel has sometimes pushed too hard, American swimming would be, you know, they tend to go pretty hard every session. But also in general, maybe the American mindset has been, let's be efficient, let's be effective, let's, you know, because I, and I can say that because I'm an American, you know, but I think maybe there is a bit of a, some cultural differences, but also in general, just we as humans. Now, I think it's important to understand that staying in the green zone for 80% of your work will also help you get faster and perform better, right? We'll get to that, but let's just stick with stress for a moment. If I reflect, Stephen, and maybe you could talk about the physiology of

this, over the past couple of years, I would say the focus of my training has shifted quite significantly. For much of my life, I have prioritised short periods of intensity. I was busy, right? Like many of us. And so I still wanted to prioritise my health so I would do the workouts but quick and intense and I'm not saying that has no value but as I get older and as I study your research I realise more and more the importance of low intensity training and so I've shifted my focus now more towards that whereas at the moment I'm not really doing any intensity at this period in my training, which I'm not saying should be there forever.

You are. Give yourself credit because one part of me wants to say, we have to remember that low intensity compared to sitting on the sofa is massively high workload. We're doing amazing things metabolically compared to doing nothing. Yeah. Well, that's a great point. And I appreciate you making it. One thing I've realized, let's say I'm on my indoor bike for an hour at a low heart rate. It feels easy, right? Pretty easy. I'm like, yeah, I could keep going. It could go longer.

I could go longer, right? And when I finished, I often feel I haven't done that much, right? Not only that, Stephen, my recovery is super quick. So I do happen to track my HRV every morning, right? And I find that when you do low intensity work, you could do more. You sometimes don't feel you've actually done that much compared to the high intensity stuff. You might even forget you did the workout. Yeah, and you sleep better. You feel great the next morning.

And as you said earlier, you're hungry afterwards. Like if it's dinner time, like yesterday I did a one hour on my bike before the kids came home from school and I picked them up and we had dinner and I was hungry. But if I had gunned it for 30 minutes and gone into zone four or zone five or the red zone, as you say, you don't feel hungry for a long time.

You can notice then the following morning your heart rate variability or HRV for short has been affected and all these things. So can you speak to this stress load a little bit? Because I do feel this is a key point I want to land with you today for people is that training, there's almost a conflict, which is we know that physical inactivity is one of the leading causes of death globally we know that a lot of the population are not meeting basic government guidelines of physical activity right and we're now saying yeah be active but be careful when you're active can you just help people understand that our great great-great-grandparents would have, you know,

they would have had jobs that were quite physically demanding as a rule. They worked on farms. They worked physically. And so they were getting a lot of green zone training, but they never called it training. Yeah. It was just work. It was like putting food on the table, right?

It was just work. It was like putting food on the table, right? But we've almost eradicated jobs that require us to use our bodies in a physical way in those eight hours of work time. the double-decker buses in London, where you had the bus driver who just sat versus the conductor who was popping off and on the bus all day, their mortality due to heart disease was dramatically different. This was some of the start of epidemiology research and physical activity. The bus driver wasn't getting physical activity. The conductor, the person who was taking tickets or whatever, up and down the two double-decker bus was more protected from heart disease. Wow. Right?

So we've seen this in these basic things in normal work have disappeared. We push buttons. Even the farmers, even the traditional factory workers, you know, they're no longer doing heavy labor. They're not getting the big heart rate. You know, they're not lifting anything. So it's all gone. And that means we have to somehow synthetically, artificially bring it back into our lives because our genetics needs it. We're still built for movement. Yeah. Now, I think your message of 80-20, at its core, it should be really empowering for people because I can think of so many patients right now who over the years

have been put off by movement because they think it has to be sweaty. It has to hurt. It has to be painful. And actually this 80-20 approach is saying, guys, you got it wrong. You don't need to. 80% of it actually will be quite enjoyable. You won't be sweating. You'll be able to have a conversation. Do you know what I mean? I think that's a very important message. And when you do the 80%, I got excited. Sorry. When you do the 80%, the 20% also feels better. It's challenging, but you're able to do it. And you're, you know, so it's a virtuous relationship. Why does the 20% then feel easier or enjoyable? You know, it's not easier, but in the sense that you are working hard, but you have now

built machinery that allows you to actually mobilize your capacity more completely. You're actually able to use your heart up to close to heart rate max because you have the capacity in your legs that can be supported. So it's an interesting, you know, building up that basic endurance, that's why we see that it also improves maximum capacity in elite athletes. They have to have the volume. They have to train quite a bit of low intensity to really pull out the maximum capacity also. Perhaps this is a good time to talk about your model of frequency, duration, and intensity. And perhaps we should do it through the lens of someone who's relatively untrained and unfit who says, Dr. Sila, I've not taken my

fitness seriously for years. I'm in my 40s. I keep hearing people say how important physical activity is. I think I need a goal. I've signed up for a 10K race in one year's time. What would you advise I do? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated,

but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health, and together, we're gonna learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm gonna teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good?

All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision-making, and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits, and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal,

and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of

their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Well, the first thing we'd have a conversation and I'd say, okay, you and I are going to negotiate a contract. And my contract negotiation with you is how many times per week are you with given your work situation, your family life, your coaching kids, whatever it is, how many times per week are you going to commit to to get out the door? Off the sofa, put on the kit, get out the door.

That's the first thing we're going to talk about. And they're going to say, you know, I've got this, but I will commit to three days a week. All right, fantastic. Let's get started. And so then I'm going to say, now for the next six weeks, the only thing I care about as your coach is that you maintain your contract with yourself and with me, that you're going to get out the door three times a week. I'm not even worried about what you do. You know, jog 20 minutes, do whatever you can. But the main success criteria is you have been able to mobilize,

find time, make the, you know, the kids are taken care of, they fed. You have time to get out the door. So this is frequency. That's frequency. So this is, for you, the most important thing. It's the starting point. It's the starting point. So this is frequency. That's frequency. So this is for you, the most important thing. It's the starting point. The starting point. You start with frequency first. Absolutely. Because now what are we doing? We're building a ritual, a routine, a habit, call it what you will, but it is what we see from Kipchoge. It is what you see from Kili and Jorday. They're getting out the door every day. And so we're going to get out the door first.

And after a few weeks, I suspect it usually happens that if they manage to stay true to that contract, they're going to say, you know what? I'm doing it. I'm getting out the door three times a week. It feels pretty good. All right.

And how does it feel if you miss a session? It doesn't feel so good because it's gotten to be a feels pretty good. All right. And how does it feel if you miss a session? It doesn't feel so good because it's gotten to be a habit. Good. All right. Check box one. Check. Okay. Now, they may say, you know what?

I think I want to go four. That's another question. But even with just three, I'm going to say, all right, let's move forward. Let's go ahead and see if we can stretch one or two of those sessions a little longer. So this is duration. Yeah. Because I may ask them, how long are you running? How long are you jogging or walking or what? 20, 30 minutes. Great. But let's have as a goal that one of those workouts a week, we're going to slowly progress to an hour. Now that may feel like a lot right now,

but it's for sure doable. But we're going to give it six weeks to get there. So let me just pause there a second, Stephen. We're not yet into 80-20. No. We're into building a routine, building a habit, building this new behavior, finding a way to integrate it into your life.

