The 80/20 Rule: Why Most of Your Training Should Be Easy

Stephen Seiler:
It gets, it’s too easy to cross over that first threshold. The most likely mistake your athletes will make will be to train too hard. To end up in that middle intensity zone. That is the most common mistake that gets made.

Uphill Athlete:
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Steve House:
There is a place in training where most serious amateurs end up, and it’s not easy and it’s not hard, and it feels like work, but from a training perspective, it produces very little. In the mountains, the terrain pushes you into that zone, whether you kind of meant to go there or not. Our guest today, Dr. Stephen Seiler, has spent 30 years measuring what the best endurance athletes in the world are actually doing, and one of the most consistent things he’s found is they almost never go into that zone 3 as we sometimes call it. Welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast. And welcome, Dr. Seiler. It’s such a great honor for me to have you on today.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, thank you. You’re, you’re revealing my age because I’m starting to get up there. When you study this stuff for 40 years, it adds up. So I’ve got my gray hair to prove it.

Steve House:
Yeah, well, and you know, that’s, that’s the, one of the really cool things about what you do is that you just additively get better because you have more experience more, you have just more reps, right? And you’re going to see more connections because you’ve just ingested so much more information. So you just get you just get better with time. Unlike us athletes that, you know, have a have a hard pull date. Well, I.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, I’m on that. I’ve been on that side of the equation too. I’m feeling the watts go down, you know, so, so, uh, but but it is what it is. The alternative is even worse, so.

Steve House:
The alternative is not as good as it. I agree with you there. Uh, I have to just say that, you know, you are one of the first scientists I started, really recognizing your work on my journey of trying to understand how to train, you know, goes back to late 9090s, early 2000s, and, you know, hate to date myself here, but you know, going to the library, looking up. Endurance training and journals and just. And I, and I started to run across your name and uh, started to read your, your articles and, you know, yours in that phase where you were explaining things in a way that were helped me make sense of different. Pieces of of training and endurance training specifically. I did a little bit of cross country, ski racing as a kid, so I was really drawn to that, and I was also drawn to just kind of like any kind of, you know, as an alpinist, there wasn’t really any sport, nobody was signing alpinist, of course, and so, you know, you, but, and you were working with cyclists and rowers. And of course, they were different, but the, you know, you were really looking at these people doing these long duration events. And so that was super important for me and I just, I feel like, hey, personally owe you a great debt of gratitude for for the work that you’ve done. So thank you for that, first of all.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, thanks. And, and, and one of the things way back that, that I started with is that I was trying to look for kind of universal characteristics. And, and, when we started, when I started looking into this, yes, I, I did look at rowers, I looked at, uh, across country skiers, runners, cyclists, uh, to name just 4, groups. And what we saw, what what I saw was that, huh? Even though these groups come from different parts of the world and and don’t really talk to each other. They have, Similar, similar habits of emerged. They were doing things, certain things very similarly, and one of them was this intensity distribution. They weren’t going hard every day. They were spending a lot of their time at a very, what we would call, aerobic talking pace kind of intensity that was sustainable for a long time. And I’m going to say a long time because as soon as you start putting a very precise number of hours or minutes to it, then everybody starts arguing. But, you know, they would go they could go a long time. Uh, and and that no, that long time for a cyclist might have been 5 hours for a row or it might have been 90 minutes, uh, for a cross country ski or a couple of hours. So, you know, different time scales, uh, and turns out that was also important because the time scale was partly a function of the, the ballistic loading, the, the, the eccentric loading on their legs, and, and if it was very low, then they were able to do big long, uh, distance workouts. If the eccentric loading was high, they tended to have shorter workouts, distance, you know, the aerobic sessions. So there was this, there were some central characteristics that kind of shaped the way the athletes trained. Uh, emerged. So you might say that their training methods emerged from the constraints of. sport. And and and that was really important for me to see.

