Modern Wisdom - #046 - Alex Hutchinson - Endure; Finding The Limits Of Human Performance

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

Alex Hutchinson is a journalist, athlete and author of "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance". What makes some of us quit while others can continue? Just how much of human performance is dictated by the mind and how much by the body? These are fundamental questions which all of us have contemplated, today we find the answers. Alex takes us through the fascinating research that went into his book. I was blown away by the insights as he breaks down the components that make up "endurance" and gives us some fantastic tools to improve our own. More Things: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sweatscience Endure The Book - http://amzn.eu/d/f19Ihzf Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year. We are kicking off 2019 with what might be the best episode that I've ever recorded. I know I do say that a lot, it's a running joke, but this one genuinely could be it. Alex Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and an endurance athlete. Recently wrote a book called InJure. Mind, Body and the curiously elastic limits of human performance. I think anyone who has ever gone for a run, has thought to themselves what makes some of us quit while others continue, and just how much of human performance is dictated by the mind and how much by the body, a fundamental question which anyone who has ever taken part in a

physical pursuit has considered. And today Alex is going to take us through exactly what he's uncovered. I'm absolutely certain that this is going to be a massive benefit to a lot of listeners. If it is to you, please pop it into your gym, Facebook Facebook group or send it to some friends that you know would really appreciate the insights that Alex gives us. This could genuinely be a game changer for a lot of athletes performances as we move into 2019. So pound the share button if you would be so kind. Don't forget to hit subscribe if you are new to the channel. It would make me very happy indeed. And if you're a regular listener, please go and give me five stars. Wherever you are tuned in, now let's go and improve our endurance.

Alex, welcome to Modern Wisdom, how are you? I'm good, thanks Chris for having me on, I appreciate it. Brilliant, so I'm specifically excited about today's podcast, not least because my endurance sucks. So I am hoping, as I'm sure many of the listeners are, to find some strategies that can improve our endurance. And also, I think probably define and better understand what endurance is, because as far as I'm concerned, it's something that I work on quite a lot. And sometimes I feel like it's good and then sometimes I feel like I might have never

trained before in my life. Yeah, I mean, so I'll confess, I started with a very narrow definition of endurance. I've been a runner in my whole life, so I was thinking very narrowly, and of endurance as kind of how fast can you run a long race. But I've come to think of endurance as a much broader thing. And in fact, I'll jump right in with the definition that I ended up using in the book, which is that endurance is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. So it's something that takes place over time.

And it can be, we can be talking about mental endurance, physical endurance, you know, at work or during exercise or whatever the case may be. But what I'll end up arguing is that fundamentally that struggle is the same and the struggle to continue, you know, to keep studying for an exam or something is actually the same mental struggle that goes on when you're running a marathon and you're trying to force yourself to maintain a pace that is unpleasant. That's a very artistic definition, I think, much more artistic than I would have thought. Very artistic, but yeah, it's definitely not where I started out thinking that my definition

of endurance would be the maximum amount of oxygen that your lungs can transport to your muscles. That's what I was expecting. Mid-range exercise. But that definition, I didn't just pull it out of, let's say, my head. It's actually from a scientific paper from a guy at the University of Kent who studies endurance. He's the head of the endurance research group there. That's what he concluded, this is what the fundamental, you know, bedrock of

endurance is that it's not about oxygen, it's not about muscle fibers, it's about a mental struggle. And that ultimately, when you're, whether you're running a marathon or again in some other aspect of your life, struggling to continue against something that's unpleasant, it's how you face that struggle mentally. And it's your struggle to continue against that mountain desire to stop that's unpleasant. It's how you face that struggle mentally, and it's your struggle to continue against that mountain desire to stop that really matters. So that's the scientific definition,

even though it sounds like I was writing a poem about endurance or something. Yeah, so where does endurance begin? What did you first begin to look at, and where does the book start? Yeah, so actually, I mentioned that I've been a runner for most of my life and actually, I competed for the Canadian national team for about a decade as a cross country runner and track and field runner. So this started as a sort of personal quest for me and actually,

the place I start the book is a single race that I had back in the mid 1990s when I was a university student where I was trying to break the four minute barrier for 1,500 meters, which is a little bit shorter than a mile. So it's kind of, it's like a 418 mile. So, you know, it's a poor man's four minute mile barrier, let's say it's not as fast as the four minute mile, but significant.

And I actually was stuck at 401 or 402 for four years during high school and then university. So I had the sense that I had approached the true limits of my endurance, that maybe I could run 359, but that was about all that I'd be able to. I'd been running 401 or 402 year after year. And I ended up, I ran a race and what happened is the timekeeper gave me the wrong splits. Basically, I was, I,

went, you know, when you run a track race every lap, there's a timekeeper who will call out how fast you're going. So you have a sense of whether you're on pace. And he was calling out splits that were about three or four seconds off. And basically fooled me into thinking that I was running way faster than I was. And so about a third of the way through the race, I was having this like, wow, this is way faster than I think I'm going in, yet I feel really good. And so I just had the sensation I was having

the greatest day of my life. And so I just kind of went for it. I really unshackled myself from my pre-race expectations. And then I'm burning 352, which was like a nine. Like, I believed me after four years of running the same time over and over again, it was absolutely mind blowing. And what then happened is that I was totally altered. I never struggled to break four minutes again.

And in fact, I then ran 349 in my next race, and 344 in my next race. So all of a sudden I went from like a mediocre college runner to running in that Summer's Olympic trials. And so that for me was the real foundation of hang on, the limits of my ability when I'm up against what seems like physical limits. There's something more there because my muscles didn't change and my lungs and my heart and all these other things. None of that changed dramatically over the course of those few weeks, but being tricked somehow

unlocked some reserves that were otherwise there. So I don't want to oversimplify that. And from that moment on, I knew I would write a book on instruments, but it kind of laid the groundwork for me of thinking, there's something more to this. It's not, we're not just like cars, where you press down the gas tank and your speed is a function of how many cylinders you have in your engine and how much gas is in the tank. Instead, it's something much more complex.

And I think for anyone who has tried to push their limits in any capacity, you pretty soon realize that it's not just some sort of mathematical thing that I'm capable of X, and that's exactly what I'm capable of, that there's more to it, and that the brain plays a role in dictating in ways that we're not even aware of, the brain plays a role in setting our physical limits. So that was the start for me of trying to understand how does the mind and body work together to create what we feel as physical limits? That's a very poignant way to start your journey, I suppose. It's going to be something that's going to really kick it home that you made such a marked difference in your performance

purely based on the fact that you had this mental barrier. So what's kind of the established understanding of the limits of endurance at the moment? Yeah, so it's in flux, I would say. It turns out that it's an exciting area to write about in terms of scientific research because there are a lot of differing views right now. In fact, one of the sort of mixed benefits of the modern world is that you can go on Twitter and follow a bunch of the scientists who are at the forefront of researching this area and discover that they actually really hate each other. You can follow their ideas, but also follow their, like, their, their, their sort of school yard

insults of each other. So it's, it's an area in flux. But the way, the way I would frame it is, is for most of the 20th century, there was this attempt to understand the human body sort of more or less as a machine that, that, and there was a huge amount of progress made was made throughout the 20th century of understanding all the parts of the human machine, how muscles contract, what fuels them, what are the different ways muscles can work, you know, the cardiovascular system. And all of this with this sort of unspoken assumption that if you could understand all the parts of the machine, you would fully understand the workings of the human body. So just like we can, we know how much gas goes into the gas tank of a car, and we know

