The Evolution of Training Technology

Hunter: So that’s, I mean, I even had a guy just started up with coaching with me and came to me and said, yeah, I just spent the last year wasting my whole entire year because I tried to use this AI plan that I created on ChatGPT. And it totally didn’t work and it wasted my year.

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Steve: Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. I’m your host today, Steve House. And today with me here is Hunter Allen, who’s a rare guest who’s been inside multiple technology revolutions within endurance sports. He helped make the power meter usable as a coaching tool in the late 90s and 2000s. And he also co-built TrainingPeaks, who all of our listeners are well familiar with that platform by now. He’s also recently written about the latest contender for game-changing technology, the Continuous Glucose Monitor. He’s also a cycling coach. He doesn’t do much coaching in mountain sports, so he’s a great person for us to talk to, to exchange ideas with because we work in parallel but different realms, but we both share a passion for technology and helping people and helping them understand how to improve. to improve. So what I want to really dig into with Hunter today is this idea of technology in training. What is worth wearing? What data is worth tracking? What is worth or even important to ignore? And how do we think about the sort of hype and disillusionment cycles like we’ve seen with a lot of technology that’s come along in the last couple of decades? And he’s got an incredible vantage point as having lived through a lot of this. So Hunter, welcome. I’m so happy to have you here.

Hunter: Steve, it’s an honor and a pleasure. You know, I’ve followed your mountaineering climbing career for years and years after I retired from pro cycling and got hard into climbing. And so I remember seeing your name and pictures all over all the magazines. So it’s a great, great, great honor to be here.

Steve: Well, it’s a great honor for us to have you. And those feel like another lifetime. It was a great lifetime. I really enjoyed it. And I’m sure you enjoyed your racing and training and like all those years. Pretty, pretty great to have that. I’m like, I don’t know about you, but I sort of feel like the reverse retirement plan was a pretty good approach. I did all my sports and playing and dumping it all, putting it all out there until my forties. And then I got a shifted gears and a different kind of life.

Hunter: And then you got a real job.

Steve: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. of value for people in the world. That’s a good feeling too. I wanted to, you once said this great line, putting a power meter on your bike doesn’t make you go faster. I just want to kind of surface that and talk about like what you saw in the power meter revolution. Let’s go back. What year was it? What was happening? What was the platform like, TrainingPeaks, like at that time? Kind of give me a little background.

Hunter: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it was one of those really serendipitous things where one of my athletes back in 1999 came along and said, hey, I’ve got this newfangled power meter. Would you train me with it? And I was like, I guess I have no idea what 300 watts means. You know, I don’t know, but I’ll try. And I didn’t have those things when I was a pro in the mid 90s. So really soon after, like I realized, like, wow, if I’m going to really understand this, I need to buy one of these and have a real clear connection personally to these numbers and feel how how this, you know, what’s 500 watts up a hill. And so I started training again a bit and getting into it. And then in, I believe, the year 2000, there was a first-ever power meter seminar. It was in Philadelphia. USA Cycling organized it. The co-author of my book, our book, Training and Racing with a Power Meter, Dr. Coggin, was there. And then another guy, Dr. Alan Lim, who owns Scratch Labs. and then Dean Golich, who’s been a longtime coach and really well known in cycling world too. And they presented and they kind of like said the whole time, the software is no good. The software is no good. You know, this is the revolution, but we don’t have a way to analyze this data. And so my, my client at the time, Kevin Williams was his name. And Kevin said to me, you know, at lunchtime, Hey man, I’m a programmer. We can build software. I can do this. And I was like what really and he’s like yeah this is what i do and so kevin and i started yeah it was really cool and so um we started building cycling peaks software is what we called it originally um and we just kind of played around with it for a while and then we launched that finally we got serious about it launched it in 2003 and uh that you know we thought ah you know we’ll sell 100 copies or whatever. Well, we sold a lot more than that, which was awesome. We were like, wow, this is really cool. And it just became the gold standard in analysis of power data. And nobody had put that together yet. So that was CyclingPeaks. And then Joe Friel and Dirk Friel had a company called trainingbible.com based after Joe Friel’s The Cyclist Training Bible. And they were doing really an online thing to try and, you know, work with coaches and planning and all this stuff. And so that was really fun. And so we basically just kind of merged the companies together. So Cycling Peaks, Training Bible became TrainingPeaks. And so that happened in 2005. And yeah, we just kept on going from there. And it was one of these things where, you know, it was like a, it was a new newfangled tech device. And it was really interesting. You know, Steve, we think of tech kind of trickling down. You look at the, I love Formula One. So I watch Formula One all the time. And you look at all these new things that are on the Formula One cars, and eventually that stuff kind of trickles down into regular cars, like just paddle shifters on the steering wheel, right? Formula One had that in 96. You know, it was like a really long time before regular cars

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Hunter: had those things. But in the power meter world, it actually trickled up. And it was really interesting because the people who adopted power meters were all of the engineers and the math guys and the statisticians and the people who really ended numbers. And they’re like, man, this makes total sense to me. And so these are all these master riders, category three, for riders, beginner riders, and all the pros were like, ah, we don’t need that. You know, nobody’s going to use that stuff. And, um, and so then all of a sudden it kind of trickled up to the pro level and then the pros started using them. Uh, and then once the pros started using them, it was, there was a switch that kind of happened. Oh, I think it was like 2008, maybe 2009. So it took a while. I mean, that’s six years to all of a sudden 2009, every magazine I opened were pro and he had a power meter on his bike and it was like okay it was then at that point then it became the trickle down piece for all the people who hadn’t adopted them yet now got them so it was a really unique way that this tech went uh not a non-traditional way

Steve: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If you could rewind to 2003 and reintroduce this technology to the world, like what would you do different?

Hunter: oh man that’s a great question that’s a great question um you know i don’t know that’s um that’s uh we did it we we we fumbled around a bit um but we did it really well and it came off really well i’m not sure i would change too much um because we were using the tech of the time so you know we built a um a universal downloader uh basically there was like five different power meters maybe four or five at the time i think four actually and none of them had a way to download the data and so now it’s super easy right you just push stop and save on your garmin it pushes up to in your training peaks you know i remember telling somebody and i don’t know when it was 2008 or

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: Something I’m like this is coming one day. You’re gonna walk in your garage, you’re gonna push save, and it’s gonna connect your Wi-Fi, and it’s just gonna be instantly inside TrainingPeaks. They’re like what that’ll never happen you know right so um that was a really important thing that we made

Steve: I don’t know, right? Exactly. Look at this now, right?

Hunter: because it allowed everybody to buy any power meter they wanted and download it into this into uh into our software which cycling peaks became what’s called wko plus now or wko software which stands for workout um and so you know i think that um that would have been um yeah i mean i I just don’t know if I would change anything, to be honest, Steve.

Steve: That’s a great answer too, and so I want to go because what you really did is you wrote the book before, well, before people had adopted this, and I mean, according to my research, you guys sold like my off by much here.

Hunter: Yeah, I think somewhere between three and… 400 depending on what copies you count, whether audible counts as one or not

Steve: let’s count it i mean and i mean let’s just say like that’s that’s that’s amazing those are amazing numbers for any book right and so you you really it really started with education which i think is is super interesting what comes from that though and this kind of leads into the next thing I want to understand is like the human aspect of it, right? When the power meters went mainstream in cycling, as you said, it started this trickle-down part. Did athletes start behaving differently from your point of view or from your vantage as a, both as an observer, as a coach, as a cyclist yourself? And yeah, how did that manifest in the actual behavior of people?

Hunter: Right, right. Right. So, and then this is also kind of one of these things that we didn’t set out to do. You know, when when Andy and I wrote the first edition, which came out in 2006, you know, we had just gotten really tired of answering the same email over and over.

Steve: Exactly right. So many books were bored by this.

Hunter: Oh, God, it’s so many emails, you know. And so I started writing articles and putting them on a blog site. And then I started and then all of a sudden I realized like, oh, hey, you know, we actually have a book and we have a system that we can do, you know.

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: And so that was what really changed the thinking and really the training philosophy. And again, we didn’t set out to like, oh, man, we’re going to change the world, you know, and like change all of cycling’s principles of power of training at all. And we just set out to say, hey, this is how you use this device. And these are the steps that are really clear and they’re really simple. And anybody can do it if you follow step one through seven. And so once people grasp that, like once they saw it written in a book and they started reading it, and then our second book came out in 2009 or the second edition came in 2009, then all of a sudden it was like, oh, I just buy one of these and I do these steps and I’m training with a power meter. And we’re like, yes, you’re now training with a power meter. So that’s what really people really did change. Like all of a sudden they were looking at their numbers on their power meters. They’re doing intervals to hold specific numbers. They’re trying to hit certain numbers up a hill or, you know, and we’re trying to, we’ve categorized ourselves in what’s called the power profile chart. Like, how do you fit against the world’s best?

