The Science Behind Getting Fitter, Faster & More Efficient | Reece Barclay | Ep 56

0:00Reece Barclay, welcome to the podcast for the second time. Yeah, second time in six months. Yeah, first time you came on with Lucy. Yeah. I think if no one's watched that episode, please go back and watch that. It was super interesting. We obviously dove into your background, but also Lucy's background. But today, I really want to dive into your background and what you do. So for me, personally, you are, first of all, an incredible athlete. but secondly you're an incredible coach and you are one of the most knowledgeable people within the endurance space so i've i want to kind of like touch on that and then also in this episode i want to go through kind of like an endurance 101 for people looking to improve their endurance yeah um but yeah let's start with yourself yeah thank you for that introduction um i i've been doing sport since I was two years old.

0:59I remember watching my dad, he was a professional boxer. I remember being at the side of the ring watching him. It was very old school style. They call it spit and sawdust. He was, you know, old iron weights, doesn't even know what weight was on the bar. He used to just throw him around and he used to box like 15 rounds and I would be fascinated from a young age and then I got into martial arts through him so I did karate I got my black belt in karate which taught me discipline and then I went on to play squash which I absolutely loved different sport but I was unfortunately useless at it I worked really hard at it but I just I had really bad hand-eye coordination so I was terrible and then eventually I found swimming when I was 13 and most people would say it was too late to start swimming.

1:54Everyone had been doing swimming from the age of like seven and were already competing at nationals and there was me coming into swimming at such a late age of 13 but it was a right contrast from squash where I worked really hard but was useless. With swimming I picked it up really quickly and within a year I was like making nationals so I found two two sides of sport one was like you can have talent and work really hard um I had no talent for squash but I worked really hard and I had loads of talent for swimming and I wasn't necessarily working that hard so I learned pretty early on that okay sport is a really dynamic field um and then from there I went on to compete like at the highest level in swimming um just off of like international level was there or thereabouts but unfortunately for me well fortunately for me I went to university and yeah both studying university and swimming at the highest level are not compatible um obviously I was swimming at five o 'clock in the morning and then I was in lectures all day swimming again in the evening and then I'd go straight from swimming in the evening to the library to finish my coursework and in the end I was just sleep deprived and my swimming went like that but my academic studies fortunately were really good and I loved it and then I met Lucy and we actually went into triathlon which was like way later on so that's about a roundabout way of me saying I've been doing sport my whole life and I've I've done multiple different sports I've studied it I've done it and fast forward 15 years now I've I've been coaching all that time so I've built up a lot of knowledge on the way when starting triathlon with lucy uh you was competing as well at the start yeah and then you transitioned into being kind of like a full-time coach slash manager slash everything else that you are today um would you just be able to go into that like what level did you get into like with triathlon yeah so for those who don't know triathlon is split into amateur and professional side so the amateur side is anyone can go and do a triathlon um and there's there's multiple different distances but we decided that we're going to jump straight into the full distance which is the Ironman distance um and obviously I had my I'd finished my degree at that point so I felt like I had a an abundance of knowledge to help me and Lucy do this obviously we were both extremely fit because we were professional swimmers or just recently retired professional swimmers but we had no experience on the bike and on the run so it was sort of like a self-experiment meant to be just a total bit of fun no anticipation of ever taking it to where we've got to now so you you never starting out both of you just thought you'll start this for fun yeah so basically we we were going to set up a personal training business at the time um i was 22 lucy was 20 and we was looking at the industry going okay everyone's got a million different qualifications why are they going to come to me and lucy at such a young age and entrust us to be their personal trainers we need to distinguish ourselves from everyone else and at the time ironman was booming and we was like right why don't we do that and then we can sell to our our new potential clients that we've done an ironman we can coach you for that so that was the pure reason for it was a kind of like a self wanting to do it and also like a business decision um and yeah we did ironman bolton uh 2014 and it was a sufferfest i loved it but there was so many things in that race where i was like well i could be better like for example i was so novice on the bike that my chain went into the little ring so midway through the bike course i dropped my chain onto the little ring and i was so scared to change it back into the big ring that if I dropped that chain I wouldn't know how to fix it I did the rest of the race with the with the bike in the small ring so yeah there was just like loads of little things in that race and as soon as I crossed that finish line I didn't have to wait long Lucy came about 10 minutes after me and she was like that was good I want to do that again and we was like wow I didn't think we'd be doing that but so you enjoyed the hills of Rivington absolutely loved it Sheephouse Lane um the there's like a masked wrestlers that scream and they've got their tops off waving as you go past so it was absolutely brilliant loved it and yeah we went back the following year and took it a lot more seriously and both of us took like i can't remember the exact amount but it was in the region of two and a half hours off of our previous year's time so we dedicated a whole year to it and that was at the point where we decided okay we're going to become professional with this now yeah interesting and then how how long did you kind of like stay competing so not very long for me um I competed professionally from 2016 until 2022 but obviously we had covid in that era so unfortunately I missed a few years there but um my career was short shorter lived because Lucy's career took such a crazy trajectory um um so for those of you who don't know she turned professional in 2016 and in 2017 she came second at the Ironman World Championships which is the biggest sport biggest race in our sport and very quickly with that came sponsorships media attention um our life changed and it was full of better but it meant that you know both financially and um sort of as a demand of time I was giving more and more and more of my time to Lucy which I'm completely happy with but I always say as an athlete you have to be selfish and I could not be selfish like there was periods of time when we were both racing professionally and Lucy would have an issue and I'd have to really block it off in my head and just be like well that's your problem today because I've got a bike ride to do and I just had this like overwhelming feeling of I'm letting her down and in the end it got to the point where I was like I don't want to feel like this anymore did you ever feel like a sense of like let's say that you having Lucy having her problems and you not dealing with it or are you not one not wanting because you wanted to deal with it but being selfish as an athlete was there a bit of kind of like not competition but did it like hurt the relationship a little bit um I think my biggest problem of being an athlete is I'm not selfish i'm i can't be i'm not instinctively selfish i have to be selectively selfish as an athlete at the time i was going against my instincts um and yeah i remember there was one session where she was having uh connection issues with the internet i was trying to do this bike ride this was like 2018 or 19 and she kept on getting she was getting wound up obviously because she was trying to do this long bike ride and the internet kept on dropping and I got so wound up I was just ignoring ignoring putting my headphones on and in the end I got so angry that I just smashed the keyboard and was like I can't do this like and it was at that point I was like this is just not working like something needs to change I still carried on racing professionally I would call it but I accepted as a you know I'd always known that Lucy was going to go on to become a world champion that was always in my in my heart that i knew she was like um a phenomenal once in a generation talent and i've seen that from back when we were swimmers if you rewind even further i was at a very high level but she was at an even higher level so i knew that but i also knew i was young and i wanted to see how far i could go but anyway uh fast forward to around the covid time that was really when i thought okay once we get out of this mess that the you know the country was in lockdown and all that i decided that i was going to give myself um another year of racing and then retire and just go full-time into coaching and helping lucy and i was really content with that i did my last race in 2022 at challenge rough um and yeah whilst i know i could have been a better athlete i was very very happy crossing that finish line going okay now I'm going to be on the other side of the fence and just purely help Lucy um how is how is life different because uh we had a brief chat just before this and you mentioned that being a everyone wants to be an athlete but nobody realized how much it takes yeah yeah I think there's this rose tinted view of what it is like to be an athlete because you see it on social media and it is literally the hardest thing about being an athlete is how relentless it is there's like a rose-tinted view of what it's like to be a professional athlete because sort of the social media effect everyone thinks what a wonderful lifestyle you spend all day doing training and then you get to go and compete and there's this kind of conception as well that the athletes at the very top are just lucky because they're talented and I can tell you from experience that 90 % of the talented athletes quit probably before they even reach their potential the ones at the very top of course they're talented but they are most definitely the hardest workers in the room and the hardest part about being an athlete in my opinion is not the training not the grueling hours it's the relentlessness of every single day 365 days a year you have to be an athlete you can't switch out of being an athlete you can't not be an athlete for a day because if you decide that you don't want to be an athlete that day you're giving a competitive advantage to someone else who is being the athlete on that day So whether it's Christmas Day, your birthday, anything like there's been millions of times where Lucy's had to make sacrifices to seeing her friends and family going away on a training camp.

12:07I mean, bless her. She didn't. She even didn't go to her granddad's funeral this year because she knew it was in the middle of a training block, which she had to be prepared for. And it's that kind of sacrifice that people don't see. And obviously, social media doesn't share that. But yeah, if you're not training, you should be recovering from training as an athlete. So it is 24-7, 365 days a year. And that's the hardest part. Yeah, every single thing that you do and every decision that you make needs to be for you being an athlete rather than against you being an athlete. 100%, yeah. And it's a little thing stack up.