how far that car can go that you could calculate, and actually there are equations that they sort of were perfected in the early 1990s of, if I know what's called my VO2 max, which is a measure of oxygen capacity and my running economy, which is kind of like the fuel economy of a car, and my lactate threshold, which tells how much lactate, which is a metabolic byproduct of building up in my body. Anyway, if you take these three quantities, which you can test in the lab, you can plug them into an equation

and it will say you should be able to run a marathon in so many hours, so many minutes, and so many seconds. And so it's a very deterministic model of like, we know the parameters of this machine. Therefore, we know the limits of its endurance. How accurate has that proven to be? So in the big picture, it's, it's pretty good. Like if, if I take, if you take a hundred people off the street, send them to a lab, have them complete those tests, then you'll be able to rank them

in order of how fast they're going to run a marathon with reasonably good accuracy. But you're never going to know exactly. So you're going to be able to tell that if someone who can run a marathon in 230, two hours, 30 minutes, and someone who can run the marathon in three hours, and maybe even two hours, 45 minutes. But when you take a bunch of people who are at a similar level, let's say the field at the Olympics,

everyone there is fit, and everyone there has trained hard, has talent. The lab values will tell you absolutely nothing about who's gonna win the race. And that's the realization people came to, that there's, once you get rid of the obvious, like you know that the guy who's been training his whole life That's the realization people came to that there's once you get rid of the obvious, like, you know that the guy who's been training his whole life is going to be fitter than the

guy who's never run a step. That's the equations in the lab tests can tell you the difference between those two guys, but you can't tell the difference between a field of relatively equally matched people. I get that. So it's not sufficiently high fidelity to be able to narrow down the real sort of very close, close knit competitor. Yeah, exactly. So I don't want to dismiss and say this is useless because it's not. It tells you a lot. It just doesn't tell you everything. And, you know, where things get serious and interesting is not whether Joe Olympian can beat Joe Sixpack. It's who's gonna actually win the Olympics or whatever,

or from a personal perspective, am I in shape to run a new best that's better than I ran last year? And the lab tests don't have, as you said, they don't have enough fidelity to see that sort of fine grain. And so it was in the late 1990s that people, some scientists started to challenge this sort of orthodoxy.

There's a guy named Tim Noakes, who's the South African sports scientist who is extremely influential, extremely controversial. These days, he's probably best known that he's become a real advocate of low carb high fat diets and writing some very provocative stuff about how everyone else is part of the business. And idiot. Yeah. And an idiot and corrupt paid off idiot.

So. Someone's shilling for the pasta companies, all the rice companies are giving back handers to the rest of the endurance researchers to make sure that everyone stays on a carbohydrate binge. You're essentially quoting directly from what he would say. That is, that is almost exactly what he says. And I love him already. He wrote a whole book about the high sports hydration

where he basically called out by name most of the leading sports nutrition researchers in the world and said they were all paid off by Gatorade. The thing is there's some truth to what he says, but it's not, I think he takes it too far. I think the research, anyway, this is a bit of a rabbit hole, but the point is he's very provocative. He may not get all the details right, but he sure as heck forces people to think carefully

about their assumptions. And so in the late 90s, he started to say, hey, this sort of focus on the body is missing something important. And it's not just enough to say, well, you know, of course, you have to be motivated to or you have to try hard, that you have to think about the brain and the body as one system together. And he proposed an idea that he called the central governor model, which was this idea that no matter how hard you try, you can't push to your true physical limits. Because if you did, if you pushed to the point where you really couldn't

get enough oxygen in, then your heart and or your brain would be in trouble and you'd kill over and die essentially. So he said, we're hardwired with this sort of central governor, a central protective mechanism to always hold back a little bit of reserve, that the brain is deciding where your limits are for your own safety. And whether that's strictly speaking true or not, I'm not sure, and I don't think anybody is sure. But what that did is spark a whole kind of revolution and re-evaluation of the role of the brain in limits. And so when I got interested in this topic, which was about 10 or 12 years ago,

the whole field was in a pevel as people were arguing about this central governor idea, what role the brain played. And that has sort of continued to this day. There's still a bunch of rival theories and arguing about how the brain should be incorporated. But overall, I would say there's a sort of underlying consensus, which is that, yeah, when you go out and if I put you on a treadmill, set the speed at a given pace and say, run until you fall off the back of the treadmill, the moment you fall off the back of the treadmill or the moment you say, stop the treadmill before I fall off the back, it's fundamentally a decision that you're making.

And it's not based on, there's no measurement I can take, whether it's your heart rate or your breathing rate or your body temperature or your lactate levels. There's no measurement I can take that will tell me when you're going to fall off the back of the treadmill reliably. But there is one question I can ask you, which is how hard does this feel? And when you get to the point where you say, this feels like about a 10 out of 10 on effort. Boom, you're off the back of the treadmill. And so it's your brain's processing of all these signals

from your body and processing of how you're feeling in general, processing of how you slept last night and how you're getting on with your partner and so on. Your brain is processing all that information into one number, which are one sensation, which is how hard it feels and that is the ultimate sort of final answer in terms of where the limits of your endurance are. So that's I think it's not universally agreed upon but I think that's where the field is moving now in contrast to the 20th century. It's a machine if we know you're lactated and you're breathing rated and stuff will be able to dictate your limits. I get that completely. I recently did a podcast with some of the cultures from Reebok Crossfit

Time side up here in Newcastle. And as a part of that, I asked them the question, which essentially you're moving through the answer of now, which was, if I put a bar that is five kilos above your PB in front of you and I tell you that you need to pick it up, there's a chance that you may be able to pick it up, but the difference between you lifting it and not lifting it really lies within your mind and what I was fascinated by and we couldn't come up with the solution, but you may be able to give us some sort of, some spotlight on this is what the mechanism is that works on whether or not you pick the bar up or whether you don't pick the bar up, how your brain is able to

choose how much of your body's performance gets deployed, if that makes sense. Yeah, totally. Well, so the first thing I'll say is if you put the bar that with five kilos extra on it, and if I don't tell you that it has those five kilos, so that you think it's just the same load that you've lifted before, that's going to raise your chances dramatically of lifting it. If you believe that, yeah, this is, I've done this before, of course I can do this, then you'll have a much greater chance of doing it. Is that due to hormonal profile in the body?

Is that because of just a psychological bias that we've got? Yeah, I think, well, it's, I think there's a mix of things going on. Fundamentally, what's going on is your brain is sending a signal to your muscles, telling how many muscle fibers should be recruited, which muscle fibers in what order? And so it's a very, very complex process.

