Building your Performance Pyramid III: Speed/Power

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my last article on “building your performance pyramid”, I covered the second tier of an endurance athlete’s performance structure, i.e. aerobic capacity or endurance. I suggested that, while maximizing your ability to generate energy from fat is a worthy health goal, from a performance perspective, the specific endurance that typifies triathlon racing, all the way from sprint triathlon to ironman requires a higher level of output than fat burning can produce. A level of output that must be trained for and supported with a higher level of carbohydrate in the diet during these periods of specific preparation.

Looking back at the series so far, I’m seeing that it’s turning into a big list of “dumb things that athletes do” :-)

Dumb thing #1: Live a stressed out, nutritionally deficient life and expect your body to adapt to the hard training that you’re putting into it.

Dumb thing #2: Train hard enough to deplete your body’s energy reserves on a frequent basis then fail to re-pay these reserves because you’re taking nutritional cues from Dr. Atkins.

And to complete the trilogy of dumb things that athletes do….

Dumb thing #3: Train like you’re preparing for an event that lasts 2-10 minutes when your event actually lasts 2-10 hours.

I get it. You’re time constrained and on the hunt for the most ‘time-effective’ routine out there. This  leads you to training sessions that make you feel as though you “got a good workout in” within a limited period of time. You may even be able to justify your choice of high intensity training by citing (short term) studies like the following that show improvements of 2-5% in VO2max after only 2-4 weeks of high intensity training (e.g. Lindsay et al., 1997, Westgarth-Taylor et al., 1997, Stepto et al., 1998)

The problem with this approach is that you’re adding to a very wonky, top heavy pyramid & it's a matter of time before it comes tumbling down….

1.       It doesn’t work long term:

2.       These high intensity workouts are in no way, shape or form, specific to the demands of your event.

3.       You’re teaching your body to use (& crave) massive amounts of carbohydrate which, as discussed in part 1, is just plain unhealthy!

Let’s look at the first one, the issue of trainability. With the excitement over David Epstein’s book “The Sports Gene”, the question of ‘trainability’ is quite timely. We’ve known for some period of time that the anaerobic capacity of athletes is a largely heritable trait (e.g. Szopa et al., 1996, Klissouris, 1997, Bouchard et al., 1997), i.e. speed/power athletes are largely born as speed/power athletes. Put another way, an athlete’s ability to ‘swing’ their anaerobic capacity in one direction or another is quite limited. This is the reason that, in the world of elite sports, the ‘sharpening’ phase of training is relatively short when compared to the ‘base’ phase of training because, experience has taught coaches that if anaerobic ‘sharpening’ training is continued too long, performance plateaus and eventually regresses. If you want a real time example of this, head on over to any triathlon forum and look at the athletes touting the benefits of “high intensity training” These athletes seem to go silent after a month or 2 or, if they continue, they ascribe their plateau to reaching their genetic limit. Maybe they have reached their genetic limit for anaerobic capacity, on the positive, though, they’re competing in an aerobic sport, right? Which brings us to the second point…

Blood lactate levels in triathlon events from 2-10hrs range from 1-4 mmol/L indicating a very low anaerobic contribution to performance. In these events, the energy limiter is not the rate at which glucose can be converted to energy but rather….

1.       How quickly you can metabolize the by-product of this conversion (i.e. the pyruvate that is created) so that muscle acidity doesn’t increase.

2.       How well you can supplement the creation of energy from glucose with creation of energy from fat.

In other words, aerobic and metabolic fitness – tiers 1 & 2 of the performance pyramid.

For all but a handful of triathletes, the peak of the pyramid (speed/power) is overly developed when compared to the levels below it. The average Ironman athlete has no problem producing enough pyruvate to fill their mitochondrial ‘buckets’ at race pace. In fact, most have a large reserve which leads to a good deal of overflow & undesirably high blood lactate levels. This, in turn, creates a ‘wonky’, unstable upside down pyramid that looks like this…

Put more simply, 99% of athletes already have more than enough of a “speed/power” reserve for long course racing and don’t need to emphasize work that leads to high levels of blood lactate. Maintain? Yes. Develop? No. What they really need is more fitness specific to their event & especially, a stronger health base so that their training consistency and body’s ability to absorb the training that they put in is maximized.

So what does it take to maintain your anaerobic capacity while building the base layers of your pyramid? While every athlete is different and should be tested periodically, my suggestion would be to start with no more than 5% of your weekly training time at pace/power levels at or above the 4mmol/L mark. For an athlete training 10hrs per week, 30 minutes total (divided among the 3 sports).

The exception to the rule occurs when we have an athlete who isn’t able to generate even moderately high max blood lactate levels. After discounting the effect of nutrition or being over-reached, some athletes have simply taken aerobic training too far (or have let strength/power slide too much). By cutting off the top of their pyramid, the absolute size of the pyramid is reduced.

 

While this doesn’t greatly affect performance over those long course races, (where performance is a composite of aerobic and metabolic fitness) it does affect the athlete's short course performance & it also seems to affect the training response of the athlete, i.e. athletes lacking in strength/power don’t respond to aerobic training as well as athletes with moderate to high peak power outputs, presumably because the size of their training pyramid (pool of trainable muscle fibers) is diminished.

For these athletes (and these athletes only) an additional specific preparation block dedicated to restoring some ‘power reserve’ may be warranted. In a reverse periodization approach, this is simply a matter of beginning specific preparation one month earlier with a block of training with a threshold/VO2 emphasis.

Take home points….

·         It is quite rare for the ‘sexy’ elements of fitness, i.e. VO2max, threshold et al. to be true limiters for age-group Ironman or half ironman performance.

