The Rich Roll Podcast - Coach of The Norwegian Train: Olav Aleksander Bu On The Science of Elite Performance

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

The co-founder of the companies Santara tech and Entalpi, Olav is a sports scientist and elite coach who helped to devise a protocol of testing and performance optimization, grounded in the scientific method, that is achieving undisputable real-world results as evidenced by the Olympic gold medals and championship victories of Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden. I had the honor to sit down with the Norwegian triathlon world champs Kristian and Gustav a few months ago. And while they earnestly answered every question I asked, I was still left wondering: what exactly is going on in Norway to produce such towering figures in the world of swim-bike-run? Here today, with the answers and practical training protocols, is the coach of The Norwegian Train himself. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Athletic Greens: athleticgreens.com/richroll  Whoop: WHOOP.com  Native: nativedeo.com/rrp Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. These guys are pincushions. You're pricking them all the time. They got patches all over their body. There's data flowing out of their eyeballs and you're pouring trackers down their throats and isotope water, like it's insane. Several weeks ago, we released an incredibly popular episode

featuring the triathlon world champions hailing from Norway, Christian Blumenfeld and Gustav Iden. And despite them earnestly answering every question I asked, I was still left wondering, how do they do it? Why are they so much better, consistently better than the competition? Well, here today with answers is the coach of the Norwegian train himself, Olav Alexander Boe, or as I like to refer to him, the moneyball mad scientist mastermind of endurance mastery.

We have got a lot of attention of how we have implemented sensors, instruments, technology, science, but one thing that maybe doesn't get so much attention is also the human aspect of it. Olaj is a sports scientist and elite coach who helped to devise a protocol of testing and performance optimization grounded in the scientific method that is achieving undisputable real-world results in the form of Olympic medals and triathlon world championship victories. In the same way that I

expect the best from Christian and Gustav. I can't expect less from myself. In today's highly anticipated conversation, we cover Olof's background, the specific protocols that he has instituted that have garnered so much success. Understanding how we can work on different things to excel performance. His fundamental laws of energy in training, and so much more. You can always come there with as much details, as much data you really want to, but if people don't buy into it, if they don't trust you, if they don't feel like it. Nothing's going to work. Exactly.

This one is sure to be a must listen for any and all athletes out there, both professional and recreational. It's lined with actionable takeaways and is very much a part two to the episode with Christian and Gustav. So, if you haven't yet checked that one out, I would highly recommend it. And it's coming right up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, here we go. The Norwegian train rides again in this conversation between me and Olav Alexander Booth. in this conversation between me and Olav Alexander Booth. Olav, it's finally a pleasure to meet you in person. Thank you for doing this. We're recording this on the heels of having sat down with Christian and Gustav. And now we're gonna dive deep into the science,

what's really happening in Bergen. What is this Norwegian equation that you have unlocked that is rewriting the record books in triathlon? So much to talk to you about today, but I guess the first thing just to open it up is like, how did you make these guys so good? This is what everyone wants to know. make these guys so good? This is what everyone wants to know. I think there is, or we are actually on our path towards an easier answer,

but unfortunately, it's not an easy answer just yet because I think on the one side, of course, what we have got a lot of attention of over the last years is how we have implemented sensors, instruments, technology, science. But one

thing that maybe doesn't get so much attention is also that there is a big portion of it, or maybe still the majority of the portion of it still is also the human aspect of it. And that's how it's going to be. Coaching will still be for many years, decades, maybe even to be coaching will still be for many years decades maybe even a big part just human interaction but of course what science and technology helps us to do is to start to become more aware of things that really matters for each individual right so you're known as the data guy you've got an engineering background you don't have a background in triathlon. You kind of entered the world of endurance sports with a bit of a beginner's mind, but with this kind of understanding of how data sets could be powerful in up-leveling what we understand about human physiology and

performance. And we're going to get into all of those techniques because they're so fascinating. And we're gonna get into all of those techniques because they're so fascinating. But to kind of echo what you just mentioned, amidst this conversation about what you're doing with these athletes and how that's differentiating their performances from the rest of the pack, what kind of gets missed or is underappreciated

is the importance of the human element and what I would call culture, right? You're working very intensely with a small group of athletes and none of the data sets are gonna make any difference if these guys don't get along, if their mindset isn't right, if they aren't on the same page and receptive to what you're trying to teach. So let's start with the culture piece. Yeah, I think the very fundamental of everything is culture and exactly that I'm also very fortunate

because I've been in a place where I met a lot of good people that also took me on a journey and brought me where I am today as well and allowed me to develop both as a human but also into the sports of triathlon, for example. Actually, I'm not that... The funny thing is I'm not that interested in sports itself. That's not really my passion.

My passion is more actually humans or let's say what I dubbed today, finding peak human performance. I think that could be in many different places. But if you don't have the culture, the habits, the work ethics, and I think also the passion for each other, then you can always come there with as much details,

as much data you really want to. But if people don't buy into it, if they don't trust you, if they don't feel like it, then... Nothing's gonna work. Exactly. Yeah. So that is for me, the very fundament that also one of the things that maybe I don't communicate too much about it externally,

but one thing that always is my biggest worry, especially when you have two such extreme athletes like Christian and Gustav, that on the one side, they are in a unique position where they are able to train against each other or with each other every day, and they know their strengths and weaknesses, but that means also when they come to the competition, they know also who they have to win over.

And I think that that is a stronger position than going to competition and don't knowing who you are going to compete against. So for me, that we together, they together have a really good relationship is maybe one of the things that plays the most with my emotions too. It's no small feat.

I mean, just having spent a couple hours with them, obviously things didn't go Christian's way in Kona and Gustav finally got, you know, what he's been searching for all along. Christian historically, you know, the person who has been a little bit more successful and had more of the limelight on him. And you can't help but think,

like I was wondering, like, are these guys still gonna be friends? Like, how does this work? Like, how are they gonna move forward as training partners, as roommates, et cetera, two people who spend all their time together. And the tone and the tenor is set by the culture that you're trying to create for this small, intimate group of athletes who spend all their time together. And the tone and the tenor is set by the culture

that you're trying to create for this small, intimate group of athletes who are really trying to do things that no human being has ever done. Like inevitably you would think there's gonna be a culture clash. Like there can only be one alpha. Like how is this gonna play out? And to see their affection for each other

and to really understand like, oh, their bond is deeper than race results. That doesn't come easy and that is unusual. Yeah. I think, of course, there are many ways to manage this or as a group or where we have different roles but one thing that i try to guide this a little bit from the sideline or let's say a little bit more not so visible i have of course the talks we have actually quite a lot of discussions or not i wouldn't say discussions but more conversations around values values in life really matters, who do we want to be? And that also boils down very much to priorities. Where do you actually decide to spend your thoughts throughout the day, weeks and so on.

And that's also very much affected by what kind of people do we surround ourself with. And for me, it's very important that we always surround us. You can always find fascinating people that have done extreme things and other things, but maybe their values doesn't necessarily align with our values. It doesn't mean that their values are wrong, but it doesn't align necessarily with our values. And for me, the most important thing is to be a good human.

It's a good human. Nothing is worth anything unless... Think of it this way, and that is that if you win a gold medal and this gold medal or that competition you are competing in has no value to anybody else that gold medal suddenly have no value at all the reason for why something has a value is because the society around us really value it and that's why also it's so important for me that on the one side we are individuals but on the other side too we we only really have a value if we have a value for the society around us yeah right so that means also that when we choose who we surround us with it it's important that we always surround us with

people that have values that are nurturing, nurturing or not necessarily consciously, but it's more like you're being in an atmosphere where you pick up consciously and subconsciously things that contributes to making you a better human. And that means also to the question of alphas. And that is that we don't spend very much time on focusing on who is the alpha or not. We can joke about it.

I think the last time we made a joke about that must have been probably a year ago, one and a half year ago. Because I think that in a group, if you have a lot of attention to who is the alpha or there's a discussion about alpha or let's say being a leader and these kinds of things, there will always be a fight for this.

There will always be a rivalry for this. But this is not really what is important. What is really important for me is more, let's say each of our own development. And as long as we always progress and we take care of the people around us, we eventually will achieve our goals. So how does that translate into tactics,

strategies and practices? Like I'm thinking about the applicability of these principles to the coach that's listening, to the CEO or the executive, anybody who has to lead and empower teams of people. How does it play out on a daily basis in terms of curating that type of culture? I think habits takes time to develop,

but to maintain a habit, as long as you make sure, then it's much easier to maintain a habit. But developing habits, that's very often the thing that costs energy to do. And that means that normally in the daily life of our training zone, I don't have to spend too much time on, let's say on culture and these kinds of things,

because I'm very well aware and spending quite a lot of time on also evaluating, not necessarily only the things they say, but also the things they don't say and communicate. And when I see that there are things that are starting to worry me a little bit, I'm not afraid of taking up that topic, even though it might be unpleasant.