You know, if you're doing, say, a deadlift, there's, I can't remember, there's only like 13 different muscles. There's 17 different muscles that have to contract in a very specific order. So just, just saying, just contracting more isn't always the right answer. But contracting in a way that, if you don't think you're

going to be able to do it, then you're already perhaps contracting in a pattern that is defensive so that when you fail, you're not going to hurt yourself. But in doing so, you make it less likely that you succeed. Whereas if the neuromuscular signaling is proceeding with the assumption that you're going to be able to do it,

you're maybe giving yourself a little edge because you're not holding back with the fear of failure. And that probably ties into your story from your 1,500 meter run as well. Absolutely. I think there's a big connection. And when we start talking about muscle strength, it's interesting because obviously lifting something once is different from sustaining something for an hour or for four minutes or whatever the case may be, but there's a lot of parallels and there's a lot of literature. So I have a chapter in the book called Muscle,

where I try and sort of disentangle. So what does it mean to be limited by your muscle strength? What does it mean is fundamentally what happens when you reach failure is that is it that your muscle fibers simply aren't able to contract in a way that completes the motion. And it turns out to be just like with sort of marathon running, it turns out to be much slipperier slope to try and figure out what your limits are. So there's some famous studies from back in the early 1960s. And one of them, what they did is that they had volunteers doing a maximum kind of biceps curl contraction once every minute. So they were just supposed to do it all out. Don't save anything just once a minute. Give us your maximum curl for

a couple of seconds. And they were measuring the force produced. And then before one of the the lifts, they had one of the researchers snuck up behind the volunteers and fired a gun in their ears, basically scared the crap out of them. And all of a sudden, of course, their strength, their maximum strength suddenly goes up by something like eight or 10%. And we sort of understand this intuitively as a fight or flight response. They were completely scared at that moment, a fraction of a second before they were left. So, bam, they're able to produce more force. Now, they could get a similar effect by injecting adrenaline or injecting some stimulants, I think it was effidrin or something. I'm not, I can't remember what the stimulant was. So, there are chemical ways of sort of

altering what's going on in the brain, which in turn changes how much of your muscle force, you know, if you think in evolutionary terms, at that moment when the bear is chasing you or whatever the case may be, then whatever safety circuitry is hardwired into your body, it's a good for you if that circuitry is somewhat flexible and can say, you know what, we're going to just say more of everything here. Yeah, yeah, let's not save, let's not save this for another day. So and you see that with with with pain too, like the, and the same thing if you're, you know, if you're a deer being chased by a wolf and you trip and break your leg, it's not

the time to say, oh, I need to lie down and let this leg get better. You're just going to keep running even if you break, even if the leg snaps. It's worth breaking, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's these mechanisms that affect both how we perceive what's going on, like pain perception, but also how we send muscles, our send signals from our brains to brain to our muscles. And those can be mediated by emotional responses

and by hormones, and also just by, like we were saying before, like deception, then there are studies where they do exactly this sort of thing. They tell you you're going to lift one weight and you're lifting another weight. Are they tell you you have to, you're racing against your own best performance, but really they have you racing in virtual reality against your own best performance plus 1%, or plus 2%. And they find that if you add a percent or two, and you have the belief that you can beat that,

you think it's just your own best performance from last time you were in the lab, then you beat it. Until, unless it's changed too much, if you speed up this virtual reality representation of yourself by 5%, then that's too far. And you're trying to race against yourself, but you know something is wrong, and you end up getting discouraged.

So it's never like do all of this or do this thing always works. But depending on the context, there are various ways you can tweak what you expect to go on in your brain and use that as a way of doing more than you were previously capable of. Yeah, what's interesting there, there's a funny story, I'm not too sure how much truth is in it, but a couple of my friends are firefighters and they say a lot of the time if there's been car accidents and stuff and mothers have been known to be to have incredible bursts of strength when they're concerned about their baby in a car and they've been able to pull handles harder than they would be able to and you know move things out of the way because they've got this

mortal fear of the situation that they've got this mortal fear of the situation that they're in and that kind of ties back to the bear scenario that you'd described. And then the same for anyone who's ever watched a powerlifting competition, if you look at powerlifters before they step up to the plate, they're sniffing smelling salts that take your face off and they're getting their friends to slap them on the back of the neck. He's like, if someone, if you went through that in a normal day-to-day life, you'd want to go to bed for a little bit. But these guys are electing to do it because they think that

it's going to prime their mind into a state where they can recruit more from their body. Yeah, totally. That's one of the things I looked into is this, okay, is it true that a scared mom could lift a car off their crushed baby? And if you look through news archives, you find story after story like this, but of course it never happens in the lab because you're not allowed to put a baby under a car in the lab. They just don't go for it. But so I was trying to sort of figure this out.

And I found, I ended up finding a story, probably the most plausible story I could find happened about 12 years ago in Arizona, a guy who was a cyclist was hit by a car and strapped under the wheels. And the guy who came and, so reportedly, according to eyewitnesses, this guy came and lifted the car up so that someone else could pull the cyclist out from under the car.

And so it turns out this guy was actually, this guy was not a guy who looked like me. He was a guy who actually could deadlift. He had a best of, I can't remember something like 700 pounds in the gym. He was a strong old strong old boy. Then he was the guy that you wanted. If you're trapped under a car, you want that guy. Yeah, he was the right guy. And so the question is my time.

This is what I've been training for my entire life. And in that moment, he undoubtedly did more than he had ever done, because one of the cool post-scripts to the story is, you know, it all happened. He got the guy out. He's driving home later that night, and he realizes a mouth feels kind of funny. He gets home and realizes he's cracked eight teeth or something like that. So he was clenching his mouth so hard while doing this lift.

And so, you start to do the math and say, so the car was a Chevy Camaro. And it's like, okay, how much is a Chevy Camaro way? Well, it weighs something like 1400 kilos or something depending on the model year. And so that's a lot more than, and then you say, well, what's the world record for a dead lift? Well, I did some digging on this.

And so the unofficial record is actually, it was set at the world's strong man competition. And I think it was 1982, a guy lifted, I got named Tom McGee, lifted, I can't remember the exact numbers, in the vicinity of 1150 pounds. So like 500 kilos of cheddar cheese. It was in New Zealand. So you can find the video on YouTube. It's amazing. It's just stacks of cheddar cheese and he lifts it up.

And it's like, there's a big gap between 500 kilos and 1,400 kilos. And then you start to do the physics well. Okay, you don't have to lift the whole car up. You just have to lever it up on its back wheels. So maybe you're lifting a half its weight, or third of its weight. And then there's the shocks.

How much lift are you getting from the shock absorbers? So the final scientific answer that I come up with is, I don't really know, maybe it could happen. And there's also, I ended up digging into the old Soviet athletic literature. There's some studies from back in the 50s and 60s in the Soviet Union trying to understand what the ultimate limits of weightlifters are. And they concluded that a typical person can access about 80% of their maximum muscle strength,

whereas a trained weightlifter can maybe get to 90% in competition. And then that, I had someone, I had a friend of mine who speaks Russian, you know, translates some of these papers for me, but it's pretty obscure where they get those numbers from or whether they're just kind of pulling them out of their ears. But the bottom line is, under the right circumstances, it seems pretty fair to say that you can often find a little bit more strength. You can't necessarily find double your strength or something. You're not going to be able to lift that car over your head or anything like that, but maybe

you're going to be able to get an extra 10, 20% of what you're already capable of, and then maybe that'll be enough to get the baby out from under the car or whatever the case may be. So what we're saying is that the brain plays a very prominent role in eliciting as much of your performances as you can. Yeah, exactly. So the important thing is that the brain doesn't turn you into Superman. So if you're asked to bet on a mentally strong person

who weighs 30 kilos and a sort of lazy guy who's huge and with enormous muscles. The guy with enormous muscles is going to be stronger. He's going to lift up more, but even if he's getting less out of himself. So mental strength isn't going to allow you, you know, David to beat Goliath. But for most of us, the fundamental thing is trying to come closer to our own limits, to get the most out of ourselves so that we can, or if you want competition, to beat people who are roughly on our level, not at the six levels above. And in that case, that's where the mind comes in. It determines whether you're going to get 90% or 95% out of yourself, not whether you're going to get 500% out of yourself.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. So what during your discovery, during the research for the book, did you discover helps with moving the brain towards a more efficient deployment of the body's capabilities? Because everyone who is listening that trains will understand the concept of progressive overload for muscular training and a lot I haven't spent an awful lot of time running. I'm going to presume that the same will be done that you'll run a long distance, then split that up into smaller distances and move your split forward and have little breaks and, you know, it's on and so forth. So is there an equivalent for the brain?