12:45Like I say, if someone else is doing something that you're not or recovering better or training or not taking that day off, then chances are, law of averages, they're going to have more prepared. And, you know, 365 days in a year, if you're losing, I don't know, 10 of them to sickness, 10 of them to travel. and then all of a sudden you lose 10 because you're feeling slightly lazy or you're not quite up to a session you've almost like you've taken what you would always lose for travel and always lose for sickness and added a third onto it just by being being lazy or just taking that one day off which people think is okay but it's not because it adds up and stacks and of course when you throw injury into the mix which is also inevitable um you just can't afford to take those days off yeah it's crazy it could it could easily add up like you've just mentioned there them three things 10 days of each that's a month gone exactly and then say for example you you do have unfortunate circumstances where you're potentially injured and if you're injured it might set you back another month yeah that's two months here that you you're out and then you've got to regain that fitness after it's not like you're you're maintaining it well you can maintain end but um i don't know there's there's things that yeah i think with the with the injury side of things or even if it's a niggle not necessarily a full-blown injury those are the hardest periods because you have to do more but you know you're getting less so for example if if you have like a knee injury or something you can't do the running okay fine but you trick your mind into going okay it's fine i'll go on the cross trainer but you know full well the person who's out there doing the running is getting a better stimulus than you on the cross trainer so you have to do more you say okay 90 minutes on the cross trainer is worth one hour of running so you end up doing more and your your brain is engaged in all of the rehab stuff and yeah it becomes like a torturous thing but the only thing i would say is to athletes everyone eventually will get an injury everyone eventually will get sick so it levels out the playing field and i think that's probably one of my jobs as as Lucy's support network is to keep her head level and you know it's not a crisis because nine times out of ten other athletes are dealing with the same so over the course of particularly a career it levels out some people are more fortunate than others but yeah it's keeping keeping her head focused on the long game rather than the immediate short-term setbacks how have you found like transitioning to being a coach like you know not training essentially as much obviously you still train quite a lot but um that being second priority and lucy being first priority and your other athletes as well um how have you found that i think i found it quite natural um i think i've got two sides where i've studied sport and i've participated at sport at a very level so I can see it from both angles and I can apply science that I've learned and I'm still learning you know I read all the time but I can apply it to the real world as well and remember my experiences as an athlete what what I was going through and see that in other athletes and there's sometimes where I like I read a science journal or this textbook this cut in science is saying this and then you apply it to the real world and it just doesn't doesn't gel it might for some but I think I'm really good at knowing what will and won't work and not being afraid to to fail as well I think is a really important part of being an athlete but and a coach the biggest thing with all of the new data and science that's coming out is to try it and i think there's probably nine things out of ten that we try don't work but then you'll find that one thing that does work um certainly don't get caught in your ways as a coach because you you have the old school coaches that they call them the old dinosaur coaches like they they won't even look at a heart rate monitor i mean that's fine because their style method works but then you've got the other end of the extreme where you've got 50 sensors on in a heat lab monitoring everything and I don't think either extreme is right I think you need to be dynamic in which way you go and yeah so for Lucy for example I can look at her and when she's training I can I can tell you what her heart rate is I can tell you what her lactate is I can tell you what pace she is what power she's pushing almost to the what just by looking at her I don't need to test her lactate I don't need to see her heart rate I can see that's because of years and years and years of watching and observing um so that I lean more now towards the old school kind of don't need the data but I use the data to um validate my observations um but yeah I think what makes me a good coach is I've been there and done it as well as an athlete and I know that when Lucy says I'm not feeling it today or um I'm just not my body's not cooperating I know how that feels and there'll be days where i say okay fine we can change the session but there's also days where we're getting close towards or something and i have to be harsh and say like i know you how you feel today i really know how you feel but you're gonna have to find something to get that session done because we need to do this today um and yeah she doesn't always like me when we do that but it works it's cool that like you say you can relate and you've done it when you're looking at like these new things whether like there's so many like fads and and when it like you say nine out of ten things are probably a fad they don't actually work but that one thing might work are you testing them as well yeah we test pretty much everything like you mentioned as opposed to like getting lucy to test it are you testing it as well oh yeah for sure yeah yeah i'm the guinea pig i always test everything first on me um and then yeah i will go okay lucy we've been been reading about this i'll give it a go and then if i think there's merit in it it goes to lucy obviously she has her team as well like i've never just throw something on lucy i mean there's we're talking nutrition mostly now um but you also have like altitude heat um loads of different crazy like lactate core sensors all these kind of things that are relatively new but they've been around forever but now with technology everything's becoming easy to monitor um the big thing for our sport is is aerodynamics uh technology of the bike the shoes cooling equipment all that there's millions of things in in triathlon um but as a purely training point of view nothing's changed in over the last hundred years you still have to get your heart rate to a certain zone to to elicit a response you still have to put in x amount of hours it's still exactly as it was back when I watched my dad boxing 15 rounds with uh you know nothing but a pair of boxing gloves and a little bit of iron it's the same principle it's just if you applied modern technology to that you would he would be being told oh Dean your heart rates at 140 and you're in lactate zone two and he'd be like I don't know what you're talking about I'm doing three minute rounds punching a bag like it's the same thing we just applied modern technology to it it's crazy isn't it because like uh like boxers like traditionally like used to wear a black bin bag yeah and go running and things like that but that's heat training exactly yeah if you look at these core sensor suits now they're designed to make you sweat more was exactly what a bin liner was they just didn't have a label to it or a science to research it um so yeah it's interesting how it's gone full circle but yeah with with with all of the data i think you can really get you know too bogged down by it and especially i don't think as an athlete you you're a good example you love all of the new fad stuff coming out and um you're probably reading absolutely everything to give you an advantage as well like you think oh if i found something before anyone else has that gives me a competitive advantage and you have a genuine interest in it but you can waste a lot of time and a lot of hours a lot of effort a lot of brain power reading and researching and i think that's kind of like where you should part as an athlete you should pass it on to your team to do all of that background reading um and that's what i do i enjoy it nine times out of ten it doesn't work but there's that one thing that you find is a diamond a dozen you're like oh wow that i'm so glad we found that and we recently found one as well like just in the wind tunnel um something so simple we moved lucy's saddle forward and it was nothing to do with power generation it was to do with slotting her head into a better position so that when she's racing um she's in the time trial position and she's got a little straw which is her hydration and she gets annoyed that it keeps banging her chin so it's like oh we can try and move you forward but it will come at an aero cost because well not necessarily a cost but it will change something aerodynamically so we went into the wind tunnel to test what's going to happen thankfully it was an advantage it was one to two watt quicker which is not a lot what's that over an ironman distance though i think it's around two watts probably about 90 seconds at the speed that the uh the women go but bearing in mind she's not going to hold that perfectly the whole time but what really happened was we moved her saddle forward um about a centimeter and it it opened up her hip angle which meant she was able to generate 15 more watts power so that small tiny change has now suddenly enabled her on the bike and this was since challenge rough which was two weeks ago um we were like wow if we just done that for that race you would have put another 10 to 15 watts out like and now we've measured that the last two weeks we're measuring it with a lactate the heart rate everything going wow yeah that little small change even after all these years there's there's still loads of hidden gems out there um and yeah we'll run out of time lucy will you know be a hundred before we find every single game that you could possibly have but that's why i think you asked me before we went on air is like where do you think it's going i think it never ends like sport and particularly a sport like triathlon is limitless with the amount of gains that you can find yeah no it is incredible like you say you've got to be relentless with keeping searching like say you're probably going to fail nine out of ten times but that one time is going to make the difference yeah and that's a key point like I think one of the things that makes us a little bit different is that we're always looking I think the day that I decide that I can't be asked to read that journal or I don't want to go to the wind tunnel is probably the day where my passion for it has run out but I'm still genuinely buzzing and excited to find those things and Lucy still wakes up every morning like what can we do better yeah well it's free fitness at the end of the day exactly exactly i think um like say you can you can do so much training but if there's low-hanging fruit that you can take then you might as well take it i want to move on and i want to go into kind of like endurance and the topic of endurance because there's so many things that we can optimize and there's so many things that people can learn about first one i want to ask you about is how much do genetics play a role within endurance athletes well that's a loaded question um i'm going to say

24:47a high high percentage of the very very top athletes are genetically fortunate there's no doubt