·         An unnecessary focus on these qualities can lead to stagnation of performance, inadequate preparation for the demands of your event, negative changes to your body composition & poor health.

·         When a speed/power block is indicated, it can and should be a short & sweet ‘remedial’ cycle before returning to the training that offers long term gain & is truly specific to the event.

With apologies to whichever wise coach I’m stealing the following quote from; “Speedwork is the icing on the cake. Most of you don’t have a cake yet.”

Train smart,

AC

 

Building your Performance Pyramid II: Aerobic Fitness

 

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

In my last post, I outlined the importance of establishing a firm base of ‘metabolic fitness’ to both performance and general health.

When it comes to exercise for health, having a very good metabolic profile will take you a long way towards your goals of health & longevity. Considering that the most pervasive debilitating disorders of modern society are strongly linked to metabolic dysfunction (or the excessive inflammation that is related to this faulty metabolism), keeping your metabolic and stress hormones in an optimal balance will take you a long way towards optimal health. However, for the athlete intent on maximal performance, having a strong basal metabolism is only a part of the picture.

Once a strong basal metabolism is established, the serious athlete must address the limits of exercise metabolism, i.e. sugar burning. To put the relative importance of these 2 systems into perspective, check out the figure below which shows relative fat and carbohydrate contribution for a top age group Ironman athlete for each of his training zones.

While the breadth of the fat burning system is virtually limitless, its height, or power is not. Generating energy from fat is a rate limited process. Meaning there are inherent limits to exercise intensity if the athlete is intending to ‘run on fat’. Indeed, in this athlete’s Ironman power zone of 220-240W, for a 75kg, you can see that aerobic glycolysis (sugar burning) makes up more than 2/3 of the performance picture.

This fact has important implications with regard to the current push for “low carb, high fat” diets. When dealing with athletes, it’s important to recognize the difference between eating and training for optimal health vs eating and training for maximal performance. Make no mistake, the majority of athletes can greatly improve their ability to use energy for fat by making better choices in their daily nutrition. After such interventions, I’ve seen athletes double their fat oxidation rates in tests like the one above, i.e. go from the typical 3-5kcal/min up to an incredible 10kcal/min energy generation from fat! This adaptation greatly improves the athlete’s long term endurance. However, if we look at the 10kcal/min mark on the chart above you can see that it equates with a power output of less than 200W, a level that’s simply not going to cut it for an average sized athlete with competitive aspirations of a Kona slot or beyond.

The aim of the game, then, for the competitive athlete is to maintain a developmental balance between the fat burning and sugar burning systems over the long term.

In terms of nutritional and training periodization, this is a yin-yang concept. During the bulk of the year, when you are working on building your ‘health base’ and focusing your training on your ability to generate energy from fat, if you’re a competitive athlete, you should still include sufficient training (& sufficient carbohydrate in your diet) to maintain your glycolytic (i.e. ‘sugar burning’) power & capacity. On the flip side, when you are approaching your ‘A-Race’ & a good chunk of your training is metabolically similar to your event, i.e. focused on ‘sugar burning’, for the sake of your health and recovery, you should maintain your body’s ability to use fat for fuel.

In practice, for a high level AG male athlete of average size, this may look something like this….

	General Prep (Base)			Specific Prep (Build)
Training	90% Fat Burning/10% Sugar Burning ---------------------->			75% Fat Burning/25% Sugar Burning
Nutrition	40/30/30 diet -------------------------------------------------->			50/20/30 diet

 

Rather than give recommendation for all sizes and levels of athlete, the litmus test of ‘taking it too far’ is very simple. When an athlete is not including enough carbohydrate in the diet or enough ‘sugar burn’ training in the program, top end performance is noticeably compromised.

A great example of this comes from my experiences in the lab. When we schedule blood lactate or metabolic testing for an athlete, one of the pre-test instructions is to ‘come rested’, i.e. ideally tests take place towards the end of a recovery week. Invariably, though, over the course of a year an athlete will show up far from ‘rested’, sometimes without advising the tester of this (!) This may happen immediately after a big training camp or block of training, i.e. when the athlete’s glycogen stores are very low & their ability to generate energy from sugar is, consequently, compromised. The test unfolds as follows… The athlete looks spectacular in their ‘easy zone’ generating very high levels of energy from fat and showing a very slow rise in lactate & then they just… stop. When the body goes looking for sugar to fuel the increasing workloads, it comes up short. Therefore, the maximal lactate and maximal power that the athlete reaches are very low (often less than 7mmol/L LaMax)

This bring us to 2 practical recommendations for the athlete looking to improve their metabolic fitness without sacrificing performance…

1.       Periodically ‘check in’ on your glycolytic power via short, maximal tests to ensure that you’re not overdoing the low carb thing.

2.       As you get closer to your ‘A Race’ shift the emphasis to improving race pace endurance. Being able to roll 150W for 20hrs on water & chia seeds is a great test of your basic metabolic fitness but if your race requires 225W for 9hrs, you’re going to need to add a little something to your training (& your nutrition) to get ‘race ready’.

Train Smart,

AC

Building your Performance Pyramid I: The 'Health Base'

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

 

 

I’ve heard it said that elite athletics and health are mutually exclusive, i.e. that, at the very top of the sport, athletes are riding on such a razor’s edge of overtraining that none could be considered healthy. I don’t agree with this, and would actually go as far to say that at the VERY top of the sport, the athletes who are able to consistently turn in top results are only able to do so by having a very strong base of general health behind them.