Yeah, well, there are a bunch of different ways. You can go, some of which I recommend and some of which I don't. One of the things I tried just for kicks, well, while writing the book, there's something called Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, which is basically, you take a nine volt battery and a couple of electrodes and you attach it to your head and you run some current through your brain. It's a weak current, so let me just reiterate here, this is one of the, in case of any doubt, this is one of the things I'm not suggesting you do. But, I mean, all joking aside, as far as anyone knows, it's safe. But if you pick the, if you put the electrodes in the right place, you can moderate or change

the activity of the neurons that are responsible for your perception of effort. So you can make it given level of exercise feel a little bit easier. And as we were saying earlier, if it feels easier, you can do it for longer or you can make a given level of exercise feel a little bit easier. And as we were saying earlier, if it feels easier, you can do it for longer or you can increase, you can do it harder. Because how it feels is really what matters. So over the last five years, there've been a bunch of studies showing that this technique,

you do about 10 minutes of electric brain stimulation, it changes how you're near on fire for about an hour. So you get this temporary alteration and how hard exercise feels. And as a result, you're able to push harder and achieve more. And there were athletes using this technique at the Winter Olympics this year, the 2018 Winter Olympics. And the walking around with nine volt batteries attached to them. Well, or using them in training. And there were, you know, there've been professional sports teams experimenting with it.

There's a Silicon Valley startup that makes noise canceling headlobs. Hey, low fsign. That's the one I'm talking about. And that's what I tried while writing the book. I didn't actually work for me in the sense that I'm bald. And apparently my, you know, the tough weather in Canada has toughened my scalp

to a degree that I really had trouble making electrical contact with the spikes that are supposed to deliver the control or just kept saying insufficient electrical contact. And I'm like, man, I'm digging these spikes into my head. I ended up with like 24 little red divots on my head for the rest of the day. So anyway, all of which is the point here is that there are ways of directly manipulating the brain that alter your perception of effort and altering your perception of effort improves your performance, which is, to me, is a cool

principle because it shows that you haven't changed anything below your, below the neck. All you're doing is manipulating how your neurons communicate with each other and all of the sudden your physical limits have changed. That's interesting. So, effort is a big mediator there. So when you're doing RPE and you say rate of perceived exertion is a nine, but if the next day you then felt that that nine was an eight, you'd be able to move more. That's 100% it.

That is the fundamental truth or at least theory that is at the forefront of exercise physiology right now, that that RPE, the rating of perceived exertion is the master controller of what you're capable of. Wow, tell us more about that. So I mean, RPE is just for listening to aren't familiar with it, rating of perceived exertion, it's a very simple concept. And there's you can, it's a, if I, if I'm doing an exercise and someone to ask me, hey, how hard doing an exercise and someone asks me, hey, how hard is this exercise on a scale of,

you can either use a scale of six to 20 or a scale of one to 10. So let's just say the one to 10, because it's a little simpler. And I say, that's a seven out of 10. Then they'll say, okay, that's great. And they know, then roughly how long I'll be able to continue doing that. And once I get to 10 out of 10, that's it. By definition, I'm done.

If I'm saying this is as hard as I can go, then they know that I'm not gonna be able to keep doing that. And once I get to 10 out of 10, that's it. By definition, I'm done. If I'm saying this is as hard as I can go, then they know that I'm not going to be able to keep going there. Now, when people first hear about this, they kind of think, well, that's sort of an imperfect, rough vague description of how you're feeling and what one person will call 7 out of 10, another person might call 6 out of 10. And that's all true.

But the fact remains that it turns out to be a really reliable guide to how what you're capable of doing. And people are like, well, it's not as reliable or accurate as your lactate levels or your whatever else that gives you your heart rate or your breathing rate or all these other things. You're rating of perceived exertion incorporates all of those things. All of the same media, it's mediated by all of those things, isn't it?

Yeah. So we're talking about a different level of explanation. Of course, your heart rate matters, but it only matters in so far as it makes, or is associated with exercise feeling harder. And what's the key thing is that, yes, rating of perceived exertion reflects all those things that are going on in your body, but it also reflects what's going on in your mind. And that's what's what are in your brain.

And that's why you can alter your rating of perceived exertion using something like electric brain stimulation, and then you're able to keep going or lift more or run faster, even though you haven't changed anything about what's going on in your muscles or your harder, your lungs. And so there've been a number of studies that have demonstrated that, to be the case, if you find a way of manipulating perceived exertion, then you've effectively found a way of changing your physical limits. That's crazy.

And that's a crazy. It's a super powerful insight because if it's true, then it changes your whole perspective on what are my limits. Because when you feel like you've hit your physical limits, it doesn't feel like it reflects your feelings or your receptions. It's like, no, I swear to you, my legs could not take another step.

And what this research is saying is, yeah, they could have. Yeah, if a lion had jumped out from behind a tree and started chasing you, you would have taken it. You just needed a little bit more motivation. Yeah, and of course, in some circumstances, let's say it's the Olympic final, motivation is already pretty near to maximal. So it's not like, people aren't trying hard, but even in that situation, the fundamental determinant is that the reason you stop isn't that your

legs are completely incapable, it's that you've reached the point where it's absolutely at your maximum effort. It's as hard as you can push. I love the idea of this. I often think about the very, very granular nature, the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, about just how much more could you have squeezed out? Okay, so the line jumps out and then, oh my God, the line's attacking your wife.

And then, oh my God, then your mum's behind your wife. And you know what I mean? Like, you just think like, how much more could we layer on top? I do think about this quite a lot. It's a very interesting thought experiment, which it would appear is actually existing in real experiments as well. So I wanted to clarify, they've never actually done the line thing with the mother. The way that they have them. That needs to be done. We need to get some funding and then it'll be fine. So I want to talk about how some specific factors can define your limits because we will get onto some tactics for how you can improve the mind game, so to speak. But there are things that your mind will detect.

So pain, oxygen, heat, thirst, and fuel, I think are the ones that you define quite heavily, is that right? Yeah, yeah, there's a bunch of those. And I think there's maybe a couple of those like heat or I can't, you know, so basically, what I tried to do in the book is, I tried to sort of attack my,

this claim that we've just been talking about that it's all perception of effort and say, okay, well, what happens when we really push some of these things that limit us to their absolute extremes? Like what are you perceiving as well? You're saying you're talking about perception of effort, well, what is the perception?