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: Right and um so what’s your phenotype? Are you a sprinter? Are you a climber? You know, are you a time trialist? You know, so we started to categorize those things, but yeah dramatic changes in how people change their training

Steve: What were some of the kind of failure modes you saw in terms of the human interaction? What did people do wrong with the technology initially?

Hunter: Yeah, um, I think that, uh, initially it was one of those things where, um they they just didn’t, uh, it was back to the education piece; they just didn’t understand that you could use it for so many different ways, right? You could use it in a way to guide you in your interval, right? Okay, here’s my five-minute interval; I can use it that way. Then you could use it in a way to look at your entire ride, like, okay, how many watts did I average, you know, what my kilojoule usage created, some key metrics there. And then the piece was, and I still struggle with this a little honest, but is the, which is the real magic is the aggregation of that data. And so being able to see

Steve: Hmm.

Hunter: like, oh, what’s happened historically, because ultimately what I wanted to do was I wanted to be able to, you know, back calculate everything to create an athlete’s peak. Right. And, you know, So the magic of coaching, as you know, right, it’s like I can give anybody a training plan and they’re going to get better. Here’s a training plan. Go get go do this. Go do structured training. But the real holy grail of coaching is when somebody says, OK, on June the 5th, I want to have the best ride of my life or I want to have the best climb of my life or I want to have the best run of my life on that day is you get them to peak on that day. grail of coaching. And so I wanted to be able to figure out like, how does that work? And so that was one of those things where like, I still struggle with that a little bit where people still don’t understand like, oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. We look at all this data. We see how this is going to go and we start to plan. So planning this peak to happen.

Steve: Yeah, I’m planning the taper and planning like the body’s response to the training. one of the things that i noticed as a purely as an observer i’ve never actually ridden with a power meter i’ve ridden road bikes for training just to accrue lots of volume and that kind of thing. What I’ve observed that people kind of the number becomes more important than the feeling in their body. And I’m sure you’ve seen this. And how do you coach around this? How would you tell people when you sense that they’re like prioritizing a number and a readout over, you know, maybe how they’re feeling? How does that manifest and what do you tell them?

Hunter: Yeah, that’s the big challenge, right? The paralysis by analysis and just the overemphasis on those numbers. And, you know, a little quick anecdote. And, you know, training with these things isn’t for everybody. It just really isn’t. I once had a very, very talented athlete. She was one of the world’s best ultra-endurance mountain bikers. And she wanted to win the La Ruta race, La Ruta de Conquistadores, the mountain bike race across Costa Rica. and you know so we got our power meter and you know and one day she calls me up and she’s in tears on the phone just sobbing and crying and you know and i’m like oh my god you know she always rode with her dog and like somebody hit her dog or she ran over a dog and i was like i was like all these visions of what happened and i’m like what yeah i got her calmed down and finally like what what’s wrong what’s wrong she’s like you know i was supposed to do 190 watts for two by twenties and I only did 187, you know, and I was like, Oh God, you know, just like, she was a monster and, um, the technology. And so it just was, it sent her in this spiral of she

Steve: We’ve created a monster, yeah. I mean, not her, the technology.

Hunter: Didn’t succeed every time. Exactly. And not understanding it like, Oh, you know, you know, you’re still training the same system, right? You’re still training your lactate threshold system. You know, this is the way to ensure that you are. And yeah, if you hit 187, it’s no difference from a training perspective and adaptation phase in any way else. So, you know, I said, okay, well, I talked to her boyfriend who now is her husband. I said, Hey, you know, you’re just going to put a piece of tape over her power meter. And then she’s going to hand it to you when she comes home from training, and you’re going to download it, and you’re going to send it to me. And that’s what he did. And then we came up with a system of ways to talk about it. Like, you know, I had to come up with, you know, okay, you know, super hard, hard, right. You know, gave her, gave her some, some exactly some RPE. So I think that’s an issue. And so when you have

Steve: Like an RPE kind of thing. Yeah.

Hunter: Somebody like that and they get sucked in so much, and you know, you just have to say, Hey, look, you know, remember your goal is to do your best. And whether you’re doing these intervals, whether you’re doing a race, whether you’re doing whatever it is. And at the end of the day, right, you just, you just need to say, you know what, I did my best. And if your heart rate is slammed to the ceiling and you’re doing the power you can do, then you’re doing your best on that day. The caveat being, well, if you aren’t hitting the numbers and you had a heavy then maybe that’s, that’s means you need to rest. Like, Hey,

Steve: Right, yeah yeah yeah, yeah and the other thing I’ve told people is, hey like I could have made

Hunter: Let’s just stop the training and let’s rest now.

Steve: up and i may have created the number wrong like we don’t use power meters but like maybe it’s 190 and it was supposed to be 187 it’s like 190 might have been wrong like you might have been like so there’s you know we’re i think people also think that as coaches we’re infallible and that we have some magic ball know precisely exactly like to the watt what they should or to the heart rate what they should be doing and the reality is like as you said the physiology is going to be what it’s going to be on that day and the important thing is to be training the the system that the workout is is aiming to to train so yeah that that’s that’s a good lesson i think to remind people of yeah

Hunter: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I talk to people all the time like, you know, this is about, you know, understanding what your perceived exertion is, understanding what those wattage numbers mean at that perceived exertion, looking at your heart rate, you know, your heart rate, I call it the intensity of your intention. So heart rate tells us how hard we’re trying, right?

Steve: Thank you.

Hunter: So it’s the intensity of your intention. It’s like, oh man, if somebody sends me a power file and their power goes up to 200 watts and it flatlines, it goes across with no heart rate data there. I’m like, oh, I don’t know if it’s an endurance ride. I don’t know if it was; they’re at their threshold. I have no idea. But if they send me a power file that’s 200 watts and their heart rate’s 178, just nailed to the ceiling, like, oh man, they were just killing it as hard as they could go. So that may be close to their FTP or whatever. So, you know, we’ve got to have that metric as well, because then that gives us, again, the intensity of your intention.

Steve: For those that might not know, what is FTP?

Hunter: Functional threshold power. So functional threshold power. So this means this is basically a quasi-steady-state power where you ride at for around 60 minutes. Doesn’t have to be exactly 60 minutes. It’s the highest power that you can maintain for that period of time. And when you go above that, then you start to fatigue. You can’t hold it longer. And when you stay below it, you can just go for an hour and a half or two hours or whatever. So, you know, athletes will go out, and they’ll test their FTP, their functional threshold power, by doing a 60-minute test. That’s the gold standard. Or they can do what we call a 20-minute effort. but they have to do a five minute effort before because if you do just a 20 minute by itself it contains enough anaerobic work capacity the ability to do hard work for zero to two minutes or so that is just enough right there that it would skew your number high so what we do is we do a five minute blowout and then take five minutes easy and then do this 20 minute test and then we subtract 5% from the 20 minute number. And that gives you really close to what you could probably do for your 60 minutes.

Steve: yeah i find it personally that not too many of my athletes can mentally push that hard for 60 minutes unless they’re in a race and they have that like environment around them that you know they’ve got to keep up or they’ve got to beat someone or whatever i think that’s like the psychology piece of that i always found interesting and and you’ve been you and i have both done these tests ourselves too like it’s like 60 minutes can feel like a long time.

Hunter: Yeah, it is right it is

Steve: That is.

Hunter: Yeah, it really is. It’s a mental thing, right it’s mental toughness, and it’s, uh you got to learn

Steve: Take some discipline. Yeah.

Hunter: To suffer, and how can you suffer, right, on the limit for 60 minutes, and um, you know, you know, you and I are, you know, and all the people listening here, right. We’re talking to the choir, but it’s so interesting when you, when you meet somebody who’s not fit. Right. And, and, and in our little world, right. I mean, I’m very fortunate, right. All the people around me are always very, very fit. And I live in this rosy cone of endurance sports, you know, and, um, but then I’ll meet somebody who’s not, and they’ll like be huffing and puffing at the top of the stairs and got top of stairs like, Oh, I got to take a break. And I’m like, well, just keep going and breathe hard. Like I can breathe way harder than that. And I can do it for like 60 minutes or maybe two hours.