But I think it's much better to ask the question because they also know my intention. So even if it's an unpleasant question, but they know that my intention is good, then I think it's- And there's trust. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that means that in the daily life, when we are doing the training and so on, That means that in the daily life,

when we are doing the training and so on, we have a very open dialogue about strategy, about tactics and all these kind of things. Of course, they know each other quite well. It was quite funny a little bit leading into the competition or in Kona, we did a lot last preparation weeks. And then, of course, they are having a little bit of, let's call it serious fun, because they are feeling each other out a little bit of let's call it serious fun leading because they are feeling

each other out a little bit on the in the training and of course they talk a little bit more like open-minded a little bit about how they feel and so on but eventually the last day i know what of course christian is thinking that okay this is my strength this is how i'm going to leverage it and also the funny thing was that Gustav also told me that when I get out of energy lab, this is where I'm going to make my search. So I knew already, but of course that last part of it, I can't say to Christian because Gustav, of course,

comes and tells it to me in confidence and the same way that Christian does. But that's fine. When you have this small last thing and you say, okay, this is what I'm going to put together. That's fine to keep the small part there, but keep being open, being transparent, and actually also actually being willing to expose yourself,

I think is also very important because when we find our competitive advantages, it's very easy to grow into that, this is my thing. But eventually people will catch up. But if you are willing actually to expose that competitive advantage and share it, maybe with your strongest rival, it also puts you in a place where you know

that you're building your rival stronger, but it also puts yourself in an uncomfortable position also where you need to start to hunt also for new competitive advantages. And this way we also drive not only, let's say the physiological part, but also the psychological part and build each other stronger also in training.

Yeah, it's delicate though. Like it feels fragile, right? If you get one of those pieces just a little bit wrong the whole thing could collapse on top of itself that that's also where i think it is important to create robustness too i think that if if that had been a worry with for me that it starts to become very fragile then i would sit down and actually spend quite a lot more time talking about these kind of topics culture and these kind of things because I knew that now things are fragile and the chances for that suddenly something breaks and either require even more energy to bring it back again and you

can't really focus on the details or let's say those small marginal gains you actually back just the basic building trying to repair things. That's a situation that I think, or I know at least for myself, would be very hard to live with. So in those situations, when I start to feel things are fragile, those are the times where data and everything else really doesn't matter anything for me anymore.

The only thing that matters for me now is the relationship and bringing that robustness so that you have some room to play. In Kona, the way that the race played out, did that meet expectations? Did it defy expectations? Did it surprise you? And what are you kind of taking away from that experience

to go back to the lab and learn more? I think the biggest mistake we did going into the competition is that we knew that there were outsiders that were going to take risks, but we just- The laid lows, et cetera. Which was based on everybody's feedback,

Christian Gustav having trained together with him that no they could let him go but uh there were others where they were more cautious about and then they get to pay for it on the run afterwards so but in terms of performance they were gustav was one minute off what we predicted would be the final time for the race. One minute off. And that was the swim was where we expected to be. The bike was where it expected to be. The run was a little bit more than a minute slower than what we would expect it to be.

So I would say that performance-wise, what we prepared for, it was where we expected to be, but we just miscalculated a little bit, let's say, our competitors. And I actually, I don't spend very much time on competitor analysis and so on because I know that Christian and Gustav really have a better feeling and a better understanding of that than me.

So I trust them much more to do that part. My goal is rather to just make sure that we prepare how we think is possible to prepare for race with the given conditions that we have. We went from a sprint distance in Bergen, which is on the opposite side of the spectrum. We knew we had very little time to prepare going into Kona. And yeah, that making sure that that part fits together

is the most important for me. And then the rest is- Right, I mean, who could have predicted that Sam Lalo would do what he did? That can't be part of how you're preparing for a race anyway. But with respect to Christian and his performance, obviously things didn't go the way

that he would have liked them to have gone. What was that conversation with him like after the race? Actually, we really haven't had that because I normally like it. I know that Christian is spending quite a lot of time evaluating his own performance also after the race. And you don't necessarily, because one part is the data

or the other part is also the other things that you can't collect with data, especially in a race where you can't use equally much instruments as you are doing in training. So the qualitative part of the analysis after a race like this often takes a little bit of time and it needs maybe a little bit of time to mature. And as I know Christian also said earlier

today and that is that it's still something that they're playing around or let's say rewinding in his mind a little bit what could he have done different what didn't go according to plan and of course now the next days we are starting to discuss it a little bit, but it's not like throughout one conversation we will have the answer to it. It's something that we will start to get a picture of it, then we get more the course picture, and then as we start to work, you still start to rewind or play off the scenarios in your head,

and that will eventually come out into the program. So leaving Kona, heading back, also now long distance triathlon is not our main focus anymore or not our focus at all. Now the challenge that we are really focusing on is the Olympics. So for me, actually,

the only thing that I'm thinking of now is basically how can we, Bermuda, unfortunately, the only thing that I'm thinking of now is basically how can we... Bermuda, unfortunately, I don't have... It's very difficult to do very much with because we come from Kona. They have to recover now for a couple and bring it back into training. Then they get St. George, half Ironman world champs.

And then a week after that, you get Bermuda. The problem with going to Bermuda, that race, is that you have so much noise in the training with both that you have been doing races that are very different from what you are going to do in Bermuda. You have a lot of travel and other things that is happening there.

In Bermuda, you don't, we can't say, okay, this is what we did. This is, okay, this is how it turned out in Bermuda. If I would do that, I would probably end up with a lot of false positives no it's just a very unusual it doesn't create a clean data set from which to extract any kind of truths yeah exactly and that that means that it's actually from Bermuda into Abu Dhabi where we get I think it's three or four weeks where we really can start to do some work

and in Abu Dhabi then then we would have an idea, okay, this is what it looked like in training. This is what the data sets look like. This is the feedback I had from the athletes and discussions. And then this is the rest was in Abu Dhabi. Then you get the benchmark against others. And this will be the point where we also go back into the labs and start to do more structured Olympic targeted work to eventually or hopefully

be able to do something that nobody have done before. And that is to go from the Olympic to the Ironman and back to the Olympics. Nobody's done that. No. Right. Yeah. They're so different. And I want to get into how all of this unfolded and then your unique approach to the relationship between science, data and human performance. And I think the best way to do that is just to do it chronologically, like to recount your entrance

into the Norwegian triathlon equation and kind of go from there, because you've been learning as you've been going and you did come in with this engineering background, but this beginner's mind without all the kind of calcified baggage around what you're supposed to do and the way we've always done it

and this is the way it works and no, we can't try that kind of mindset. Yeah, as long as I can remember, and both my grandparents, but also my parents have said that I had a big hunger or thirst or curiosity to understand things since I was a kid to the point where my parents

had just had to clean almost the house for everything that could be tinkered with tinker with yeah are you the guy who's like taking the tv apart and stuff yes okay yeah and and and when I first had done that and I looked into it and saw how things were I want I was not so keen to put it back together again right a lot of detritus lying around the house. So that was not so fun. But yeah, technology, it's also a little bit of a paradox. On one side, I really love nature.

And one of the times where I actually are able to recharge the most is actually when I'm completely away from technology. When I'm out in nature, I'm not able to be reached places where there is no phone connection or other things like this, it takes a few days and this is when I really start to find my own peace.

And this is one of the things that also I very often miss the most. But on other side also, technology and how we can learn more about humanity, about what we do, just advance, or let's say be able to advance faster in what we do, there I think technology is really powerful. And the way I actually got into, I started some businesses that I built up and sold.

And then in 2011, we had a family accident. I lost four family members in a helicopter crash uh we were going we were building a mountain diary farm and uh which we was more for for the family so i flew first off with parts of my family and then the helicopter turned back home and came back up with the rest of the family and it crashed. And there was nothing we could do. And it is a remote area where there is no phone reception. So I had to run for one hour to get up on a mountain top. How old were you?

At that time, I think that was my 30th birthday. My 30th birthday was gonna be celebrated when we were up there at the mountain dior. Oh my Lord. So I remembered running up the mountain there. I got some time to think and I thought, okay, I really have to do some, because I came from a more, much more explosive background

where I really liked power training and sailing was- Sailing, yeah, was the thing. And that's also one thing that people don't think too much about, but in a sailing or in very competitive environment, everything, there's nothing happening on the boat. Everything is just... Five second bursts. Yeah, like super explosive and every second counts

because if you're losing one second throughout attack before you are able to get up to speed again, that's already quite a lot of meters. And for every tack you're making or every job you're making now and you're losing time that's you can't do that if you really want to be the best so from there of course it went into endurance sports i did a lot of experimentation but again i was with business i found a very good mentor and that was he was the cefo of pricewaterhousecoopers in norway and he took me under his wings and guided me in sports when I decided I need to do something with my fitness.