It's like it's not effort Effort isn't a thing. It's like, okay, it's a combination of fatigue and pain and discomfort and, like, you say, the heat and the sweat and the oxygen and you need to break them down, right? And that's what you've done here. Yeah, well, and what is effort? Is that actually a deep question that maybe we can we can swipe out a little bit? There's lots of arguments about this. There's researchers who argue very strongly that it's different from pain and it's different from fatigue. What it actually reflects is how hard your brain is working to send signals to your muscles. So the harder your brain has to work, you perceive this as a struggle to continue against

a mounting desire to stop. And so there's studies that try and separate pain from effort. So they first they have you get a sense of what pain is, they force you to dip your hand in an ice bucket and until you can't. And you say when you pull that, your hand out of the ice bucket, they say, get out 10 or 10 pain. Now I want you to think differently about so pain versus just effort.

How hard is it to keep pedaling that bike? They put you on your bike, they have you peddled to exhaustion and what they find is at the moment you give up, what people tend to be saying on average is, yeah, oh, this really hurts. It's a pain of like six or seven out of 10, but my effort is at 10 out of 10.

So you're giving up, it does hurt, six or seven out of 10 pain is bad, but it's not seven out of 10. But my effort is at 10 out of 10. So you're giving up, it does hurt, six or seven out of 10 pain is bad. But it's not 10 out of 10. It's the effort that reaches its peak, which is something different depending on, you know, it's defining it as something distinct from from pain. So anyway, that's a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't want to like, believe it at that point, but the question of what effort is is an interesting one and it's not obvious. It's something that people are arguing about. But to actually answer your question, so yeah, what are all these things that go into, to creating the perception of effort? It's creating the perception of limit as well, isn't it?

It's what defines your limit within these, or within different contexts, I suppose. And of course, I've been rambling on about how limits are all just sort of a creation of your perception of effort. But of course, look, if I lock you in a room and don't give you water for a week, you're going to die. And that's not a figment of your imagination. You're actually going to run out of fluid. I'm very glad.

And far earlier than that, if you're running a marathon and you don't have a hot day and you don't drink any water, you're not going to die, but you're going to be probably performing sub-optimally because your blood's going to be getting a lot thicker because you've lost so much fluid to sweat. Regardless of how hard you want to push. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter. You can be the toughest guy in town, but if you don't, or similarly, if you, let's say, you don't eat any breakfast, you don't eat, let's say you don't eat for 24 hours and you're trying to run a marathon. Well, you're going to be out of gas in the same way that a car can run out of gas, and it doesn't really matter how tough you are.

Your performance isn't going to be as good as it would be if you had a full load of fuel. And similarly, if it's 35 degrees and sunny, you're not going to run a marathon as fast as you would if it was 10 degrees and overcast. And again, nothing to do with mental toughness. So those are the sort of catcher arguments that you have to think about and say, okay, Alex, before you write a book that claims that the limits of endurance are all in your head, what are all these other things tell us, these forms of limits? What happens when you run out of oxygen if you're free diving or climbing a mountain like Mount Everest? And so let me just give you the broad overall conclusion, which is that all those things

are capable of slowing you down. But in keeping with what we've been saying, the way they slow you down is that they make things feel harder. They give you basically, I don't know if you haven't written you think of orange lights and red lights or yellow lights and red lights. I can't remember the answer. Red or engineering, yeah. Yeah, so let's call it, they give you orange lights. They are cautioning you that, hey, you're going to get in some trouble

if you keep going without drinking. And so we're going to make this feel harder, even though your body isn't failing yet, we're going to make it feel harder to try and force you to slow down so that unless you take some fuel or get some water, whatever the case is, the thing is that you're missing. So these things do slow us down,

but the way they slow us down is not because your, you know, your out of water and therefore your body isn't functioning right. It's because your brain is perceiving the short, you know, the increase in body temperature or the reduction in fluids in your body as a potential problem and it's raising your perception of effort. Now if you persist and ignore the orange lights, then yeah, you're going to hit a red light. You're going to run out of fuel. You're going to over heat and have to stop or whatever the case may be. But those red lights are only hit if you ignore the orange lights and the orange lights are mediated by again by your brain. So yes, there are real physical limits. Of course, you know, of course, if you don't drink or eat anything, you're going to, you're not going to be

able to perform the same as if you do. But the way, in most cases, the way those, those limits act is by acting on the brain rather than by making your muscles stop working or whatever. So it's acting on the, the RPE again, essentially. Exactly. Exactly. It's so it's sounds so stupid that I didn't think about this before, but that the rate of perceived exertion or how much effort you feel you're putting in is this macro figure which collates all of the different inputs that your body is feeling.

So like you say, you've come in, you had an argument with the wife last night, but you had a good night's sleep, well, but you didn't drink enough, but you wait enough. And all of these things are collated into your body, determining what is the current status quo inside of me at the moment. And therefore, how difficult or easy am I going to allow this

particular level of discomfort to feel as I move through or this particular exercise to feel? That's exactly it. And to me, it's a really powerful way of thinking about things. So powerful. I want to do the obligatory step back and say there are plenty of scientists who will say that's a bunch of crap. There's still lots of debate, and some who still would say, no, the body is a machine,

the mind doesn't matter. So it's an area of research, but to me, that's a very convincing explanation. It makes intuitive sense, and there's also some really fascinating research that kind of backs this up and says, no, this is what's happening. One of my favorite examples is they had cyclists do an endurance test and they flashed pictures of either smiling faces or frowning faces on the wall in front of them, but only for 16 milliseconds at a time, which is like a tenth the length of a blink.

So the cyclist didn't even know the were faces flashing on the wall in front of them, but it was just enough that they could perceive it unconsciously. And it sort of changes your mood. You see someone smiling it unconsciously makes you feel a little bit happier or if you see someone frowning it makes you feel a little less happy. And what they found is in a very subtle way that changed their the reported perception of effort as they were cycling this endurance test and changed their performance by 12%. And so it goes back to this idea that it's, your perception of effort is integrating everything

that's going on. It's not just integrating what your lactate levels are and what your, you know, body temperature is. It's also integrating how you're feeling about the world. And so you're asking yourself the question, can I keep going for another 10 seconds? If you're feeling a little bit better about things in general, the answer is yes. So this is the kind of thing that, I'm a sort of very skeptical guy by nature and I sort of have always ignored sports psychology and not really put much stock in it.

When I started to look at this research, it made me think, oh wait, you know, this is, these are results from scientific labs really quantifying the fact that what's going on in your brain matters. Everyone at home who has ever done a workout which has got to has pushed them towards their limits will know that some days it goes in and you can go into the gym and it feels everything just clicks. For whatever reason it is, your rate of perceived exertion, it's like the ceiling's just

been lifted. And then there's other days when you go in and like gravity just feels so much heavier than it should do. I think working off that rate of perceived exertions makes so much intuitive sense to me. I really like it as a concept. So I wanted to talk one of the things that I certainly thought would have been a big impact, would have been pain or discomfort, I think. Did you look into pain and discomfort and such? I did.

In fact, there's a whole chapter in the book on pain when it was a fun one. So yeah, so again, I know I'm sort of saying this over and over again, but I'll say there is disagreement among scientists. And in fact, this is one of my favorite examples of disagreement because there's two guys at the University of Kent, a guy named Semwell-Marcora and a guy named Alexis Major, who are colleagues. And Marcora is basically the leading advocate of effort is the be all and end all. And Major is the leading researcher on the role of pain in exercise. And so they have totally different views on what is more important.