In fact, to both absorb an elite level training program & to respond to such a program requires a very strong constitution. Athletes who lack such a constitution find themselves perpetually overtrained or injured – no recipe for reaching the top! But what goes into this superman constitution & is this something that can be developed?

As a coach to athletes at all levels of the life/performance spectrum, I witness a large range in 2 very important attributes in the training process:

1.       Recovery from training

2.       Response to training

The first ultimately determines how much training an athlete can absorb over the course of a week, month or year. The second determines just how much fitness the athlete gets from a given training load. Both of these qualities are largely contingent on the athlete having a ‘healthy system’, which, in turn depends on the athlete living a healthy life!

Let’s delve into these 2 foundational qualities in a little more depth…

What determines how quickly an athlete recovers from a given dose of specific training?

Well, considering most competitive events rely heavily on the athlete’s ability to generate energy from sugar (glycolysis), the rate at which an athlete is able to replenish their ‘sugar stores’ after an exhaustive bout of specific training is certainly an important factor in how quickly they recover & are able to commence the next bout of specific training.

So, what determines this rate of sugar replenishment within the body? I’ll give you a clue, it’s probably the most talked about hormone these days when it comes to health, that’s right, insulin.

A primary role of insulin is, in response to feeding, to open up the gates of depleted muscle cells so that they can be refilled. The problem comes when the stores are always full, i.e. the athlete has too much sugar in their diet.

Body says: “Neat, sugar in the blood stream. Send insulin to open the gates of the muscle cell to let some in to refill them”.

Insulin gets to the gate of the muscle cell and there is one of those “Parking lot full” signs there.

After a few times this happens, eventually Insulin loses his motivation to send the message, i.e. the body becomes insulin resistant.

But, "I’m an athlete, you’re taking about diabetic problems here. I’m too fit to worry about that sort of thing. Right?"

Competitive ‘Type-A’ working athletes can have some of the most messed up gluco-corticoid systems around! Think about it; they are typically time limited, which means when they train, they ‘hit it hard’. They come back to a stressful work desk which signals the body to keep the blood sugar coming (and maybe hit the candy/soda machine if it starts to drop) In short, the body never knows when the next assault is coming so the parking lot is always full!

Let’s ditch the metaphor and talk some actual numbers. Julia Goedecke is at the forefront of metabolic research for athletics. In a 2000 study, Julia and her colleagues looked at resting respiratory quotients among a group of athletes. The respiratory quotient is an indirect method of assessing how much carb/fat an athlete is burning at rest. Among this relatively homogenous group of ‘fit folks’, what they found was surprising. The amount of carbohydrate that these athletes burned at rest spanned a very wide range, from 0% to almost 94% of their resting energy needs were being met by sugars! The implication for the athlete looking to recover as quickly as possible is clear: If sugars are being burned, they’re not making it to the muscle for replenishment/recovery. How much longer is it going to take a ‘sugar burner’ to replenish his glycogen stores when he is using so much of it for his basal energy?

Furthermore, if your body is burning sugars preferentially, there’s a good chance that your little insulin messenger is getting tired of doing his laps & when you need him the most to actually get the glycogen stores in the muscle back up…well, think “boy who cried wolf.”

There are 3 important practical applications here that will serve to improve your health base…

 

1.       Don’t eat sugars when your body doesn’t need them

 

2.       Particularly in the early season, minimize those times that your body does need them, i.e. avoid excessively stressful (depletive) training. If in doubt, go easier!

 

3.       If you are serious about athletics, also make it a high priority in the early season to set up your life to minimize the non training stressors which, undoubtedly, affect your recovery from the demands of specific training.

A second important role of insulin in recovery is that it serves as a ‘switch’ between anabolism & catabolism in the body, i.e. it serves as an important messenger to tell the body to switch from ‘breaking down’ the body to ‘building up’ the body. An athlete who is insulin resistant is also resistant to body repair and growth!

Athletes who are perpetually awash in cortisol due to either excessively stressful (intense) training or an excessively stressful life never experience the ‘switch’ that enables them to build the body back up after tearing it down – a process that is the crux of effective training!

I can confirm this from experience. After working with athletes from all professions and life circumstance, I can attest that the range in training response to a given training load between those athletes who lead the most stressful lives and those who live the most simply can be as great as 50%, i.e. it can take twice the amount of training to get the same fitness benefit when an athlete has other stressors to deal with. Of course, typically these athletes also exhibit a blunted recovery profile and can’t tolerate the same level of training. They certainly can’t tolerate 2x the training that they would need to keep pace with an athlete with a ‘healthy system’.

Hopefully, these examples illustrate the importance of starting from a strong ‘health base’. Athletes who have very healthy metabolic/endocrine systems recover much more quickly from, and get more fitness benefit from, the specific stress of training when the time is right.

Live smart.

AC

Taking aerobic training too far.

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

“There is no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves” – Frank Herbert

In my last couple of articles for the Endurance Corner website I looked at typical (& atypical) long term physiological development patterns of triathletes.

Pattern 1 (usually young)

-          Young, untrained athlete begins chronic endurance training (often with a view to Ironman) but observes an initial relative strength over shorter distance events.

Pattern 2 (usually older)

-          Older athlete begins chronic endurance training (also often with a view to Ironman) and notices an immediate relative strength over the long stuff.

At first glance it might appear that the old guy has exactly what the young guy wants, i.e. good long duration endurance. However, this ignores one important point…

Fiber type conversion and atrophy of your fast twitch fibers ain’t the same thing!

A natural side effect of the aging process is an atrophy of muscle fiber size (& consequent strength). This is most observed in the larger fast twitch fibers. This leads to the better endurance relative to strength and speed trend that we noted above. Older athletes have less ability to ‘fire’ and to train these fast twitch fibers when they are ‘out of the rotation’.

