Dr. Frankenstein's Kona Monster

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

At the moment, I only use live subjects for the 'experiments' in my basement exercise physiology lab but just in case I ever lose the plot entirely and decide to put together some hybrid of body parts to construct my ideal triathlete to contend in Kona, here’s what I’ll be on the lookout for…

Skeleton: My Kona monster will have a light, ‘small boned’ skeleton of average proportions. He will be relatively tall (~1.8m) in order to:

a)       Have a sufficiently long vessel & long arms to be relatively hydrodynamic in the water.

b)      Have a sufficiently large surface area:body weight to dissipate large amounts of heat; ~1380W of heat energy on the bike (@290W) and 1180W of heat energy on the run (@2:40 marathon pace).

c)       Have a sufficiently large thorax able to hold the engine capable of powering that 290W on the bike.

However, he will also need to be quite light for this height in order to run that 2:40 pace. Under 70kg total (BMI~21.5). To accommodate the weight of the necessary muscle & organ mass to produce the requisite power numbers, the skeleton would have to weigh only approximately 5.5kg, i.e. a very light frame.

Some distinctive features of this frame:

-          Average to short total leg length with relatively long femurs – lower leg length approx. equal to (not significantly greater than) femur length (=decreased bike frontal area without sacrificing leverage/power)

-          Relatively wide arm span (equal to or greater than standing height) with average shoulder width, i.e. long arms (=smaller frontal area on the bike without affecting swim economy)

-          Small to average size feet (=better run economy & decreased FA  on the bike)

All in all, my monster will need a frontal area at or below 0.39m^2 to put in a competitive bike split at 290W. He will need the bike and body geometry to achieve this.

Muscle: “Konie” will have sufficient leg muscle mass to generate ~290W over the bike course. In normal Kona conditions, this represents about as much power as an athlete of this size can generate without overheating. In this case, more is not better. Assuming that his VO2max power would need to be ~400W/5.4L to do so, at 200ml/kg of muscle this would equate to 27kg of appendicular mass. On normal (triathlete) distribution, ~20 of this 27kg of muscle would be distributed to the legs and ~7kg to the arms.  

Cardiovascular system: To fuel  400W of power at VO2max is going to take a significant amount of O2. Somewhere in the range of 5.4 liters per minute. Assuming an a-VO2 extraction of, 16ml/dL, my Kona monster’s cardiac output is going to need to be 34L/min, or at a max heart rate of 180bpm, a cardiac stroke volume of ~190ml, in other words, ‘a big ticker’.

Bodyfat: Doing the math, Kona Monster is going to need to be pretty lean. At 5.5kg frame mass, 27kg of appendicular muscle and a likely visceral/organ mass of ~33kg (average for someone of this frame), total fat mass can only be ~4.5kg or ~6% bodyfat.

Overall:  Konie’s somatotype will be a small meso-ectomorph (1.4/3.7/3.5)

Other: I will also require a set of jumper cables to get this bad boy started :-)

If you want to see how you stack up compared to “Konie” a DEXA scan coupled with a standard anthropometric assessment (girths and breadths) will give you some insight.

Choose your parents (or your sport) wisely & if you see me coming at you with a tape measure, run the other way :-)

Train Smart

AC

Training Weight vs Race Weight

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)

"All we need is just a little patience" - Guns and Roses

As the Summer season is on the horizon, shirts are coming off, 5K’s are being entered and it seems that everyone is feeling ‘a few pounds heavy’. I figured it timely to pen a short piece with some thoughts on the significance of identifying and sticking to your ‘training weight’.

For many, ‘training weight’ is synonomous with ‘out of shape’ weight, i.e. I’m not yet at ‘race weight’ but this diminishes the importance of identifying and holding a good training weight.

There are a couple of studies that come to mind that back up the importance of not being in too much of a hurry to get to race weight. A 1980 study that tracked the British Olympic Road Cycling team over the season found a significant difference in the weight ‘swing’ (high to low) for those who were selected for the team vs those who weren’t. The selected athletes held an ‘off-season’ training weight of ~7% greater than race weight for the first 3 months of the season. This was significantly greater than the non-selected athletes.

A more recent study helps to explain why this difference may have been important. A 2005 study on “The effect of dominant somatotype on aerobic capacity trainability” found a significantly blunted training response in ectomorphs (the skinny group) vs all other groups. The meso-ecto group displayed almost double the improvement in VO2max of the pure ectomorphs over the same period of training. In fact, even the endomorphic group (average 20.6% body fat) exhibited a significantly better training response than the ectomorphs.  I’ve found a similar effect in my own coaching experience…

I track the relationship of fitness improvement versus training load in the form of an ‘F coefficient’ for the athletes that I coach. Without exception, the athletes with the highest F number to date have been of the mesomorphic persuasion (BMI>22). The athlete with the highest F number has a BMI of 24.1! Or, looked at longitudinally, my own highest F coefficient has occurred when my bodyweight was in the range of 176-178lbs (BMI = 21.5-21.7), while my best race performances to date have occurred below a BMI of 20.75.

My larger point is that while there are certainly races in which being light/skinny is desirable (specifically those with an abundance of heat and/or hills), when it comes to getting as generally fit as possible by both handling the most load and getting the most from that load in the early season, it’s important to maintain a little ‘reserve’.