25:00but for for elite endurance performance i think it's probably less of a genetic loaded gun if he was asking me about basketball or something like that of course or swimming is another good example if you're a six foot four swimmer versus a five foot five swimmer you're going to be better at six foot four there's no doubt for endurance sport i think it's probably less um i would say you're actually more advantaged being average body shape and size as an endurance athlete and the physical attributes of being tall and strong are disadvantages for endurance what about being small like the other side yeah i think i mean there'll be a lot of arguments here because you know some of the best triathletes in the world are tall powerhouses on the bike but for sure that is a disadvantage on running because that you know mass on running is the more heavy you are the more energy it costs and over an iron man that adds up smaller athletes tend to do really really well in endurance sport and you've only got to look at the marathon runners they're tiny um is that that is genetics but i think it's um more of a genetic lottery in other sports than it is in endurance because you look at world champions over the years in in triathlon they've been in the men's side they've been you've got patrick langer who's about five foot seven and probably weighs i don't know 62 kilos and then you've got um jan fredino who's six foot six and probably weighs 80 kilos so it's a huge gulf there but when you look at elite marathon runners i'm pretty sure there's never been an elite marathon runner who's ever been more than 70 kilos correct me if i'm wrong but they're all tiny tiny so yeah and that's endurance so it depends on the on the lens you're looking at as and the tour de france as well like for sure you're never going to be a gc rider if you're you know van der poel is probably the the best all-round cyclist in terms of absolute power skill level but he's never going to compete for the gc because he's probably 15 kilos heavier than pogachka and vinagard so yeah depends on your speciality yeah no it's interesting and like that but like you say i agree with what you said you can improve endurance a lot more than you can do other things so say for example they say you can't teach speed yeah if you're like you've either born with like these fast twitch muscle fibers yeah or you're not and you can obviously improve them slightly but with the endurance i feel like the there's so much more room for improvement and that's probably why it's so popular like the marathon's so popular the ironman's so popular is because one there's so many factors you can improve on but two like your endurance capacity like you said before like there's kind of yes you get beginner gains but they never ever like tail off yeah i'm actually a good example of this like i was a sprinter uh in in when i was swimming and um I was naturally very good at anything from 30 seconds to two minutes that was my you know when you when you do swim in you do everything and then you just sort of navigate towards what you're doing best at and that was my my area then I ended up doing Ironman which is eight and a half hours um seven and a half hours nowadays and it was only like really later on in in my life I did like a muscle biopsy of what is my muscle makeup and it was like so geared towards sprinting i should never have been good at doing ironman um you know i'm completely not tailored towards that but i ended up doing all right with it because i had a long enough time to train for it and yeah i think it's it just shows the body's so versatile and it can adapt to anything but when you look at the very very very top it's the ones who have specialized and have the genetic gift as well what about vo2 max vo2 max is like one of those bragging rights things um so there's loads and loads and loads of research on vo2 max is directly proportional to your overall long-term health and um well-being so you very very rarely would see someone with a vo2 max of 70 or above getting a lifelong disease like cancer there's loads of research that the lower the vo2 max the more increased risk of health diseases so if you look at it through that lens it's a very strong determiner of overall health and performance but when you look at it through the sports lens um yes for sure there's athletes who have got crazy high vo2 max and every single elite performer will have a high vo2 max relative to the population but there is a cost at having a higher vo2 max so it's like having a huge engine in a car yes you can rev and you can absolutely roll that engine up but it costs a huge amount of energy to keep that engine running so when you look at elite endurance sports efficiency becomes way more important than vo2 max someone with a really high vo2 max who is super efficient will beat someone with a lower vo2 max who's also really efficient that that's not not 100 true if you um take into consideration things like aerodynamics and things like that but on a on a relative that athlete versus that athlete the one with the higher tv vo2 max who's also really efficient will probably beat the the athlete with a slightly lower vo2 max who's also really efficient but the key is that efficiency trumps someone who's got a really high vo2 max who's not efficient but when you come down into the shorter distances so your jacob ingobritzons for example jake jake whiteman um vo2 max is huge on those kind of sports because you've got a big engine and you're revving it to the max for a relatively short amount of time like three and a half minutes to five minutes vo2 max is everything in those kind of sports yes efficiency and form but assuming everything else is equal that's when vo2 max is most important so for someone who is just like the general person general athlete that is looking to improve their fitness what is a good measure because from my experience like vo2 max doesn't change that much yes you can improve it but once you become well trained it doesn't the numbers don't really move that much like they might move one point or something like that or over kind of like a year of training whereas personally like i find uh lactate threshold in whatever exercise you're doing so say for example if it's cycling then looking at how much you can sustain um within your between your lt1 and lt2 yeah i think that's like a great a better measure because it's kind of like black and white here's like your lt2 point if you go over that then you're going to start creating lactate yeah yeah yeah for sure i mean like if we if we're looking at the you know um vast majority of us we're probably vo2 max training is important because it gives you the efficiency at the really really high intensities which you're probably going to come across in a race but way way way more efficient than that is um you know most most athletes are time crunched so if you was 10 hours a week athlete doing vo2 max training the whole time um is not is not going to be the best way to improve plus you probably will end up burnt out if you did 10 hours of vo2 max training a week you need a little bit of it but uh lower intensities like threshold training or you know even just pure endurance training would be better um and the reason for that is there's millions of reasons but if you're trying to push up your vo2 max i think that gets to a point where certainly as you get older as well vo2 max is not is not the metric you want to be looking at it's like vo2 max or your relative vo2 max so your body weight to vo2 is is more important because absolute vo2 max you would say like rowers elite rowers have the highest absolute vo2 max but they're also 95 to 100 kilos so their relative vo2 max is lower than someone who is just a recreational runner for example um so it's not so much how big is the engine you can't just hone in on one thing you have to look at about everything around that and certainly for for uh recreational athletes vo2 max is is something i would just take with a pinch of salt and it's just one of many measurements that you you perhaps should keep an eye on but certainly not the one that you know it's got so much hype around it but it's it's not the one you should be focusing on no it's um it is really interesting uh and like you say like i i think there's other tests that are probably like better for the average person um and something that i don't know i like to get tested probably like once every six months and i'll normally go off like the lactate threshold um next question what do you think actually limits endurance yeah so we we spoke about this a little bit before i think the limit of endurance is the body's capacity to burn and utilize calories and then recover efficiently for the next training session so what do i mean by that i don't think there's a limit to what your body can adapt to a stimulus i think if you carry on giving your body more stimulus and you recover adequately and that's the key point you will continue to improve forever it may not be like at the rate of improvement you'll get at the beginning but the line is not plateau it's continually up the problem is the cost of one hour more at 25 hours a week versus 10 hours a week is exponentially more and then you get to a point of diminishing return so injury risk goes up burnout goes up

35:08hormonal disruptions go up. Loads of things start to stack against the odds of you just doing more. Because if it was that easy, everyone would just say, okay, cool. I'm going to do 100 hours of training a week and I'm going to, you know, win the Olympics. And some mad person, I used to know someone, and this is truth. He used to train 50 hours a week. And we was like, no, no, there's no way. There's no way. He was on Strava. I raced against him. He won the Ironman world championships as an 18 to 24 year old um he used to race with a backpack on a camelback and he used to do a legitimate 50 hours of cardio a week and we're talking like that's not including recovery that's not including sauna stretching that is literally like timer on heart rate elevated yeah and he he won the ironman world championships at um 18 to 24 year old i think he was 10th overall including the professionals that day and everyone was saying oh he's going to go on to just win everything this guy because he can just train and i remember the week before the ironman world champs we was staying in a house with professional athlete lucy gossage and joe skipper who's just recently retired and he said to joe oh i'm going to do a 4k swim this morning and then i'm going to bike the whole course and do a half marathon and this was like three days before the actual race and Joe was like he's not going to do that and we sat there all day on Strava going oh he's done the swim and then he uploaded the bike and then he uploaded the run and we was like this guy's this he's mad he's ruined his race he's overdone it and he went on to win and I raced against him that day and he absolutely spanked me but fast forward three four years later he completely burnt out he won't mind me saying this he had all sorts of knee issues and back issues and and ended up completely retiring from, from, uh, from the sport in it as a whole, he never raced, never raced again.