I just started to Google who really is the person to ask for. And there I- Because for your own fitness? Yeah, for my- Your own pursuit of being an athlete. Exactly, yeah. To do something with it, because I obviously needed a coach

or I thought I needed a coach to help me advance. And I found out there was a guy named Ojan Mattsson, Dr. Ojan Mattsson. And we had a common friend which put me in contact with him. We met, both of us were doing kiting. And that became my journey, a very special journey because in he the way that he coached me or inspired me was very much not that he didn't tell me okay no this is

you have to read this on page this page or this is working exactly this way sometimes he could of course be a little bit more direct in his guiding, but most of the time, I would say probably more than 90%, 95% of the time, he was much more in nurturing that I had to figure out, I had to find out by reading, encouraging and empowering you, but ultimately allowing you to have your own experience. Yeah, and that became something that became such a big passion for me because I'm also extremely competitive in a way that I want to be the best in the things I do. So in the same way that I expect, of course,

the best from Christian and Gustav, independent of what kind of goal they are pursuing, I can't expect less from myself. I have to expect for myself to have the same pursuit for developing or being a really good coach, understanding how we can work on different things to excel performance. And that is a never-ending pursuit because there are so many things about physiology that we still don't know. I would say that there's probably more things we still don't know than what we do know. And that is very, that's actually for me, makes it very interesting to work on it because it's then also becomes a research project on each individual. It's not something that-

And also that there's so much growth yet to be had, right? I mean, this is a big thing when you come into triathlon and you're like, yeah, you guys have been doing this, but like, you don't even really understand what this means and there's so many other things we could be doing. Yeah, and that I think, when I also have done two athletes that are very willing to join in on the research projects too, which makes it much more fun.

And I think fun is a very big, that's super important actually. But where it makes it interesting, you know exactly how you say it is growth and maybe growth is in the end what it all is about. If you don't have growth anymore as an athlete or even as a coach, I think you start to level, yeah.

Yeah. So you're exploring your athlete side, you're learning about the science of human performance. How does this ultimately land you at the feet of the fledgling Norwegian Triathlon Federation or program or whatever it was at the time. So it happened to be that I had never thought over that there was a national team in triathlon at that time.

But Oger Madsen, he was the coach from the Olympic Federation for the Olympic or for the Norwegian Triathlon Federation and for RL. And it was in 2014, I think, 15, then he started to bring me a little bit more. So I did some training sessions with them. But eventually he said that you should really come in and be a part of the Olympic program in triathlon

and start to use now because he had privately tutored me in physiology and of course with my background from technology and I could start to merge a lot of the studies we do today there are you distinguish between in vivo and in vitro and the problem with in vitro is that you is you can study things and you can control things and you can get a result but you're not able to bring it back into human performance context. With the technology that we have available today, we are getting closer and closer to that more of the research we are doing can happen in vivo or in the situation with the athletes. And I think this is something that he, as a physiologist, also thought was quite inspiring and interesting to see how quickly I was able to advance in the understanding of how performance come together. And where he said that, Olaf, can you help me

with some of the analysis when he was doing that with the team? And as we did this, I think he also found quite a lot of inspiration in this. And that was eventually where I was sitting down with Ariel and Ojan and talking and they said, okay, now, this was in 2015, leading into 2016, I started to shadow Areld and Christian just to see in a lot of different areas, from everything from the bike to basically metabolism and a lot of other things, what did the training look like?

What did the performance look like? More or less trying to understand where the gaps were. And then as Rio was concluded and we started up again a few months later, making or starting to make a way towards Tokyo, this is when I was asked to, okay, come into the program and take over the scientific part of it. Then I became part of the coach team. So in Rio, you're essentially observing, right? And you're kind of gathering information and data. And from what I understand, you kind of come to this conclusion, looking at triathlon, like sort of canvassing the landscape, that

despite extreme advances in the bicycles, like we've seen bikes come a long way, beyond that, and some kind of aerodynamic stuff, and maybe, you know, carbon plated shoes, what have you, there really wasn't that much advancement in the sport. I mean, I think the marathons that Dave Scott and Mark Allen were running way back in the day until very recently were still kind of the gold standard and people were struggling to eclipse those times. Now the record book has been rewritten, but back in 2016, this was sort of the case, right?

And you have this realization like, oh, there's so much more we could be doing because technology has advanced so much and data science and these data sets could actually create models for much more efficient training to extract a higher level of performance from the athlete who's willing

to kind of go all in on this with me. Yeah, the really nice thing I, or one of the things that I really value with Christian and Gustav is actually a lot of the conversations we have because they also have a lot of ideas and perspectives on the sport and performance and limitations.

And that is how I also see that we are working together as a team. It's not like I'm like a leader or a coach dictating what they should do, but it's rather we just have different tasks. And for example, one thing that me and Christian were sitting down discussing, this was, when was this?

This was, I think it was early this year or was it leading into Cozumel? I don't remember exactly. But then when we started to break down, okay, what do we think is possible to do in the swim, the bike and then in the run one of the things that we when we started to analyze performances it's quite interesting to see that if you take sprint performance or olympic sprint distance and you compare them you'll see that you can basically take the swim and you can multiply it by two point let's say for the for the fun of it we just say 2.1 a low let's say two point low something so

it's a little bit more than than a factor factor two on the swim is the same on the bike and the same on the run so the times are almost on all these different disciplines almost a double that's that's that's it uh if you go from olympic distance and you go to half ironman distance you're almost also seeing exactly the same the time that you're using on the swim if you go from 1500 meter 99 meter is almost line there the same on the bike is almost also seeing the exactly the same the time that you're using on the swim if you go from 1500 meter 99 meter is almost linear the same on the bike is almost linear and also the same thing if you're going to run is almost linear if you now go from half Ironman you go to full distance Ironman is actually the same for the swim and for the bike but not the run and then the question becomes why is there such a big difference on the run, but not the run. And then the question becomes, why is there such a big difference on the run part,

but not on the bike part and not on the swimming part? And one of the ways that we started to view this a little bit is that if you look at the training that you're doing throughout the day, throughout the week and so on, swimming 750 meters, you do every training set. You never have a swim session as a short. No session is less than probably 2,500 meters or so.

Or even, I would say that very seldom less than 3,000 meters. Most of the time, more than 4,000 meters even. So that means that most of the swimming sessions you have throughout the week, you are actually covering also arm and distance in your swimming, just broken up into intervals, lower intensity, sometimes high intensity and so on. But you cover more or less the volume there there the same also goes for the bike for all

distances maybe except from for for ironman distance in ironman distance of course you have a working time that is more than four hours of course 180 kilometers but you do several times a month maybe rides that are closer to four hours and sometimes maybe even a little bit more than four hours on the bike of course not at the intensity, but you still get the volume in there. Running is the place where you, yes, in your running, you always cover a sprint distance or five kilometers on the run.

Olympic distance, 10 kilometers on most of the session you will cover even that way if you count your cool down or you warm up your main set in your cool down. When you come to the half Ironman distance, this is where you, okay, you still cover that distance or close to the distance, maybe once a week or at least a couple of times a month,

but the Ironman distance, you don't. And then when we start to understand this, then the question becomes why, what can we do about this? Right, so basically you're saying that the Olympic distance triathlete is approximating Ironman training for the most part in a way that has been underappreciated, right? There are more endurance athletes

than we've sort of respected them to be and are closer along that path towards being an Ironman athlete than one might originally have surmised. So that's the original kind of idea, except for the run part, right? And translating the training into taking that athlete from the shorter distance to the longer distance.

The run is where the opportunity lies. That's for one, but of course, I also am a big believer in specificity, meaning that the body will, what you'll see is that a lot of the things, we have a very simple approach a big believer in specificity, meaning that the body will, what you'll see is that a lot of the things, we have a very simple approach. In one say you can,

we have a very science-driven approach to it, but it very often what we see is that it ends up being a very basic or simple approach to a lot of things. If you want to race in Kona, going to Antarctica and doing your preparation, that will probably not be a very good idea. It will prepare probably quite well to race in Antarctica, but but not in kona so you need to be in the place where you want to prepare both from understanding the course but also course getting used to the heat that is

there the same thing also goes with with racing i don't think that i think that the reason why we could come into ironman racing and really just make a huge hit there and being very dominant is because we saw that there was a big room of improvement. Or let's say in Olympic racing, we are closer to what I call peak human performance, while in Ironman racing,

we are further away from it. It can have to do with the competitiveness, the resources that are spent on it to understanding the physiology and all these kind of things being involved there. But that's why I think that. And I think that for a period of time now,

because now every now and then you start to get a new picture of, okay, what can we do smarter in our training? And these are the times you typically make, you jump up one step in a staircase. But as people are starting to really understand this and able to extract the margins from it, that's also where you're starting to see that the sports,

or let's say those distances also become more part again. So now it's more that, okay, we are in a place where we are exploiting our gap, which has not been covered in the longer distances. But as the long distance, the people that really just focus on long distances, they will bridge up and they will get a competitive advantage again.

Because training as an Olympic athlete prepare you for Olympic distance. Training for an Ironman do require a different specialization. And the reason for that is there are two fundamental laws I really often like to come back to when things becomes a little bit too complicated.