So for the first six weeks, it's like, look, three times a week, just make sure you're doing it. And it could even be just a 30-minute walk around the block, whatever, but the only goal there is building up the frequency. Once that's in, you're then saying, okay, can you occasionally make it a bit longer? So duration is your next priority. Right.

Okay, I love that. Length in certain sessions. And it's still, I have not said anything about huffing and puffing, how hard they go, how hard it should, no pain, no gain. I haven't said any of that. Okay. I haven't mentioned it. But we first got a frequency established. We've developed a habit that feels sustainable, doesn't feel like it's stress, actually feels a frequency established. We've developed a habit that feels sustainable, doesn't feel like it's stress, actually feels a bit rewarding. They actually feel like this feels good.

I'm happy with myself. Great. Now we've stretched it out. Now we're getting a little physiological because now we're starting to use duration and the physiology, our research shows that, yes, there's a difference between training 30 minutes and training 60 minutes.

But what's the difference? Well, we turn on, for example, more fat utilization. It takes a while. Duration helps increase the molecular signaling for adaptation. So there are some different pathways, some different signaling pathways. And in a very rough categorical way, you can say we have signaling pathways that are volume sensitive. They respond to more, just more activity. And we have signaling pathways that are intensity sensitive.

They respond to higher energy demand. But this volume pathway is, it seems to be one that has a fairly big scope for continued use. It's sensitive over a big scope, whereas that intensity pathway is not. It is sensitive for a brief scope. You do some hard intervals for six weeks, you get an effect, but it doesn't just keep going. You don't just keep getting better and better and better. So we're already playing a little bit, even in my very simple crude methodology of saying frequency first and then duration, I'm tapping in to their biochemistry. Let's just stick on duration for a minute. I think it's an important point here. So this hypothetical individual who you are coaching and trying to help,

you're now starting to increase duration. So let's just say that all of their sessions so far are in the green zone. and that would be reasonable i think from what you're saying right so they're all in the green zone they're all conversational pace if we were to measure their lactate it would be low it would be stable heart rate pretty low relatively all these things probably when they started it wasn't right but they're building up that but it's slowly getting better yeah okay. Okay. So the difference between a half-hour brisk walk and a one-hour brisk walk is really interesting because we can think about frequency and duration.

We can also think a little bit about intensity, I guess, because depending on your level of fitness, I guess, because depending on your level of fitness, the first half hour may not feel the same as the second half hour. Oh yeah, for sure. So although you're still in the green zone, like if you were to split it into two things, like a zone one and a zone two, for example, it's like you maybe, the first hour was in zone one. The second one, I think from what I can tell from your work, as a function of the fact that you're going longer, it means that actually now relatively the intensity is a bit more because you're having to sustain that workload for longer.

Yeah, it's a great point. And if we summarize what you're getting at is, I would say that ultimately there is no such thing as a steady state. You know, steady state meaning just flat. So, yes, even for Kipchoge, best marathoner in history, even for him, the third hour of running at, you know, a pretty high pace is more taxing, more challenging than that first hour was at the same pace, even for him. And even for him, if we took off at some world record pace or so in the marathon, there would be a point where it felt easy here, but now it's unsustainable. So, and all of it's at pretty close to his green zone, pretty close.

So the point is, yes, you're exactly right. Is it as we stretch these workouts within the green zone, we do tap into fatigue. They will, if they get, you know, a cyclist that does a four hour ride, that fourth hour is very different than the first hour. Yeah, it's the term heart rate drift that you talk about talk about because i see this um i don't really cycle much i haven't really cycled much but i'm trying to get into it on my indoor bike over the past i don't know six months or so i've been i've been increasing it and let's say you're 150 150 watts, for example, so a power setting on your bike, and you're at some kind of relaxed cadence, let's say. Your heart rate can be at a certain level, and you think, yeah, I'm in the green zone. This is easy. Right, this is easy, no problem, I can do this for an hour, no problem. But if I was to increase it, if I had time one day, to 90 minutes, you may find, certainly a few months ago,

I would find that my heart rate was starting to creep up. Oh, for sure. So even though I'm cycling at the same pace with the same power output, my perceived level of exertion is starting to go up and my physiology, my heart rate is starting to reflect that. So if you were trying to do steady state or stay in that green zone might there be a risk at some point then that unless you then lower your pace

or lower the power output that you're going to creep into yellow or say you've done enough and just stop oh you could stop there you just say well 90 minutes you know i had this misdrift that's enough for today. 90 minutes was good. And as you train and get stronger and fitter, that heart rate drift becomes less. Yes. Wow.

And 90 minutes can now be stretched to 120 minutes. And I experienced it myself. When I got back into training, I had been in leadership and I wasn't training very much. I got back on a bike, bought myself an agrometer like you have and started doing these workouts, started lengthening them.

One of my first aha experiences was to do a three hour ride at 200 watts, 205 watts and just track. And yeah, for the first 90 minutes, I was like, oh man, I got this, I'm getting in shape. And then all of a sudden, started saying, this doesn't feel so fun anymore. And the heart rate's drifting up, right? But then six months later, that drift was less. That flat period was longer. I had more durability. I had

built out my capacity even within the green zone. Yeah. Right? So, and I had a better foundation for then doing those harder sessions in the yellow and the red zone. Yeah. Just a point came to mind, Stephen. One thing I'm experimenting with, and I really hope this has taken value for the audience, is that I have known for years, and many people experience this, that when they work out in the evening, let's say they go to the gym after work and they push it hard, their sleep gets trashed afterwards. They can't, not everyone, but many people can't switch off. They're still feeling the heart going in bed. I used to be like that many years ago

when I played squash. If I play squash at 7 p.m. in the evening with a friend, but I really struggle to sleep. When I do these low intensity rides in the evening, I'm not finding they're affecting my sleep. And I think that also speaks to the stress load of training. Like if you're training at a low heart rate in that green zone, actually, you know, it's having less of a stressor effect on you.

And in many ways, does that make sense to you? It's exactly what we're basically trying to manage. I say that for me, training intensity distribution, after doing research on it for over 20 years, is all about managing the relationship between signal, adaptive signal, that I'm trying to create signals for more mitochondria and capillaries, and stress, which is a systemic phenomenon. So the local adaptations, they're happening in the cells, the muscles and the capillaries.

But the stress response is more of a systemic wide response. So I'm trying to manage. Now, I don't want to get rid of all of this, but I want to get that ratio in my favor. And green zone training gives us a high adaptive response at very low stress. And that way you can, you know, and we have ways of measuring this, but you talked about earlier

that it's kind of this two zone model, low stress, high stress. I say, yeah, we're trying to stay under the stress radar most of our workouts. But then some of our workouts. Yeah. But then some of our workouts, then we say, yeah, today's high stress. It's good. But I built it in and I have a plan because tomorrow I'll go easy. And the day after that, I'll still go easy because I'm building in some recovery.

Yeah. Okay. So I'm managing the stress in my workout program. in my workout program. Let's go back to our mid-40s individual who's trying to do this 10K. So, so far, we've got the six weeks of getting the three times a week and the frequency. Then we're now, I think for six weeks,

you're saying maybe one of them, maybe two of them, just increase the duration a little bit. Now, what do we do? All right. So now we're three months in, 12 weeks. They feel like it's sustainable. Hopefully, they haven't gotten injured.