36:58Now he does like crazy backpacking adventures where he goes on a 70, 70 hour bike ride and all these kinds of stuff. It's in his blood, but more isn't always better because it comes at a cost is my point. Um, I think there's a sweet spot probably around 20 to 30 hours a week as a professional, but it's what you do with those 20 to 30 hours and how well you recover from them. Yeah, no, it's, man it's crazy 50 hours that's like it's the most i've ever seen like everyone always says oh this guy does this this guy's and i just remember back to that that's legit yeah it's crazy he used to run like 100 miles a week cycle 25 hours and swim more than i could even imagine it was mental why do you think we quit before our bodies do um the long and short of that is it's a defense mechanism so your body the reason why you feel uncomfortable when you're pushing hard is because of a chemical imbalance that's going on but it's your brain's perception of that imbalance and it viewing that imbalance as potentially life-threatening or harmful so its natural thing is to prioritize your overall health and well-being and tell you to stop because what you're doing right now is not good for us when you hear of these like crazy stories where adrenaline's kicked in and you've seen people like lift up cars or they've just gone numb to pain and they've done something and then they realize afterwards that they've cut their leg or something that's your body's way of overriding that that pain tolerance but nine times out of ten when you're just in a normal training session you you experience that pain and you stop before you get to the really really damaging side of things now the problem is with athletes is they've trained their mind and their body to ignore those signals and you have to to a certain extent as an athlete because you have to constantly push those boundaries and in a race yeah you have adrenaline but in training you don't have that adrenaline but you still have to get to that level that you are going to race at so you become accustomed to pushing and pushing and pushing and to the point I think really good athletes can literally override their pain fresh shoulder and turn turn their mind off go to a place you know you put the headphones in and you go to that place where you're in the hurt locker I think that actually makes a really good athlete but the the flip side of that is if you don't always listen to the signals then you can end up doing damage and sometimes it can be really really bad like we saw with Lucy and Kona last year that was her just overriding her pain threshold and her tolerance and in the end she ended up in a medical tent so there's a line that you don't want to cross but sometimes as athletes you do cross it do you think that affects affects like perceived effort as well yeah for sure like I know from when I was racing and training a lot I would go in an ice bath no problem I would like i'd get in it and i'd just be like okay okay it's painful but i can do this i'm not saying i've gone soft but i don't put myself into the pain pain locker as much as i used to now i go in the ice bath i'm like oh i just want to get out it's horrible i haven't got that on switch that i used to have um and i see it with lucy a lot as well like she i have to if lucy's got a problem um be it like a niggle or anything and she tells me it's already more than it should be because she won't tell me unless it's bad because she just goes out it's nothing it's nothing and then when she tells me it's like ah okay there's a problem stop we need to actually address this and i go how long has this been going on it's been going on for two weeks why didn't you tell me like because you know she's accustomed to turning it off turning it off um whereas i think most of the population who aren't put themselves through that all the time would be like i've got a problem i need to go to the doctors about it or you know i won't run today because my knee hurts athletes can't do that so they're naturally not good patients yeah it's funny the the have you watched the nadal documentary on uh yeah and he says like he wouldn't have won literally like 10 of his grand slams if it wasn't for him working through pain of course and that is true i mean that is 100 true yeah it is to align yeah and then it gets to a point where you're better off saying something and addressing it then it's a denial thing as well right you know because when you've as an athlete if you've got an injury you or you admit to the injury you know okay they're following up with everything nine times out of ten it goes but you never want to admit you're injured as an athlete because it's it's a big disruption yeah no it's um yeah as well phil cessman he was like he never goes for a run without pain like he feels pain all the time i'm like for me like when i heard that i was like shocked because well i think this is another thing elite athletes aren't healthy humans they're living life on the edge of what is possible and they're a long long way before that stepped over the line of healthy they are unhealthy individuals experimenting with the boundaries of human capability um for sure they're not healthy like the amount of niggles and injuries lucy has and the amount of you know sugar that she consumes to fuel her lifestyle was uh you know she's probably going to end up with all sorts of hopefully touchwood not but later on in life you make that ronnie coleman's a good example um i don't know if you've seen ronnie coleman now but the he's fucked yeah his body is broke but he said oh i would never change anything because i explored the absolute limit of bodybuilding at the time okay fast forward 10 years he's in a wheelchair and athletes make that sacrifice it's a personal decision i don't i don't think it's like anyone who's won a world title wouldn't trade an achy knee later on in life for that world title i don't think but yeah they're not healthy individuals and and for sure it's uh it's it's too far with a lot of the sport how do you avoid burnout i don't think you can avoid burnout as an elite uh at the very top i think you've you've got to go there i think you will yeah it's like what i just said right you're at the limit and we're not perfect so you're going to go over that limit uh how detrimental is that like is it okay to have a little bit of burnout like say for example if you're slightly burnt out can you restore that within a couple of days or sometimes you hear of athletes having like chronically burnt out where like they need to take like weeks months off yeah i think it depends on the dose of pushing through burnout as well i think it can be really really detrimental until when you get deep like hormonal disruption um and for sure if you've got like you know a malnourishment as well during that time because also burnout comes with an element of depression as well it's not just a physical burnout it's an emotional and mental burnout which is depression which can lead to under eating under fueling and the whole athlete's identity is is wrapped around pushing through um so i think it's if you've got a great team around you that can tell you you're pushing too far you need to step back you can save an athlete from burnout for sure you can you can be that sounding voice and say that's too much now they'll still go into it every now and again and i think a little bit of functional overreaching they call it is is is warranted for pushing the boundaries but when you've got those athletes that will just keep pushing through and they've got no one to tell them to stop or they're demonized for um stopping and you know i don't i don't know of any examples personally but i've heard of people like oh you should just carry on pushing through and turning up to the training sessions even though they're deeply in fatigue then yeah you can push them into it can be career ending really um especially like if you lose the love for it i think that's like you need to have have like a positive mindset being an athlete like as soon as you get into that like negative like say if you're a little bit um depressed like day in day out like yeah you're not recovering as well yeah for sure i think anti-joshua recently did a little podcast with um eddie hearn and he he spoke about obviously he had terrible incident earlier on last year where he lost his two best friends in a in an accident um and they reviewed his his life after that and said basically look you're spreading yourself in so many different directions he had I think he had 10 businesses going at the time and in the end they said you need to just put it back to just you boxing because you're spreading yourself too thinly I think athletes are at risk of that as well they're incredibly high achievers in everything they do in life um that they're overachievers in so many areas because they apply their sports mentality to other things and I think that can just spread you so thinly and i see that a lot with athletes they're so good at what they do and then comes fame and sponsorship and then they suddenly start doing loads of other things and their performance drops in the field that they originally came to it which was sport because they're doing everything and that emotional energy and everything gets drained away from the sport i think it's really important to sometimes pull it back and say okay all my energy needs to go in into this one thing that i'm concentrating and yeah you see it a lot unfortunately i want to move on altitude training yeah we're going from going from burnout to altitude training i will link it by saying that is a classic example of how you can get burnout because you just take what you do at sea level and you go to altitude and then all of a sudden you're like oh yeah i'm doing an altitude camp but you've thrown in such a big stimulus that you probably will be at very high risk of burnout um but altitude training has its place and it's very valuable it's been studied for many many many years now and we do it ourselves um well what is it if someone like has never heard of like altitude training like would you just be able to explain like the science behind it yeah so the science behind it is you are essentially going to altitude so that you're breathing in thinner air so you're not breathing in less oxygen um there's just less air so you're effectively getting less oxygen um and what that does is it drops your blood oxygen levels to a point where your body produces um epo which is also a performance enhancing drug so back in the i think it's the 1980s 1990s people would just inject themselves with epo and they would get all the benefits of an altitude camp and more um simply by injecting and people with um i forget the i forget the anemia i think it's anemia yeah they get prescribed epo to help them produce more red blood cells but yes you can you can naturally stimulate this by going to altitude there's other benefits as well so when you train at altitude um your lactate buffering capacity goes up um but there's caveats like as i say the the demand of the training goes goes much higher you can't train as intensely at altitude because there's less oxygen so sometimes you get a trade-off between producing more red blood cells and getting that benefit a hematological benefit but at the cost of a high-end capacity benefit so yeah there's millions there's live high train low which is like living at altitude but then you come down to train at lower altitude there's live high train high there's train high live low there's loads of different methods what do you think the the optimal is because i know you and lucy have tried and tested quite a lot yeah i think live high train high in certain dosages is really powerful um so you'd go to an altitude camp spend anything from minimum of three weeks i'd say up to six weeks training at altitude and you get a really big benefit you have to then time it very well coming down you can either drop in immediately into a race where it's quite high risk or you wait two weeks and then you get the the shedding of the fatigue but then the boost is still there and that works really well and how how long is that window so from two weeks 14 days after you come down how long have you got where the altitude training actually has a positive impact or can you prolong it yeah you can prolong it so you can um top up the dose so if you come down from altitude you would sleep in a tent or you would do intermittent hypoxic training to kind of prolong those benefits but the actual benefit itself is the peak benefit is around two weeks it's different for individuals and also you have to make sure that you've got your um your blood levels recorded before during and after because you can very very quickly become anemic at altitude um or your iron levels can go down and essentially then you undo any of the benefits you was going to have anyway so it needs to be something that's quite closely scientifically monitored that's one of the areas where i'd say i'd lean more towards the science side and make sure we're doing it properly so if someone was to go and try altitude first of all you go get a blood test make sure that your blood's uh healthy yeah before actually going up you never want to go to altitude if you're if you're anemic because you just yeah it's like I can't explain it I went to altitude in 2022 and I had covid at the time and it was the worst thing I've ever done I spent two weeks in bed I lost about five kilos away and then it took me about six months to recover after that and yeah it was just not worth it so and then any kind of like supplements you should supplement with because I know uh like you say you're creating red bull cells so yeah I think it's particularly if you're a female athlete taking supplemental iron um altitude is beneficial but again you need to check before because you iron's toxic so if you take too much of it it's actually bad for you um you definitely don't want to be just slamming down vitamins for no for no reason um most most of your training altitude will be at slightly lower intensity um just because you can't physically go as hard is there a certain elevation what you'd like recommend people to start off at because i know there's obviously different altitudes that you can go to yeah so logistics is really hard in europe there's pretty much two elevations you can go to there's 1700 is the minimum i would say to really elicit what's font ramo font ramo was 1500 font ramo is um 1884 meters but yeah you sleep slightly below that if you sleep in the village so you're at the very now some people don't respond at that altitude um lucy doesn't really respond there i I go there and I can notice it straight away, whereas she's like almost at sea level.