Steve: Yeah, right. Yeah, that’s a reframe. When you were kind of running the WKO division, which is sort of, correct me if I’m wrong, kind of the desktop division of the analysis and of TrainingPeaks for like a decade or more. What I’m curious is, is there something that you saw from that sort of 20,000-foot view of data, lots and lots of data flowing through that platform that you learned that maybe you wouldn’t have learned if you were just looking at one athlete at a time?

Hunter: Oh, I mean, there are so many insights. I mean, so many insights, Steve. I mean, that was massive. massive. And, um, you know, I think, um, the fact that we’re able to see so many different athletes and how they, um, responded to training and, um, you know, where some athletes need to have more freshness coming into an event. Some athletes needed to actually have some fatigue coming into the event. Um, you know, some, you know, athletes, and then this nut still isn’t cracked. And I think that probably the AI could do it. But, you know, where we, there are periods of our training in our season when we recover faster than other times. So like you may be in a period of training where like, oh gosh, from January to February, you’re actually doing the work and you’re recovering really fast. But then something happens. And now in March, okay, you can do the training, not recovering as fast and you may need an extra day off and maybe it’s not the cumulative amount of training maybe it’s something else you know and so being able to adjust some of the parameters to help us as coaches to say you know actually hey wow red flag you know athlete joe now has gone into this slower phase of recovery you need to back off a little bit um and that nut that That hasn’t been cracked yet. And I’ve always wanted to, I know that that’s there and I’m like, oh man, how do we do that? And I think that now maybe if there’s some AI tools that probably were going to come out in the next couple of years that I bet you will be able to see some stuff like that

Steve: Yeah, agreed, agreed. I think that’s so interesting. one of the statements you made is how basically how you give a bunch of athletes the same workout they all respond to it in different ways and they all need different amounts of time to recover and be ready for the next one and so on and i think that this is one of the things that generally people who are new to training just don’t understand they think that training is just a recipe that everybody follows the same recipe the same recipe works for everyone you know and they but with the skepticism of what a coach even does. And I think that that is fundamentally what a coach does. I mean, we both coached a lot of athletes, and it’s pretty clear to us pretty soon when working with an athlete where those levers, where those dials are and how they need to be set. And to your point, like that they need to change over time. It’s actually kind of what keeps it interesting.

Hunter: Yeah, totally. Absolutely. And I think that’s where, you know, to me, it’s, it’s, I think that that’s where, you know, kind of go back to the AI thing, right? That’s a thing. It’s like, well, oh man, I can type in a training plan. training plan on whatever AI you want to, and it’ll spit you out a training plan. But, you know, it doesn’t have any clue, like what’s going on in your history and how you recover and your life and all this stuff. And I mean, it just is a huge, huge, massive, massive swag, you know, with people who are trying to do this. And it’s just like, it just doesn’t work, you know. And so, I mean, I even had a guy just start up with coaching with me and came to me and said, yeah, I just spent the last year wasting my whole entire year because I tried to use this AI plan that I created on ChatGPT. And it totally didn’t work and it wasted my year. I’m like, yeah, okay.

Steve: Yep. It looks like it knows what it’s doing, right? If you’re not an expert, this is where people need to remember. I said this to a lot of athletes in the last six months. They need to remember it’s artificial general intelligence. It doesn’t have specific knowledge, and it’s a predictive algorithm. It’s just predicting the most likely, and from its training data, what is the most likely next output, whether that’s a word or a number. It’s not thinking. And I think people have a hard time still understanding the limitations of that because it does seem magical. Right. Like, I mean, we’ve all been blown away by some of these things that that is doing these days. So back to sort of this hype disillusionment cycle, I’d say that power meters are in the steady state phase, clearly where there’s probably like a predictable adoption cycle for someone who’s getting into training for cycling, whatever kind of cycling they’re doing. And that’s just part of the path. um what do how long did that take, and what actually marked that transition was at that moment like when the pros started using it as you explained i don’t know 2009 ish or was there like something else

Hunter: Um, you know, that’s a great question. Um, I think it was probably a little bit past 2009 because, um, we had, uh, in 2009 with TrainingPeaks, we came out with the performance manager chart where we were charting chronic training load, acute training load, and what we call training stress balance. And so that took a while for people to really understand that. And our book came out in 2009, and I wrote a chapter on how that, what that meant, how to use that. So it probably was a little longer than that. Probably was 2011 or so, 2012, when finally at the point was like, okay, not only now, do we have more power meter manufacturers in the space that also made a difference, right it was like

Steve: Right.

Hunter: oh we’re just srm and power tap now we have the shram quark power meter we started to see garmin jumping in there with their pedals you know so all of a sudden some of these things started to really you know oh that brought the prices down a little bit more it made it more affordable um there started to be some crank manufacturers uh that came in stages the single arm crank that’s like oh man now you can get one of these for 300 bucks um so i think it was really more of a price point actually that allowed it to get to a place where then it was just universal you know oh man if you’re if you’re a serious cyclist and you care about improving then yeah you got to have power meter like i mean that’s just like that’s just yeah you’re gonna drink water water bottle you’re gonna have that power meter kind of thing

Steve: so the transition was really marked by the democratization of the technology in terms of just reaching a price and enough, enough competitors that it reached an enough volume for all to support all those competitors that, that they could produce them at a, at a price that people could have more people could afford.

Hunter: Yep. Totally.

Steve: Interesting. Yeah. When did people and what did people learn to ignore about power data?

Hunter: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s an individual thing where each person, they get to kind of go through that cycle themselves where they understand, you know, one, the first thing you do is you get a power meter, and you realize, oh, wow, these numbers fluctuate like crazy. So how do I understand this information? And then you start to understand how you use it and look at it and see what you’re doing while you’re riding. and then at a certain point you decide, okay, you know what, I need to make sure that, you know, when I’m just out here and I’m riding my bicycle at an endurance pace, I’m just merely, I’m not looking at these numbers second by second. I’m just merely using it as a governor. And it’s like, I’m glancing down every once in a while and saying, you know, I need to keep it under 200 watts a day.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Hunter: Um and so all of a sudden you you know at a certain point of that process, maybe maybe six months or a year even after buying one of these devices you come to this realization like okay, here’s how I’m going to use this now okay when I’ve got a very specific interval okay, I’m,

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: gonna go after it but if not then i’m just out riding okay yeah whatever uh if i’m doing a really important tempo work where i’ve got to ride for three hours at tempo then i’m using it as a as a uh not only as a governor but to to here’s my basement i don’t want to go under 250 watts i got to hold 250 watts or higher the whole time um and so then that i think made it a difference there and so i think that probably happens for each each person around that time

Steve: Interesting. Interesting.

Hunter: Yeah, it’s it’s a personal- it’s a you know, it’s like it’s a, it’s um, and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a

Steve: We’re going to get to…

Hunter: uh it’s like you have that personal connection with the device right and i think that’s back to our our our talk about rate of perceived exertion and understanding what it feels like and then associating that feels like number with your data and once you have that personal connection and that connection is really solidified, then at that point, and I think that takes six months, you know, or even a year.

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: So, yeah.

Steve: Totally agree. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to get to, we’re going to get to continuous glucose monitoring, but before we do, I want to kind of walk through some of these different categories of tech and just kind of get your take on them as someone who’s, like I said, been through these tech cycles a number of times. First up, I think, because you’re going to not be surprised, let’s talk about HRV, whether it’s coming from an Oura Ring or a Whoop device or it’s Garmin native. You know, is this a how do you integrate this? How do you talk to your athletes about it? I don’t want to let go. We don’t have to go full, like, you know, black or white. It’s not necessarily real signal or horoscope. You know, I think there’s a lot of gray to most of this technology. So where do you use HRV?

Hunter: sure yeah you know i think it’s a great metric um i think it’s a great metric because i think that it it it gives us the picture of life stress right i think it’s probably um one of the best from that perspective like uh it just it just fills that hole uh you know and i think that’s something that we don’t have any other way to measure life straps. And so I think that that’s a, it’s a valid thing. I mean, I’ve seen it. I’ve, I’ve saved a bunch of people’s seasons because of it. There’s a couple of charts in WKO that overlay that on top of other charts. And so they’re pulling that number in and all of a sudden we’re starting to see this, this, this trend that’s just like boom going in the basement and it’s not so easy to see from the you know from the tree view but you know from looking at the forest view it’s like oh wow all of a sudden now what’s happening here you know you’re training really well and things are going well but all of a sudden your hrv has just gone through the basement you know something else is going on we need to stop right and so whatever that is and it doesn’t matter it’s just like this is a great signal leading indicator. I think it’s also a good indicator too of when you are recovered, you know, and it’s like, oh, okay, when, when, when, when can I, okay, yeah, of course I’m going to train hard no matter what, and I’m going to do hard intervals and there are multiple days that I’m going to stack together. And so I’m just going to be tired on the fifth day or whatever that I’m doing and expect that.