They haven't had any desire to go back to the sofa. You know, there's progress. Maybe they've lost a little bit of weight, but we haven't focused on that. I'm sorry to interrupt. You said no injury. That's another benefit of staying in the green zone a lot right you reduce the risk of injury yeah because the worst case scenario is that they start out gangbusters and get an achilles injury or get

a knee injury or do something and that's just such a defeating, you know, result. And what do they do? They just go back to the sofa. So we're going to ease into this. And all these, you know, the bones and tendons and that, they haven't been doing anything. So we're sneaking some adaptions in that they're not even thinking about. Their bodies are getting used to that pounding on the asphalt, that stretch cycle that the muscle has every time it contracts. And so we're building in some durability. We're building in some resilience in their body that had faded away. It was there when they were kids because they were running around on the playground every day. Yeah.

every day. But it had disappeared. It had faded because they've gone into this typical modus that we fall into in our 30s and 40s where we're just not moving very much. And the movement we do is just not very much like exercise. So we've unraveled some of that in those 12 weeks. And we've built a base so that now I feel comfortable as their coach with giving them a bit of a challenge and saying, you know what? I know that on that route that you like to do, there's a hill. And you normally walk up that hill. But we're going to add one day a week. We're going to add some. You're going to run up that hill.

And not only that, but we're not going to run at full speed, but you're going to run it where you feel like you're really, you're breathing hard, you can feel it. And it's a hill that takes you a couple minutes to get to the top. And then we're going to turn around and walk back down and do it again. And then maybe the first workout, we do that three times. And then a week later, you might be able to do four times. So now we're going to intensify, but even within the intens workout, we do that three times. And then a week later, you might be able to do four times. So now we're going to intensify, but even within the intensification, we're also going to

use duration because this is where people go wrong. When they start doing interval training, they always think it's always got to be higher intensity. The progression is always intensity. No. If I, the first time I say, let's do intervals, and I say you're going to do four two-minute bouts, two minutes where you're running up a hill fairly fast, your heart rate gets up 85, even maybe 90% of max at the end of the third two minutes. And then we say, all right, let's add another two-minute bout.

If that feels okay, we're going to go from three times two to four times two. So you're not making the two-minute going uphill four minutes. You're saying, let's stick to that. Let's just add another cycle in. Yeah. And then we're building out. It's like stairs. You've got to rise and run, right?

And we're using both to progress upward. Just to play devil's advocate there, in case anyone is thinking about the 80-20 model and thinking, well, hold on a minute, three sessions a week, if one of them is an intensity session, well, that's 33%, right? Is that a bit of overkill? Are we sort of obsessing about the wrong thing there? Is 80-20 just a rough model? And we do have to remember that 80-20 was from athletes that were training every day, essentially. Got it. So yeah, so the math's not going to work if you're only training three days a week. But on our side, if it is too easy and one hard they're also they also have built-in rest days yeah okay so it's not going to be a problem or they could also forget about a seven-day cycle

and go okay i train three times a week but one in every five sessions is going to be intensity so therefore you you know because we have this seven-day model in our head, but we don't have to train to a seven-day model, do we? That's right. And I've talked a lot about this. Even my own daughter, who I coached as a runner, that's what we did, is we changed the seven-day cycle to a 10-day cycle. And then we ended up going down to nine. But you say, well, how in the world did that work? Well, it gave her more space because there were certain things, certain key workouts she wanted to do

and within a seven day cycle, it wasn't working out. It wasn't sustainable. 80-20 was not, it was more like 70-30 and she wasn't handling it. But when we gave her 10 days to work within for us to program, she said, she said, Papa, now I feel flow in my training. I still remember that. She used that term. Now the training is flowing. And then her personal records, you know, ran a 116 half marathon, you know, it got better, but she,

we were making some mistakes and she was training the hard sessions too hard and it was getting too compressed in the seven-day cycle. So often it's about giving the athlete room, you know. You say that you've coached your daughter in the past. Yeah. Many people who listen or watch this show, they have children and they're trying to encourage their children to have healthy behaviors. What have you learned in the years of training your

daughter, good and bad, that we can maybe learn from you if we're trying to create healthy behaviors in our own children? Well, my goodness, it really depends on the kid. Obviously, kids have their different personalities. If I use my daughter as an example, she is the quintessential good student, good athlete, a perfectionist. Right. Everything's got to be A-level at the same time.

There's no room for, she doesn't give herself a break. And so my job as her father has been very often to put the brakes on, to give her a license to recover, to take a rest day. Often she would say, Papa, I'm feeling pretty tired today. Maybe I need a rest day. And I would say, Sirene, my daughter, if you're asking me that question, you know the answer. But yes, I'm giving you confirmation, take a rest day. And that's what she needed. It was very difficult for her as a very motivated athlete to give herself a rest day, the luxury of resting. And so she needed me to confirm for her to be on her side as that second opinion doctor and say, yep, you're right. You know, so for her, it was about keeping the brakes on. Now for other athletes,

if it was my son, I might have to give him a gentle kick in the rear, right? So it does depend on their baseline level. What does rest day mean? Does that mean sit on the sofa, watch television? Does it mean a light walk? Does it mean yoga? And I know it can mean many things, but to you, what does it mean? For me, it means you'd feel like you are not having to look at a training plan. You are not having to think about mobilizing your body and your schedule. And I find also that rest days also mean giving yourself a little space to get other stuff done. Often for a family father or family mother with kids and with a job and that, that giving yourself the luxury and not feeling guilty when you take a rest day,

it may allow you to get some bills paid or do a little something, get the kid to soccer practice and make dinner and it's a little easier that day and you don't feel guilty. So it ends up reducing your overall stress level. It ends up improving your recovery and you end up being a better hobby triathlete because of the rest days.

I saw some of your presentations on your YouTube channel, which is just fantastic and a wonderful resource for people if they want to learn more about all of this kind of stuff. You shared in one of your videos a paper that I think showed that when we are experiencing high levels of stress, whether it's from training or from workload or kids or to-do lists, whatever it might be, your response to training is impaired. That's right.

Like it can be delayed. That's right. Or maybe you don't get the full benefits. Yeah. So again, we go back to this. It's, you know, it's again, I didn't invent it, but this idea of a stress bucket that, you know, in an evolutionary sense,

our bodies and our brains don't distinguish between the stress of an interval session and the stress of getting the kids to soccer practice and the stress of a stupid boss who's unreasonable in their demands, you know, but it all contributes to cortisol. It all contributes to stress responses. And it goes into that bucket. And so that's kind of where we're at. And when, when athletes, scholars, scholastic athletes, for example,

you know, let's imagine Oxford rowers or something when they've got exams, then that coach needs to be aware that, okay, their tolerance for training is going to go a bit down because they're taking exams. They're more stressed. So we're going to factor that in to the training. We're going to give them some days off. We're going to ease up because once we get past the exam period, they're going to feel this resurgence in energy and we'll be fine. So good coaches in school settings particularly understand this but also in the clubs it then would require that wrong

wrong you you tell your coach hey you know what right now i am really under the gun so i think i need to bring down the expectations on the training side. Okay. This is great for any teachers who are listening, right? Just that little bit that you just mentioned there, if there's any, and I know there are, which is why I'm bringing this up, teachers and exercise teachers or PE, physical education teachers at school, that's really interesting. Let's say you're in a high school and you train the football team or the tennis team or the whatever team it might be if it's exam time and your kids are therefore probably doing a bit of extra homework maybe hopefully yeah feeling under more stress, maybe not sleeping as well, whatever it might be,