51:54She has to go much higher to get the benefit. And that is a genetic thing, actually. It's not so much a, oh, I'm fitter than you. It's just a genetic. When does your body decide, OK, this is enough of a stimulus? It's all about stimulus. Her blood oxygen saturation goes down by like 1%. Mine goes down by like 10 % at that elevation. So for her, she's not getting the benefit that you would get at Sierra Nevada, which is in Spain. And that's at 2 ,400 meters. much higher um much bigger response from there but the trade-off is normally at sierra nevada where it's 2400 meters you need a couple of days to kind of like acclimatize yeah for sure like more than i do like easy stuff yeah you need a week at least um so in that week you'd just recommend just you wouldn't go straight into your hard sessions no no you get sleep deprivation as well so you slightly um the oxygen levels in your blood go down so much that you actually end up with sleep apnea a little bit so you end up a bit fatigued you wake up feeling not quite rested that takes about a week to get out the system again that's another trade-off like your your quality of recovery goes down um is that for the entire time you're there or just for that first week normally for that first week once your body adapts so your your breathing rate changes one of the first things your body does when you go to altitude is it tries to dump a load of fluid so you end up weeing a lot because the response is your body wants to thicken the blood to provide more red blood cells to your you know oxygen starved muscles basically so the first few days in altitude you end up urinating a lot and then after a while it realizes okay this isn't an efficient way of doing this i'm going to have to switch to another method of adaptation again the stimulus is high enough at that point for your body to go okay cool now we're going to make epo um and that becomes the primary change over the next two to three weeks your red blood cell count will increase and then your blood volume stabilizes and once you get to that point you're you're pretty much at the maximal adaptation you're going to get and you'll find that your training probably comes back into line with what it was at sea level and then that's the point then you go down you have a an abundance of red blood cells for the the environment that you're in so that's the benefit and how long would it would it normally last it can last again it depends on your training and your um recovery during that time but you can prolong it for about a month or so if you if you do the intervention so sleeping at altitude and breathing so really it's just two weeks that you get of like beneficial competition time yeah i would say that two weeks after 90 of people will go down wait two weeks then compete you can and lucy won the world champs by her first ever world champs by dropping straight in and it was a risk because we didn't know it's quite high risk um but if you time that perfectly that is the best that's like so how did that work she was at altitude is it the day after or did she have to like do media or whatever she had to do media so we timed it as late as possible it was only a two-hour journey from where we were staying to the race so it was really fortunate um yeah we the race was on saturday and she dropped in on thursday morning so she had 48 hours um and yeah that was to this day the best she's ever felt in a race she said she just felt like she was floating yeah so if you can do that then you can do that we tried to do it again the following year and it didn't quite work as well so and it was exactly the same yeah i mean for us personally it was she was undiagnosed celiac at that point so there was a million other things going on but if you can time that right it's really cool interesting let's move on to heat training because i know these are not linked but they can create a similar stimulus yeah so heat training is first and foremost if you've got a race in a hot environment you need to be accustomed to the environment in which you're going to race in so heat training is derived basically from that preparing for hot hot climate races but there's a huge amount of research on actually it can perform or give you a performance enhancing effect not just in hot climates but also in temperate climates as well and the idea behind it is you elevate your core level up to a certain point you hold it there in training for a certain amount of time so normally 90 minute stimulus is the most you want to give yourself at any one given time you have a physiological adaptation to that which is an increase in blood plasma volume and that has a similar effect to the altitude you have the altitude you have an increase in EPO which is the oxygen carrying um delivery of oxygen in in your body but blood plasma volume also has a similar effect you have more blood so therefore you get more oxygen so you're working muscles um and yeah it creates it creates a very potent uh additional stimulus on top of the training stimulus that you're giving you and how long should you be doing this for this is more something that now athletes are doing all the time um as in like they will throw in heat training into their regular weekly routine and just stay almost permanently heat adapted um if you was to do a very focused heat adaptation block two weeks is the researched um with a protocol of in that two-week period you'll do 10 heat work sessions with a few days off and this is the primarily primarily just to increase blood plasma right yes uh other physiological adaptations that will help you in the heat so increasing sweat rate um you'll have better profusion of of your blood capillaries in your working muscles so they will be able to dissipate your body's heat better um and then also you'll have changes in your rate of perceived exertion at heat that's really important a lot of people don't talk about that but skin temperature is directly linked to your rate of perceived exertion so when you first start heat training especially if you've got one of those you know sweat suits on the rpe is through the roof but you're actually not that hot and that's just your brain going wow wow i'm panicking this is hot but over a course of like a two-week block your body starts to learn okay i'm not gonna die here this is okay um and then your rpe comes down even though nothing's changed nothing physiologically it's changed it's just your rp it's changed and then is the the proof that if you do it for like a longer period so say for example then first two weeks your blood plasma increases and stuff like that but there's i think the study has shown that like over a five six week period that you can get the similar effects where your body starts producing more red blood cells yeah yeah so you i think the last probably i don't know when i read this last article on this probably last year i think it was a decay rate of two percent per day on a heat protocol so for every day that you don't add a heat stimulus you decay two percent i mean how they quantify that is questionable but if you carry on adding a heat stimulus after you've done a heat block so three times a week you can really prolong how long you stay in heat but the point is as an athlete nine times out of 10 you are sufficiently warm enough in a training session to elicit a heat response so if you was doing a hard workout your core temperature will go probably to 38.5 or above all of the research on heat adaptation is getting your core temperature to 38.5 or above so the argument is actually as an athlete you're probably already heat adapted most of the time you just don't know it you haven't got a heat sensor on when you put a heat suit on and really look at it you can measure how much time you are in that heat stress zone they call it but for a professional athlete you're probably 90 of the time already heat adapted and is that probably why some people like love it and some people don't think it really works because they're potentially already 100 yeah if you use like from a cold climate and you always got a fan on you're in air con room and you do a lot of low intensity training um which a lot of athletes do, you're probably not getting warm enough to get that heat benefit.

1:00:03Adding the heat stimulus into them would be really potent. But for someone else, say the Norwegian method, where you're doing double threshold days, your core temperature is probably already at 38.5 or above. So you're getting some heat adaptation. There's other studies like... And skin temperature changes is also something that's quite potent in heat adaptation, which they're only now really looking into with these core sensor stuff. But you get different benefits from having a hot skin temperature and a hot core temperature. What about active versus passive? Like do you rate passive? Yeah, massively, because that adds to a stimulus that is not directly while you're training.