Steve House:
And were those constraints, do you think, created by the kind of durability effects of the ballistic aspects of the movements, the power aspects of the movements?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, that was one of the constraints was just how much damage does this movement due to the musk muscle? And if we’re talking about running, if particularly we’re talking about running downhill, then that’s going to be your kind of highest mechanical load of the endurance sports. And then you go on the other extreme and you, you’ve got, uh, swimming, or cycling. Or you have essentially no eccentric work. Zero. And now cycling, you can get hurt, you know, you can crash and burn, but the the muscle loading is there’s no eccentric work. And so a cyclist can, you know, the really well trained cyclists can tolerate these really, Aerobic sessions, you know, 6 hours, 7 hours. A runner is never gonna just on an, at least regular distance runners. They’re not going to go out for a 7 hour run. Uh, you know, so, so there are some, that was one of the big constraints, was just the physical loading on the muscular tree. Another constraint that came out eventually was that. You know, the autonomic nervous system, if you turn on the autonomic nervous system every day, you create this big fight or flight response. It’s not sustainable. It results in too much stress on the body and the body reacts. Uh, the body will not let you be in high stress mode day after day after day without Shutting you down for protection. It’s basically the brain protects the body, because the body is how the brain gets around. So, I mean, that’s really, if you think about it from an evolutionary point of view, the brain is in charge. And the brain uses the body to move itself around. In the in the environment. And so if the body does something stupid, the brain Shuts down or the brain can put the brakes on. Uh, both acutely and chronically. And so these kinds of constraints. This is part of that constraint environment. I, you know, ultimately, I said, okay, this is, this training intensity distribution is emerging from, it’s an emergent property, if we were going to say, of the constraints. And it’s an emergency emergent property of the constraints that are evolutionary cells have faced. You know, we weren’t always driving to the grocery store. Let’s put it that way, you know, and so.

Steve House:
We were chasing down dinner.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, we were having a chase down dinner. We were having to sometimes skip a meal. You know, all of these different things. So, so our biology is a function of that world still. Uh, but um, but of course, now we’re in a very different world and that’s where we get in trouble from a health perspective. But from a training perspective, you know, it’s helped us understand. Uh, what is going to be sustainable for athletes and what turns out to be sustainable is kind of this 80/20 model is a good kind of starting point to say, yeah. You know, about 4 out of every 5 or 8 out of every 10 sessions, they’re going to be in that aerobic kind of steady. Uh, talking pace zone. You’re not, you’re not killing yourself every day. You can’t, but you need some of the high intensity work also.

Steve House:
Yeah, I want to go to, I want to actually ask you a specific question because maybe I misunderstood it, but it’s, I think one of the more important studies from you that I’ve read, and it was with, uh, I may pronounce the names wrong, but Haugen and and Kuffel, and you guys put trained runners who sessions attract heart rate variability for 4 hours afterwards. One of the things that I took out of that was you had said that, Up to 2 hours below of training below this, We’re calling first ventilatory threshold. Let’s, I mean, we can talk about which zone we’re gonna call that, which number we’re gonna talk, call that, but just physiologically. You know, that what we’re talking about right now, that long, easy, um, effort. That that produced basically no autonomic Disturbance is measured by HRV. I found, like, that’s exactly what, that’s the, that’s the science of what you’re just telling us, right? Like that’s, that’s the evidence of the back that up.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, it’s, it’s one of the, one of the pieces for sure, and and it certainly influenced me. It’s the only study I’ve done directly on using heart rate variability. Because let’s face it, heart rate variability is messy.

Steve House:
It is, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, but, you know, the so-called signal to noise ratio is not great. So you need to measure it a lot and to see the pattern in a in a person. But then it can be useful. And so we did this. Uh, and we had good, well trained athletes, do, you know, a 60 minute workout, a 2 hour workout, a threshold session, and a high intensity session. So we had them do 4 different types of workouts that differed in both intensity and duration. And then we looked at that recovery post post-workout, looked at heart rate variability recovery. And as you said, if they were below that first turnpoint, that first demarcation line, uh, in in lactate numbers, it was going from one millimolar to an average of 2.7 millimolar. So not high, but above that first threshold. As soon as they went above that first threshold, the heart rate variability recovery changed pretty dramatically. It took longer to recover. But if they were below it, I still remember athletes saying to me, I said, they would say, I feel better after the workout than I did before. You know, and they would literally some, they, many of them would get a kind of a rebound. They would actually have higher heart rate variability 5 or 10 minutes after the workout than they had before they started. Uh, so they were getting a, a, a, a super compensation almost in those early minutes. And they felt great. And one hour versus 2 hours didn’t mean anything. It didn’t matter. You know, they were, we couldn’t see a difference in a one hour run versus a 2 hour run. Now, these were, some of them were, It included world-class orienteers. So these were, these are well trained athletes, just so we’re clear.