For example, physiology is easy to, if you ask somebody about vo2 max for example you get so many different answers what's what's the single best workout to train your vo2 max some will say long slow distance some will say high intensity some will say micro intervals there are so many different answers to this and a cardiologist will have a say that okay the heart is the most important thing you get for other people say no it's the muscles and mitochondria which is the most important thing of it the fact is that when you just look at a simple graph and you plot VO2 on the Y-axis

and you plot power on the X-axis, you'll see that if you plot five minute power, increasing five minute power on the X-axis and you plot VO2 on the Y-axis, you'll see there's a perfect correlation between the two. So obviously increasing your five minute power will obviously also increase your VO2 max. If you don't have a high five minute power, you can't expect to have a high vo2 max now the question

becomes is that i think that too often in training we end up diving into physiology and trying to understand it from a physiological perspective instead of a requirement perspective what is really the demand or the requirement that we need to adapt to. And that's also why I think that you will, if you go out and of course, now I'm just throwing out some numbers here. I really don't have evidence for this, but it's more like a feeling based on all the people that I've been talking to.

And that is that you'll most often find probably more excellent coaches that don't have a physiology degree than excellent coaches that has a physiology degree. And the reason for that, I think, is because the coach that doesn't have a physiology degree than excellent coaches that has a physiology degree. And the reason for that, I think, is because the coach that doesn't have a physiology degree, he needs to understand performance from a practical perspective.

What is really the demand here? How can I really work on that demand? While a physiologist, very often, because maybe they've been taught in the book that the heart is the main limiter, and they start to obsess too much about an isolated part in the body rather than seeing the holistic thing about it and that's why also the two fundamental laws that i always

end up coming back to and one is the first law of thermodynamics is that is you can't create energy you can't destroy energy you can only convert it from one form to another form and that means in the body it means turning calories into velocity right Right. And the other is basically being the stationary action principle, meaning that, or the law of least action. And that is basically that the energy will always, the nature will always try to solve a task with the least possible energy required. So if you're going to run 10K

and you start to become better and better and better at it, the body will always start to try to figure out how can I do this with the least possible energy expended. And that's also where the specificity also comes in, because if you train for Olympic distance triathlon, that has a completely different demand with bigger surges, it requires higher power outputs and these kind of things, while an Ironman distance don't have that kind.

You're not gonna have, you don't need a huge five minute power in an Ironman. If you're gonna put in huge five minute power, you're going to put in huge five-minute power, you're probably on one side not going to have a very ideal metabolic profile. And secondly, it's going to cost you too much energy if you decide to put in a surge like that. So we also know that, for example, that the heart is grossly inefficient. I think that statistically for average population, the heart has an efficiency of 10%.

And like Gustav said, is that his view to max, he knows now because we have done quite a lot of research, and that is that his view to max for this Ironman have come down. And the reason for that, again, is because you don't, since you don't need a big view to max, you don't need equally big heart. Right. And we also know that from nature,

it's easier to, let's say, solve something with higher frequency than higher force. Higher force costs more, and it puts bigger strain on what you need to dimension from a pure physics perspective. But that back to the stationary action principle, the other fundamental law, and that is that the nature will always try to solve things as cheaply as possible.

So if you're going to be good on the Ironman where the power put is much lower than it is for Olympic distance, that is going to need an adaptation. And a part of that adaptation and being able to extract more and more and more from your capabilities will also result in reduction in stroke volume because you don't have the energy. If you spend too much energy maintaining a big view to max, a big heart and these kind of things, you're obviously focused on training something that is not necessarily preparing you for an arm.

The discipline that you're trying to excel at. No, that makes perfect sense. There's always gonna be compromises. And when you're gonna toggle that lever to level up in a longer distance race, it's gonna sacrifice that high end power that you don't necessarily need. What you need is efficiency

and you need the breadth of that aerobic capacity to last for that number of hours without tapping out your glycogen stores and all the rest. The sort of traditional approach, the conventional wisdom around preparing for an endurance event has always been, or historically has been, you go get lactate tested and you do that traditional progressive test

where watts are increased at a specific interval and you prick with lactate and you take perceived effort and heart rate, et cetera. And from that, you extract your training zones and then maybe you revisit two or three months later and you set the parameters of your training protocol in accordance with those zones and in conjunction with like some kind

of periodization situation, right? You enter the equation, you look at this and you say, okay, all fine and well, but, you know, is this really the best way to do this? Like, where can we improve upon this? So walk me through like how you kind of looked at this particular protocol or perhaps more broadly, how we think about intensity regulation in training and also the difference between, you know, what you tell an athlete to do and what they actually do. So I think of course, what we have seen after the Olympics

and Christian and Gustav and have been featured a lot of different places and one of the things that on the one side looks of course a little bit exotic but also get a lot of attention because it's suddenly they have blood running down their shirts and these kind of things dripping from the air and we we like to joke about it it's all about blood tear and sweat but these guys are pin cushions. You're pricking them all the time. They got patches all over their body.

There's data flowing out of their eyeballs and you're taking fecal samples and pouring trackers down their throats and isotope water. Like it's insane. Yeah, I think maybe one of the first and important thing to cover is of course, that I think that if you, my advice would normally be that

if you really don't are going to spend the time investing in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of lactate, what affects the lactate measurements, both from a contamination perspective, but also from purely that understanding that when we are measuring lactate, we are measuring our concentration. We don't measure volume. And that's actually a very interesting topic that we probably could cover sometime. Right. That sounds like a four-hour lecture that my eyes would glaze over. I don't even know what you just said exactly, but... No, what I mean by that is that when you measure lactate in the blood,

you measure a concentration. It just tells you that, okay, from the sample we made here, this is the concentration of lactate. Millimoles. Yeah, of millimoles, yeah, of lactate in that volume of blood that you're measuring. The problem is that you don't know how much do you have in your body in total. So that, for example, since you're measuring in the blood, if you have a reduction in plasma volume, for example,

which easily happens as a function of dehydration, change of climate, going to altitude, that's already going to change the concentration value. Increase the concentration. Yeah, even though you, let's say that you aim to find your maximum lactate steady state, which is like a scientific term for, or let's say maybe the only term that maybe science is able to agree over

as a threshold value is the maximum likely steady state. If you look up anaerobic threshold and you look for a different definition, you'll probably find 30, 40, 50 different definitions of this and if you go even into the protocols for how this you'll find even further ways to do this and you start to understand, of course, the weaknesses and strengths of it.

Maximize the steady state. It's a construct where you're just looking at, okay, what is the highest sustainable workout you can do or intensity you can do while the lactate still remains stable. Right, and I have a question about that. That's always confused me about this because I know that that's sort of established wisdom,

but what it doesn't account for to my mind, and hopefully you can clear this up, is the difference between the athlete who can maintain that steady state for, I don't know, two hours, three hours, four hours, and the athlete who can maintain that steady state for 12 hours or nine hours. Those are two entirely different individuals who might have that same data set that's gonna match up. It doesn't account for that difference. And obviously when you're taking an athlete

from Olympic distance to Ironman distance, that's the determining factor. I think you pinpointed something that a lot of people are forgetting. And that is that when you go into the lab and you do a protocol, or when you look at a power number or view to max number and so on,

is that you're actually looking at just power, not capacity. View to max is not capacity, it's a power number. It's just the equivalent of, let's say that if you said, okay, I can go'm i'm riding now at 300 watts it's like you say how how long can you do that because that's for some can you do that

for four days yes or can you do that for another minute yeah yeah um and that you could also have measured that just by vo2 saying that i'm riding now at the vo2 which is is this. Because you can have, for example, just to give a very simple example, and that is that you can take two athletes that has 80 milliliter per minute per kilogram in oxygen uptake. One can hold that for three minutes, another one can hold that for six minutes. Obviously, there is a huge difference there. Right. And you can't explain it by VO2 max. And that is capacity.

The problem with capacity is that that is extremely intrusive invasive to measure capacity and the easiest way to do it is that you just need to go out and you need to do you have to tit let's say you go by no actually the problem also with biopsy and this is also one of the places where unfortunately we see that more and more that we can't rely on many of the studies that have done or been done on muscle biopsies. There was a new study just released now where they had been looking at muscle biopsy in general and they actually had done muscle biopsies,

I think 12 spots on just the thigh. And they saw that the distribution of muscle, or let's say cells or muscle fibers are very different across those locations. So suddenly what we- Depends on where the biopsy is being done. And what are they looking for? Are they looking for mitochondrial density

or what is the- It depends. It depends very much on what you are looking for, because you can take cell samples and look at, for example, mitochondrial respiration. You can look at fiber type distribution, how much are white, red cells in the samples, for example, the distribution between them.