a really great coach would be taking that into consideration and going, you know what, we need to ease off in training. Now, when they come and do their tennis practice or their football practice or their cricket practice, whatever it might be, now we really want to be focusing, to use your model, on the green area because actually we want this not to add to the stress load. We want it to help them dissipate the stress that they've got in their life, right? And that's a coach that's thinking long game. They're thinking, I want these kids to be really good in June or in March, so they have to think through, now's the time for me to let up on the

stress, make things fun, because they've got enough stress from the other areas. So that's, it goes back to that thing we started with this idea of thinking long, long game. That has practical take home, Stephen, I think for any one of us. Yes, that was through the lens of a teacher and kids. but we can all apply that in our own life. Like when we're undergoing periods of high stress, like, do you also want to be gunning it at the gym in high intensity spinning classes? Or are you better off doing a one hour brisk walk or a one hourhour low-intensity ride on your indoor exercise bike whilst watching your favorite Netflix show or whatever it might be. Because you can do that

when it's low intensity, when you're in the green zone, you can actually relax and listen to music, listen to podcasts, you know, because it's not distracting the training. Yeah. And also just giving ourselves a break. You know, like right now I'm in the UK. I'm not able to exercise in my usual routine. On Tuesday, I got up at five in the morning so I could do a workout at six to seven and squeeze it in. It was green zone. I forgot I did it because in the afternoon I was like, man, I didn't get in a workout. And then I thought, oh, wait, I did.

But it was easy. And I'm not going to work out probably the next couple of days because of obligations. And I'm saying, you know what? I've got this nagging Achilles problem. This is not so bad. It's forcing me to give my Achilles some rest. I'm probably going to come out better for this. So don't worry. So I'm not worrying about the fact that I'm not going to be, I'm talking about exercise for three days, but I'm not actually doing it myself very well. But I know it's a long game. I know that, you know, in the big picture, this is going to be fine for me. Yeah.

And I'm not going to lose all my fitness in three days. So that's another thing is when things happen, give yourself a break. Don't, you know, don't worry. Don't let the fact that you can't exercise that day become a stressor in itself. Right? Yeah. Let's go back to that lady who's training for this 10K. And I intentionally said one year, for this 10k and I intentionally said one year because I think one of the problems I see is that we want to do these goals quickly now look I get it if you want to do that and you can great I think humans are very adaptable and resilient but I think sometimes when we say I'm going to do a 10k in six weeks and we go from nothing, injuries often happen. Things often happen that then put people out. So let's say it was over a year. You've explained the model right

at the start, which was frequency first, then think about duration, then bring in a bit of intensity. Would you just continue like that then for a few more months you'd observe obviously it's great people can work with a coach not everyone can afford a coach you don't have access to one you're you know you've gone to run as well to look at their you know 10k training plan or you watch a youtube video no training plan is always going to be applicable for any one individual because it cannot take into account the context of their lives, right? So what are the common mistakes people make in your view when they're trying to follow these plans? Well, I think they end up being too rigid. They think that the plan is in stone and that if they don't do it

exactly right, it's a failure. So it's very easy to have a very linear mindset that I've got to do this and this and this. And if I miss this workout, then I have to somehow make up for it. And that's not going to be a good process. If you get sick, let's say, or you have a little niggle, you know, that you need to take a day off, then you should not say, well, I'm going to do twice as much when I come back because the risk will be that now you're going to get hurt even worse, whatever it was, or you don't recover. So if you miss a workout for whatever reason, life happens,

just move forward and keep going. Because in the big scheme of things, remember you're doing 150 workouts in this year, missing one is a lot less of an issue than missing three weeks because you get sick or you get hurt. So again, back to management, I'm going to manage risk. And if they miss a workout, to management. I'm going to manage risk. And if they miss a workout, I'm going to say, no worries. And the other thing is, is that plans, what's the quote about plans? Planning is critical, but plans are useless. There was a famous general that said that. Why? Because life happens. And so we use the plan as a guide, not as a straight jacket. I've learned that working with Helen over the last few years really beautifully that

the plan that's put out is very rarely the plan that gets stuck too. But having a plan is useful. Yeah. Because if there's no plan there, you don't know what you're doing. You can do anything you want, which often means you do nothing. But having a plan means at least you can edit the plan. Absolutely. So plans are critical. And we go back to this simple idea, it's getting out the door. If you're getting out the door three or four days a week, then good things are going to happen. On average, good things are going to happen if you're starting to, because our bodies are capable of a tremendous amount of adaptation. It's almost like our bodies are just saying,

come on, I can do this if you just give me a chance. I'm made for it. We are made. If we talk about humans in the big scheme of things, humans are not particularly strong, powerful, fast if we compare with all the other animals. But we are good at enduring. We are actually, compared to other animals,

we have good endurance. Kipchoge is not just a great marathoner for humans. He's a great endurance mammal compared to any other mammal on the planet. Most mammals cannot run or cannot move their bodies at that rate for that long as humans can. So yes, we've been on the sofa a lot.'re out of shape but lucky for us our genes are there still waiting for us to offer the right stimuli and there is so much what should we say unexploited capacity that we can tap into if we just make it sustainable i once once heard you say, Stephen, that the heart is a stress-o-meter. Yeah.

I wonder if you could expand, what do you mean by that? And is there a way of measuring that? Right. Well, when I teach our students, I say, look, you can see the heart in four ways. It's a pump. It's an electrical device. It's a muscle, and it's a stress measurement device. So we can have these four perspectives. The stress measurement device is because of the nervous system activation of the heart. You have these two nerves. One is kind of, it's basically accelerator,

brakes, basically. Sympathetic nerve is an accelerator. The parasympathetic or vagus nerve is brakes, slowing down the heart. And so, constantly, but in this particular case, the brake, there's always a little bit of brake and a little bit of accelerator, unlike when you're driving a car, hopefully. So there's a balance. All right. So in that regard, there are things we can measure within heart rate, such as heart rate variability, that offer a kind of a window into that balance and how it is. What's the state of that balance between sympathetic fight or flight and parasympathetic rest and recover? So in that regard, heart rate variability has tapped into this idea of the heart rate offering us information as a stress measure, a stressometer. You're not talking about our pulse, like 72 beats per minute or 68 beats per minute? Well, to a certain extent, but there's even more information between the beats

in what's called the heart rate variability just means that between each beat, there's a certain amount of time and it's not 100% regular. There's some variability. And you want the variability. Yeah, interestingly enough, when the heart is being stimulated

primarily parasympathetically, it tends to have more variability. So this variability is an indicator of that all systems are in a state of fairly low stress and ready to respond? So really simply, our heart rate variability, or HRV for short, generally speaking, we want it higher rather than lower. Higher means there's a lot of beat-to-beat variability, which means we're generally going to be in a low stress state. If there's not much variability, i.e. if it's beating like a metronome, that's not good, which is slightly counterintuitive. I know.

But it's important that people get that. So I, like you, follow Marco Altini on Twitter. And I, for maybe a couple of years now, I'm using his HRV for training app every morning. So I get up, come down to the kitchen and within five or 10 minutes, I'm sat down on my kitchen stool. And for a minute, you pop your thumb on the camera, and you get a reading of heart rates and HRV. Now, what is your take on doing things like that? Are you a fan of doing a measurement like that? Do you think it can help guide decision-making in your life,

whether that be training or anything else? Right. What are the downsides? And I guess we could expand this out into trackers and wearables as a more broader concept. Yeah, it's a big rabbit hole or a deep rabbit hole to go down. But yes, thanks to technology, we are able to tap into various processes that used to be only the territory of laboratories. Only the gurus like Stephen could measure lactate or heart rate variability.