Steve: I expect that.

Hunter: And that’s, you still train, right? You still got to do train when you’re in that phase of like block so you don’t let it necessarily yeah you don’t necessarily let that guide you but it’s

Steve: Yeah. The old overreach

Hunter: Like, well okay at the end of that huge block, then okay what day does it start to rebound and that that guides a bit of this okay well it took five days or it took four days or it took two days, or it took eight days, and now it’s time to start getting back after it again so I like it

Steve: Yeah, I like it too. I talked to Dr. Marco Altini, who you may have a bunch of work on HRV. And one of his takeaways that I thought was really good that I’ve incorporated is just has people measure it in the same way at the same time every day. And that’s helped me get better readings from the athletes I work with, because we are working with athletes remotely, obviously. And one of the really interesting things now that I’ve figured that out, maybe I’m late to the party here, is that I’ve figured that out. And I’ve been able like what you were describing earlier, where athletes go through periods where they may recover faster and periods where they may recover more slowly. I actually think some of it’s seasonal. Like winter, it feels like, you know, a lot of times athletes are recovering more slowly. You know, it could be the moon phase. I don’t have any idea. But I’ve been able to look back and see these things in hindsight and be like, oh, okay, like he used to recover. After this little block of, I don’t know, a few back-to-back hard days, he was back in two days. Now he’s, now it’s taking four. Like that’s, that’s a way to kind of quantify that because one of the mistakes I think people make is trying to compare it to others or compare it to, you know, they get, I think this is part of the adaptation, adoption. I think this is part of the adoption cycle where a lot of times people, and I’ve been victim of this myself, I’ve been guilty of this myself, where it becomes part of my identity. You know, it’s like, what was your HRV score this morning? Like, you know, mine was better than yours. Like, you know, sleep score, I’m going to get to it in a second. Like, what was your sleep score? Like, we’re all bragging about our sleep scores now, like trying to outdo each other. And it’s like, and then we kind of get through that. and it’s like, oh, that’s like the, it’s like part of the ego. And then it becomes part of like, oh yeah, this is a thing. This is how I use it. This is how I interpret it. It just becomes something I do and less about, you know, braggy or that kind of thing. Let’s talk about sleep tracking because almost every device is doing it now. What do you feel is actually actionable? What is decoration? What is hype? Where are we in the cycle?

Hunter: Yeah. You know, I like the fact that we’re tracking sleep. I think that that’s really good. It’s a very challenging thing to track sleep with these wrist devices and hand devices.

Steve: Yeah, I agreed

Hunter: I mean, there has been just like you, right? There’s been many a time I’ve laid in bed and read on my Kindle at three between one and 3 a.m. because I can’t sleep. And it says I’m sleeping, you know, and wake up and you got a great sleep score. You slept all night. I’m like, no, actually, I didn’t.

Steve: I need to bring it to you

Hunter: So, you know, I think that’s just not that accurate, you know, from that perspective. Um, you know, I think until, unless you want to wear a band around your, your chest and have a, a real sleep tracker, then that’s, that’s what you’re going to have to have. But, um, otherwise, you know, I think there are good big-picture views, you know, things. I think that that’s where, um, looking at your big picture and looking at the trend is better. So saying, okay, gosh, you know, um, you know, I’m, my, my sleep is trending downward. What’s, why am I not getting quite so much sleep? Is that something that I’m doing? Is that some part of my training? Is that some outside stress is going on? So looking at those things, looking at your REM length and looking at your deep sleep length again, as an average over a period of days, not just saying, okay, well, that was, that night was messed up because I, But looking at over a period of days, you know, and if I can get my athletes to sleep an hour and a half of REM and an hour and a half of deep, then that’s a really good amount. Like they I have a lot of people perform really, really well when they get an hour and a half of each of those on average over seven to 14 days.

Steve: Hmm. Hmm.

Hunter: So I again, I like it. I think you just have to be careful with some of the little pitfalls there.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And I agree on the device trap there. There’s some things that are promising, I think, more than they can deliver. What about respiration wear? We have this, you know, time wear, similar, you know, obviously the argument is that breath is more honest, if you will, like heat, caffeine, fatigue. Does the evidence support that? Have you played with it? Where do you think this is in the kind of hype, disillusionment, and adoption cycle?

Hunter: Well, I mean, to me, I think this is, you know, and I worked with a company, oh, probably six, seven years ago before the time one came out, helping them develop theirs. And they haven’t, they’ve never been able to do anything with it. But I learned a lot about it. And the, I think this is a really great metric. I think that you could actually replace heart rate with your minute ventilation rate if you had it on the screen of your bicycle computer or running or whatever. And it would be like you say, right? It’s not, you know, it’s a response just like heart rate is a response, but it’s not susceptible to how much caffeine you had and all this stuff. I think from a mountaineering climbing perspective, it’s probably superior to everything. Right. I think that the potential there is massive to be able to say, gosh, you know, if you have this and you’re tracking your mental ventilation, your respiration rate, and you’re looking at this, you’re trying to stay below a certain rate, you know, or you’re trying to get to a certain rate. But once you’re on the mountain, then now you’re using this as a guide for you. And I think it has a tremendous potential for that.

Steve: yeah i agree we’ve been playing with it a lot internally i’m just playing with it we’ve been discussing it a lot internally as our own coaching team trying to understand how how we’re all using it and what people are seeing and i think it’s i think it’s so early days there um but but i agree And just from my own personal experience, and I think this is very intuitive, and you’ve been up to high altitude and done big mountain stuff. And, you know, my respiratory rate at a very high altitude is obviously very high. And frankly, much of the work that my heart muscle is doing is just to supply my respiratory muscles. You know, even if I’m just standing there or sitting there, like I’m still having to breathe really hard. And so I think that there is some sort of fundamental truth into that, that we just haven’t figured out quite how to measure it and what exactly all the things mean and how to… I think it’s sort of a good analogy with your power meters. We have the ability to measure this stuff, but figuring out what it means and how we take action against this data is a whole other puzzle that has yet to be put together.

Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I, I wouldn’t, you know, I wouldn’t, I would probably apply similar things and similar thinking from, um, you know, training the power meter to this. And that was what I was thinking about, you know, heavily when I was involved with this one company that was working on their device was like, you know, there’s got to be, you know, zones. Right. And so these are, these are ventilatory minute ventilation zones. Um,

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: And so then all of a sudden it’s like, you know, wow, I’m, to a certain place because I need to get to this respiratory rate and I need to hold it. And I need to be here for a certain period of time in order to get ready for this training, this big mountain that I’m going to climb or whatever. So I think that there’s absolutely a place where you could apply a really similar formula to, like, power training. It’s like, okay, look, all right. So first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to do testing, and let’s go test you. Right. Okay. And so we need to do some testing protocols. What’s that going to be? Okay. Well, we’re going to test each of these zones and we’re going to test what your, your, your ventilation is at what we call your threshold. We’re going to test it, your VO2 max, and we’re going to extrapolate all these other ones in there. And then, okay, now Steve, I want you to go and do two times 20 minutes and uphill running or whatever. And I want you to be in this respiratory zone. And, and I think that that would be really easy to apply. And then you say, okay,

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: now we know where you are. And then when you do go to a big mountain, then at the same time, you say, oh gosh, you know, this is what I’m at right now. God, I’m, I’m in zone three and I’m

Steve: yeah yep yeah and then two weeks later you’re adapted

Hunter: You’re like, I’m totally acclimatized. Right. So I think that’s that. I think it’s got a lot of potential there.

Steve: yeah yeah i agree i think that uh one of the really interesting things i i have a pet theory and I’m just going to throw this out here to the universe that a lot of the training at normal barrack hypoxia like the people going to the gyms where the altitude of the gym is whatever 12,000 feet or or something like that um and there’s a bit of a build out of these facilities feels like lately a lot of the training effect of that is actually that you just have to breathe harder and you’re sort of training respiratory muscles and so you get when you go out of that environment then you get better respiration. And let’s be, let’s be honest, like oxygen is pretty fundamental to the whole process of aerobic endurance. And so if you’re, if you’re getting better respiration and you’re just better oxygenating your blood supply, you’re performing better. And it has nothing to, it has not as very much to do with the quote unquote altitude in these training facilities as much as it does to do with the fact that your respiratory musculature is being trained and conditioned in a way that is allowing these adaptations to make the muscle stronger

Hunter: Yeah, I’d buy that theory. I like it.