But again, the problem with also muscle biopsy is that there's a concentration measurement and not a volumetric, meaning basically that you can have two athletes where it seems like, for example, one athlete, let's say you take one athlete, two sprinter athletes, or two athletes where you look at the distribution of muscle fibers and one would have let's say he you said oh you have 70 type two

fibers and 30 type one fibers but then you find another one as well you take use in bolt and you would say that okay problem high but let's use the same number 70% type two fibers and 30% type one fibers. But if you just gave a visual, if you just looked at them visually, one would have like huge thighs, another one would have a small one. So you could have the same amount, the distribution between type one and type two would be the same,

but it's just that the other guy has so much more fibers in total that you do understand immediately that- Right, and obviously a biopsy doesn't tell you that story. Exactly, and the same thing back to power then. Power, asking exactly about maximizing steady state. Maximizing steady state, you will probably not be able to hold for many hours, but what you would see there is a huge range there as well.

Some people will be able to hold a maximizing steady state maybe for 30 minutes before they start to fatigue. Others can hold it for 70, 80, maybe 90 minutes before they fatigue. And we really don't know exactly why. This is still something that we are studying. Some people are saying that it has to do with the neurons that are starting to fatigue. Others are saying that no, it's due to glycogen availability, so you're running out of glycogen. And then the problem is also that you can't necessarily, because there's also where we say that, well, you can store approximately 500,

600 grams of carbs in your body or glycogen in your body. But that doesn't necessarily tell you that you can tap into all those 500, 600 grams of carbs maybe some people will only be able to tap into 300 of those before the body will start to signal and say that okay something really bad is starting to happen here now so we are going to shut you down and you're not able to override it while other athletes as you train for this you you learn to tap more and more into those resources we really don't know exactly what is and that's why if you try to explain things only from a physiological perspective and the training that you're building up becomes very physiologically oriented you might actually lose out on some more very practical approaches like just saying okay but okay if we don't understand physiology 100 there are still black holes there are gaps to be filled how can

we then understand it from a more practical perspective? Well, go out, target this speed, go for that long, and we see basically where you bonk. Or you go by power, go out, ride at power until you see that you, maybe not bonk,

but I say that you are not able to maintain that power anymore. And you start to get a very good picture of also capacity. Because capacity is more how much you can do at a certain intensity over time, not only power number. Because that's also, let's say,

the problem when you try to say something about FTP, critical power, maximum active steady state, and so on, is that you're just telling somebody that, okay, my maximum active steady state is, or my FTP, whatever term you want to use, my anaerobic threshold is 300 watts. But again, if you have two riders with the same FTP,

one might be quite superior over the other ones because basically if you had now looked at, okay, how long can you ride this? One guy can ride this for 60 minutes, another one, you ride this? One guy can ride this for 60 minutes, another one, 30 minutes. The guy that can ride this for 60 minutes, obviously if it's a competition lasting for 30 minutes, he will be able to tap into something

that the guy that only were able to ride for it for 30 minutes were not able to tap into. So that's why I think that practical coaches that has often a more practical, or let's say a physics perspective that I like to have myself to the approach and just saying okay if we think of that there's an input there's an output and in in between there there is physiology this this gray box that we we have a lot of

understanding inside but there's also a lot of things we don't understand but you just said okay what this is the input this is the output and you measure it try to measure things in a very practical way is very often easier to get much more specific answers and understand demand, understand limitations, and then you rather use this gray box of physiology to try to understand how can we do things smarter. But that's where the evolution is, yeah. Right, right, right.

So to kind of telescope out a little bit, in the broadest sense of the word, how do you think about intensity allocation for the endurance athlete? Like how much of this, you know, you're gonna get irritated at me, but like, we're just gonna use zone phraseology. Like how much is zone one?

How much is zone two? How much is threshold, interval, tempo work? Like, how do you think about that? Like broadly and generally, not with respect to a specific athlete? Again, I think I have a much more demand approach to it than necessarily zone approach to it. And I think like Gustav and Christian also said this,

that in the training leading into the competition, we of course, we have a plan for, okay, this is what we think we need to do, or this is a good plan. But as we train, we we have a plan for okay this is what we think we need to do or this is a good plan but as we train we see that necessarily that one athlete doesn't respond or christian or gustav doesn't respond exactly as we plan and then with this this is where we need to make a make the adjustments i think where to go with this because it's a very complicated uh it's not easy to answer this because i'm much more demand driven. And I instruments for me is a way of doing accounting towards the goal.

Instead of you just say, okay, this is a plan. We want to win this competition. So we make a plan for this. I get it, I get it. I guess where my head is coming from is thinking about, like there's been a lot of press about like, how did Kipchoge run as fast as he did recently? And Killian Jornet publishing his training diary.

So you could see exactly what he's done over the last year and extracting general principles from that. It paints this picture of how important like very low intensity work is. Like how much is actually being done in zone one, would blow people's minds and defies that argument that that's just junk miles, right? And also opens up the door to a conversation around an athlete's perception of intensity and workouts versus what they're actually doing. So if you take Christian,

for example, I know that he has this, you know, immense capacity to dig very deep. He, you know, knows how to really probe that anaerobic engine that he has. And you realized early on in working with him that on the easy days, he was going much harder than he was meant to and not even realizing it because he has, you know, that capacity to, you know to be in what most people would feel to be like the red zone. Is that fair? Is that an accurate? Yeah, okay. I think that's a very good way to put it. Because also, again, back to specificity again, you have a target in the training, and this is your number one priority.

So if you're going to raise Kona at an average power of 300 watts for four hours and 10 minutes. And that's what's going to bridge you also or set you up for a really good run. That means that that kind of work, training four hours and 10 minutes, or sometimes a little bit longer, low intensity, a little bit shorter, a little bit higher intensity, but in general around 300 watts than for four hours and 10 minutes, that is your number one goal to improve in your training. And when you want to improve this in training,

again, I'm a big believer of specificity and that the body is extremely smart and adapts to the things that we prepare for. But that means also that if you now have workouts around there, on the one side, we know that athletes that trains mobile, for example if you strava published a study i think or an article in 2011 12 i don't i don't remember when but basically

where they have took they took all marathoners that had run a specific marathon and they basically published the data behind those that had been running a sub 230 between 233 and so on and also across genders. And one of the things that you see there is maybe the single best predictive performance in that context was volume. You just saw that the faster people were running, the more volume they had put in. The problem with volume is that

when you put in a lot of volume and you say, okay, well, maybe if we just put in even more volume, then it must be even better. If you now don't take into account that doing that volume also has a demand, basically, again, first-order thermodynamics, that speed, that power that you're doing over those hours, that has a demand, so it has to come from calories.

You also need to start to feed accordingly to be able to uphold this. Otherwise, you're going to run yourself into the ground at some point. And that means that how the intensity has to be dictated is that you again have to think about consequences okay so if this is what i really want to be good at if i'm riding a if i'm when you have a low intensity session or let's say an easy session where you're just riding you have to evaluate okay how does this session now in will that impact that key session that i have tomorrow? This is also just something that I can add

is that a lot of people talk about quality sessions. For me, everything should be a quality session, whether it's a low intensity, medium intensity, or high intensity, because we must separate quality from intensity because intensity just tells you where you are on the scale. Quality is about how do you execute that specific session. And if you're going to execute that low intensity,

just a junk mass, that's going to be a low quality. But it can also make it high quality if you have a clear purpose with it and you know why you put it in there. But it means also that if you have now, you know that you have a key session tomorrow or day after and you are doing an easy ride today, but you're starting to feel quite fatigued

because you're riding a little bit higher power because you can. You just feel, I feel good today. This is really nice. I have good speed. There's a Strava segment, whatever that is there. And you get a little bit too hard on the pedals or on the run, swim, whatever.

On that session, that might actually hamper or limit development that you're gonna have on the key session in one or two days. And this is why I think it's much more important to to have those key sessions and let the other sessions you learn from the other session and how they basically bridge into increased performance on that key session because the reason why you have also all the other sessions around there is because you believe that having that low intensity sessions, those high intensity sessions will eventually make you also better on that key session. Right. best on the low intensity sessions. You're going to do personal best on the high intensity sessions. You're actually setting yourself up for failure and not being able to, let's say, personal best on that key session that you're aiming for. And this is unfortunately a place where you don't

have the answer up front. You actually rather have to go back and reflect over what did I do? How did I execute this? And then gradually learn. And as you learn, you become a smarter athlete, you become a better coach, understanding how all these things comes to better. But of course, at some point also, you want to see how can we push this one more step? Yeah. Yeah. It's a different definition of discipline. We tend to think of discipline as the wherewithal to like do the hard thing, you know, when it's demanded upon us, but the true discipline is being able to hold back and always bringing the appropriate amount of intentionality to everything that we're doing, right?