A too often forgotten truth in endurance training is that it takes a level of anaerobic capacity to fully access an athlete’s aerobic capacity. A specific example of this can be found in the criteria for assessing a ‘true’ VO2max (vs a ‘VO2peak’) is a blood lactate level at or above 8mmol/L. Interestingly, studies on this criteria have found that even 8mmol/L is often insufficient to achieve a VO2 plateau. In other words, to access & train these ‘mixed’ aerobic/anaerobic fibers requires the anaerobic capacity to hit a max lactate of at least 8mmol/L – a capacity that may be missing among older athletes.

Elite long course athletes exhibit a similar pattern as their FT fibers begin to take on ST characteristics. However, the difference is that the total muscle mass recruited (& consequently the total power) over these long durations is preserved & is thus far greater in the elite.

Summarizing the above, a less desirable side effect of the whole aging process for the endurance athlete is that the size of the ‘trainable muscle pool’ is diminished. For this reason, when we see a developing athlete with very strong long duration numbers, we also tend to see an athlete with a blunted training response.

When this athlete is approaching the limits of their genetic potential, this kind of specific adaptation might be a good trade. However, for the athlete who is still improving, taking the wrong turn at this fork in the road can severely compromise their potential.

A visual example of this is shown in the 2 lactate/VO2 curves shown below. Both are very good (but still developing) Ironman athletes with PR’s under 9:30. One is in the 45-49AG, the other is in the 25-29AG. Can you guess which curve belongs to which athlete?

 

The left side of both curves is very similar. Both exhibit similar power numbers at the aerobic threshold (~2.5 w/kg in this case) & just above it. Unsurprisingly, this translates to a similar performance level over the Ironman distance.

However, beyond this point, the curves start to separate. The increased anaerobic capacity of the younger athlete becomes apparent. This anaerobic reserve translates to a difference in max/peak VO2 numbers of 4ml/kg/min & a difference in peak power output of 1 w/kg.

Also, the older athlete fails to reach a VO2 plateau. Put another way, he lacks the anaerobic capacity to bring in the higher threshold ‘mixed’ muscle fibers to fully tax (/train) the aerobic system. If we extend the older athletes curve to the 8mmol mark we see a similar max power level to the young curve and a VO2 plateau becomes far more likely.

Most importantly, for 2 athletes with further Ironman ambition, the older athlete has an AeT of 56% of their peak power output while the younger has an AeT representing only 44% of their peak power output, i.e. room to grow!

The take home messages from this article…..

1.       Take the time to ‘check in on’ the athlete’s anaerobic capacity during base training. The ability to generate a maximal lactate of at least 8mmol/L (or a CP5 of ~1.15x CP20) should be preserved during general prep. For most athletes this balance will occur naturally with a little bit of ‘spice’ added to a normal base program (as described in the EC article) but for older or higher volume athletes, it may not.

2.       For developing athletes who are lacking this ability, it is a wise investment to insert a block (or 2) of training within the preparation, focused on re-building this anaerobic capacity while maintaining the athlete’s aerobic numbers & total training load. Often an improvement in the training response to the aerobic load will be noticed after a brief ‘switch up’.

Train smart.

AC

Movement Economy: The D'Artagnan of Basic Limiters

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

A little addendum to my Endurance Corner article on ‘basic limiters’ today(http://www.endurancecorner.com/Alan_Couzens/basic_limiters) to address a ‘sort of’ basic limiter – movement economy.

In the article, I defined ‘basic limiters’ as those oft ignored elements of performance that are crucial to all athletes (and maybe all human beings) independent of whatever sport they participate in. In summary, those basic limiters are:

· Aerobic Base (Metabolic Fitness)
· Basic Strength
· Mobility/Stability/Muscle Balance

I half considered adding a 4th basic limiter of movement economy to the equation but it didn’t quite make the cut for the EC article so it wound up here on my personal blog :-) This is the ‘almost a musketeer’ limiter in the sense that while it has some elements that are specific to the individual’s sport, it is a general limiter in the sense that no matter whether your event lasts 2 seconds or 2 days, your ability to transfer metabolic energy into forward movement in the most efficient, economical way possible is a crucial ability.

This ‘sort of’ basic ability is made all the more tricky by the fact that many of our most basic movements are, when you break them down, incredibly complex. Take running for example, an economical run stride demands setting the body in the optimal position to utilize the elastic energy of the tendons coupled with an incredibly complex sequencing of rapidly contracting certain muscles while relaxing others so that inter-muscular resistance is minimized.

Swimming is even more of a mess. Not only must the timing of the optimal contract-relax sequences be figured out, but due to the nature of the resistance, the most economical type of stroke changes with different speeds of movement! Having a longer vessel (and maybe even a slight pause in the stroke) becomes progressively more important with increasing speed.

Contrast these with the relatively simple sport of cycling or basic lifting (which both have a much more steady application of force) and you see how there can be quite a discrepancy between 2 equally ‘powerful’ athletes on the bike (or gym) when it comes to swim and run speed/economy for a given output.

You may be movement economy limited if….

If I were a comedian I’d go Jeff Foxworthy at this point but I’m an exercise scientist so straight to the data…
· Your 30s power on the bike is >7w/kg and you can’t break 30s for a 200m run sprint.
· You can do 12 pull ups in 30s but can’t break 30s for a push start 50m freestyle sprint.