Working out of the same university as well. Yeah, and what's great and what's what I think is really, really wonderful and speaks well of both of them is that they collaborate on studies and they do them together and to and you know they may disagree about the interpretation of the results but they're they're trying to tease apart the relative role of pain and effort. And so my reading of it is that pain matters. I think it definitely matters. The more unpleasant something is, the worse you'll do at it. But that pain is subordinate to effort. Pain mostly matters because if something is painful, it'll influence your sense of effort

and you'll feel like it's harder. But in a sense, it doesn't matter what's subordinate to what because the point is since pain contributes to that feeling, how you handle pain will influence how you perform. And there's some really interesting research showing the difference between athletes and non-athletes in terms of how they manage pain and how that affects their performance. So there have been a lot of studies over the years that show that athletes have a greater pain tolerance than non-athletes. So you take some arbitrary way of inflicting pain, whether it's with blood pressure cups

or ice bats or pressure sticking, poking people or whatever the case may be. What you find is that, first of all, what you find is that their pain sensitivity is the same. Athletes and non-athletes, it's not that athletes have some sort of magical way that they don't feel pain and so the threshold at which they say, hey, that hurts. Stop that, you bastard. Yeah. Is roughly the same. They feel pain the same. It's just that the athletes are willing to sit there and endure it for much longer.

They'll be, they'll say, okay, keep on going. Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. It hurts, but I can tolerate it. And they're maximum threshold is much higher. So the next question then is, is this because the people who become athletes are those who are born with a high pain threshold, or is it by being an athlete, you learn to have a higher pain threshold? Yeah, exactly. Which way is the arrow of causality moving here? Yeah, and my default answer in these cases is that it's probably a bit of both, but I think the strongest evidence is towards the second idea, which is that by training on a regular basis, you increase your pain tolerance. And again, this isn't because you stop feeling pain, it's because you learn to cope with it. You develop psychological coping mechanisms. If you go to

the gym every day and put yourself through some discomfort, you gradually get better and better at various things like distraction. You get better and better at various things like distraction. You get better about thinking about something else instead of just thinking about how much this exercise hurts. You also get better at interpreting pain as information. So taking away the emotional response, not like this hurts. I hate this, this is a disaster. Just thinking this hurts, therefore, this tells me, it gives me some information about how hard I'm working and whether I can continue for, so it's almost related to mindfulness,

which is of course a big buzzword these days, but one of the definitions of mindfulness is non-judgmental self-awareness. And by exercising on a regular basis, you start to be able to be non-judgmentally aware of pain, it's just information. It's not a signal that you're about to die. Yeah, I think a lot of people, especially when they get into pain, if they're not used to training, they will begin to either push it away or identify with it quite heavily

because it's such a foreign sensation, but the same as with anything, if you are acclimatized to it, and you've been here before wherever he may be, then you'll be able to deal with it more comfortably. Yeah, and I think everyone understands that, let's say you're a sedentary person who's never, who doesn't do any exercise, and you decide you wanna run a 5K with your friends in six months, and so you start a sort of run walk program, do a little training.

Everyone understands that in six months your body will have changed, that your lungs will be more powerful, your heart will be stronger, your muscles will be more efficient. What people don't realize necessarily, I don't think, given enough credit to, is that their mind will have changed a lot too. So when you start, you know, and you're not familiar with running, you go out and do a bit of running, and pretty soon your legs start to burn and you're panting heavily, and all sorts of alarm signals are going off in your brain and you're thinking, oh my god, this hurts so much. I'm going to put myself in hospital. I need to slow down and stop. But the more times you kind of hold your finger near that flame, the more you realize, oh,

I can hold it there and I'm not going to die. So I can hold it a little bit closer next time or hold it there for a little bit longer. And over time, you're actually pushing your body much harder, even relative to your fitness. So you're getting fitter, but you're also pushing deeper into the well with experience. And one important thing about that, there was a classic study in the early 80s with the Scottish national swimming team of all places where they measured pain tolerance not just once, but throughout a season. And what they found is with these elite athletes, it had been training hard for at least a decade in most cases, their pain tolerance waxed and waned throughout the season.

So their pain tolerance was highest right before their most important competitions. And then it was lowest in the off season when they weren't training. So these were very experienced athletes. They'd spent plenty of time in the pain cave. But it still wasn't a question of just like once you learn to handle pain, that's it. You know, you now know and you've mastered this trick and you never need to think about it again. It's something that you have to constantly work out every day to remind yourself, or not every day, necessarily, but on a continuing basis, you have to keep teaching yourself how to handle discomfort. And if you, you know, you've taken them on the off, then your body gets a little softer, but so does your mind. Yeah, I think that there'll be a lot of crossfit that are listening and some powerlifters and

strength athletes as well. And I certainly think that of all of the signals that our brain is receiving, which is influencing our rate of perceived exertion, pain will definitely be one of the ones that's at the forefront. Not enough oxygen manifests itself as a painful breathing and a discomfort. And a lot of people would probably confuse that

being out of breath with pain and the muscular burn and the leg burn and all of these things manifest as pain, it sounds like pain would probably be a pretty big gatekeeper to a lot of performance. For sure, and I think it's sort of like, I don't know, being a wine lover, a cheese lover or something, the more sophisticated you get, the more you can distinguish between the subtle flavors of pain. Yes. When you start out, it's just like, holy crap, this hurt. Oh, well.

Everything hurts, and it's all the same. It's all just one big pain. Whereas, once you've become accustomed to it, it's like, ah, I feel that my, you know, I feel the lactate in my legs. Oh, and I think I'm going a little bit hypoxic. I'm running out of oxygen. And, ooh, I think I detect a subtle undertone of muscular fatigue or whatever.

So, you appreciate all the nuances of pain. I totally get that. I mean, anyone who's ever sat on an assault bike and tried to slow down their breathing as they're going maximally will know that you can actually control your breathing quite well. You can focus on breathing in and out rhythmically breathing deep and controlling that, but the pain in your legs doesn't stop, but the pain in your lungs oddly does. So you can actually, if anyone is sitting on an assault bike tomorrow, I urge

you to try it, do warm up and then do 30 seconds of max cows, but focus on breathing in for two and out for two as deeply as you can. And you'll notice that you can control your breathing up until the point in which you need to start to pant. You can control your breathing quite nicely, but the pain of pain in your legs doesn't go away. But you've been able to isolate the two as opposed to let you say this, kind of nebulous coating, this glazing of just discomfort that goes every- Yeah, and with familiarity, as we begin to isolate and you get familiar with them, they're less scary. It's just, instead of this one big sort of unpleasant feeling, we have all these different sensations that we can, like you said, we can control or move up and down as desired.

And yeah, then you're willing to handle it for a little longer or for a little more brilliant. So let's get on to some of the, I'm going to call them solutions, but I guess that they technically aren't. Some of the tactics and some of the tools that you discovered which can aid people with regards to their endurance. Yeah, so I mean, there are a bunch of techniques, and I mentioned a while ago, the electric brain stimulation, and there's that sort of approach. But I think, and you know, like we could spend a lot of time talking about the pros and

cons of various different tools like that. But to me, the underlying most important thing, if you want to get the most out of yourself, is actually to manipulate basically your belief, your self-belief. And this goes back to what we were saying, right? It's reenal ready to start at the show that if you believe you're capable of something, it will change fundamentally the way you go about doing it and it will change your experience of whether you think you're capable of it, it will change your perception of effort. And so how do you change your belief? Well, I, you know, you can have a situation where the timekeeper gives you the wrong time and a race and it tricks you into thinking that you're capable of more than you are. But that's not something you can control.