1:00:45So, for example, you would do a session and then you jump in a hot bath or a sauna afterwards. um i think there may be like an element of placebo in that as well or kind of like a therapeutic mental state like lucy for example loves jumping in the sauna after doing a session because it probably just gives her time to unwind from the session during that she'll be rehydrating as much as you can she's getting a heat benefit from it but she she much prefers that than doing a you know bolting on an hour after her workout in a horrible suit um it does elicit the same sort of benefit but it's not as potent as doing it and you also have to really really give yourself quite a high stimulus to get that core temperature that high so you have to be in a hot sauna or a really hot bath which for some people can be uncomfortable yeah no it's interesting so you'd say like the gold standard is active and then second really like passive yeah and that can initiate kind of like a relaxing period as well yeah after a session and it's more comfortable yeah and i think if you're if you're a if we apply that to you know age groupers or amateurs um you're not spending 10 hours a week in your high heat stress zone so if you've got a hot race hyrox is a good example i know there's been a few races where the air con's not worked and they've been in this boiling hot haul and a lot of them have fallen short because you know they've overheated for sure you definitely want to do some heat work in preparation for that because it's one less hurdle you have to jump over on race day if you're prepared for it yeah uh and then last thing i want to touch on there are some downsides obviously yeah the key one being kind of like hydration yeah but you mentioned to me and i don't even think about this but uh you said if you're if your core temperature goals too high then your microbiome and your bacteria in your stomach can actually be affected yeah it's like with anything um too much of something is not necessarily a good thing i think athletes are geared towards more got to do more got to get as hot as i can in the heat session because that makes me harder and i'm going to end up better than everyone but you end up detrimenting yourself um if you get too warm you literally denature yourselves they can become um they essentially pop they get too hot they're overworked your gut biome starts to dissolve uh you get a mild form of heat stroke which you know i've i've seen athletes training heat sessions and they think that they're preparing their body for a hot race but they're actually destroying themselves yeah right so the aim shouldn't be coming out of a heat session completely dizzy where you can't think and you're kind of like brain dead 100 i've done that quite a few times no absolutely i think it's having a lasting effect yeah i think it was um was it i messaged you a little while ago and i saw you doing the air bike in the sauna yeah and it was what was it a week before welds or something i said jay you need to pull off of that before then because i know you know what you're doing but i've the risk gets high as you get towards a race as well i would pull off heat training i wouldn't do heat training two or three days before a race i would say the costs of it outweigh the benefits yeah interesting right okay we'll move on and i think this one um sits in quite nicely uh the importance of hydration like within any session oh yeah for sure i mean it's particularly when you're doing heat work but i think it's this is probably the lowest hanging fruit that i see most athletes mess up like the amount when you do a training session you wring your top off afterwards have you ever done this yeah have you done that into a bottle and seen how much is i bet you haven't no next time you do a heat session or you do a really hard training session wring your topper i know it's disgusting but wring it out into a into a bottle and just see how much sweat comes off you if you're i don't know 85 kilo guy you're probably working hard you're you're sweating 1.5 to 2 liters easily an hour and but you drink 750 mil in that session and that's that's a lot for some people yeah so you are chronically dehydrated as an athlete always like when i was training we used to do a heat lab sessions and the protocol was if you you had to do a urine sample in the morning to say that you were fit to go into the lab now i won't name the lab because i don't want to get them in trouble but I don't think I ever passed a urine sample and one day I was like right I'm gonna get on top of this I'm gonna try and pass that urine sample tomorrow morning and I was adamant that I'd done it I'd drunk like I was just drinking like gallons and gallons of water and I got there and they're like no you're still dehydrated and I asked the scientists there at the time I was like how can I be dehydrated I've drunk all of that it's like yeah because you're chronically dehydrated like it takes a long time to hydrate yourself properly everything I'd just been drinking was just passing through me you know I was hydrating my stomach but everything else around my body was dehydrated and that's one of the things that we learned really on early on into our career is hydration as much as you think it's just one of those like oh yeah it's hydration everyone was sort of hydration it's probably the lowest hanging fruit everyone can do to increase increase their performance like what's the point going up to altitude if you can get a 10 benefit by being hydrated for most sessions you're wasting your time and money by chasing that one percent when there's 10 % right there and all you've got to do is drink water.

1:06:06Yeah. And what is it? Is it a balance of just water? Like what's your opinion on electrolytes for hydrating? I know I've been to Red Bull and the nutritionists are like, well, people overuse electrolytes. Yeah. What's your stand on that? Well, I think as an endurance athlete, supplemental salt electrolytes is warranted. I think as a not an endurance athlete, probably you don't need to have like the super high 1500 milligrams per 500 mil levels. That's a really individual thing because people lose different quantities of salt per litre of sweat as well. So you can test that. Precision hydration are a good example.

1:06:51They do a sweat test where they tell you exactly how much sodium that you're losing. You can tailor that as an athlete. But I would say 90 % of people who are amateurs or age groupers, as we call them, are probably getting enough salt in their diet from day to day. It's only really when you're training that you would have the extra salt. I wouldn't prescribe drinking salty drinks throughout the day if you wasn't doing more than, say, 10 hours of training a week. As you get past that 10 hours mark, then I would say it's warranted because you probably are deprived in both salt, electrolyte imbalance and fluid.

1:07:28and how many obviously it depends on the day and depends on the weather as well but like on average how many liters of water uh yourself back back in your day or uh lucid drinking per day well i would lose i was really sweaty so i would lose over two and a half liters an hour when i was really really sweating um which is just i physically could not replace it and i used to have i call it the keg i've still got it it's just a big keg it's like I think it's three liters and I used to just say from the moment I finished my session to the moment I do my next session that's got to be empty and I would fill it with everything I put cranberry juice anything to just make me drink um but on a given day I don't know I was training five six hours a day I'm probably sweating 15 liters in a day of which is just ridiculous like you cannot you cannot physically replace that much fluid without consciously trying and I'm always like when we go to races i'm like the feeder of lucy so i'm just constantly giving a little rice bowl drink this eat this drink this eat this on a race day have you worked out how many how many liters of water she's going through yeah so she's depending on the environment she sweats obviously a lot less than i did she sweats 1.2 to 1.5 liters an hour okay so over an eight hour race it's anything from 11 to 14 liters of sweat which is crazy right yeah like i actually went to um the rebel apc and i was like yeah i probably drink like eight liters per day and they were like that's way too much yeah and i was like oh like really that's interesting too much too much like i i just always feel thirsty i can always drink a drink if that makes sense yeah well i think i think like i think i thought it's a good thing oh i would i would certainly say it is a good thing like there's no such thing as over drinking as an athlete i would say like most most people were i've done sessions where i've been dehydrated and you know it's fine for an hour but when you get to that second hour your performance just goes like that yeah well what the story is if you're like two percent dehydrated then yeah it's kind of like a 20 drop off in performance it's the number one thing that detriments your performance i think like just a one-on-one on that is like make sure before every session like i make sure i have a liter and a half in the morning as soon as i wake up a liter and a half water now people might think that's extreme but at the end of the day like i don't know i want to be going to the bathroom like within an hour of waking up yeah like after you've been obviously after you've just woke up you've gone to the bathroom i want to be going to the bathroom again like probably an hour after yeah i would say that's definitely not detriment it's like 101 athlete like you need to as soon as you get up hydrate and whenever i've spent times around like the best athletes like they do drink so much water yeah you have to yeah it's crazy it's crazy um what about kind of like glycogen fueling and hitting the wall like how how do you manage that within an iron man yeah so hitting the wall is kind of the thing that you don't see as much anymore we used to see it back in the 1990s and 80s of you know these classic people doing a marathon and they get to that 22 mile a point and everything is just empty but i think with modern day fueling the science of how much you should fuel and also the super gels um hitting the wall is far less likely glycogen emptying is is something that we don't see as very often anymore because they're consuming such high amounts like back when this is probably been the number one thing that's changed from when i started racing professionally to now we was told back then it's physically impossible for you to consume and utilize more than 60 grams an hour like anything more than that just creates an opportunity for you to be sick because you'll create a bolus in your stomach and you either it comes out one way or it goes up that way so don't do it now i've i don't know how true it is but there are people experimenting with 160 grams an hour um which is absurd that's on the bike right yeah so on the bike is different from running just because of like the the up and down movement yeah exactly when you're running you're rattling it around so it's probably like 90 to 100 probably running yeah i think even that's pretty high running i mean for for a male that's about right for a female probably less but cycling you can get away with a little bit more cycling for sure you can get away with more and that means that you've over the course of 15 years it's doubled the amount of calories that you're consuming and utilizing on the bike or on the run so yeah hitting that wall is far less likely but i think one of the more likely thing to happen as an athlete especially an elite athlete is to hit the wall in training because of chronic under fueling and i say chronic sounds like a terrible word but i mean like short dosages of chronic under fueling can easily leave you uh depleted for the next day and a good example of that is like say lucy goes and does a five-hour bike ride there's been there's been loads of times where she's come back and there's been like a media obligation which she's she does but she just forgets to eat um and then she goes to bed she eats her normal dinner but it's not enough she goes to bed gets up the next morning goes and does an early morning swim doesn't really eat a lot because she doesn't like eating before swimming and then she's chronically depleted there's no more carbohydrates left in her system whatever she didn't replace uh from the day before got used up in the morning of and then she goes and does a four-hour bike ride she rings me up two hours through saying i've completely bonked bonking by the way means like it's hitting the wall and she has to stop at a petrol garage in the middle of nowhere and drink red bull and slam a load of bananas and just get everything in wait about 20 minutes for it to kick in and then she go again and sometimes well more than likely when you go again it's still not the same effort that you could do no and then you're already like then it's just a case of crawl home yeah because you the day's done that i think the studies have been done where like if you do hit the wall like it is very detrimental to your body and your body almost goes into kind of like this this reserve mode after that where like yeah you're just ticking by and you're just like one gear yeah you don't want to you don't want to push through that you want to just say hey that's done i need to get home so You can't just simply refuel and then just go hard again?