Whether it's to go hard or to, you know, check yourself, like because there's that Strava, you know, segment coming up and you could be a workout hero and a race day zero if you're not careful. Like I feel like Strava just fucks with people's heads and probably derails more training programs than anything that's ever been created by humankind. And back to that also to lactate,

for me lactate is actually the third layer. For me, the first layer is velocity. In the end, power doesn't matter. Power really doesn't matter either, because in the end, you're gonna race in Kona. And if you're producing 500 watts for four hours and 10 minutes, but you are racing at an average speed of 35 kilometer power,

that there obviously is something wrong. Yes, super nice power numbers and all these kind of things, but in the end, it's not power you're going to make you win, it's the velocity that's going to make you win. So that means that for me, the first layer is always velocity. Understanding what the speeds are, what are the time you're going to give,

because the distance is absolute. And the only thing that you can make, then do, or that you can do then to bridge down the, I'll say the time that you're going to take you to raise the distance is that you need to be do, or that you can do then to bridge down the, I'll say the time that you're gonna take you to raise the distance, is that you need to be able to increase the velocity. Power is the second layer where you can start

to understand now, for example, biomechanical, where you can optimize, for example, biomechanical, because you can still produce a lot of power, but if you are moving more sideways than forward, obviously there's something really poor with your efficiency. Your position on the bike isn't translating into velocity. It's just watts for watts sake. Exactly.

And the same thing, that's also where the third layer comes in. Because now when you're starting to use lactate and these kind of things, that allows you also to understand necessarily how efficiently are you producing that power. Because we also have to remember that with all the technology that we have available today, it's still outputted as normally as a one hertz metric or let's say like a one second output.

But when you pedal around, for example, in a circle, obviously your power is not gonna be the same, exactly the same power all the way around that circle. It's gonna change throughout that circle, for example, which we call intra-cyclic variations. And the same thing is in swimming also. When you're swimming, for example, forward, you might be very powerful and you are able to accelerate yourself up to very high instantaneous speed. But because you produce a lot of drag, you also deaccelerate very heavily,

which is not very efficient. You're wasting a lot of energy. And being able to work and understand is how can i actually expend the least possible energy moving at the same speed forward is a huge benefit and where lactate comes in is that now you basically have moved yourself to the third layer and that is understanding more the metabolism part in the body how do you actually where does the energy come from and with this all these tools instead of that you have like a starting point saying okay we're going to win in kona and you just make a plan and then you shop in kona and you look at okay how did this go all these tools allows us basically to do let's say a form of accounting

as we move and understand before race day how things are starting to change how do we adapt how do we respond to the different stimulus and allows us to basically make corrections before the big day and that's obviously what we want to do because one plan, a plan is a plan, but it's also nothing more than a plan. So when you're pricking these guys with needles for lactate readings, like, you know, several times a day during the course of, you know, a couple workouts, what are you looking for? Like, what is the data that is instructive in how you're gauging the training and approach? So one of the very complicated things with lactate is that it's influenced by a lot of

different factors. We touched upon plasma or let's say also hydration. So how much blood do you have in your body? Because the muscles is where basically the lactate is produced and is then released out into the bloodstream. And if you now, for example, have a smaller or less blood volume, that means that the muscles will still continue to produce the same amount of lactate, generally speaking. But it also means that if you have a lower blood volume, that means that for the same intensity now, you get a higher lactate concentration in the blood. If you drink a lot, you're well hydrated, you're going to maybe heat acclimatization,

the opposite is going to happen now. And if you now just look at the raw numbers there and you just compare them from, let's say from week to week or something like this, you will start to make what I would call like false positive adjustments in the program. So lactate is extremely complicated because you need to understand it in the bigger picture. And I guess this is also what Gustav also tried to pinpoint a little bit.

And also what we do know is that lactate actually is a fuel, it's a super fuel for the body that the body actually uses. It's, yeah, the body actually prefers to burn lactate if it can do. But also we know that metabolism, to burn anything, you need oxygen. So your VO2 max will also affect your lactic concentration.

And typically as you specialize, for example, for an Ironman distance, what will happen is that your VO2 max will naturally come down. To use a very simple example, if you get diarrhea or you are getting sick or something like this, you lose completely appetite. And then you start to eat again after one week, you will feel fill in your stomach very, very early on. The stomach basically is very plastic,

it basically pulls together. But as you start to eat more, you're getting your appetite back and so on, your stomach starts to stretch again. Same thing is probably also what is happening with the heart, at least what we have measured indirectly, is because it costs a lot of energy to have a big stroke volume, the stroke volume will start to come probably down as you're starting to specialize for an Ironman, much faster than we have thought ever before. We don't know yet, but this is the research we are working on.

So now when your VO2 max comes down, that will also now suddenly start to affect how your body is using the different substrate or how they say how the different substrate is represented in the blood as lactate and this makes it very complicated and you have to use quite a lot of common sense but also from previous understanding to understand Okay, are we where we want to be or are we not where we want to be? What is really affecting it?

For example, if it's hot outside, for example, much hotter than in other days, the problem is one of the critical functions for the body then is to prioritize cooling. So more of the blood in the body will be redirected from the core towards out the skin to transport heat from the core towards the skin. And then basically, so you can basically get rid of there,

transfer the heat to the surroundings. But also when this is happening, that means also there's less blood going into the muscles and less blood into the muscles means less oxygen into the muscles, less oxygen into the muscles means basically that now, if you're gonna do the same, continue at the same velocity, the body needs to start to draw

more of the local energy stores, glycogen, carbohydrates, which again will turn out in a higher lactic concentration so there are so many things that basically affects lactate concentration in your blood that if you're in a very stable environment and often also the problem with research is that we are we are trying it's so the more we do in the field also the more you understand that even when you go into a laboratory and you do this kind of testing, that a lot of the testing is not in vivo. It's actually a form of in vitro because it's so far out of context that yes, you have to know exactly why. We will continue to use lab testing a lot, but you really have to understand what you are, what kind of information

you are getting in the lab and how you can't or can't transfer that knowledge to the field again. Right, so on a practical level, for example, like testing Christian or Gustav out in the field, what kind of principles did you extract from like, okay, you're in Kona and you're getting ready for the race and you're out there and they're getting pricked and oh, it's hot out and like, how does that inform tweaks in the training like oh we saw something interesting here with the

lactate that we didn't know beforehand and now we're going to do this instead of that so to give a practical example the typically the closer we get to the race the more requirement or demand oriented we become. Because at that time, adapting or ensuring maximum adaptation to what you're going to do is the most important thing. Physiology more has to just come along. But of course, hopefully you have set up your physiology to be able to come along the closer you get into the race.

So now when we are out in the field and we are doing the testing, and let's say I do the lactate testing on the boys, of course, now I know the context because we have the core sensors on the body, we have the MOXIE sensors on as well, where we can see what is the core temperature, how much is it changing. Is it changing more than yesterday, for example?

And if I see, for example, now the core temperature is coming up higher than, for example, yesterday, then I would also, at the same power output, I would normally also expect that, A, that the lactate is starting to come up a little bit higher, but also it might start to become unstable too. So it's, and I would never also do a decision only based on lactate.

It would be based on the other information that I have available. Right, it's only, that information is only as valuable as how it relates to core body temperature and 10 other data points, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's just where it gets. We all want to be reductive about this,

but like the more you know, the more complicated it is, which puts you in a compromising situation of trying to explain this to lay people. Like it's very difficult. The core body temperature piece though is so interesting. I feel like this is, you know, a whole new frontier that, you know, is only just beginning to be understood. I had a guy on the podcast many years ago,

this professor of biology at Stanford, Craig Heller, who'd done a lot of studies on this at Stanford and had developed like a cooling glove and realized like he could get 40% boost in performance off like a pull-up test from his students when he could maintain a cooler core body temperature. And in a place like Kona or any endurance event where the body naturally overheats,

you tip over into a zone from which you cannot return and it's disastrous, right? So to the extent that you can understand core body temp and figure out a way to, as Gustav and Christian were putting it earlier, tolerate an increase in core body temperature or maintain a lower core body temperature, that is a massive key to gigantic performance gains,

I would think. And in terms of energy expenditure, from your perspective, it's a function of looking at, okay, you were saying earlier, like the law of like no energy is wasted, like energy in, energy out. Well, that energy in, is that going towards velocity or is that going towards cooling your body temperature and figuring out how to kind of get that equation

the best that it can possibly be? It's actually one of the things that really triggered me when it came to heat and our actually green tech sensor, the core sensor, the white thing that they're wearing on the belts, is that we normally say that the body, or if you look at your computer, bike computer, you'll see that normally that when you do

a certain amount of work, that when you do a certain amount amount of work you get out of a calorie amount and you think okay how can how can this know this and that is of course that we know that there's a very tight correlation between power and calimetry and that's because some of the tests that have been done in the past says that there is a rather fixed ratio between mechanical power and thermal power. And thermal power is what we couldn't measure in the past. So when you just do this work now, they normally will say that the body is 25% efficient. In reality, it's less than 20%.