Steve House:
Yeah, yeah, of course. Um, I. I think this is one of the, I have a couple questions I’d like that. Well maybe we should define our terms real quick. Let’s talk about this first ventilatory threshold or how do you like to talk about this now today currently, because, you know, these things are always changes, change a bit. Some people use different zones systems and others and throw different numbers out there. But if we just talk about the physiology and how you, Demarcate between, you know, How do you how do you explain that currently?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, my my daughter and I just recently published an article on the use of intensity zones, and it was in 100s of of co athletes and and also some coaches, and it is, it’s a mess. And TrainingPeaks, I think, offers 40 different zone systems in there, you know, because they want to be just, uh, you know, we’ll take it. We’ll take you, whoever you are, and whatever zone system you use. But what the system that is maybe most defensible just from a straight up physiological perspective is a 3 zone model, uh, with 2 demarcation points, uh, either a lactate, turn point one, and turn point 2, or a ventilatory, turn point one, and turn point 2. So 2 different ways of trying to get at the same demarcation lines. Because the ventilation changes and the lactate changes, they’re connected. Mechanistically. So there’s a reason that we use both. Uh, so 3 zones, 2 demarcation lines, plus you might call it a max line, which is VO2 max, the maximum oxygen consumption, and presumably maximum heart rate. That’s a 3rd line that we can establish. Because you can work above that line, but you can’t do it very long. It’s it’s, you know, seconds to minutes. So those are the demarcation lines. You could ask if there’s another line that we should have somewhere as the, what’s the low end of the scale. When does when do we get to start calling it training? You know, because at the very long end of the scale is sitting on the sofa watching reruns of of friends or whatever, you know. So, how far above that, you have to go before we can say, you’re in zone one. And that that’s debated, you know, and it probably, it’s probably depends on how long you do it. But let’s say maybe it’s something like you know, 50% or 55% of max heart rate, something like that, you know, some lower end. So we got this scale now and it’s 3 zones and 2 lines of demarcation that we try to find with some kind of testing. But most people don’t test. Most people don’t do really careful villatory tests in a lab or. Uh, uh, lactate profiles. You know, you, you can, you can buy these lactate handheld devices and some people do that. But it’s still a fringe, you know, so, for many of your listeners, most of them probably don’t have a lactate meter, and they’re not buying all those strips. They’ve got a heart rate monitor. Uh, a lot of them, most of them, I’m guessing, probably 90%. Uh, but that’s their, the most likely piece of kit that they have from a, from a wearable perspective. Um, And then they’ve got their brains. Meaning they have perception. Uh, and hopefully that’s a well tuned device, meaning that they are connected to that perception. So now, if I’m trying to help an athlete, one of your listeners, um, Find zone one and stay there. You know, don’t go above, don’t go into that middle zone today because my coach said, hey, I want to keep it, keep it green. Then I’ve got a few poor person’s diagnostic tools. One of them will, assuming you are using a heart rate monitor, what we should see with heart rate is it goes up initially when you first start running, but within about 15 minutes, if you’re in an, you know, a regular pace and even pace, it’ll flatten out. Heart rate will plateau, and it’ll stay pretty flat during that workout. It won’t just go up, up, up, unless it’s really hot that day or, you know, something like that. But if you’re at sea level doing a 10 K run or 15 K easy run. Heart rate should go up in the first 3 to 5 minutes and then start flattening it out and stay pretty flat. So that’s, that’s poor persons, Marker number one is heart rate flattens out.

Steve House:
As long as the terrain is consistent, right?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, and and even if the terrain is inconsistent for a cyclist or, you know, we would, we can kind of, Flat, we can adjust pace.

Steve House:
Monitor pace, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
to try to to try to smooth out the heart rate. That’s a way of, you know, using heart rate as a guide. Uh, you say, you know, on this hill, I’m going to try to keep heart rate below 140 or whatever, you know, to, to try to stay true to the, to the goal of the session. You know, even though the terrain is undulating. So there’s heart rate. Another is, is just how you feel during as you’re going along. Can you, we got this idea of talking pace. Now, that’s not, again, it’s not perfect. There’s some people that can talk at a pretty high workload. Other people that struggle at really low work, you know, so, but on average, if you can hold a conversation, talk about the game last night or the bad call by the ref, with the person running beside you, that’s a good sign that you’re in that zone. You’re in that low intensity zone. Okay, so it’s another indicator. Another indicator is that when you finish the workout. If it was in that green zone and you manage to stay there, you’ll be hungry right away, you can go straight to the dinner table. Now, that may sound like a strange indicator, but it actually is an indirect indicator of your autonomic nervous system response. If you turned on a big stress response, you won’t want to eat right after that workout because you don’t have any blood flow to your stomach for one thing. You’re bought, your brain is kind of saying, wait a minute, you know, you’ve had me in fight or flight mode.

Steve House:
What just happened?

Stephen Seiler:
I got to settle back down and let blood flow come back to your, your splanchnic region or your stomach before you go eat a hamburger. You know, so often we will have, it’ll be maybe an hour between the end of a tough workout and when appetite starts to come back. But if you’ve stayed below that first turnpoint, you can go straight to the dinner table and eat spaghetti. So that’s another kind of indicator that you got it right.

Steve House:
No.

Stephen Seiler:
If that was the goal. So that gives you some some street measures, you know, of of heart rate, response, talking pace, uh, a flat. I mean, uh, uh, ability to go straight to the dinner table. those are 3 pretty good. Uh indicators.