But now all of us can. And then the question becomes, okay, is that good? Yes, it can be. Is it bad? Yes, it can be. So in your case, it seems to be positive because you gain insights into how your body's working. You probably have gained some insights into the effects of various things, like whether if you drink a couple of beers, maybe that affects your sleep, or if you have a particularly stressful day, or you work out

too late in the evening. So you maybe learn some things, and then you can manage your day a bit differently, be a bit more careful with when you finish your workout and so forth to ensure that you get good sleep. So then that's becoming instructive for you. But the negative would be that if you begin to train to that metric as if it is the outcome that you're interested in, I've got to get my heart rate variability higher. You know, it was only 80 today and my all-time goal at best is 87. Now you're starting to treat that metric as if it was, again, a performance variable. And this is the danger. And people do fall into that trap. Marco Altini is the first to say that you you know, you don't want that to happen.

That's why I like him so much is he's a developer of a technology. He offers it, he gets paid for it, but he also is very quick to say, what are the limitations? Yeah, he really is. And that's, for me, that makes him gold. And what I love about it, because I personally don't wear permanent trackers for a variety of reasons. I, you know, oh, you've got a regular old school watch. A regular old school watch that says tick, tock, tick, tock. I bought it in Heathrow Airport. Well, I mean, it looks great and it does what it says.

It's cheap as can be. Tells you the time. Yeah, that's all it does. But I do believe that obsession with metrics is a real, real problem. I've seen it for years in medicine, even like, you know, you could call a blood pressure monitor

an old school tracker, right? But I, for many years, I've said this a couple of times on the show over the past years that, you know, roughly speaking, for patients who would say, Dr. Chatti, should I buy a heart rate, a blood pressure monitor from the pharmacy?

The truth is for about half of them, it was great. They'd measure once a week. They'd use it as a stimulus to stay focused on lifestyle changes. The other half would check four or five times a day, would get stressed out at one reading that was a bit high and then keep checking it even more without realizing the stress is driving it up.

And so I do think it's personality dependent. I love the fact that this is a consistent thing every morning at the same time in the same order and situation. For one minute, I put my thumb on this and I get some metrics. And I don't, if I'm honest, always use it to modify what I do in the day.

get some metrics. And I don't, if I'm honest, always use it to modify what I do in the day. I'm using it just to build up a understanding of my own physiology over time, which has been really, really interesting. You tweeted recently a slide about wearables. I think you've been giving lectures all over the world and you were talking about a few things with wearables. I think you've been giving lectures all over the world and you were talking about a few things with variables. They need to be valid and reliable. Never rely on a single metric. Don't become obsessed. Remember frequency, duration, and intensity. Then you also said wearables often measure one variable, but estimate several. Do not trust the estimates. Right. And I actually got that particular word choice of measure versus estimate from Marco Altini. Are we speaking here about readiness scores? Like a lot of these apps?

Let's take a heart rate monitor. What does a heart rate monitor measure? Heart rate. That's it. heart rate monitor, heart rate monitor, measure. Heart rate, that's it. That's the only thing it actually can measure with the technology. But then if it has heart rate, you can do all kinds of little games and try to measure or estimate calorie consumption or expenditure, oxygen utilization. You can make all kinds of estimates. But the farther you get away from the core measurement that the device makes, the more fuzzy every one of those estimates gets. So you get, it almost becomes, you know, just, I could just guess in some of the estimates that are being made by these devices.

But the companies, the technology companies, the reason this happens is because they have a core technology. It's a hardware-based technology. It's expensive. They've used a heck of a lot of time to develop that technology. It's much cheaper for them to iterate the software than it is the hardware. Yeah. So they want to sell you more watches by telling you that it has more features. No, it only has one feature,

it measures heart rate, but it has a whole bunch of algorithms that it can throw at you. And I do believe that a lot of these readiness scores that people then use to determine their training or their workload that day, I've seen some pretty sketchy stuff about how accurate these things are, you know. And so I just would urge a bit of caution. I spoke to Professor Russell Foster from Oxford University, you know, leading neuroscientist, sleep researcher for decades. He has real concerns over sleep trackers in terms of their reliability and their repeatability. And interestingly enough, when I did speak to kip chogie

on this podcast a couple of years ago one week after he broke the world record in berlin i asked him about his aura ring which he uses but he says he never looks at it the morning of a race yeah because he doesn't need to know it was what's it gonna what's it gonna do with the information yeah it's like i don't know i can't race today my hour of data tells me i have my readiness to train is too low and he knows he's not gonna sleep well the night before a race like the rest of us i mean you know in fact one thing i did want to ask you steven not only because you have done uh decades of research in this field but you've also spoken to and worked with a lot of these top athletes, right? And there's two ways I want to go with this. The first thing is we mentioned

Kipchoge. I also had Killian Jorney on this podcast many years ago, maybe three or four years ago. And I tell you one thing that struck me as I reflect on both of those individuals. thing that struck me as I reflect on both of those individuals. Given how successful they both are, given how good they both are, given that they could both very reasonably be considered potentially the greatest of all time in their respective fields, I was so struck by how little ego both of them had. Now, let me be really clear. I'm not saying most of my guests have ego. I don't mean that at all. I mean that you might expect if those individuals were, let's say, a Premier League football player, and I don't mean to be casting aspersions, right? But you might expect people who are that successful and that good to have a bit of an ego about who they are. But these guys didn't. Why do you think that is? And is that

something you have seen in other endurance athletes tend to be what we call process oriented they tend to if they because it let's face it if you're going to do something 20 25 hours a week you kind of need to enjoy the process if you're so they tend to be process-oriented, which means they don't just think about the result. They think about, is the process sustainable? And they actually enjoy that process. And they're humble in the sense that they understand how big it is, how demanding it is. And I guess in some ways, it's a little bit romantic to imagine you use the two examples of kipchoge and jorna because they are runners which is the most kind of primordial movement that we're

made to do our bodies are fundamentally almost evolved for running we we we know that from from scientists that have studied this and so i think they have this just amazing respect for the awesomeness of running on a mountain. And how small they are in relation to the bigness of whether they're in Eldoret in Kenya or on the, you know, top of a mountain in Norway. So I think they're just more tuned in to nature, perhaps. And that gives them a perspective on things. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And that's very similar to my view on it as well. But yeah, something that's always struck me.

Another athlete I believe you know or have worked with is Niels van der Poel, is it? Van der Poel, yes. And we've been talking about the importance of rest. And you mentioned just before we started recording that he was well known for his 5-2 approach, which I think is what, two days of complete rest? Yes. Well, you got to let me give you a little story. Please, yeah, yeah. I did an interview with him and he's a wonderful guy.