Train Smart,

AC

Two tickets to the Gun Show

The video above is from one of my favourite movies, Anchorman. This week’s blog entry is about morphological characteristics of elite Ironman triathletes, or more specifically, how big are their guns? I guess in reality, I’m more interested in the correlation between things like thigh girth, muscle cross sectional area and performance, but I’ll take any excuse to throw a Will Ferrel reference in there J

One of my own personal struggles as a triathlete is with the issue of bodyweight. At various points in my athletic career, my pre-occupation with my bodyweight has bordered on dysfunctional. The issue is not helped by the obvious reinforcement that comes from running my fastest marathon ever, which was ~20 minutes faster than my next fastest marathon, at 158lbs. For my 6’4” frame, you can imagine I was pretty skinny. In fact, all of the times in my past that I would consider I was running relatively fast have been at a low bodyweight (158-165lbs). I always assumed this relationship to be causative. Now, I’m not so sure.

The crew (Mat, JD) and I just returned from Endurance Corner’s inaugural spring training camp in Tucson, AZ. The camp was a great experience all around, great training, great people, great environment. For myself, one of the highlights of camp was a discussion that I had with Jonas Colting (World Champion and 2x Ultraman Champion). Jonas was great to be around for a couple of reasons. Number 1, he is a great archetype for the sort of athlete I could become. He is a big, strong dude, and a great runner to boot (that’s him in the yellow crocs below)

#2: He is one of those athletes with a no-limits attitude. It can become easy for athletes with egocentric personalities to buy into the “I guess I was born to be a gifted athlete.” This is particularly true when anyone with a rudimentary understanding of exercise physiology is familiar with the work of Daniels, Yarbough & crew, who ultimately came to the conclusion that the gold standard of aerobic performance (VO2max) is largely genetically determined. In my mind, I am yet to see a study with sufficient duration that has led me to conclusively agree with this. Perhaps my own bias is coming into play here. If so, I’m fine with that I’d much rather adopt a self serving inaccurate belief than a self-defeating accurate belief any day of the week.

Anyhow, back to the convo with Big J….

It was Jonas’ take that muscular demand for O2, i.e. having bigger oxidative fibers, can be a potent stimulus for VO2max improvement. This was interesting to me for a couple of reasons - #1, I was re-reading Noakes ‘Lore of Running’ on the car trip down and he comes to a similar conclusion:

“The high rate of Oxygen delivery to those skeletal muscles, which is needed to sustain their function during maximal exercise is the result, not the cause of an athlete’s superior exercise capacity.”

#2 I had largely discounted those bigger athletes who do well at endurance sports as genetic freaks, e.g. Big Mig with his 7.04 L/min VO2max. Sure he goes up hill pretty quick, but for us mere mortals without his engine, if we want to go uphill quickly or we want to run quickly and we’re lacking a couple of L/min of absolute VO2max, the only way we are going to improve our relative VO2max is to shed some pounds. As Noakes’ perspective above suggests, this may not be the case.

The last VO2max test that I did resulted in a max oxygen uptake of 4.5 L/min. Decent, but certainly not elite by any stretch of the imagination. If we accept the traditional view on VO2max that claims that the best I can hope for is a 5-15% improvement in my ‘engine size’, it is pretty clear that I have a much better shot at long term improvement by making my modifying my chassis and making it more efficient than spending a lot of energy eeking out the last 5% from my engine. However, if we adopt the alternative approach that ST/FOG fiber demand for O2 is a potent stimulus for VO2max improvement, hypertrophy of these fibers becomes a viable objective.

This perspective does have some scientific support, particularly in the European Exercise Phys literature. Berbalk has done a number of studies looking at training load, fiber size and cardiac adaptations and has shown a definitive link between the 3 among endurance athletes. Is it causative? Maybe yes, maybe no, but at least in my mind it makes enough intuitive sense to be worthy of further exploration and I’m not going to wait around on the lab rats to do the exploration for me!!

So, what is the ideal endurance athlete muscle make-up?

a) ST/FT%: A number of studies have shown a higher % of slow twitch fiber area in endurance athletes vs. speed athletes vs. untrained. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of 65-85% ST fibers for endurance trained athletes (Costill et al., 1976). While the ST/FT balance seems to have genetic determinants, deliberate atrophy of the FG fibers can affect the ST/FT balance.

b) ST/FT fiber size. Strength-endurance athletes, e.g. rowers, cyclists, swimmers typically have FOG fibers 1.3x the size of untrained individuals and 1.5x the size of pure endurance athletes, e.g. marathon runners (Pieper, Scharschmidt, 1981)

What does this look like in real world terms?

VS.

And the numbers? Gordo was kind enough to forward some recent anthropometric data from his Snowfarm stay in NZ. Compare the numbers below to some data that I have from elite Australian distance runners at the A.I.S (mean values, n=18) and my own measurements

A couple of observations jump out when comparing G with similarly elite distance runners:

1. He is heavier. Even when corrected for height, G is carrying an extra 1.1 grams for every cm of height.

2. While heavier, the extra weight is made up of fat-free mass (bone and muscle) as he is similarly lean to the elite distance runners.

3. He has a larger frame than the elite distance runners (at least if we take biepicondylar femur breadth to be representative of bone widths through the skeletal frame)

4. He has greater calf girth than the distance runners. As previously mentioned, this is largely independent of calf skinfolds and is primarily indicative of greater cross-sectional muscle fiber area in the lower leg musculature. A theoretical basis for why this might be the case is given in point b above.

When comparing G’s data with my own, the observations do more than jump out, they leap from the page and punch me square between the eyes. In fairness to Gordo, I must point out that the same conclusions that I am forced to draw from the data are exactly what he has been telling me for some time now. Ditto Matty Stein for that matter, but as Tidwell from Jerry Maguire sort of said, whenever I am confronted with an assertion made without empirical data my gut response is “show me the numbers!!” Well, there they are. It will be interesting to see what I do with them.