It depends a little bit what kind of modality, what kind of sport you are doing, but normally you would say 20, 21% efficiency, that is what it is. But this boils down to how you measure it also a little bit. That's why maybe we have seen higher numbers also in the past because it depends a little bit on how we measure. And traditionally, how this was measured in the past and also today is that you use indirect calimetry. You're using a mask to measure your oxygen uptake. Again, what we have done and where this has been important for us

is to advance this into the field. And we are working with a Canadian company to be able to get rid of all kinds of wires and so on so the app really wants to use it, feels comfortable to use it. And at the same time, we can feed that data straight into our biocomputers or sports watches so that we can start to look at for example mechanical power and the carometry because in between there the difference between those two or let's say the missing piece there if you calculate just

carometric power into mechanic or into power like say pure power you'll see there's a huge component missing and that will you see there's approximately 80 percent so then where does this 80 percent go most of it heat the problem with that obviously is that when you know your muscles are doing work on the bike you're taking calories and calories will ultimately be the ceiling to your performance you can't get more energy than what you have trained your body to deliver at any given time so in the same way as in formula one for example they're really trying to improve the efficiency of the cars and today they're talking about maybe more than 50 efficiency of the combustion engines is not because the combustion engine in itself is capable of out or how's it turning fuel 50 into pure mechanical power is because they actually are recycling the

heat that the engine is is so the heat that the engine is. So the efficiency of the engine is probably around 20, 25% as well as it's, but the rest of it is actually just taking the heat that the engine is producing and they are able to recycle also a big part of that back into mechanical power. And of course, in the body, what happens is that when you're exercising

and we know that now suddenly for every calorie that you are burning, 20% of that goes into velocity or power and 80% of that goes into heat so where does the heat go obviously now there we have a huge thermal capacity so we can store a lot of that heat but that will at some point become a problem because we will start overheat and the body will will try to get rid of as much as possible of the heat but then one of the ways to do this is exactly that the body starts to prioritize bringing blood instead into the muscles out towards the skin and get rid of it so this is of course where i we we need to we need to understand how does this work and where we had a very experimental approach to it and we did

everything from rectal probes to rectal pills to basically, which is not very invasive because the artists have become so used to it that it's okay, just do it. But on the other side, it's a very expensive method to approach or to use. And here now, I knew that there was a lot of patches on the market that of course said yeah we can measure the core temperature this kind of thing but they do the same way as if you have a if your kid is sick or something like this and you take the you scan the frontal lobe with the thermometers it will give you a core temperature or temperature of your body but the thing is that

it doesn't measure it it just takes the skin temperature it's not it's not a true accurate measurement no it just takes your skin temperature. It's not a true accurate measurement. No, it just takes your skin temperature and then applies a constant. What really intrigued me with the sensor that Core produced was that, or GreenTek produced, was that it's basically there are two sensors in there. And that is the one that measures the skin temperature, but there's also is a thermal power meter in it.

So if you had made this one in metal and you put your cooking stove to two kilowatts and you put it on there, this won't be able to measure that. Okay, there's two kilowatts output now. That's crazy. And now suddenly we can have this on the body. And that's why there are picture out of course,

with Christian. So it literally tells you how much energy your body's producing and the temperature piece. Yes, exactly. Wow. So this is now, let's say your body's producing and the temperature piece. Yes, exactly. Wow. So this is now, let's say- Is that Bluetooth to the Garmin? Yeah, no, actually ANT plus, but also Bluetooth, yeah.

Straight into the Garmin so you can have it there. So you actually have both now, mechanical power and thermal power looking at it. That's freaking crazy. So what we also then want to optimize is basically how can we take those calories, those limited calories that we actually can turn into work per minute, per second, per minute, per hour. How can we optimize that?

Because again, calories are the limit, but how can we now increase the ratio between the thermal part and the mechanical part? From an evolutionary perspective, that ratio sounds crazy. evolutionary perspective, that ratio sounds crazy. Yeah. That only 20% goes into actual, you know, what would you call it? Like energy output, 80% to heat management. It doesn't seem right. Like how did, how did, how did humans survive? You know, it's so inefficient. Yeah. But probably that was also one of the keys when you didn't have like very, I'm just speculating because this is something, this of course is a when you didn't have like very, I'm just speculating because this is something, this of course is a topic I didn't research very much,

but because it doesn't affect the performance of the boys too much or knowing this, but I, one could maybe speculate that we didn't have proper clothing or these kinds of things. And then the body needed to be able to keep yourself warm. So a lot of the calories had to go into heating your body and making sure that your body stays

at a very delicate temperature. and then the rest is work and and we didn't need to be able to be more efficient because also actually if you look at it more from an evolutionistic perspective one of the things that i i was really fascinated doing research into tokyo olympics where we knew that it was very hot instead of going by necessarily that, okay, we need a cooling vest, we need air conditions and all these kinds of things. I knew that, well, there are tribes, there are people, native people around in the world.

They go out in the daytime and they hunt down animals in the scorching sun. How are they able to survive this? And what I found there is that of course, there've been written books about this as well. And that is that you basically see that humans are probably one of the most superior species in exactly also heat management,

which allows us basically to track down and hunt animals that are much faster than us, but we do have the endurance because we're able to dissipate the heat and we can just go on and go on and go on. Those animals can't dissipate heat. They ultimately keel over and the human wins the persistent hunt.

Exactly. So that is the evolutionary advantage right there. You just explained it. Yeah, it's amazing. I come from a swimming background and obviously when you're in the pool, even if the water is somewhat warm, it's much cooler than your core body temperature, right?

So your body is expending a lot of energy just to maintain core temperature, which is why I think swimming is so exhausting, but also why you can spend a lot of time in the pool. Like you can keep swimming for extended periods of time because you're not gonna overheat in the way that like you can keep swimming for extended periods of time because you're not gonna overheat in the way that you would running. But ultimately you get, I find you get more tired,

like, you know, the sleep is deeper and you walk around like a zombie if you're overdoing it in the pool. The interesting thing is that exactly for the same reason that you say there is that because here the water is taking so much energy from your body because the body needs to ramp up the heat production. If you measure gross efficiency in cycling,

you'll see that it's typically sits for a liter around 20, 20, 21%. For sub-alerts, it actually sits a little bit lower. When I started to work with Christian, we saw that his biochemical efficiency, I distinguish between biochemical and biomechanical. Cross efficiency is for me, like where you measure from calorimetry to velocity.

While you can separate it into biomechanical, we're just looking at mechanical power to velocity and on the other side for mechanical power to calorimetry and that's where you get your biochemical efficiency. And this is where Christian, when I met him, he had a biochemical efficiency of around 17%. Now it sits around 19, 20%. But one thing that we see that that's for cycling.

In swimming, it's between five to 10%. So there you see that basically only five to 10% of the calories that you're inputting are getting out in terms of velocity and the rest is pure heat because the body needs to use a lot more energy to basically make sure that you don't get, go into hypothermia.

Wow, that's wild. How does heart rate variability play into this as a valid data point? Not so much. It collect- It's interesting, because I'm saying that, sorry to interrupt, but because we're all keen on the wearables and I've got the WHOOP and all that kind of stuff, like suddenly there's a discourse

around heart rate variability that didn't even exist like two years ago, unless somebody had your kind of background. For me, heart rate variability is like a very isolated or small metric. Of course, on the one side, we say that it is representative to the nervous system, or it gives a representation of the nervous system. But I do think that,

so HRV obviously is a result of something. You can see that, of course, that it becomes more, that your heart rate more like beats like very much more like a clock, which is not too good. You wanted to dance around a little bit, but on the other side, you don't want to dance too much around either, which is not too good.

So there is like a delicate balance in between there. But as a predictor of readiness and your capacity to endure strain on that particular day. The interesting thing is that if you had measured, there are so small adjustments you can do and it will start to affect HRV. So for example, because we collect so much data, we can start to look at it over time. Not only just there, the spot picture, but basically from also how every workout even

affects it and both in the workout, but also between the workouts and so. And one of the things that I see when I've been looking at the data is that if you do, for example, you can go into a workout, you feel like you're not good at all. You look at the HRV and say, okay, you see that maybe there are some indicators also indicating that. But just simple breathing exercises can sometimes make a difference to your HRV. That's for one, your perception. But also when you do a warmup,

if you do a good, like a controlled good warmup, suddenly also the HRV can be completely different also afterwards. So letting the HRV, that's why I'm very afraid of letting the hrv dictate what you should do because it's then you are then instead of trying to do something with it you're just letting the past dictate a little bit what's going to happen so for me hrv this is an interesting metric but it's not a metric that i would use to basically determine something it's more something I would say that if an athlete feels fatigued, we also see, okay, let's try to do something that we know normally seems to get you into a state where you actually start to feel ready

again. I would rather go by the feeling of the athlete than going by HRV. HRV would not even be the second metric I would look at. Okay, first the feeling of the athlete, then the HRV. It comes fairly long down the road before I would start to consider it. Yeah, that's super interesting. You know, I have a habit of not like checking the data in the morning, because I don't want it to be a predictor of what I'm supposed to do, which is sort of weird

because that's kind of what it's meant to do. But if I feel a little off and I know I've got a bunch of stuff I gotta do, you know, on that day, I don't wanna look at it and have it tell me like, I shouldn't do those things or that, you know, so there's a weird mental thing, I think that happens with that as well.