Steve: okay well we’ll chalk that up uh anybody could wants to write about how we can work this out at us now and this is a great segue because this is a uh uh data point that we use a fair bit at a pill athlete that i don’t know if if your guys use with cycling very much but pulse ox pulse oxygenation and one of the things that we are doing is we’re coaching people who are doing both the normal barric hypoxic training but also the normal barric hypoxic like the hypoxicotent. And we’re using Pulse Ox data, you know, to adapt their exposure plus time and the simulated altitude. And these are the different variables. One of the really interesting things with this is, is how I thought like the individual response to training was varied. Like the individual response to these stressors is just really all over the map. Like you can have, like, 10 people go to quote unquote altitude in a hypoxic tent over 14 days. And they are all different. All of them are different. And so it’s very interesting. I mean, they all adapt, but just in very different rates, different like they did. It’s very, it’s very, I’d say finicky. And I think we’re still in the early stages of understanding exactly which, like, because the metrics are like, what is your pulse ox? Like, that’s going to actually vary if you’re at, let’s say, 4,000 meters and you and I are both sleeping at 4,000 meters. Our pulse ox are going to be different because we’re just different humans, different bodies. Then the altitude is going to, and the progress of altitude, sleeping altitude, it may vary. You could put everybody, you know, you could do a controlled study and put everybody. everybody on the same rate. But then how quickly they adapt to those altitudes and those simulated altitudes is just really different.

Hunter: Wow, wow super fascinating. Yeah, I mean just really small amounts because you know like we just

Steve: Have you done any work with that?

Hunter: Don’t use them in cycling, and I’ve coached a few mountain climbers over the years, and I’ve done some mountains myself. So I only have a handful of experiences with that. But I agree. I think that, to me, you know, that would be one of those, you know, and I also, you know, I did some work with that. And I can’t remember what’s the name of the company that made the thing that was like a sleeve that goes around your leg. M Moxie, right? Moxie, right? Moxie, you know, and I was like,

Steve: Oh, um yeah

Hunter: I looked at that, and I was like, you know, that’s, that’s also a great- I thought it was a potential really good thing for mountaineers as well. Because again, the same thing, it’s like, okay, can, you know, like, like you mentioned, can you use it so that you’re getting, you know, your, your pulse oxidation, your level down to a certain place, hold it there, right? For five minutes and then recover. And then when it recovers, okay, that lets you now go again. Right. Kind of ideas about well, when should you actually do the second interval when should you do another, you know, stat or something like that? So I always thought that that would be a great way to use that tool, especially in the mountaineering community and, you know, the cycling community too it just never really

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: caught on I’m not sure exactly why because I maybe because just power units are so easy in our world.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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Steve: Here’s one that I personally have no experience with, but I know that you, that’s big in cycling. Coaches on our team and a pilacy have experience we’ve talked about a little bit internally but the core body temperature and heat training and I think we should separate those but heat work has gotten kind of serious in cycling from what i can tell like and people are using these core sensors. Where are we in the kind of hype disillusionment adaptation adoption cycle?

Hunter: Yeah, yeah um, I think that they’re good for people who are training specifically for a hot event, right it doesn’t I don’t think there’s any, uh really yeah there’s not really a use case

Steve: Hmm. to heat.

Hunter: scenario unless you’re doing it for a specific event um i’ve worked with a bunch of athletes now who who’ve used them and uh and they’re really good they work really really well uh and uh you know like you know this past couple years national master national championships have been in augusta georgia in august of all times in all places i mean just you know 90 humidity 90 degrees blazing hot just brutal right um and so you know for for when you’re training for a really hot then it makes perfect sense because you can go out and say, okay, I need to get my core body temperature to 102. And once I get it to 102, then I know that I’m now simulating what it’s going to be when I’m just at, you know, riding around and, and this temperature. And so now I need to start doing intervals and I need to keep my core body temperature up to do that. So I think that there’s, um, some good use case scenarios for that. Um, I’ve coached a bunch of as well. And so, you know, it’s a great, great thing for race car drivers, because they’re in hot cars. And, you know, we can do some real heat acclimatization on their bicycles, you know, tons of these guys ride bicycles, and are super fit now. And, and so it’s like, Oh, well, we can, we can really get them ready to be in a hot car, especially if they’re doing something like 24-hour Le Mans or 12-hour Sebring or something like that where it’s like

Steve: How cool

Hunter: yeah, they’re going to be in a car for a while, a two-hour stint or two-and-a-half-hour stint or something in the car.

Steve: Yeah, as a closet car guy i kind of like the idea of that. I’ve never workedwith like endurance motor like i have worked with athletes who’ve done, like the Baja 1000 uh, but motorcycle

Hunter: Ah, yeah.

Steve: And that was also fun. It’s really fun as a coach to get these left-field challenges that you kind of have to, like, deconstruct what you know and reconstruct it for a new thing. So, and we have quite a bit of experience and, you know, particularly Chantel Robitaille, I believe, you know, our director of coaching, she’s got a lot of experience with heat training and also the crossover between heat training and acclimatization. science that’s been shown that to be effective that we’ve been using internally as well in addition to the normal baric hypoxic training so that’s really interesting i want to keep us going what about substrate universe utilization substrate utilization that’s a big tongue twister for me it’s something that’s now been made visible in training peaks they call it fueling insights i believe sort of a carb versus fat breakdown of a workout what are your thoughts where are we on

Hunter: Yeah, you know, I’m skeptical of this, you know, because I think that this is a, I mean, if you go in and you do a VO2 max test and you’re getting your expired gases and they know, you can tell exactly what your utilization is of fat carbs and stuff. So, you know, I think that there’s, um, there’s some, some, some places for it. I don’t know if it’s like, um, you know, it’s something that we can do a lot with, um, the, the, you know, the fat burning mechanism, right. Is really fascinating. And, uh, and our ability to use carbs is really fascinating.

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Hunter: You know, I came from cycling into, uh, climbing and mountaineering after I retired from cycling. I was very much a carbohydrate addicted addict. And I would read these stories of guys like Steve House who would go up mountains for 24 hours and 48 hours with like a Hershey bar and a liter of water. And then like, I’m like, how are they doing that? Like, they’re not even eating.

Steve: Well, like, on that, I want to say, like, on the Slovak Direct, when we did 60 hours, we planned 48, and we brought 48 goo packets per person for three guys, which was so heavy. When we picked up our backpack to go, we actually were like This weighs too much. We just reached in and grabbed a couple handfuls of goo packets, just threw them back because we could, and we didn’t eat them all. We didn’t, we didn’t even come close to eating them all. Cause we just couldn’t, you know, you know what happened. Everybody listening probably knows what happens after we tried to live on goo for two days. So yeah. I have to say I’m a little bit skeptical too. I think it’s super interesting. We should do another deep dive into sort of the physiology of this stuff. Keeping on the technology topic though, so one of the things that is not yet here, but I think some people are trying- oh, I know people are trying- continuous lactate monitoring. monitoring. What’s holding this up and what would change if we had lactate monitoring in real time?

Hunter: Yeah. Right. Right. You know, I think that I think that there there’s not too much holding them up, really, to be honest, because it’s very similar to the continuous glucose monitor. And it’s, you know, the continuous glucose monitor. And we’ll talk about this in a second. But the lactate monitor is going to be a similar thing where it’s got a little filament that goes in what’s called your interstitial fluid. Right. fatty layer of your skin, right? And it goes in that area. And then, you know, this little filament has a specific oxidase on it. There’s a glucose oxidase on the one for glucose monitors. So the lactate one is going to have a different one. And so I think that’s, that’s going to be there. To me, the issue at this point is the fact that, you know, that different muscles are going

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Hunter: have different levels of lactate. And I think that’s, that’s the big law, the issue. It’s like, okay, well, if I’m riding my bicycle and I’m at my limit, right? Yeah. My quads are burning. Okay. But of course my triceps aren’t. And if the thing’s measuring at my triceps, then it’s not going to get the data, is it? It’s not going to get the data, you know? So I think that’s the big holdup at this point is the fact that it is localized. Um, so I think that they’re hopefully working on it. If, if that comes around, I see it similar to being actually in the respiratory rate where it allows you to reach like, just like, okay, I need to reach this certain, this minute ventilation number, and I need to hold it for this many minutes. It’s like, oh, I can reach this lactate level and I can hold it for this many minutes. And then when my lactate comes back down, then I can go again. Right. And so I can continue to, to, to create this stress, this training stress, be real, be real clear with the training stress. So

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: I think the potential is there. I just don’t know if it’s going to be, you know, the ability to do it really well. So we’ll see.