1:13:46No, no, for sure not. I mean, you would only physically be able to consume X amount in one go. Probably, I don't know, let's say a real big push. If you stopped at a petrol garage and you sat down for half an hour and just slammed a load of food, you could get in a thousand calories that's utilisable. For a guy, my weight and size, that's like an hour. so if i was two and a half hours away on the bike and i've done everything i can to replenish an hour's worth of fuel i'm using that hour to get home really slowly i'm not like pegging it again off because then you just bonk again which it's fine on your sunday ride when you got a load of people around you and you're not professional but as a as a professional you definitely don't want to be doing that next one the placebo effect yeah i'm convinced a lot of these things um that people are saying are working for them is placebo um i got it from two sides right so you've got the very very very like wind tunnel data measured to within a what accuracy of the side of sport and then you've got the um the placebo thing so i'll i'll classify that as something like the neuro-sym thing that you put on your ear now it's meant to stimulate your vagal vagus nerve I think it is I can't remember it's a parasympathetic nervous system stimulator that you put on your ear before you go to bed and it's meant to calm you down well I'm like well I can feel it working I think but is that just because I'm now sat in bed quietly thinking about being calm or is it because it's actually doing something i don't know um there's things like electrical magnet magnet stimulation mats that you lay on so you you lay on it and it's meant to create an electric magnetic sphere around you which stimulates the ions in your body that makes you calm well i lay on that and i feel calm but then i'm like but i'm laying on the floor would i just feel calm if i was i'm always questioning it and it's placebo because it's not proven in science but if there is something in it that placebo is really powerful like you know people have genuinely improved performance but they've been on the placebo trials and that's why it's called placebo effect that's why you have double blind studies in uh in in in most studies because if you tell the person um they're they're taking this supplement that's going to make them better but actually you've just given them you know a bit of sugar in a tablet if they believe that they are then they probably will end up performing better and that's that's the power placebo power placebo is actually i've i've used it sometimes with lucy as well like i said oh yeah just try try this out really i found it so good and in my head i'm like that didn't work it was rubbish and then you give it to her and she's like oh yeah that's really good i'm like okay cool now we'll go with that because you believe it so that's great let's just go with it and then yeah you can use it to your advantage do you ever use this is on kind of like the same lines but do you ever use it within training in terms of saying like right lucy this is your last rep go all out and then once you've done that oh actually lucy you've got another rep have you like obviously it's quite dangerous because like you you can push that over training and that stimulus but um yeah do you ever do that because there's been quite a lot of studies on that like you feel like you give absolutely everything and then someone says right actually you've got to do one more rep yeah and you can do it is that the placebo rep i'm not sure we uh is it the same thing i mean that placebo is believing in something to be true but it's not true whereas giving yourself an extra rep that's like but like surprising yourself yeah yeah i mean that like yeah you can't do it to yourself no because you know yeah you know yeah but i think with with placebo yeah for sure there's so many things that have increased performance unexplainably and it shouldn't do yeah it's purely down to placebo yeah there are quite a few i think there's a study on um even like steroids like yeah where it's double blind and people thought they're on steroids yeah and they got huge gains within the gym like you've physical gains yes yes i've seen those when they literally are increasing muscle mass at a higher rate than that anyone thought possible but then they're not on yeah anything yeah it's also they've done it a lot of animal studies as well like even it's not just a human thing there's a lot of um how'd you get an animal to believe though well you i far cleverer person will tell you the setup of the studies but i know there has been placebo on rats where you know the rats thought that they were getting a reward or something like that oh yes yeah yeah um yeah so yeah it's not just a human thing it's a mammal thing i guess um let's move on to training in regards to if someone wants to improve their endurance yeah is there a training method that you would kind of recommend um yes basically look at what you're doing and do a bit more that's the simple principle of adaptation so whatever you're currently doing if it's working carry on until it doesn't work anymore because it will come a point if you carry on doing the same thing you will no longer get a benefit as a human you are ultra your body is ultra efficient at finding an equilibrium so if you do 10 hours a week at the beginning you'll get super fit and then after a year of 10 hours a week you no longer get any more benefit because everything that you would have got has already happened so you have to review your training and basically do a little bit more that's the basic principle of endurance training always look at what you're doing is it still working if yes carry on if no adapt do a bit more and that's that's simply it like you can do all the studies in the world but that's simply it is there a problem with looking at other people and saying right i'm doing a 10 hour training week at the moment but they're doing a 25 hour week yeah is there a problem with jumping straight to that yes 100 like not least because that's just reckless and you'll probably end up injured and burnt out but you want a you want to create the highest return for the effort that you put in so if you're a 10 hour week trainer we'll just stay on this example you're going to gain huge amount of benefit by going to 11 hours a week that's a 10 increase in volume stay on the 11 hours a week for as long as you're getting a benefit and then when it will come a time when that's no longer giving you a benefit go to 12 hours a week if you just go 10 hours 20 hours you you're going to end up missing out all of the the long-term rewards of going through the gears of 10 to 11 to 12 to 13 14 hours a week it's um i can't think of the right word i have to pause here i have to get this word oh i can't think of the word anyway it's gone beyond me but there there is a you know like a principle behind it it's like diminishing return lowest hanging fruit um energy expenditure equation of going from 10 to 20 is stupid like you'd be better off going 10 to 11 11 to 12 and going through the gears like that you'll you'll elicit such a long-term benefit rather than just a big jump in fitness yeah the reason i ask that is last week i was chatting to um a swedish lad and he was i think he's quite young like uh i think he's 18 years old and his coach was against him like going to altitude and against him doing like a bigger training week because he said if you jump straight to them things then you've got no room for improvement after that sounds like a sensible coach to me yeah especially for a young person especially altitude with being young as well because apparently like if your heart's not fully developed then you don't want to deprive it of oxygen or deprive it yeah i think this is so true like if you're if you're a very good athlete and you're improving stick with the improvement until i've said this like 10 times now but yeah you're improving so you don't want to get to the point where you're banging your head against the ceiling and going i can't do anything more to improve now all of the low hanging fruit has gone now i've got to do the really really expensive laborious difficult stuff you want to get to the very top of the sport and go i know you've never done an altitude camp or i'm only doing 20 hours a week and i'm already winning like you want to have that confidence plus it's saving so much time exactly yeah if you if you can get by i always look at high rocks for an example there's some people training 30 hours a week and there's some people training 13 hours a week now these guys are at the top of the sport and they're going neck and neck yeah which one would you rather be yeah exactly yeah like would you rather be training 30 hours week or 13 and then having that extra time to recover that person mood that's a healthy yeah and everything like this that's what i was saying earlier like there's a there's a diminishing return effect and there's no right or wrong answer i'm not saying never get to 30 hours a week i'm saying don't go straight to it go through the gears yeah and and on that journey you will find your perfect spot as well like i'm not saying spend 11 hours training a week for a year because it won't i mean most people if you go from 10 hours a week it'll take four weeks for you to no longer get the benefit of that you need to go up quite quick like you your body needs to be continually stressed quite aggressively probably more aggressively than in your mind what what you think is a good training plan as well like you always need to be your foot on the gas and give yourself a little bit more credit for what what you can do but going from 10 to 20 to 30 in the space of six months is stupid in my opinion yeah i think you said something once to me that stuck with me he was like every single session has a purpose yes and as soon as you have got that purpose out that session yeah then get out of there as fast as possible yeah get what you need to get out of it get the stimulus don't go beyond the stimulus because there's no benefit to be that was what the word that's basically what i was trying to there's a word for it but i still can't remember it but if you hit a stimulus it's done it's not like you hit the stimulus on one session and if you carry on you're going to hit it again no it's done the body is all or nothing theory so So once that stimulus has been hit, that's like I said, about 90 minutes for the heat adaptation, that's the maximum benefit you're going to get.