For me, if you had an electrical car, the problem with the human body is that we don't have like any gauges on our way, we can just look at our hand and it basically says, okay, you are recharged this much, for example. also the a lot of the metrics that we have today they are not really uh uh they are like very isolated very isolated metrics and the problem uh with that is that it's like if you if you have electrical car you drive during the day and you and and in reality you're using 20 battery you come back home you put it to charging and you're using 20% battery. You come back home, you put it to charging

and you're charging. The next day, you expect it to be 100% again. You go to work again, spending another 20% back home, put it to charging again. Every day you do this. But let's say that there was something wrong and actually the input to your car was only 10% during that night.

That means that after a certain amount of days, your car will actually run out of electricity. For you, when you're sitting there, because you don't have a, let's say in this car, you don't have the indicators now, in the same way that we don't have this clear indicator, you're sitting there wondering, what on earth did go wrong with my car today?

Obviously, there you can bring it to the workshop and they will immediately say, oh, you are empty battery. Unfortunately, that's much more complicated with the body. You can't basically just say that, okay, now I now i'm over trained or like this or something like this it's such it's so much more difficult to predict the performance or predict whether overtraining other things occur for me that one of the best the best recovery predictors is more that you have to look at things from a day-to-day basis so for example if you see for example, your general mood and every like these kinds of things are in general, they are, yes,

they were fractured a little bit, but you basically are, you see that you look forward to get out in the exercise or exercise in this kind of thing, especially when you come back, you basically see that, for example, the power you're outputting, the speed that you're outputting

compared to your feeling in the body, compared to your heart rate and other things, you basically see that it looks good and maybe even improving, but it also resembles the feeling that you have in the body compared to your heart rate and other things you basically see that it looks good and maybe even improving in improving but it also resembles the feeling that you have in your body that is for me the single best predictor of that you are in a place where you're recovering sufficiently and this kind of thing so rather looking at the trends and how you how you you you progress according to plan these kind of things that is for me the single best predictor compared to any other metric

that are available on the market. We're running out of time. I know you guys got another appointment. You got to go. I feel like we're an hour and a half into what could be a five-hour conversation because I barely even started with all the things that I want to know about from you.

But before I let you go, I do want to dive a little bit more in detail into the world of recovery. Obviously, an athlete's ability to recover in between training sessions is perhaps the most important thing that's gonna predict success to the extent that you can enhance recovery

and compress the amount of time required for an athlete to bounce back in between those training sessions. That's going to translate into performance gains realized sooner rather than later. So how do you think about recovery? What are the pillars of recovery that you think are important? And what are some things that perhaps a lot of athletes out there spend a lot of time thinking about that maybe are less important? Listening to the body, I think, is probably very underrated.

And learning to listen to your body is- Says the data guy, it's so interesting. Yeah, the data guy is telling me to listen to my body. But that's because there are two extremely important data stream. One is the objective, quantitative data stream. On the other side, you have the qualitative data stream, basically meaning, and that's something that you have to invest in and you have to train.

And you can, of course, use the, you will gain strength and you will be able to advance faster connecting it with the objective or quantitative data stream. But learning to listen to your body and also having patience, knowing that, okay, if I rush it today, yes, I have a competition coming up in two weeks, but if you rush it on a hard session today,

that might actually be more fatal. Damaging, yeah. Yeah, to the end result, than actually just saying that, okay, today I'm a little bit unsecure. I go out, I go easy a little bit. I feel how my body responds. If it's not there, I'm just gonna do a little bit,

go back and make sure that I'm ready for the next session again. Because one single session will not make a big difference to the increase in your performance, but it can be enough to basically tip the whole result off in two weeks time if you start to rush it. Right, I think that decision has a lot to do with where the athlete's head is at and how confident or unconfident they are

about the upcoming event. That's why I think also it's important to have somebody to discuss the training with also because they can maybe be the one that are able to bring that perspective into your life as well. But among those pillars, I suspect, sleep is at the top of the food chain there.

Yes, sleep, nutrition, obviously is extremely important. We don't believe very much in supplementation or things. Again, I'm very demand oriented, meaning that if you take a supplement, it should be because you because the doctor or somebody have identified that you are lacking something here and you will try to compensate it by, for example, go to altitude, use iron supplementation.

If you live in the Nordics, you are low on vitamin D, okay, try to supplement with vitamin D and see if it make a change. But we actually don't use supplements beyond actually what you eat as a normal food. And if you eat nice, varied food, healthy foods, not obsessing over it, because calories, again, is very important to get in.

So if you're only eating salads and all these kinds of things, obviously you're gonna have to eat a table of salad to maybe even be closer. Again, calories is super important. Sleep is super important. But also being in a place where you are able to recover mentally too is very important. And I think important, but also being in a place where you are able to recover

mentally too is very important. And I think that in the end, it boils down to choices. If you really want to excel, you prioritize it. Otherwise you're cheating yourself. We talked about aerodynamics with the lads earlier. If you guys want to hear about that, just listen to that conversation. That was a whole other rabbit hole I wanted to dive down with you, but I do have to let you go. I appreciate how open and transparent you've been with all the modalities and techniques that you're playing around with.

Like you're very open to discussing these things and not worried about other coaches figuring out what your recipe is, but I'm sure you've got a whole other batch of stuff that you're up to that is under lock and key and is top secret. But what would be, like, what's the next, like if you had to design the optimal study

to solve whatever dilemma is playing out in your mind about how to unlock ultimate human performance, like what would that look like? Like, what are you thinking about now? Where is your training mindset evolving towards? So this is where probably I would have to apply the same thing that I like to apply to my athletes, and that is sharing something,

sharing your competitive advantage. But it boils, of course, a little bit down to the dobly labeled water and maximum sustainable energy expenditure. Because on the one side, we see that there is a very tight correlation between performance and volume volume is a very gross gross estimate of what you're doing it doesn't say something about the work obviously because there's a lack of intensity you can do 20 hours of training at 100 watts you can go 20 hours of training at 200 watts and that has at least a

double amount of energy expended so maybe even or better predictor of performance is exactly to understand rather it from a calorimetric perspective how much or from a from a distance power whatever kilojoules distance perspective but maximum sustainable energy expenditure understanding actually how we can even advance this because there are this is something that humanity have tried to understand for decades and that is what are the limits to performance? We have said view to max and threshold and all these kind of things,

but in reality, it's like exactly like you also pinpoint. Yeah, but you see some people that can do this for 30 minutes. You see some can do it for two hours. Yes, exactly. That's because very often when we look at performance, we only quantify them as power metrics and not capacity metrics. And that is also the thing here is that i think that maybe one of the

single best predictors of performance is maximum sustainable energy expenditure and we in literature that and research have been done on tour de france riders uh during two uh yeah during two the fans giro d'ital, ultra runners and so on. They basically see that there seems to be a limitation around 2.5 times the resting metabolic rate. We know from the studies we have done that we are at a much higher number. And so then you can ask, okay, so what?

Basically, if you have one hour to train per week and that comes back again, if you plot on your performance, you're going to run Boston Marathon or whatever, most likely your performance will be accordingly. If you have 20 hours of training, your performance will be much better, most likely. And then the question is, well, where's the limit?

Where is the limit? So if there's a correlation going up and you can get better and better and better, I already know that these guys, Gustav and Christian, are putting down a huge amount of work. Work is probably the right word. Measuring kilojoules, kilocalories.

And my question now is just how can we really now start to manipulate the training and maybe we are on a verge of starting to put training together in a different way. We don't have the answers we just have to do the research we have to take the risk of experiment a little bit but that is actually one of the things that i'm really starting to play around with now because if you want to have a high view to max let's say that gustav or christian went into an arm and now with a much higher view to max that would on the one side just from a two-dimensional picture, be more ideal. But in order now to excel equally much at what is the specific demand of the race, that means that you have to spend much more energy

to both maintain that high VO2max at the same time be able to do the specific work that you are looking to do. And that puts higher demand on recovery, sleep, eat, how you put together the training and everything. So that is for me now, it might, when we sit down and talk again, that this perspective might have changed

because we have gone even further down the path. You've explored it more deeply at that time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's where I am now. Right, but we're nowhere near the limit, right? No. You know that, we know that. And that means that we've got exciting times to come

because I know you guys are hard at work at this. And I can't wait to see how this plays out in the years to come. So I gotta let you go. Please consider this part one of a multi-part series. Come back because I got a million more questions for you. And it's just fascinating what you're doing. I appreciate the work you're doing

and for taking the time to share with us today. I accept already. All right, excellent, man. Cool, I'll let you guys go. Thank you for an amazing day, all of you guys, and best of luck. And please, if there's anything I can do for any of you, consider me and my team here a resource.

Thank you so much. Cheers. I'm honored. Yeah, the honor is all mine, my friend. Cheers. Peace. That's it for today thank you for listening i truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books,

Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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Plants. Namaste. Thank you.