Steve: hmm yeah by the time this airs it’s not quite available yet we’re still in the testing phase but we develop some code internally to measure aerobic threshold over time in the same way a coach does like right like by you know you probably don’t have to have people go and do an aerobic threshold test if you want to know their aerobic threshold you can just go and look at some of their and you can like just pull out blocks where they’re at their zone two or help whatever number you want to use for whatever system you’re using and you can you can figure it out within plus or minus a beat or two right and so um i think that this is this is going to be this a non-invasive way to do it and we’re going to roll this out with our training group athletes first because we have like a nice control group of about 100 people right now where we can have them in there It’s going to be like backwards looking and it’s going to basically give only calculated on a weekly basis. Of course, you could calculate it daily, but it would be all in place. Right. And it doesn’t make sense. And we’ve done that. So we have to smooth it out and show it to people graphically and numerically and so on. So that’s sort of an interesting I’d love to give you a behind-the-scenes look. look at it sometime. It’d be fun. I think you would enjoy seeing that as being a tech expert that you are. So let’s talk about your domain, continuous glucose monitoring. I wanted to kind of set aside some specific time for this and go pretty deep into it as you’ve just published a book about it. But also, I think it’s really interesting where it is in this hype disillusionment adaptation. I’m going to get that before the end of this. Hype disillusionment adaptation sort of cycle.

Hunter: Great, right?

Steve: You know, a few years ago, we had this company, Super Sapiens, and they were really pushing it. And it was getting a lot of PR, if technology can get a PR. And my outside view, I never tried it. Because, you know, with a lot of these things, with training in tech, I’m actually usually not an early adopter; I’ll be honest. I’m more of a wait-and-see camp guy. And so I sort of watched in sort of 2022, a lot of people were using them, but then it seemed like everybody I knew had taken them off by 2023. So where are we? Where do you see this? And how should we think about this technology as endurance athletes?

Hunter: Yeah. Big question. It’s interesting, right? Super Sapiens came along. Phil Sutherland, the guy who was a pro cyclist, is the owner of the Team Type 1 pro cycling team and has been around for a long time. And he’s a Type 1 diabetic and has been using continuous glucose monitors for a really long time. And he came in to the world and realized this is going to change everybody’s world athletically and was very successful in raising a lot of money and creating Super Sapiens. And, you know, I think that actually kind of, that was a really good thing. And then at the same time, it was not a great thing because, you know, it would have been, it’s going to follow the same kind of cycle as Power Meter somewhat in the fact that you get one and you don’t know what to do with it. Like, what does this number mean? Like, what does 120 milligrams per deciliter mean? Is that good if I have that when I wake up in the morning? Is that bad if I have that when I wake up in the morning? Is that good if that’s what it is when I’m training? Or is that bad? And where should it be? And so there’s this lack of knowledge. on it. And so he was able to basically just pump the whole system full of all of these things and get everybody on it before they were ready to receive it, before they were ready to, like, there was any information about it and how to use it. Like, how do I actually use this? Nobody knew. And so, you know, that’s what basically I did. I spent the last, you know, three years, four years, you know, researching this, learning it, figuring it out, you know, and writing the book, training and competing with a continuous glucose monitor, um, to, so that there would be this education. So you could say, okay, gosh, I can get Hunter’s book and I can get a CGM and I can read his book while I’m using a CGM and I’ll, I’ll understand what happens when I get this glucose spike or what happens when I get this trough or what happens when I get this thing we call the slow it’s in a place right now where um you know it’s an educational state so it’s like we had this big hype it kind of came down because nobody knew what to do with it and now we’re here and now it’s like okay in order for it to come back up again you know people have got to understand how to use it and once they understand how to use it then it’s like oh wow this is a really amazing tool and i can see using this on a regular basis now that I know how to use it. So I think we’re in that kind of phase right now at the bottom. I’m hoping we’re at the beginning of the uphill climb for that.

Steve: Okay.

Hunter: So, yeah.

Steve: So you briefly described earlier how a CGM works. And I think for those that are really curious, you need to go get your book and get all the knowledge and wisdom but you did state as I understood it that CGMs are not for everyone so I want to understand who shouldn’t be wearing one and how do you, as a coach, kind of decide or triage that decision with an athlete?

Hunter: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that the people who probably shouldn’t wear one of these things are, you know, are also the same folks who probably shouldn’t use power meters. They just get obsessed with the numbers.

Steve: Hmm.

Hunter: And, and, and I think that’s, those are those folks who just become so obsessive about something that they just, it just, it hurts their performance. And, you know, when you get one of these things, the first thing you realize is that like, oh my God, my glucose went to 200, you know, and it’s huge spike and it goes up and it comes down and it goes back up and it comes down and you’re like, what is happening? Right. And then, you know, the natural inclination is like, I’m done. I’m just never going to eat carbs again. Right. I’m just going to flatline my glucose. Right. I’m just never going to eat carbs. And it’s like, no, that’s not the answer. Going keto is not the answer. And so, you know, we need carbs. We are endurance athletes. We need tons and tons of carbs. And that’s a natural cycle. It’s a natural thing to have glucose spikes. That’s normal. And so I think that’s where, you know, if somebody just gets so freaked out about this, the numbers going up and then coming down and they have to be, they have to realize like, okay, that’s okay. It’s okay. I’m not, I’m not having a heart attack. Nothing’s happening here. It’s just normal physiology. You’ve been doing it for 30 years, 40 years of your life.

Steve: Right, right, right, right. Um, I think that that’s great guidance. I think that it’s also really timely that all these athletes, both serious amateurs and professionals, are training and racing on more carbohydrate than ever before and going faster than ever before dramatically faster. And so it is like, I think that’s a really, in a way, a healthy thing for us to realize that eating is good. When you’re an athlete, you need to eat, you need to eat actually quite a lot. And to that point, endurance athletes run higher daytime glucose in the general population. And how do you help people understand that? Is it a problem to manage? Or is it just a different normal because we’re endurance athletes.

Hunter: Yeah, it’s definitely a different normal because we’re endurance athletes, you know, and the, I would say there’s probably a very large percentage of us and probably lots of people listening to this, um, right now that they’ve gone and had their HBA1C tested by their doctor kind of high. It’s been like maybe borderline pre-diabetic. And they’re like, your doctor’s like, you’re pre-diabetic. And you’re like, but I’m like super fit and healthy and 10% body fat. And I just climbed Mount Everest and all this stuff. Right. And it’s like, no way. Right. And that’s right. No way. Um, because HbA1c measures what’s called the glycation of the hemoglobin molecule so basically how much glucose attaches itself to the hemoglobin molecule over a period of time all right now so it’s an average of an average and um at a population thing, it’s probably a pretty good thing, okay but for us as endurance athletes, imagine right, okay i’m going

Steve: Hmm.

Hunter: )ut for a six-hour training ride I’m going to keep my glucose over 120 for most of that six hours. It’s going to be going between 120 and 180 for that whole time. If I let it go below 120, I’m eating again. And then afterward, I’m coming back. Now I’m having a recovery shake with tons of carbs in it. Now my glucose goes through the roof, which you want because, you know, you want a glucose spike afterward because that releases insulin. Insulin is the key that opens the door to the cell and puts all that glucose back in the cell to replenish your glycogen stores. And then an hour later, I’m having another meal now to get more glucose in, to replenish more glycogen stores. My glucose goes high again. And if I’m doing that same thing the next day, I’m probably having another meal before I go to bed because now I’ve got to get even more replenishment before I do this again the next day. Um, so you could have a day where your average glucose is 130, um, as an endurance athlete. And yeah, it’s going to say you’re freaking diabetic maybe, you know, but no, you’re not right. It’s, it’s a transitory thing, right? It’s one thing if you’ve got, if you’re just sitting on the couch and, you know, getting fat and you’re just bringing to eating chips and candy bars and Cokes and drinking Cokes. Right. It’s not moving anywhere, whereas we are using it. We’re taking it in. We’re using it. It’s a transitory state. It’s constantly being shuttled in and out of these cells and moving. Um, so it’s not something to worry about. You know, what I look at when, um, you know, when, which I think is a better measurement as an endurance athlete, if you’re not in a really heavy training state where you have day to day, really hard workouts, right. And you can just have a normal dinner at night. Um, and you have a dinner at say, let’s say six o’clock or something and you go to bed and your glucose goes below 100 milligrams per deciliter and stays there all night long, you wake up in the morning, you are a-okay, right? That means you don’t have any insulin resistance. That means that your cells are working correctly. They’re letting the glucose come in. Insulin’s working correctly. All these things are happening and you’re good. Now, if you’re an endurance athlete and you ate your meal at six and you’re not training the next day and you go to bed and your glucose is 180 and it still is 150 when you wake up in the morning, okay, you know what? Maybe you need to talk to your doctor. You may have some insulin resistance at that point. So there could be so many things going on. Diabetes is caused by lots of different things. But that’s where I think that, you know, just keep that in mind as endurance athletes, our glucose levels are going to be much higher than the normal population.