Note: I’m deliberately using short (non specific) tests here to take out the complicating factor of aerobic vs movement economy in longer tests, i.e. fitter athletes will get more mechanical work out of each liter of O2 independent of their movement economy (Coyle et al., 1991)

If you think that movement economy may be a limiter for you…

Incorporate things that teach you to get movement from quick force application followed by relaxation both in the water & out – Light Plyometrics (upper and lower), Agility Drills (dryland and aquatic – learn to accelerate!), Kettle bell/Medicine Ball Work, Jump Rope.

Note that movement economy is also contingent on mobility. For example in running, even if you’ve learned to switch the hip flexor off during the drive phase of gait, if you come up on the limits of your flexibility, it will slow you up!

Mobility is even more of a limiter to economical swimming. If you want to be fast as an adult athlete (over any distance/sport) get a basic level of mobility!

If you suspect that economy may be a limiter, the early season is the perfect time to work on these core issues of mobility & learning to move efficiently.

Train Smart,

AC.

What does it take to Qualify?: A physiologist's perspective

OK, so back to my normal milieu this week …..

Questions and emails on my ‘what does it take to finish an Ironman’ post seemed to indicate that you all liked the format but, for you, finishing isn’t going to cut it. You want to qualify! :-)

Today’s pic is of one of the top Age Groupers I coach, Shawn Burke, busting out a 9:23 qualifying time in Ironman Florida. Being able to work with Shawn and a number of other top age group athletes ‘up close and personal’ over multiple seasons, I’ve been able to witness first hand ‘what it takes’.

I’ve written a previous post on what it takes from a general work/commitment perspective to reach the very top of your age group. Despite the heat received, I stand by the message:

- Multiple years of physical training, amounting to several thousand hours of work.

Perhaps the message would be a little more moderate for a Kona slot, but the way things are going at the pointy end of the field, Kona qualifier and top AG are rapidly becoming one and the same. In fact, based on last year, most flat course qualifying males under 50 were in the 9:30’s!

But is work enough?

Gordo wrote a great blog this week on personal excellence. His conclusion that “protocol does not matter UNLESS it is supported by a habit of personal excellence” is worth a re-read. Or, put another way, you need to set up your life (& your program) to enable you to ‘do’ before worrying about ‘what you do’.

Based on the Kona qualifiers that I have worked with, some 20hr training weeks are almost a pre-requisite. Also based on the athletes that I have worked with (excepting those with freakish recovery abilities), 20hr weeks are going to be VERY hard to string together on much more than a ‘standard’ 40hr work week. Add in the constraints of a young family and you can see that for many, VO2max or FTP is NOT the #1 limiter.

That said, while a 20hr week load (and the life conditions to absorb said load) may be bordering on a pre-requisite for a Kona slot, it is not sufficient in and of itself. Put another way, just because you set up your life so that you’re able to string together the requisite load doesn’t guarantee that this load will give you all of the fitness abilities necessary to race at the very front of your age-group and secure a Kona slot. I can guarantee this from personal experience!

There is somewhat of a ‘bottle neck’ effect that kicks in around the 10hr Ironman mark. A lot of very serious folks getting their consistent 2-a-days in and all shooting for a limited number of slots. Under these conditions, only the smart survive. In these conditions, work is not enough, it is focused work that counts.

‘Focused work’, to me, means work targeted towards a specific objective. This necessitates that we define what physiological objectives are ‘mission critical’ to fast Ironman racing. By defining them we can assess whether you have that base covered as an athlete, and if not, the best way to rectify that shortcoming.

Endurance:

In my last blog piece I outlined the key endurance adaptation of glycogen supercompensation, in which with repeated bouts of glycogen depleting exercise, the body’s energy stores can double. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, this adaptation seems to have a ceiling that can be reached pretty quickly by novice or prospective Kona qualifier alike, i.e. both have ~3000-3500 cals to work with.

The major difference between the novice and the Konee when it comes to long duration fueling comes from the energy contribution from fat. Based on our lab testing, athletes who qualify for Hawaii are typically generating >33% of their energy needs from fat (~300kcal/hr). This is an important adaptation and one that can be limiting for a lot of athletes with V8 power but lousy fuel economy. By generating 5kcal/min from fat, a 10hr Ironman gets an additional 2800 calories of work done over the course of a 9.5hr Ironman. Add in ~2400 cals of worth of energy from exogenous carbs (gels, sports drink etc) and we’re up to ~8500 cals worth of energy to play with. So how much fitness do we need to get 8500 cals of work done over 9.5hrs?

Fitness:

8500 cals of energy output over 9.5hrs is equivalent to ~230W of power on the bike. Now, as outlined above, we want this 230W to occur within the zone of max fat oxidation (~60-65% VO2max) This infers that the athlete has a VO2max of ~5L/min at an economy of 75W/L.

These numbers also pre-suppose that a 230W output will ‘get the job done’ and get the athlete from A-B in ~9.5hrs. Based on my calcs, probably true for a 75kg athlete with decent position over a well paced flat course. Much bigger or any less aero, and the athlete will need more power.

So, in relative terms we’re talking about a VO2max in the neighborhood of 65ml/kg, equivalent to 5K speed of ~17:30 and a CP5 of ~400W. It goes without saying, that this represents a very high level of aerobic fitness: 1 in 200 fitness for a young male, 1 in 10,000 fitness for a 40-49 yo guy based on the Cooper Institute’s data!

It is also worthwhile remembering that this level of fitness is not sufficient if not paired with appropriate race specific endurance. If it is paired with a high level of fat oxidation and an AeT of >60% of VO2max, the athlete will be in a good spot for their Kona assault.