I just spoke with his coach just recently, last week. But Nils and I did an interview, and Nils, after he finished, he won two gold medals in the most recent Winter Olympics. He wrote a kind of a manifesto. He basically laid out all of his training for three years, how he had trained. And he says, this is what I did. I broke two world years, how he had trained. And he says, this is what I did. I broke two world records, but I'm done. He retired, you know, at the peak. Good luck. Take what I've learned or don't. It's yours to deal with. And so he puts it out. And then, of course, I do this interview. And it was just a remarkable because he is one of these guys, like you talked about, these athletes, male athletes male and female humble but at the same time capable of doing amazing things in both

training you know and performance and so he had been a junior world champion as a speed skater in sweden and he he said and it was very underwhelming, that feeling that he got. It lasted, it felt great for 10 minutes. And then he felt like, I have given up so much of my teenage life for this. And he quit. He quit, went into the military. Wow. After being world champion, he just drops it.

And then, you know, he gets talked in, he's coming back and saying, well, can you just try the national championship, see how it goes? And he trains for two or three weeks and he's still good. And he finds out, hey, it's still in me. I'm pretty technically good and I didn't have to be on the ice very long to feel good again, technically. So that seems to be very robust. And so then he says, all right, if I'm going to come back, I want to be the best. But what's it going to take? What kind of negotiation do I have to have with myself? Because it has to be sustainable for me.

That was his thinking. So second time round, he doesn't want to pay the same price. Well, he's willing to pay a big price, but it can't be an infinite price. And he enjoyed skydiving. Okay? So his initial 5-2 approach, he says, look, coach, I'll work hard for five days a week, but I get the weekends off because I want to go skydiving. And if I'm going to have to train for three years to get to the next Olympics, I got to have this. This is take it or leave it. All right, let's do it. And so he starts doing this and he's getting fit and it's working. And he's doing the two days a week skydiving,

two days a week with no endurance training, but he's just getting better. And then he says to the coach, all right, skydiving season is over. If you want me to move over to a six-day program or whatever, I'm ready. And the coach says, no, this is working. Let's keep it going. And so he never wavered from the 5-2 program. And he did blocks of just tremendous amounts of green zone training, lots of cycling, running. And then he had periods where he was doing quite a lot of threshold training. He did a lot of his work on the bike. And the only speed skating he did, his sport was speed skating, was at race pace.

So his hard sessions on the ice were at the specific pace he was trying to train for because if he was going to break, you know, win the gold medal. But all the other was building that capacity, just like we've been talking about, green zone. And all the other speed skaters in the world was like, this is just crazy. What are you doing? But he was beating all of them.

So they were presumably a lot of them skating all the time, maybe five, six, even seven days a week. He's not skating all the time. maybe five, six, even seven days a week. He's not skating all the time. He's only training five days a week. And a lot of those days, he's not even skating and he's still- Then he gets out on the ice and breaks world records. So yeah, he created quite a stir in speed skating.

But there's two things I take from hearing that. One is the importance of rest, right? Two days off, which also speaks, I guess, what we were talking about a little while ago in this conversation about training is about creating a stimulus onto the body from which the body can adapt, but you need to give it space to adapt. You need time, you need rest days to allow it. And if you are under chronic stress, like you mentioned with the students at exam time,

you're not going to adapt as well as if you're not under that. So be mindful of that. So that's one key lesson I hear from that. The other lesson I hear is about the price of success. The fact that he got to the top and after achieving the pinnacle,

it's thinking, wow, is that it? Like I've sacrificed all of this just for that one moment. And I think this is, I mean, getting away from exercise physiology for a minute, Stephen, I think this is huge and it has real take home for all of us, no matter what we want in life. There is a consequence to everything. Johnny Wilkinson, right? He came on this podcast a couple of years ago. I don't know if you know Johnny, but he was maybe in 2003, one of the

most famous rugby players on the planet. He kicks the winning goal in the last minute off the World Cup final. It was a huge moment. And it led to maybe five or 10 years of depression and anxiety. He achieved his dreams, but the cost of achieving his dreams was mental health problems. You see the Michael Phelps documentary. I was thinking of Michael the same. And in that documentary, how many Olympians, they spent four years working up to 10 minutes or whatever it might be, their race duration. The next morning, they can't get out of bed.

So what do I do now? So what's the antidote to this because we're all we're talking about doing things at whatever level whether it's the recreational level we're talking about extending our boundaries doing something we've never done before and that can become uh you know where you feel like that the outcome is the most important thing. But what we see with Van der Poel, what we see with these great athletes that you and I both had the luxury of meeting, they're process-oriented. Yeah.

That what matters most to Kipchoge is the process. Running with his friends, the group. Yeah. He talks about the group, right? Coming home, drinking coffee together or tea. They are together in a process. And that is so valuable to him. That's what he cherishes. That's what he makes space for in his life. And then the results come as a consequence of a process that is positive, giving, and sustainable. And that's what he takes with him. That's what he lives for. And I would say Jornet is the same. And Niels von der Poel said, I have to have a process that I can feel good about, that I can grow from. And he also, he said, you have to be kind to yourself as an athlete. He said this in the

interview. And he's like, kind to yourself? What happened to no pain, no gain? He says, no, it cannot be all pain. You can't always be focused on the pain. So it was an interesting thing that he was willing to say, hey, when I do these really tough sessions, I have to come into myself and find ways mentally to make it manageable. Yeah. Right? Because it hurts. And so he's truthful about that.

I mean, it always comes down to process over outcome, journey over destination. Yeah. Or whether it's- But the outcomes come when the process- Exactly. But whether it's sports science or philosophy or whatever it might be,

it always comes down to that core message. And again, going back to that interview I had with Kipchoge, I'm pretty sure from recollection, I asked him, do you still think you'd be running when you're 70? And he was like, yeah, of course. Like, cause he was, he basically said to me, if I'm not running at 70, then what the hell am I doing this for? Like, you know, he was almost saying, and I don't want to, you know, take his words out of context,

but he was almost saying, no, running is what I do. I'm a runner, right? I'm going to be running always. It just so happens at the moment, I'm trying to break world records and inspire the world to run. But even when I can't do that anymore,

in some ways he said, it almost makes me a con if I'm not doing that. And I really liked that yeah but but he's he's truly an exceptional athlete i do think there are a lot of athletes that if they achieve the ultimate success they kind of say i'm done yeah with that sport that you don't see a lot of it but those who were the most process oriented some of the norwegian athletes that i've met and that they've won multiple gold medals they were so process oriented. Some of the Norwegian athletes that I've met and that they've won multiple gold medals, they were so process oriented. They're still skiing. They're still doing it. But they are not, the key for them is, because the problem with being one of these former great athletes is

if you get out on the track, you get out on the snow, everybody wants to beat you to be able to say, I was ahead of Bjorn Dadley for, you know, so they have to deal with that reality. And sometimes they just say, look, I don't do races anymore. I don't do because everyone is trying to beat me. You know, I get it. I don't, I didn't think of that. In many ways, Stephen, I think your philosophy is the opposite of no pain, no gain. It's yes and no. Yeah. Okay. We'll qualify it it because i do not want to misrepresent what these athletes are doing and what you know yeah there yeah we work there's work there's tough interval sessions but it's it's not every day not every day it's you can't no pain no gain says

suggests that the only way i can make a gain is if there's a lot of pain, which suggests that every day has to be really hard. You get it? So, the logical assumptions that emerge from no pain, no gain are not valid. They're not true. And that's what we have to get away from. But it doesn't mean that there's never any pain. Does that make sense? There a difference. Yeah. There's a difference. So yeah, there are some sessions that are hard and they feel rewarding to achieve, but they are achievable because of the sustainable process. Does the 80-20 rule apply across all ages, do you think? across all ages, do you think? Or, for example, could we make the case that if the goal is health as opposed to performance, which I think sometimes requires a slightly different approach if the goal is health as opposed to performance, maybe not always,