Steve: Do you see CGMs as a performance device, or is it a behavioral management device?

Hunter: It’s both. It’s both um it’s a performance device and the fact that it allows me, number one to

Steve: Hmm.

Hunter: Um, so let’s say maybe not in mountaineering so much, um but uh in cycling for sure and in other sports like running, ultras, triathlons, things that start really hard, then we want to prime

Steve: Yeah, running for sure. Ultras.

Hunter: Our system, right? So it’s like my glucose is sitting at 110 or whatever before an event. Let’s say that’s some kind of a race or something. And actually, you know, I need to get my glucose to 140 because that’s really where my optimal performance zone is for glucose. And so what am I going to do? I’m going to slam a gel 10 minutes before the race start, right? Like I’m going to be on the start line. I’m squirting a gel in my mouth, you know, because I want my glucose to come up and then the race starts and I’m already 140. And so I’m priming the system. And then during that event, then I’m now saying, okay, I need to keep it so that it stays above 120. And so I’m looking at it occasionally every 5, 10, 15 minutes or whatever. Okay, cool. It’s good. I’m 130. I’m 140. Oh, man, now it’s 125. Oh, now it’s 120. Oh, crap, it just went to 115. I need to eat before it gets too low. So I’m using it that way as a performance tool during the event. And then for afterward too, I’m just ensuring that I’m getting enough carbs afterward. Do I get a spike up to 180 or even 200 milligrams per deciliter afterward with my meal or my recovery shake or whatever so I can replenish and read? Oh yeah, no problem. Oh, no, I’m done. Not like that. I can do it. No problem.

Steve: Like, just give me the pasta

Hunter: Exactly.

Steve: Yeah, that I mean, when I was training and climbing full-time, and that was my job, I mean, it was shocking how much of my week was spent on shopping, food prep, and eating. It was like, that was like a big part of my job. Like, that took up a huge part of my week. Just those things. Yeah. I mean, you eat so much when you’re training hard. And our recreational athletes that are also, I think it’s also really good for them to hear this. because so many of them, they’re going to the office, they’re sitting at their desk, they’re skipping lunch, they’re having a bagel for breakfast and three cups of coffee. And then on the other side of it, we had an athlete once, he shall remain anonymous, but we nicknamed him the cookie monster because he ate a bag of cookies during – that’s what he brought to work every day. It was like a bag, a commercial bag of chocolate chip cookies. And that was what he had. That was like, that was his food. And he thought that was totally, you know, that’s a different problem, right? But like, I think I wanted to segue into this sort of behavior chain, because there, there can be quite a, quite a wide range of perceptions as to what healthy diet and what healthy eating looks like. And how do you leverage this technology if you’re trying to get a handle on your own kind of healthy eating as an athlete?

Hunter: yeah yeah yeah you know and and so the the the other piece too is that um you know when you do this multi-day stuff right when you’re doing multi-day you have to almost go to bed stuffed right and it’s it’s a and it takes it it’s um i do i do cycling camps i do like six or eight cycling camps a year and i recently just finished one and um you know and we go out to dinner every night and after i put everybody on my camp on a cgm so we can look at their data and that way we can i can start to change some of their behaviors um and uh you know after like the first two nights you know i was just kind of carefully watching what people were eating and ordering at the restaurant you know and just watching and you know they were ordering normal stuff you know it was like protein heavy some vegetables maybe some carbs but it wasn’t a lot of carbs and so then after like the second day people aren’t recovering super well and so then i said okay now what i’m going to do is i call the restaurant ahead i’m going to order everybody a big bowl of pasta, they have to have the pasta with their normal meal, or I’m ordering everybody a big baked potato. They have to have that with their normal meal, and everybody’s got to eat it, you know? And, and so then that way, all of a sudden they’re like, what, we got to eat all this food. I’m like, yeah, you have to eat all this food because you’re not eating enough carbs, because some of them are even going hypoglycemic at night. They would come into the morning like, man, my glucose went down to 70 overnight. And I’m like, your glucose should never go to 70 overnight. You know, like we’re training, that’s way, way too low. You’re not recovering. You’re not getting enough glucose and recovery or glycogen stores. So getting that to change and then changing the way that they eat food, you know, the order that you eat food in is really important. So the way that we eat, the order we should eat in is that we should, I call it kind of food stacking. So you kind of stack your food in your, in your belly. So the first thing you do is, first off, if you’re at a restaurant and they put bread on the table, don’t eat it, right? That’s the last thing you should eat. You’re going to eat your carbs last, right? So don’t even eat. You got to be whole, you got to be disciplined, but you do a salad first and you do vinegar on the salad. Don’t do oil. Don’t do a bunch of crap on there. Just put vinegar on it. Balsamic vinegar is great for you. It contains acetic acid and it works in three different ways to help make your cells more um more available to uptake glucose to help lower a glucose spike as well so that’s the first thing you stack in is a bunch of fiber from your salad with vinegar then on your plate right you got veggies you got protein you got carbs i’m gonna eat all my veggies now so i’m gonna stack more fiber in now right i’m to get all that in now because there’s a lot of nutrients right there you need all those nutrients and vitamins and fiber in next then i’m going to eat my protein I’m going to eat all that. I’m not going to, I’m not eating and picking between these things, right? I’m, I’m focused on one thing. I’m eating all my, all my veggies and then I’m eating all my protein and I’m saving my carbs for last. And that comes at the top of the stack. And so now what happens is as you digest this, you know, all of the nutrients are getting digested in, you know, and then that those carbs come in, your glucose doesn’t go quite as high. So you don’t have to have quite as much insulin, right? Your pancreas doesn’t overshoot. Essentially what happens is it doesn’t know how much food it’s getting, right? It is no clue. It’s like, I’m just going to send a bunch of insulin out. Right. And it’s like, Oh, based on some of the, with the carbohydrates and glucose coming in. So it doesn’t overshoot and you have a lower glucose spike. And you’ve also created the situation where now, um, now I’m getting a lot of good food in my body and instead of filling up with empty stuff like oh if I just ate my pasta first my glucose would go really high but there’s not a lot of nutrition in pasta right it’s just carbs it’s not like a bunch of vitamins fiber and all antioxidants and all the really important stuff that you need too so that’s really key so changing that behavior is critical is to make

Steve: Mm-hmm.

Hunter: sure that you can really change that behavior as well from the order that you eat so it’s both it’s both a tool for behavior and also performance.

Steve: so what where does this like we talked about kind of the the hype that was fueled by super super sapien kind of we’re maybe coming out of the trough of disillusionment what does the you know what does the long-term adaptation of this look like you know we also think about like sensors how long do they last a couple of weeks and sometimes they might fall off and you know you have to pay for each one uh what is what is worth it like how much what is the value Is this something that you want people to use all the time? Is this something you want them to use for a training block so they can learn something from it for, I don’t know, four weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks? Or how do you how do you coach people on that?

Hunter: Yeah. Great question. Great question. I think you need six months of data, right? So you need to things and commit to it for six months to start because six months incorporates enough life

Steve: All right.

Hunter: experiences, right? You’re going to go on vacation. You’re going to get sick. You’re going to train hard. You’re going to have rest weeks. You’re going to have stressful weeks at work. Like you need to see all the responses and how they, how that changes your glucose with the foods you eat as you change your diet too. So I think you’ve got to have six months of data to start with. Once you get to six months, then it’s like, okay, I have a very good understanding of what, you know, makes my glucose change in one way or the other. At that point, then, you know, it’s like, okay, I’m going to use a sensor when I have a really hard training block.