If the athlete has a particularly strong fitness base, i.e. an AeT at a higher % of max and a fat oxidation profile that continues over a broader range, they may ‘get by’ with marginally less VO2 ‘top end’. However, there are limits to the % of VO2 that any athlete can hold for a given duration and in the interests of long term development, shooting for this balanced mix of ingredients is the athletes best bet towards achieving their potential in the sport.

Setting these fitness pre-requisites in place before putting the final race specific endurance block in place represents a strategy of ‘reverse periodization’. I’ll talk a little more about this in a future blog. Until then…..

Train Smart,

AC

What does it take to finish an Ironman?

A bit of a departure this week from my regular focus on high performance athletics to discuss the level of fitness required to complete an Ironman race in under 17hours.

Before I whip out the scalpel and start dissecting, a couple of quick observations on the psychology of the Ironman finish…

Having the chance to coach some first time IMers has been an interesting experience. Not so much from the physical side of things, as I point out below, the physical equation for an Ironman finish is quite simple – get the athlete fit, strong, and teach appropriate pacing. But the psychology of an athlete’s first attack on the Ironman distance is a thing of pure beauty.

In my experience, a first time Ironman has a perspective that often fades as the athlete morphs into a ‘mid-packer’. The magnitude of an Ironman finish is not lost on the first timer and the accompanying fear offers real, pure, motivation.

The athlete pictured above, Louie Bonpua exemplified ‘pure motivation’ better than anyone I can think of. For more on Louie, click here…

I know, thinking back to my own first marathon, the daunting task that lay ahead and the accompanying fear of ‘the wall’, ‘the bonk’, ‘the bear on the back’, motivated me to train seriously – 45-50 miles a week for a good 3 months prior. Right or wrong, after completing several of these, along with some Ironman races, century bike rides etc, I think I have tended to lose that outsiders perspective on the significance of running a marathon and the respect that the distance deserves. The same thing often happens as an Ironman athlete has a finish or 2 under their belt.

Make no mistake, the Ironman offers no mercy for those who have tread those roads before. She is and will always be a distance that demands the utmost respect, to finish an Ironman on any day is a significant accomplishment, one which is often forgotten by the experienced IMer until they experience the joy of crossing that line one more time.

So, let’s delve in to what purely ‘crossing the line’ entails in a little more depth….

Endurance

Of course, an Ironman finish requires substantial endurance. But what, physiologically, does this mean?

In events over approximately 90 minutes in duration, the #1 thing that ultimately will force the athlete to slow down (or stop!) is most likely to be running low on glycogen. Therefore, any athlete who takes on the task of Ironman is going to want to maximize their glycogen stores.

This is an interesting adaptation because, given the right (glycogen depleting) exercise, athletes can almost double their glycogen stores within 10 weeks of specific, intense training (Greiwe et al. 1999). Thereafter, very little change is expected.

In specific numbers, an average sized male athlete may begin training with glycogen stores of 1650kcal and after 10 weeks of training may be up to 3300kcal. In other words, time to exhaustion in glycogen depleting activity roughly doubles. Obviously this is a key adaptation for the Ironman athlete

Metabolically, the other 2 key sources of energy for our Ironman athlete are their fat stores and exogenous glucose, i.e. sports drinks, gels, bars etc taken during the race. Maximizing the energy contribution from the first is a long term training adaptation. However, maximizing contribution of the second is purely a case of being out there long enough to digest the carbohydrate. This is where the back of the packer picks up a significant advantage.

While it may take roughly the same energy to cover 140.6 miles irrespective of the speed you do it, those who space out their effort over a longer time are able to take in and digest more exogenous carbohydrate along the way. Therefore, while a front of the pack guy may only have sufficient time to digest and use an extra 1800 calories worth of sports nutrition, a ‘back of the packer’ who is out there for 17hrs may get an extra 3800 calories from outside sources!!

OK, so assuming we have maximized our energy stores to 3300 cals and we’re out there long enough to get another 3800 cals from food, how fit does the athlete have to be to use this 7000 cals of energy to get from A to B in less than 17hrs?

Fitness

So, in pace/power terms what are the requirements for a 17hr finish?

Assuming an ~ 8.5hr bike and ~6.5hr marathon, an 80kg athlete will be putting out anything from ~80W on a flat course to ~120W on a hilly course. Additionally, they will be walk/jogging at ~4 miles per hour.

In fitness terms, sounds pretty tame, eh? But keep in mind that for most athletes, this ‘fuel economy mode’ of 400 cals of carbohydrate per hour is (based on our lab data) only going to enable them to work at 50-55% of their max aerobic power.
So, keeping in mind that the athlete will only be able to hold ~55% of max aerobic pace/power over this distance, in my opinion, an athlete hoping to break 17hrs, in addition to the requisite endurance training needs to be fit enough to have VO2max numbers of ~160-240W on the bike and 8 miles/hr on the run. Based on ‘normal’ economy data, this translates to a VO2max of ~30ml/kg for a flat course to ~40ml/kg for a hilly course.

I’ve provided a couple of charts with VO2max norms for male and female athletes below to put these numbers in perspective for different age groups. My suggested ‘tough course’ IM requirements are in red, with ‘flat course’ IM requirements in yellow.





As indicated, any older athlete, particularly any older female athlete that finishes an Ironman under 17hrs is VERY FIT! Even an older guy of 40+, who finishes an Ironman under 17hrs is likely fitter than 98% of 40 y.o guys across the country! This puts ‘Iron fitness’ into true perspective.

The magnitude of a tough Ironman finish for an older athlete is borne out in the results. In Lake Placid in 2009, for instance, 1 out of every 5 guys in the 60+ age groups DNFed or failed to finish within the cut-off. For the 20-29 guys, only 1 in 23 failed to make it. For the women, a finish is even more impressive. Of the 5 females who started in the 60+ age groups, only 1 was able to complete the course under 17hrs!