different approach of the goal is health as opposed to performance. Maybe not always, but sometimes. But if the goal is health, let's say you're in your 60s or your 70s, do you need to be doing any intensity or do you think most of your health benefits will come from frequency and duration? Great question. And I'm going to change the question on you or change the parameters because I'm going to change the question on you. Please do. Or change the parameters. Because I'm going to suggest that performance equals health, particularly at 70. In the sense that if I can perform the tasks of carrying my groceries up two flights of stairs, if I can perform the task of getting across the street when the light turns green, that's a performance level that I need to have to experience a quality of life that I need. So as we get older, you could almost say that performance equals health. Whereas when we're younger, we have this big health reserve. So we can perform and we can

say, health is not an issue. But I'm feeling that. In fact, I saw a sign in your wonderful little town where it said, we have apartments for the over 55s. So I've now been put in a category based presumably on my very limited function, you know, at 55. So I was like, okay, you know, that felt off-putting, you know, but anyway. But it's probably true that there are a lot of people my age, 58, But it's probably true that a lot of people my age, 58, already their functional capacity is such that they're looking to escape having to use stairs, for example, or something. So maybe the apartments are all first level, first floor flats or whatever. But it's a vicious cycle. It speeds up the decline because if you stop using stairs because you're finding it hard so what we should do is make all of the over 55s have to be on the third floor with no elevator and then they would

that would be the most health sustaining thing we could do for them is say you're gonna have to go up three flights of stairs every time you want to you forget your car keys you know and so but we don't we do the opposite i want to say ste, I definitely don't think you fall into that category. Well, thanks. But in an extension of that, I do quite a bit of cycling as you do, I do some endurance stuff, but I would almost argue that the most important workouts for me now at my age are the strength sessions. my age are the strength sessions two days a week i get in the gym and i do not i don't use machines sets of 10 on i do things like standing long jumps jumping on the boxes

you know and the young guys are looking at me like who's the old dude trying to you know but that's i'm almost happy with that yeah what am i doing and i think we all as what we need to do when we get over 55 or 50 or whatever that age cut off we're going to use we need to start going back to how how did we move when we were kids when i was on the playground what did i do sprinted a little bit jumped a little bit lifted something hung on something right that's what older people we need is we've got to maintain functional movement a bit of balance a bit of flexibility a bit of mobility a bit of ability the ability to suddenly put my leg out when i slide on ice so that i don't fall. That's what keeps us going is some of that playground level power, mobility, flexibility.

Unfortunately, that is what we quit doing when we get older. You mentioned something really important about strength training, which we've covered many times on the show. I don't think we can cover it enough because as you well know, we are losing muscle mass after the age of 30 unless we do something about it. And clearly that's going to become very problematic the older we get if we're not maintaining that muscle mass. Let's say someone's going to go, okay, I can do three cardio sessions a week, and that could be walking or jogging or indoor bike or swimming, whatever it might be, and two strength training sessions, right? And I'm just taking that off

the shelf as something I think many people will be trying to get in, some unsuccessfully, but that's their aspirational goal. How might we use your research and work and this 80-20 model to overlay onto those sessions? Yeah, so kind of implicit in what you're laying out there is they've got some goals of maintaining their cardiovascular fitness or their endurance capacity. And they also have understood that, hey, I need to maintain muscle mass and a bit of power, you know. And so, they've got some goals there. 80-20, do I need to wrap the whole thing up in an 80-20 package? I don't really think so. And to be honest, when we've looked at, you know, developed this kind of distribution based on the data, we basically just looked at the endurance sessions. We haven't included strength sessions, to be fair. Now, should we, would we, could we?

We could. It depends on the nature of those sessions. But for endurance athletes, those sessions are not so crazy demanding because they're mainly doing the strength as an adjunct to the endurance, not that they want to just keep getting stronger and stronger. They need to be strong enough, right? And there's a difference. So it doesn't seem like those sessions are particularly stressful for them. And therefore, we've left them out of most of our intensity distribution work. But, you know, for your recreational athlete, it's part of the bigger picture. I would still say those three endurance sessions, I'm going to think,

well, don't make all of them interval sessions. Let's do two low intensity green zone and one hard-ish. And then those two strength sessions, I'd play a little bit with them as well and say, let's make one of them more traditional strength training. And maybe I would think about having one of them be more kind of movement training. Often these, nowadays the training center has a green, a little green strip where you can run or jump or something. The other day I was in there and I use it all the time. But the other day I saw a middle-aged woman, and she was doing some jumping in the box. And I was like, I wanted to cheer. I wanted to just clap and go give her a hug.

I said, this is so cool what you're doing. It's so awesome that you are using your body like you did when you were 10 years old. Keep doing it. That's awesome. You know, because I don't see it very much. You don't see it very much once we get above over 50 and maybe even less on the women's side. Yeah, we lose the play, right?

Yeah. Fun, the enjoyment. So she looks like she was playing a bit. And I thought, oh man, if only more people did what I just saw you do. Yeah. I love that. That's super helpful.

And one of my favorite workouts that I prescribe and have for many years to patients is, well, let's use that model, right? Three cardio and two strength a week. Maybe once a week or maybe once every two weeks. You know, we don't have to be rigid about the 80-20. Just, you know, I think the take-home is make the majority of your cardio-type training easy, and then occasionally jump into the middle or the

high zone. But one thing I really have loved doing is saying, okay, you're not that fit. You don't know where to start. Okay, can you walk? Yeah. Okay, great. One day a week, one day every two weeks, warm up for about 10 minutes, you know, and you look, you know, round your block or whatever it might be, and then pick a starting point and then put a timer on your watch for a minute and see what house you can get to in that minute. Okay. Yeah. Great. You get there, just walk back nice and relaxed. And when everything's settled back to normal, go again. See how far you can get. I find it a really fun way for them to go, well, I got to number 22 last time. Can I get to number 24? Or maybe by the second

or third or fourth. It's a very simple way. That's intervals. Yeah. Right? It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be fancy. And let me tell you, the muscles don't know the fancy stuff. They don't understand when you say, oh, I've got 20 seconds here and 30 seconds here.

The muscle's not calculating that stuff. So we try to overthink this on the interval training. So what you're describing, it works. And if it's fun, and the other part of me, Bill Bowerman was a track and field coach at Oregon way back in the 60s and 70s in the United States. He wrote a little book back in the first little fitness revolution in the United States, the running craze. And he was having people do walk-run workouts where they would run for 50 yards or meters and then walk for 100 and then they would slowly change the ratios and run more, walk less. It works. My coach, Helen, will be so happy to hear you say that. She is a huge fan of walk-run. I still do that as most of my training.