So how do you do it in a controllable way? Another classic example is one of the stories I tell in the book is from a mentor of mine named Ambi Burfoot, who was a former Boston Marathon champion. And he said, the single most important or most powerful workout you can do as a runner is, let's say you do five times a mile as hard as you can with two minutes break. And when you're finished, that's a very hard workout. When you're finished lying there on the ground, you know, it was a broken man.

If your coach then says, okay, get up and do one more at the same pace. And you'll say, but I can't. I just went all out and the coach will says, okay, get up and do one more at the same pace. And you'll say, but I can't. I just went all out and the coach will say, get out there and do it. And you get out there and discover that, oh, wait, I can do it once, you know, it hurts, but you do have one more rep in the tank. And what Ami Burfoot says is like, from that, you'll discover that you're capable of more than you think you are. And that's the single most important lesson you can learn in running. So I think that's powerful, but it's again an example of something that's, you know,

it's not something you could self administer. It's not super controllable, is it? Yeah, you know, even if you have a coach, which most of many of us don't, who's willing to do something like that, it only works once, you know. And he's not going to be afraid. He's not going to be your friend after he does it. Exactly. And so you have to, you want to try and find techniques

that are a little bit more under your control. And so for me, the number one thing is a technique called motivational self-talk, which is basically just becoming aware of the internal monologue in your head and ensuring that it's positive. So if you're someone like me, then if you go and run a marathon, the thoughts going through your head tend to be along the lines of, you know, this sucks, I hate this sport. Why do I do this to myself? This is a disaster. I'm, you know, I'm going to fail. And you know, when you're doing something

that's, frankly, as unpleasant as running a marathon, that's pretty normal to have those sorts of thoughts running through your head. But those are basically the equivalent of the subliminal picture of a frowning face on the wall in front of you. They're altering your mindset such that everything feels a little bit harder, so you're hurting your performance. And so you want to be able to stop that negative self-talk and replace it with positive self-talk, like, you know, I've trained for this, I'm ready for this. I can do this. And that sounds really easy. It sounds almost too easy.

Of course, it is challenging to, you have to make that become automatic. You have to really find words or mantras that work for you and you have to practice them so that they become automatic. So the way you're doing it. It's like you say, it sounds super easy,, but mean you are sat down in the comfort of our seats, speaking into microphones and the listeners at home, got the headphones in, maybe driving the work and chilling out, like do that after the five by one mile workout, like try and remind yourself that no, I can do this. And you know, like I'm on the floor dying, breathing, gasping for air. The situation has changed.

So you have to have done it a thousand times in not two unpleasant circumstances, you know, in training before it can become ingrained enough that you'll actually be able to summon it successfully in competition. Now this is, I should emphasize, this is not a new idea, right? Like, when, again, when I was in university in the 1990s, we had a sports psychologist working with the track team who basically taught us exactly that. And we totally laughed her out of the room. We thought it was ridiculous.

We just didn't give a who to about, you know, these tricks or what we saw as, you know, just ridiculous mental games. And it's, so it's only been sort of in the process of the sort of journey of trying to understand the limits of endurance, I've started to take this more seriously. And then in the last few years, there have been some studies that really rigorously try to assess motivational self-talk. And you know, bring a bunch of cyclists into the lab, have them do endurance test, give half of them motivational self-talk training, half of them give them some other sort of control, mental skills training, bringing back to the lab and you find that, yeah,

the ones who got motivational self-talk have improved their performance. And not only that, we can measure what's going on in their bodies and we see that their core temperature, they're able to push it higher. So in other words, they're digging deeper into their physiological reserves. And yet their sense of effort is still the same. So by changing the words in their head, by changing what they're saying to themselves during the exercise, they actually change their relationship between how hard their body is working and how hard it feels in their minds. And that is the, to me, I saw that result and I was like, oh, man, I wish I had a

time machine and I could go go back and take this seriously when I was competing seriously. And that is because this is real. It's real and I should have taken it seriously instead of laughing that poor woman out of the room. Yeah. I totally get that. So were there any of the techniques we've talked about the motivational self talk as one of them, we're not going to strap nine bolt batteries to our head.

This is not medical advice. Please do not please seek your physician before you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, disclaimer, disclaimer. Were there any others that could... Yeah, so you know, I almost hate to mention the buzziest of buzzwords, mindfulness training. But there's some pretty interesting research, there was some interesting research that you see San Diego,

I visited some researchers there to see their work, doing brain scanning on, basically they look at elite performers, so because they're in San Diego, they get a bunch of Marines and Navy SEALs into their lab, and also they bring in elite athletes like adventure racers. And so these people have tremendous resilience. So pretty hard people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've been through a lot. And so it's pretty fascinating. One of their protocols is that they put you in a brain scanner, which is like a, you know, a big sort of claustrophobic tube. And you're, you're, while you're in the brain scanner, you're doing these cognitive tasks on a computer. So they're in the brain scanner, you're doing these cognitive tasks on a computer, so the testing your responses, and you're breathing through a mask, and every once in a while, the flow of oxygen through the mask is restricted, so it's like you're

suddenly like you're breathing through a straw. This is not a pleasant scenario when you're locked in this giant magnet. And so for most people, when that happens, you know, at best they get stressed out and their performance on the cognitive test suddenly goes down. At worst they panic and they have to be pulled out of the scanner. For the elite performers, so for the Navy SEALs, for the elite adventure racers, the opposite pattern has happened, not only through the not panic, but their performance on the cognitive test actually gets better when they're being stressed out by this, by breathing through a straw. So they respond to stress, not by getting worse,

but by getting better, by rising to the occasion. So, obviously that's a really desirable thing. It's like, oh, I want that. I want to become Nassim Talib's definition of antifragile, please. Exactly. So, you know, and they're doing brain scans to figure out which areas of the brain are responsible and

what they find is that the elite performers, they're constantly monitoring how their body is feeling. So they have a low level self-monitoring going on at all times. And then when something, when the breathing goes wrong, when it all gets stressful, they just keep that same level of monitoring. They're always in touch with how they're feeling. Whereas most of us have kind of have the self-monitoring turned off when everything's fine, we're not even paying attention to how we're feeling. And then all of a sudden when things go bad, we overmonitor, we ramp up to panic levels.

So we overreact to the stimulus. And you can see which areas of the brain are responsible for that. So then their question is, okay, we know what the quote unquote good pattern of brain activation is, how can we help other people develop that? And the most effective tool they've found so far is eight week training courses in mindfulness. And so they've been testing it out with US Marines being deployed overseas, giving them this eight week training before and to see if it reduces instances, for example, of PTSD, because if you're able to respond calmly to stressful situations, that may reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress. So that stuff is still up in the air and research is ongoing, but it is interesting.