These numbers only serve to make me respect the ‘Iron-vets’, even more than I already do. There are some supremely fit older guys that I’ve had the pleasure to cross paths with over the past 10 years or so of IM training.

In a world of Kona obsession, hopefully these numbers also serve as a reminder to all athletes, even the young ones, that finishing an Ironman puts you in the crème de la crème of fitness when compared to the rest of the population. Simply put, when it comes to fitness, finishing an Ironman or multiple Ironmans is a very worthy goal.

Anyhow, back to the numbers….

For those without access to lab testing, the VO2 numbers that I’ve mentioned correspond with a 5K run fitness of sub 35min 5K (for flat IM) to sub 25min 5K (for hilly IM) and FTP numbers of 1.75W/kg (flat) to 2.6W/kg (hilly).

These numbers offer the first time athlete looking for a sub 17 finish a good ‘reality check’ on their basic fitness prior to beginning the more specific preparation workouts designed to acquire the necessary endurance for their IM.

Additionally, for the more experienced athlete, by knowing where the athlete’s basic fitness is, more appropriate pacing goals can be better set for the specific endurance workouts going into an Ironman race preparation phase. This is a very practical way of applying a reverse periodization approach for Ironman athletes. But that’s the topic for another blog…

Train Smart!

AC

The benefits of going 'easy'.

I received an interesting question via email this week that left me a little ponderous. Since pondering is always better shared, I thought I’d write a small piece on it for my blog this week.

The question was in reference to a recent literature review by Stephen Seiler on the polarization of training into definitive ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ training….

“It seems that you place a lot of emphasis on ‘steady’ training. I was wondering if you see a place for ‘easy’ training in the athlete’s basic week and if so, what benefits do you feel such training promotes?”

The reader is correct that I see very little direct benefit to training conducted below the aerobic threshold and A LOT of direct benefit to training conducted just above the aerobic threshold. However, this is not to say that there are no benefits to including easy training within your week. I’ll outline a couple of those here.

First a quick caveat that relates to the Seiler paper, and indeed to any comparison that a recreational athlete may make with an elite athlete’s physiological data:
Because elite athletes have greater central fitness, they have a diminished heart rate response for a given VO2max. Take for example, an ‘in-shape’ test for Gordo vs yours truly:

Gordo (60% VO2max) = 72% HR max
AC (60% VO2max) = 80% HR max

So, when looking at time within a given % HR range, for example when Seiler references that a large elite training volume is performed at 60-70% of HR max, keep in mind that a large chunk (probably half of this training) is likely at or above the aerobic threshold for folks with these sorts of engines (VO2maxes in the range of 5.0L+)

However, this does not discount the fact that a still significant portion of training is performed at a lower level than the aerobic threshold. If there is little physiological benefit to training below this magic number, why would these folks spend 500 hours per year or more doing so? Do they have too much time on their hands? While probably partially true  there is benefit to spending some of your weekly hours noodling.

Easy training or, more precisely, recovery training is, in its purest form, training to train. Let me explain….

When an athlete has completed all of the quality training that they can muster and the energy tanks are empty they are left with 2 basic choices:

1. Grab some food and sit on the couch until you’re ready to go again
2. Grab some food and train easy until you’re ready to go again.

While, for the time limited athlete, the first strategy is probably not a horrible one (providing your couch time doesn’t extend into days :-), it is not optimal.

While the benefits of active recovery between intervals within a session are well known, i.e. marked increase in the reduction of lactic acid within the muscles, redistribution of blood pool etc, the benefits of easy/recovery training between key training sessions are less well understood.

One could probably postulate that moving more blood into the muscle will more quickly evacuate the debris associated with muscle damage and lead to an expedited healing. This is a core tenet of many physiotherapeutic modalities. However, there is much more ‘good stuff’ to be had than just speeding up the muscle healing.

Fundamentally, the primary physiological limiter that prevents athletes from getting up off the couch, out the door and into their next key workout is incomplete refilling of the muscle glycogen stores. Therefore, anything that will hasten this process will ultimately lead to more steady-state training within the athlete’s week.
So, this begs the question, ‘how in the world could expending more energy lead to getting energy back at a faster rate?’

It’s a fair question and one that has received mixed answers. For example, Choi et al., 1994 found that while active recovery was beneficial from the perspective of lactate dissipation, it did result in slower total glycogen replenishment than passive recovery. However……

When looked at on the muscle fiber level, it was found that this extra glycogen breakdown was coming from the relatively unused Type 1 muscle fibers while replenishment of the Type II fibers was marginally enhanced (Fairchild et al. 2003)

This makes intuitive sense when we recognize the fact that exercise is a significantly more potent stimulus for muscle glucose uptake than insulin - the stuff that is secreted when using the ‘sit on the couch’ methodology (James et al. 1985).

When you undertake light exercise (below the aerobic threshold) between your key sessions, you greatly increase blood flow and consequent glucose delivery to the muscle and you put the muscle in a much more receptive state to take up and use this glucose to replenish muscle glycogen stores than if you were sitting passively.

Additionally, easy training mobilizes energy from muscle fibers that are full of glycogen so they can be utilized by those fibers that are depleted, i.e. the athlete can ‘borrow’ energy from slow twitch fibers to use in fast twitch fibers (Brooks, 1985). Similarly, the athlete can borrow energy from unused muscle groups to pay the energy debt of exhausted muscles. For this reason, doing some cross-training using different muscles on your recovery days is a good practice.