She's like, you're recovering when you start to walk. You can go for longer by putting in strategic walking. It's just a way. All right, I'll tell you this last story maybe. What got me started doing research on this intensity distribution. One of the key moments in my scientific life was I'm out jogging in one of the local forest trails in Norway. And I see a young woman, she's jogging in front of me, and then she comes to a fairly steep hill, and she starts walking up that hill. And then she gets to the top and starts running again. And the reason that was jarring for me was because I knew I had tested her. I knew she had a VO2 max that was quite high,

meaning she was a very good endurance athlete. Her sister was an Olympic silver medalist. And I was like, why are you not running up that hill? Even I can run up that hill. But then I learned, well, no, because that day was a green zone day for her. And she was exhibiting intensity discipline. And that was this moment of truth for me is I realized, okay, I got to rethink this. What I thought I understood about training. Because there's knowledge here that I need to understand. And that's when I started trying to measure it. I love that. It's a beautiful

story. Very, very inspiring, especially for those of us who struggle to not let our egos get in the way of what we're doing when running or cycling or in the gym. I just want to finish off by referring to a tweet that you put out recently, five things you consider as an aging athlete, right? So I'm going to say you're one of the world's leading researchers in this area, because I think you are. And as well as all the research work you've done and the contributions you've made to this field, research work you've done and the contributions you've made to this field, I really found the five things you look at now as someone in the over 55 category, I found really interesting. Mobility, extension, booty, slalom skills, and reps in reserve. If you can remember that suite, can you quickly walk us through what each of those five things are?

You may have to remind me. Let's start with the first one. Mobility. Mobility. Because we do tend to lose the ability to use our bodies. We tend to lose flexibility and mobility. And sometimes, particularly things like cycling, it's very monotone in body position. So we have to counteract that.

So as you're getting older, you're making sure you're paying attention to mobility. Yeah, because what happens as we get older? What do we do? We start crumpling over. Well, that's the second one, extension, isn't it? Extension was used, I think you were saying in that tweet that you observe as people get older, that's what they're doing. They're sort of hunched over. And cycling tends to promote that. So I say, when I'm in the gym, when I'm in the weight room, I'm extending. I'm doing medicine ball throws. I'm doing jumping. I'm doing everything I can to be the opposite of what I do on the bike. So you're training extension. And I will say, as I've already mentioned,

because I'm six foot six and a half and until recently i would hunch over quite a lot and really these days i really do stand into my height a lot better than i ever have done i noticed posture a lot and your posture was sublime when you were standing in the dry season this morning so i think the extension work is working. Number three, booty. I think you were talking about glutes. Yeah, I kind of said that a little bit jokingly, but it's about our hips are where our power is. Our gluteus maximus is our biggest muscle.

And it refers to this issue that we lose muscle mass, and we particularly lose these big muscles. We lose this core. You know, the hips is where everything starts. And so I need to keep a booty, meaning I need to keep using, doing some squats, doing some things that stimulate that musculature, you know, kind of between my stomach and my thighs in that hip area. Great. Fourth one was slalom skills. I think this referred to your ability or your desire to adapt and say the body never forgets. We've all had injuries. We've all had issues. You need to work around them and not neglect areas, I think was the message. I've got a surgical shoulder, two surgeries. I can't do pull-ups anymore. I've got arthrosis, but I'm not going to quit working out.

I can do other stuff. So I have to find the exercises that do allow me to do as much as possible and live with that. So the slalom means I'm having to skirt around this particular exercise because I can't do it anymore. It hurts too much, but I can do other stuff. And the final one, which I think speaks to your entire philosophy is reps in reserve. Yeah. And that is just the reality that, you know what, I don't have to push myself to the absolute exhaustion, throwing up level anymore. And there's a term in the weight room called reps in reserve. So you might say you're going to do a set of eight at an intensity that you could have done 10. So you had two reps in reserve. You left a little in the tank and it's easier to recover. You get a good benefit, but you walk out of the gym

without having hurt something. So that's reps in reserve. And it's very anti, I'm going to you know i don't think western is the best term for this but but i do think it's quite a western quite an american uk mindset that you leave it all out there on the table you know it doesn't count unless you didn't throw up yeah and it's like no and i think kipchoge said in one interview not not the one with me that he likes to finish a lot of his workouts with a smile on his face yeah it's like hey yeah i could have done more but i didn't and that's why he can do it week in week out yeah we're back again to to it's you're playing chess or you're playing checkers you know it's long game long game so i've so enjoyed this conversation i can't tell you i've been looking

forward to speaking to you for months. Well, before I ask my final question, if people want to stay in touch with you and they want to follow your work and everything you're up to, I mean, I would highly recommend your Twitter feed and your YouTube channel, but is there anywhere else you'd direct people to? No, those are the main, you know,

obviously if they're geeky and want to get to the articles, they're all Google Scholar. They can find that stuff. But the interaction for me that's probably the biggest one right now is X or Twitter. It's a nice... I learn as much as I teach there. I try to give, but I get a great deal back. So I think it's a wonderful forum for me. Well, I definitely encourage everyone to follow you

and subscribe to your YouTube channel. I think it's just a phenomenal resource. To finish off, Stephen, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. And the goal each week is to inspire people to make positive changes in their life for their health and their happiness. I think this 80-20 philosophy

has got such widespread application. So at the end of this conversation, I would like you to speak to two different people. For that individual who fancies themselves as a bit of a weekend warrior. You know, they work hard in the week, they've got kids, but they like to push themselves. They like to do the park run. They like to do 10Ks every few Sundays when there's a local event on. I know many people like this.

But they're feeling, you know, tired. They're not getting faster. They wish they could run faster or be injured less. What would your final words of advice be for that individual? I would say to them, just put a little bit of trust in me for six weeks and follow this guidance that we're going to reduce the number of hard sessions. And you're going to, you know, if you're

doing two or three times a week, probably three times a week, they're going pretty hard. I'm gonna say, can you let me have two of those? You keep one really hard, give me two. And I want them to go into this green and we'll stretch them a little bit. Give me six weeks of your time as an experiment and let's see where you're at in six weeks.

And what do you want them to assess? Is it sleep, energy, performance, all of these things I'm guessing. And they may, it happens surprisingly often. They may say to me in an email, you know what? I haven't run this fast in 10 years. And I'm being totally honest with you.

I get so many emails that say that because it surprises them so much. I'm running slower in training and I'm faster in the 10K. I don't get this, but it's true. So just give it a six week try. Okay. Great advice for them. And then very, very finally, I'd love you to speak, Stephen, to that individual who knows that they don't move their body as much as they should. They listen to this podcast, they read books, they know how important this movement is, but they find it hard. They feel like they've put on excess weight over the years. So they don't find it that easy to move.

Based upon all your years of experience, what advice would you give to them? Start with just getting out the door. I mean, you're describing my mother. So part of me wants to cry because she has diabetes, type two diabetes. She has, you know, at risk of losing a leg, but it's because she hasn't been able to do

that basic thing of just getting out the door and walking around her living facility, you know, and walking around her living facility, keeping it just really small steps. And little things have such a huge effect when you're starting from that low point. So give yourself a pat on the back, and do little things. And so we're back to that contract with yourself. And I think it always begins with getting out the door the first time and just patting yourself on

the back for that. And then do it again. And pretty soon there's a habit there. And pretty soon you feel a difference. And it can can it just starts that simple yeah you know it's it's i i want to say it's not hard but i know it is hard yeah because i've experienced it in my own family how hard it can be uh for for for some of us so i i'm with you i understand but i need you to just get out the door you know and let's start at the bottom of that pyramid three times a week, 15 minutes and see where it goes. Stephen, I've so enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for making the trip over from Norway.

And I honestly hope it's not the last time we speak. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. Honestly, Hope, it's like the last time we speak. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.

And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming

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