Steve: Thank you.

Hunter: And I need to make sure that I’m training very focused and I’m keeping my glucose in the right levels. And I want to nail all these workouts and recover. So I do that when I have a hard training block. And then also when I have an event like, okay, if I’ve got this event coming up two weeks before the event, I’m going to start using a CGM because now I need to make sure that one, are my numbers good enough? Am I, do I have my glycogen stores full leading up to the event? Then I want to have it during the event itself. And if that event is, you know, a trip to some big mountain in Nepal, then, you know, glucose to take a stash of them. Um, you know, and then that way you’ve got them and you know what you’re doing. Um, I did, uh, what was it? Three years ago, I did the Everest track, you know, and did all Kali Patar and, you know, um, a lot, a lot of pass and all that stuff. It’s so

Steve: Amazing.

Hunter: Much fun, you know, and, um, but I care; I have my glucose monitor on the whole time, you know, and I was making sure I was staying fueled the entire time that I was doing that. Um, you know, and it was a huge difference. So, yeah.

Steve: That’s interesting. Did you notice the change of diet because you were eating rice and lentils? like affects your what how much you needed to eat and that kind of thing or was it not such a maybe the cuisine and those tea houses has improved since my day, spending

Hunter: It’s all dal bhat, man. It’s all dal bhat power, 24 hours. um yeah no i mean i think it’s uh you know it just it just really lets you um it uh it makes you so aware of what you need to eat and i think that was the key right is that um you know all those things okay yeah sure lentils and rice they’re gonna they’re gonna create a glucose spike and that’s fine right again whatever you’re an athlete you’re replenishing you’re fueling for the next, you know, the next hike, you’re fueling for getting to the next spot before you camp. Um, so that’s totally fine. And I think that more, more so is like, oh man, did I get enough food today? And, uh, you can really tell that, you know, when, when your glucose levels like, man, my glucose has been a hundred for the past six hours. What am I doing? You know, I’m not fueling enough. I feel fine, but I’m not fueling enough for tomorrow. And,

Steve: Yeah. One of my early mentors is a super experienced expedition climber. He was a leader on the third expedition I ever went on in the Himalayan, the Karakoram. And he made this comment. He said he can always tell who’s going to do well in the expedition by watching them at dinner.

Hunter: That’s a real critical piece.

Steve: and whoever eats the most, those are the people that are going to do the best. And of course, me being like 28 or whatever, I took that as like a, as a, as a gauntlet thrown.

Hunter: That was a challenge, man. I’m going to win this.

Steve: I’m not competitive, but, but, but yeah, but that, but, you know, and again, maybe like once my ego process that I did that there is something really there like on these expeditions also because you’re are high altitude you’re you’re not metabolizing food the same way you do at lower elevation because of the change in oxygen availability and and so on and so forth so there is a lot to it I’m really glad that the focus is on eating enough and that’s the conversation we’re having because I think for there’s been a lot of damage done by the conversation being, hey, you’re eating too much, which which as a climber, you know, I heard many times and some of us were more susceptible to that message than others, unfortunately. But I think that this is a really good development. Let’s switch back to tech.

Hunter: Yeah. Okay.

Steve: Just kind of winding things down here. What is the smallest viable tech stack you’d put on? Let’s call them a serious but not a pro endurance athlete, like a serious amateur.

Hunter: Yeah. The smallest one, um, I would just say a Garmin watch, right? I mean, I, I think,

Steve: Okay.

Hunter: I think a Garmin watch is, is, uh, you know, it’s got a lot of features, right? You get your sleep data you can track your workouts you can um you know get your heart rate uh resting heart rate. You know it’s got a bunch of things, so the Phoenix 7 or the Phoenix 8 pro they’re they’re solid yeah

Steve: Yeah. What is your preferred tech stack?

Hunter: Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, I would say Garmin watch still, um, I would say for sure a CGM as well. You know, I think that after that, you know, from a cycling perspective, we’ve got to have a power meter. But if it’s not cycling, then, you know, a real heart rate monitor, especially if you’re like, so the Garmin heart rate is not super great when you’re working out. Right. It’s OK. It’s not super great. If you take your watch and you turn it to the inside, right, it’s going to be that sensor is going to be much better and much closer to the skin that those photo sensors are, those light sensors. So then that’s better. But still, like, if you really want to know what your heart rate is, I really like the Wahoo armband. I don’t want to wear a chest strap. I wore chest straps for 30 years. I’m so done with chest straps.

Steve: Me too.

Hunter: Um and like put that on my arm, you know, and i’ve compared both of them; they’re really, really close and super good so I just wear a chest strap i put the sensor so it’s on the inside of the bicep so that it’s, you know it’s also really thin skin right there it gets a good reading um so heart

Steve: Yeah.

Hunter: rate monitor right there, uh you know, and i think that would be that would be it um so

Steve: We basically require that for all the athletes we coach. That’s on our minimum tech stack because we don’t have the power meter. Really great to hear all your perspective on this. So let’s talk about what happens as CGM kind of progresses in this adoption cycle. 10 years from now, what’s that going to look like? Or what would we use? using something that we don’t have yet.

Hunter: Right, oh man i would love to have a crystal ball um um you know i think that it’s still going to be there because um diabetes is such a huge issue right it’s such a huge issue for so many people um and you know uh it’s just it’s very for type

Steve: Hmm.

Hunter: One diabetics who have uh continuous insulin pumps uh they’re connected to those pumps so they can insulin out in a big, in a very, very controlled way. Um, you know, type one diabetics are living longer and longer lives than they’ve ever lived in because of this technology, which is amazing. Um, so that’s really cool. Type two diabetics who do produce insulin, but just have, um, you know, lack of exercise and very poor eating habits, essentially, um, they’re still going to all be out there. So I think that, that, you know, the, from the perspective we’re going to see in the like any of these things the price is going to come down um they’re going to become you know a little bit smaller they’re already pretty small now um i would love to think that they’re going to be uh sensors out there that you don’t have to insert into your interstitial fluid you know that just is a wearable itself a true kind of okay i can get the information from our skin And Apple’s been working on this for a long time. It’s not as easy as it might seem. So maybe that nut will be cracked. If it does, right, I mean, to me, that would be the ideal dream, right? Apple cracks it, and then they send an update to everybody’s Apple Watch. And overnight, 50 million people all of a sudden know their glucose on their Apple Watch. and that would be absolutely amazing to see.

Steve: yeah that would be amazing to see that and yeah i mean i wouldn’t put it past them so last kind of closing for the athlete who wants to do this right isn’t sure to how to start with all of this what’s the one thing you want to tell them

Hunter: Yeah, great question. I think that, number one, you know, kind of back to your question about the tech stack, you know, do research on which thing you want, which device that you want, I think is really important. Because if you don’t do that, you might purchase something that doesn’t really work for what you’re trying to accomplish. So I think that’s really critical. So do enough research, listen to your coach so that your coach is going to always have good advice for you about which ones to get. And so I think that’s really important. And then number two, you know, give yourself six months. You know, you’ve got to spend you’ve got to have this relationship with the data. Right. You have to understand back to the beginning of our conversation. What’s in my perceived exertion? What do I feel like? And what my, what are these numbers say? So like you can start to understand this association, have this real personal connection, give yourself six months of life experiences of hard training, getting sick, vacation, all that stuff. So you’ve got it in there. Um, and then number three, you know, um, use the tool the way it’s supposed to be used. Right. So like, if you’ve got a, um, you know, I’m doing specific between this heart rate and this heart rate or this ventilatory threshold or ventilatory minute ventilation and this minimal ventilation or this glucose and this glucose, then nail them, right? Like do those intervals, right? And do them right. Um, and use the tool itself. I mean, the athletes, and I know, you know, this too, Steve, you see this, I’m sure in all the athletes that you guys coach, all the athletes we coach, The athletes that do 90% of the training plan that we give them crush it, right? They crush it. You know, and so that I think that, you know, just really, yeah, consistency.

Steve: Consistency

Hunter: Oh, my gosh. So those are the three takeaways there.

Steve: Yeah, no that’s great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share all your knowledge and perspective on all this. It’s been amazing. We’ll have links to all the information, including your books, on the page with the podcast. Thanks so much. It’s great to reconnect with you, and we’ll stay in touch.

Hunter: Awesome, Steve. What an honor. Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.

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