They've found that you can generate these elite-style brain patterns with mindfulness training. When you think about what mindfulness training is, you're trying to have non-judgmental self-awareness. So you're trying to be aware of, hey, am I feeling pain? Yes. I'm not denying that I'm feeling pain. I'm aware of it. I'm acknowledging it, but I'm not overreacting to it. And so that's kind of what they find is the hallmark of the elite performers. And I think it has a lot of application to whether we're talking about endurance or whether we're talking about CrossFit or whatever the context. I think it's not too big of a leap to say that would be

an effective way of enhancing performance. Now I should say, I'm sitting here again, as I said, I'm sitting here with my comfortable chair, saying, that's what I think would be a good idea based on the research. I haven't done an eight-week mindfulness training course, so I can't speak from personal experience, but I think that's an avenue that I would say is worth exploring. I guess that sort of stuff would work across so many different domains as well. For traders, Wall Street traders in very, very high-pressure

situations and stuff like that, you talked about the fact that this endurance is not merely relating to physical activities, but to all activities. Yeah, exactly. That brings a full circle back to this idea of endurance as a very generalised struggle to continue against a mountainside, to stop. And again, I want to emphasize that I didn't start out this book trying to make endurance a general concept. That really all I cared about was trying to understand the mysteries of my running career and why I didn't go faster than I did. But that's where the research led to suggest that it really is a generalizable concept.

And if you can learn to endure, and I think it's interesting that, again, you look at the data, for instance, on pain tolerance, that athletes who are enduring a specific kind of pain in training, doesn't matter what kind of pain tolerance test you give them. Whatever pain tolerance test you give them, they're better able to tolerate it.

So it's very generalizable. You're able to apply these skills you learn, well, pushing yourself physically, you're able to try to apply those in other areas of your life too. So it really is a bit of a superpower when people talk about the being benefits from physical practice, being mental and a mental practice crossing over into physical, it seems like there's some real good evidence for that to be the case. Yeah, I think you have trouble finding any dedicated exercise or who doesn't believe it's had

far-reaching effects on their lives, and I think the research backs that up as far as I can tell. Amazing. Before we go, I want to very, very quickly nerd out about the night breaking to Elliott Kipchelge thing, because I want to know whether or not you think that the two hour marathon barrier will be broken, and if so, when it will happen. Yeah, so, you know, my record of prognostication is not great. Did you predict the Berlin marathon smash? Well, in a way, so let me back up slightly and say in 2014, I, Runners World had me do a big 10 page report on the physiology

of what it would take to run a two hour marathon. And so I spent all sorts of time talking to every expert I could find. And in the end, at the end of those 10 pages, I need this prediction that I thought the two-hour marathon, two-hour marathon barrier could be broken, and it would be broken in 2075. So that's a long time from now. And so then, two years later,

we got this call from Nike, basically saying, we're gonna try and do it next May. Do you wanna come along for the ride and report on it? And so my initial thought when that happened was, man, one of us is going to look really stupid. That makes my article look really silly or it makes Nike look like idiots, yeah, one of the things. Exactly, one of us is going to look bad.

So take my predictions with the grain of salt. But so what happened with the Breaking Two Project, which was this multi-illion dollar multi-year attempt to sort of engineer an ideal marathon, is that Elie Kipchogi ran two hours, zero minutes, 25 seconds, which was not sub-two, but was faster than the official world record by two and a half minutes. So it didn't count as a world record because he had pacing all the way through, which isn't allowed.

But still, it sort of showed that a human could run that fast, which was really shocking. So after that happened, my prediction, here's where my predictions get a little better. So that was in May of 2017, breaking two happened. So I said, Ellie Kipchogi just ran this almost two hour marathon. So I think in an official marathon, even though he won't have all the same benefits that he got from the breaking two race, I think he's going to run two oh one something, which would be more than a minute faster than the official world record. And so I made that prediction in a big New York Times op-ed just before the Berlin marathon in 2017.

That is called putting your balls on the line. Yeah, I said, it's going to happen. And then what happened was it rained in Berlin. And so he ran a great race, but you know, in the rain, it was slow. He didn't break the world record. He didn't forget to a one. He didn't even break to a four or two or three rather. And then so his next marathon was in London earlier this year in early 2018. And he was the hottest London marathon in history. So he ran a great race and he won again, but he didn't run under the world record. And so at that point, I thought, oh man,

first I predicted 2075, then I predicted 201, something, and they're both gonna be duds. But then in September 2018, Kipchogi finally got a decent weather day, and he ran 201 39, which was a minute and 18 seconds faster than the world record, which is a huge huge. It's the biggest margin in 50 years or something, isn't it? Exactly. So a huge, huge, huge improvement. And I got to say to everyone, I predicted a

201 in Berlin. It was last year, but still. Yeah, I was wrong by 365 days. Give me a break. Yeah, it's close enough. Close enough. So what happens next? It's hard to know. Because there's all these questions about, so how much of this is Elliot Kipchogi being a once in a generation talent?

How much of it has these got these new shoes from Nike, which have a carbon fiber plate in them, they're supposed to make people 4% faster? How much? What are all the different ingredients that make made up his world record? And nobody knows for sure. I don't know, you know, nobody knows for sure.

So the question is, will someone else follow Kip Jogi into this sort of 202 or 201 range or is Kip Jogi gonna be a guy who's Mark stands for 15 years? But if I had to predict, I'm gonna say, now that we're at 201, I think the chorus of voices who would have said, even three years ago, who would have said two hours will never happen in our lifetime. You guys are all more on. I think that chorus is just hearing. And instead, now, I don't know, I still think probably 10 to 20 years from now. But boy, I would not put any money that I want to see again on any prediction, because

I just don't know what's going to happen. So I wouldn't bet against another big improvement. I also wouldn't bet against it sort of stagnating for a while. Yeah, it's bizarre, isn't it? When you think of a such a long distance, over two hours of running, that we're talking about shaving off 25 seconds and that that margin feels like such a huge mountain to climb. And it's obviously because, you know, I've anyone who hasn't, I urge them to watch the Breaking Two documentary. It's on YouTube. And it's absolutely fascinating, but Elliot Kipchoghe lives this monastic lifestyle. Very, very simplistic

guy seems super calm all the time. And he looks like the sort of person who has dialed every single. He looks like someone that was born to run. Yeah, I would, I would 100% echo the encouragement to check out that National Geographic Document John Breaking 2, because it really is a taste of not just what sort of science and tech was involved in this race, but Elliot Keptoggi's personality. The guy has become, and I say this, as a journalist, I'm supposed to keep my distance, but the guy has become my hero, like his, my sort of life model in terms of his approach to life. And I really sincerely believe that his mindset, his self-confidence in the way he has nurtured

it is in his own way accomplishing everything that I have written about in my book, everything we've talked about today, like motivational self-talk. None of that has anything to teach you. I'll get Kip Chowky. It's the other way around. We're trying to figure out a little bit of what makes him so magic and how the rest of us can learn to push ourselves a little more like he does, but to me he's the Zen master. I couldn't agree more. What a beautiful note to finish on Alex. Today has blown my mind,

I'm sure, I've made a lot of the listeners at home think very differently about the way that they look at their endurance and their mind and body connection during training and in other pursuits as well. Would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online? I'll make sure the link to the book and all of your socials are in the show notes below of course. For sure, thanks. Yeah. So probably the best place to find me is on Twitter.

My handle is sweat science, all one word, and that's where recent articles and anything I find interesting I post. I do have a website, Alex Hutchinson.net, where you can dig into my sort of past, but Twitter is a good place to find me. Fantastic. Alex, I really appreciate your time. Today has been awesome. Thanks so much Chris.

This was really fun to kind of dig into some of the deeper stuff. Thank you very much. Catch you later.