By utilizing these forms of easy training, quicker between-key-session recovery takes place. It’s the old adage of ‘the more you do the more you can do’. Or put another way, the more ‘active’ your recovery, the more purposeful training you can get done each week.

This adage brings up a key condition and one that, in the quest for bigger logbook numbers, a lot of athletes miss – your easy training should result in you being able to do more steady training. It should support, not detract from your key workouts.

Yet again, it comes back to understanding the purposes of your workouts and sticking to them. It has been said that once you begin making your easy days a little too hard, it is a matter of time before your hard days become a little too easy. Hopefully understanding the whys of easy training will make the embarrassingly slow shuffle or the ‘granny gear’ spin a little easier for the ego to tolerate :-)

Train smart.

AC.

Energy Pacing your Ironman II

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first”
- William Shakespeare

The pic today is of James Watt, the ‘brother from another mother’ of the inspiration for my previous post, James Prescott Joule and the guy, I guess, who we can very indirectly thank for our power meters :-)

I received some good feedback from my last post on Energy Pacing your Ironman. I also received a number of questions that the article left unanswered. One, in particular, got my attention:

Alan,

very interesting concept, and - as usual - a very well written post. One more thing (for clarity) can you add a similar table mapping the watts and body weights to IM bike splits (assuming these are the main areas of influence)? I know that this will be a gross simplification as there are quite some differnces in hills, aerodynamics etc. (I've seeen some rought tools that would allow to build such a table, but I'm hoping you've something like that already prepared.)

Such a table could be a great tool to provide a comparison between bike and run times - something better than "your run time should be 2 hours faster than your bike split" ..

Thanks
Thorsten
http://EnduranceNut.blogspot.com

I did comment in the last post that:

“ Truth be told, there is a speed advantage to a slight negative bike:run split (more so for bigger athletes!!) due to the energy on the bike that is ‘wasted’ overcoming aerodynamic drag. Put plainly you get more speed bang for your energy buck on the run where extra energy goes to increasing speed rather than overcoming additional aerodynamic drag. So, the athlete should seek to slightly exceed these run standards.”

This law of aerodynamics is termed the theoretical square law and it basically states that the resistance increases with the square of the velocity. Or put another way, the faster you go, the more the energy demands increase – exponentially!

This begs the question, if our energy stores are finite, and are best devoted to the slowest speed/lowest drag discipline (i.e. running), what is the optimal bike/run allocation?

As Thorsten correctly points out, there are numerous considerations that make a truly accurate assessment of an equivalent bike speed vs power difficult to ascertain. Still, that won’t stop me from trying :-)

Below you’ll find a table that looks at energetically equivalent bike splits for a given power output for athletes of different stature on a flat and a hilly Ironman course.




The data are derived from Bassett’s (1999) power equations using the appropriate elevation and climbing data and a constant wind speed of 6mph.

The CdA for each of the different athletic height:weight combinations are from Bassett’s recommended estimates multiplied by an arbitrary Ironman adjustment factor of 1.1 based on the more conservative positions of Ironman athletes.

The following charts use the above data along with the power vs run speed data from last week's blog to illustrate the difference between bike and run splits for a given bike and run power output.

a) 80kg flat course



b) 60kg flat course



Looking at the 2 charts, the first shows a comparison between prospective bike and run splits for an 80kg athlete averaging a nominal power output for the bike and run resp. It is clear that as average power goes up, the athlete gets more ‘bang for their buck’ by distributing more of their energy to the run.

The second chart shows a similar scenario for a 60kg athlete. From the charts, it is clear that,

a) All athletes who average more than 130W (~13:30 Ironfolk and better) across the course of their race will benefit from holding back a little on the bike to distribute more energy to the run.

b) The faster the athlete, the more that they benefit from holding back on the bike (with the exception of fast bike pros who must weigh this benefit with the potential benefit of the pack draft)

c) The smaller the athlete, the more they benefit from holding back on the bike.

So this gives some good general guidelines, but in terms of race strategy we need some specific power and pace guidelines for a given athlete. This brings us back to the question, for a given athlete, how do we determine what mix of bike/run output is optimal?

The following is a graphic representation of the bike/run relationship derived from the tables for an 80kg athlete putting out an average 200W/720kj per hour on a flat course over the course of the event, with their respective finish times (with an arbitrary 1:15 added for swim and transitions) for each strategy:



Over an hour separates the different pacing strategies for an athlete with the same fitness/energy output. Clearly, pacing is a critical aspect of Ironman racing.

From the graph it can be seen that, as highlighted in my previous blog, an even energy split of 200W is not a bad way to play things. The more typical 220W bike + ~180W (4:40) marathon results in a split some 16 minutes slower. The also typical 240W bike + 160W/5:15 ‘blow up’ on the run results in a 36 minute slower overall time for exactly the same total energy output.

But can we gain even more ‘free speed’ by saving more energy for the run?
The real ‘sweet spot’ for an 80kg athlete on a flat course begins to occur at a 180/220W energy split or 180W bike/3:51 run. Marginally better results can be had at a 160/250W (~3:30 marathon) providing this pace is below the athlete’s anaerobic threshold and the athletes CHO/Fat oxidation threshold (the point where fat burning begins to shut down).Remember, this effect is amplified for smaller or faster athletes.

With the possible exception of the leading pro males who must weigh the relative benefit of staying with the group vs saving some energy for the run, nearly all of us can benefit from taking the theoretical square law of aerodynamics into account when formulating a pacing strategy. Remember that any time you (or your competition) decide to ‘put the hammer down’ on the bike you are (exponentially) throwing energy into the wind that you could be using to fuel propulsion on the run.

Race Smart.

AC