1:24:11If you did a 10-hour heat session, you're just going to make yourself ill and you're not going to be any better off for it. Minimum effective dose. That's what I was looking for. The minimum effective dose of training. That's what you always want to try and achieve. Get in, get out. Get what you want out of it, do it, and then get back and recover and go again the next day. What about high and low days? Like hard days, easy days. do you think a typical week should be looking like hard easy hard easy or do you think in some cases you can do some level of hard effort every single day yeah i think and what defines that as well yeah this is such a broad brush i mean everyone's different you know they're all cliche but i think the easy days enable the hard days and some athletes can do most athletes do probably like two really hard days and then an easy day and the reason for that is you need that day to replenish um and if you if you don't need that day to replenish then your hard days probably weren't hard enough that's like some some athletes are like oh yeah i feel fine it's like okay but then you need to go harder in those hard days um to need that easy day i think that's probably a good way of looking at the very top level so you wouldn't do one hard day one easy day you do two hard days one easy day normally yeah but that's in our sport so in our sport you have diminishing return like you say because you're going into that second day maybe a little bit fatigued yeah you're not going hard going hard so like you might think that you're going hard yeah and effort wise you're going hard but you might only be at 80 that second day yeah um is there still benefit to that or would it be better like splitting them up with a recovery day in the middle it depends what sport you're doing okay in your sport probably better off one hard day one easy day because your sport is operating at a very very very high intensity it's um muscle fatigue muscle fatigue breaking the muscles down um you're gonna take long you need longer to recover there's just more to recover like there's more things that need to happen for you to be 100 than say lucy for example who all right her days are really long but she's not breaking the muscles down in the way that you would in high rocks but that said when we do like a two-day block if she had a long run to do we'd always put that first because that's the most physically demanding thing on her body and we know that the bike ride and the swim after that long run will be compromised but that's just part of our sport and it's um yeah program planning around that is always done in a specific order and we know that after that third day or on the second day of really really high intensity training or really long endurance training she needs that easy day and that for lucy would look like an easy gym session and an easy swim and then she's good again she doesn't need longer than that but some athletes myself um back when i was training i needed two days like i'd go so hard into a session that i needed two physical days of very easy training to get back if i tried to do it the following day after an easy day i just wasn't ready to do it again um and it's very individual in the person yeah because you see some people and like they'll they'll do one or two hard sessions a week yeah but then are they doing the rest of their sessions super easy yeah yeah or they're going like moderate you see that easy yeah but that's what i go and run at marathon pace marathon pace sounds oh yeah easy i can do it for a marathon marathon pace is so hard like if you get if you go and run 10k at your current marathon pace that's a hard run like that's not easy running um so what is easy what is hard like that's that's the thing with the elite elite athletes they're all of their training is crazy hard for a normal person on looking for them it's easy because they can recover but physically internally they're still damaging their muscles as they would you know you still got to run at 330 a k or 320 a k in your case for an easy marathon pace session most people that's park run pace like no it is interesting and a prime example uh jake whiteman recently um he came on the podcast and said like he does quality over quantity and he says oh yeah i do easy days and when you actually look into his easy days he'll go for like seven or eight miles yeah and it will be about 320 330 pace yeah and you're like well like this is an easy day like yeah that's hardcore like well they're used to running 235 a kilometer in the last bit so for them that's easy but that's still but it's still taxing yeah yeah for sure yeah yeah it's not it's not running at five minute k page yeah um so that's why i'm saying like it's a broad brush you can't say yes or no because it's different sport different athletes different circumstances but in general you definitely want to factor in easy and hard days into your training yeah no i i agree i think i think mentally as well it's important because you know you look at your like lucy will look at her calendar for the week ahead and go oh that's a big day i need to be like so the day before that we'll have an early night you always go to bed early anyway but you really know okay tomorrow's a big day you don't put any media in on that day you you factor in that you're going to be a bit grumpy on or anxious going into it and you mentally prepare for those big days and then last thing that i wanted to touch on is kind of like obviously endurance is a stress how much do other stresses in your life affect like your recovery yeah so along along the way i've coached um you know top athletes but i also coach age group athletes and i would say as a whole age group athletes are way more stressed than a professional athlete because they have life they have kids they have commute times they have financial stresses with affording a bike for example you know huge expense traveling to the races if you tallied up all the stresses of an amateur versus a professional the amateur is way more stressed the job of the professional is to not be stressed their job is to train and chill whereas an amateur or an age grouper they don't have that luxury they have a hobby which they've decided to turn into something I want to give a go properly but that doesn't mean they can just turn down the stresses of their life they have to fit it in around all of those other external stresses and the reason why I mentioned them is because you could give an amateur or an age grouper a really good training program and I've done this in the past and this is not a reflection of my coaching but they're not responding and I'm like what's going on here like the worst case I had or the best case I had was a he was a first responder so he worked crazy shifts ambulance work like one day you'd be working 1am to 9am and then on the next day he'll be working 5pm till midnight so he just had this crazy lifestyle and everything I gave him wasn't working and in the end I was like I just don't think anything I'm going to give this guy is going to work because his life is chaos um and it made me realize that external stress has a huge impact on your performance as well like if you're stressed you're not going to respond to a lot of the training that you give and that's number one thing as well with lucy whenever she's stressed out sometimes a lot of the time the reason why we ditch a session particularly if she's running is because she's stressed so like lucy will be stressed and angst about something it could be anything um and she'll go for a run and i can see she's tense and in the end i just say like stop session because you're gonna end up injured literally like you're you can see your next tense you're running like you want to punch something you're better off just stopping the session going for a walk with the dog or you know go and take your anger out on the punch bag or something but don't go and try and do a session and push through it when you're stressed because it's gonna lead to bad things yeah oh it is interesting one thing that i really struggle with is travel yeah travel is especially the long haul like i think if you can just a key is if you can just limit long haul flights yeah within a year like because i think every every long haul flight is like say a day off training yeah i mean airports are horrible for everyone um but when you when you factor in that you're going there to perform i get so stressed out with like germs like you go for an airport we put a mask on we've been doing that since before covid but someone next to you on a tightly packed commuter tram to the bus is sneezing all of a sudden you're like wow i've just done months of training and i'm going to catch a cold and it's happened to us um then you've got the time differences of different um places the logistics of is my luggage going to arrive all of that just a huge stress so always try and get to the destination that you're racing at early if you've got the luxury of that again amateurs enough um age groupers don't have that they probably have two or three days off work that they've booked for that so yeah stress is a performance killer and it is a killer and if we zoom out past performance and sport i think number one thing that causes illnesses in our society is stress for sure like it's been linked to increases in rates and all sorts of different illnesses so i always say to my mum she's always stressed about something i'm like mum you just gotta like stress is a killer you gotta try and be cool sounds weird it's also addictive i think yeah i mean there's yeah there is that there is that people chase stress but there's a different kind of stress like as an athlete you chase a stressful environment but is it stressful it's like an adrenaline filled environment which is stressful but there's a different kind of external stress i'm talking about that so for you for example if you were doing a session um and the gym lights went off and there was a power cut would you find that stressful or would you be like oh okay well i'll just come back tomorrow oh i'd have to i'd find some way to try and carry on my session if i couldn't find if i couldn't carry my session yeah it stressed me out yeah so that's like someone else is interfering with your i can see you're stressing yeah yeah i don't like them kind of i'm thinking more like um say and like you say you've got to see how you perceive it as well like stress as if like i'm always late to everything yeah and it could be a choice for me to be early yeah but i kind of like like the thrill of like having to rush somewhere or trying to beat the sat nav or trying to like okay okay if if a walk says it's 25 minutes in london yeah it's never i'll try and run to make it faster like i don't know for some reason like i just i could just chill out i don't need to be there or i could just set off earlier but like sometimes like i don't know i mean that's like that's why you're red bull athlete i guess i suppose like a you've got to be a little bit on the edge of uh of things but yeah real real stress is is no one wants real stress in their life for sure no no and it does have an effect um like you say if you can avoid that and just train it's the ideal in the ideal world yeah yeah even with professional athletes there's a lot of stresses that go on yeah it's life that humans you know at the end of the day humans have human emotion and we have to live our life as well um and things do get in the way so it's never perfect never ever ever had we had i don't even think we've ever had a perfect week of training there's always been something in a week there's you know whether it's the dog's been sick or or you know um something's not working technologies and i want the more technology you introduce into a program the more likely things are going to go wrong well it's nice to know that you know the the one of the best ironman athletes in the world um still hasn't had a perfect training week so that's nice that's a little bit relatable um i think we've covered everything yeah it's been a long one is there anything else no no i think i've probably spanned my wheels a little bit by saying things over but yeah no no i i really enjoyed that thank you for today thank you very much yeah thank you thank you for having me and it's a pleasure to be back um great knowledge from that yeah hopefully i mean say it's uh it's a bit of everything for everyone on that i'm trying to make it relatable to age group and amateurs what's next for yourself we are going away now um it's been recorded in july so we go away for kona camp now um lock ourselves behind closed doors in club la santa so this is the brutal part of the year this is the business end of the season yeah how many weeks are you there uh we are going to be there for up to eight weeks okay yeah and that's ground dog day yeah almost yeah pretty much eat sleep train repeat um we love it there and it's quite nice because every week there's a fresh group of people that come in um so it feels like not as monotonous but it's still monotonous but i'm actually really looking forward to it i'm excited for this one thank you reese thank you