Steve House:
Yeah, and we’ve used, we’ve kind of settled on, you know, what we call an Uphill Athlete world. Zone one is recovery zone. Like as you said, like defining that bottom, when does it start start to be training? And we define that as sort of 10% to 20% below aerobic threshold.

Stephen Seiler:
Okay, but don’t call that recovery, please.

Steve House:
Um, Okay, what would you like us to call it?

Stephen Seiler:
You’re training. In fact, you’re not only training, that’s your bread and butter work. That is truly what distinguishes the best from the rest is the the hours they’re getting below threshold.

Steve House:
Well we would. Well, so this is like 10 to 20% below threshold and then aerobic. I am talking about aerobic, non-aerobic threshold, and then 10% below aerobic threshold, 2 aerobic threshold is what we would call our, our zone 2, which is our, like, you know, our, our bread and, button or our language.

Stephen Seiler:
Okay, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you, you’re, you’re, you’re recreational runners. They don’t have a big wide green zone, a big wide, and so the problem with this, this language of zone 2,

Steve House:
That’s right

Stephen Seiler:
It came from cycling. It came from one very specific group and that cyclist, not only that, but elite cyclist. Uh, and it was hyped up as, you know, this is the new thing, zone 2 training. But it’s, it’s, it’s artificial in the sense that, Yes, in cycling, particularly in world tour level cycling. Those athletes have a huge LT one power, a huge band of power output that is aerobic for them, and they can sit on the bike and do 0 at times because you can get it, you can be going down a hill, you can be tucked in behind a bunch of athlete, runner, uh, a bunch of other cyclists and and be at really low power.

Steve House:
And.

Stephen Seiler:
So, yeah, you want to be above noodling, as we call it, you don’t want to be going so slow your bike falls over. So, then that idea of zone 2 makes sense. But as soon as you cross over into almost any of the other sports, that’s not the problem we have. The problem is more often that, It gets, it’s too easy to cross over that first threshold turn point. And particularly for your athletes where you’re doing a lot of undulating, uh, work. You know, you’ve got a lot of uh, vertical profile. It’s tough to stay at a low intensity. So, to be honest, I wouldn’t use that conceptualization if I was your people.

Steve House:
What, what would you call it?

Stephen Seiler:
your athletes because it will be misleading. You’re the most likely mistake your athletes will make will be. To train too hard. To end up in that middle intensity zone. That is the most common mistake that gets that is made.

Steve House:
And this is what I tell people all day. And so some of the mechanisms we’ve built around trying to help people do this is we’ve said, okay, we’re going to measure your aerobic threshold, and we built software that will do that by looking at their training over time, it finds like the, it does basically like little heart rate drift type tests, like pace to heart rate drift, looks for, um, that, that, uh, drift from, of the heart rate going up, while the pace stays the same, or the heart pace going up is the heart rate goes the same. And uh, the anaerobic threshold. And I mean, I know this is just very rule of thumb, but I want your honest opinion on it. We’ve been saying to focus almost exclusively on. We use the term zone 2. Maybe we should change it. I’m completely open to that. Because these things do change. Uh, we have people do exclusively zone 2 until that’s with those, those 2 markers, those, which I think first venel, first threshold, and second threshold are within 10% of each other in terms of heart rate. So if somebody’s got a, anaerobic threshold of 170, their aerobic threshold has to be, you know, at least 17 beats within that, or, you know, does that track for you, or how would you, like, I mean, I know these are guidelines, right?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, the only… Right.

Steve House:
These are not.

Stephen Seiler:
Here’s what I would do to help you out there is, I would say, remember, if you take a percentage of max heart rate. The problem with that is you’re not accounting for how much of it is your resting heart rate. And that varies.

Steve House:
Well, not max heart rate anaerobic threshold.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, but same, same, it doesn’t matter because the calibration is the same. You’re taking a percentage of max heart rate. And, and, Okay. And and 2 things, there’s 2 variables there. One is what’s your max heart rate, and that can vary from 140 to 210. And what’s your resting heart rate, and that can also vary a lot. My resting heart rate is 35. When I’ve been super fit. Uh, that’s a pretty low resting heart rate. My max heart rate is also low. So I, what, but if I take my max heart rate and subtract my resting heart rate, I get what’s called my heart rate reserve. That’s how many beats I actually have to work with. Because you don’t go below your resting heart rate. So, so if we calibrate and just take percentage of heart rate reserve. Which means implicitly that I know my max heart rate reasonably well, I know my rest. heart rate reasonably well, and I’ve identified that reserve. Let’s say it’s 130 beats. Okay? Now 13 beats is 10%. You got me? And so now you can, that will track quite closely with percentage of VO2 max. It’ll be a better calibration. So, and it’s simple, it’s, it’s straightforward. It’s not a lot of hard math. Uh, but you can, you know, you can use percentage of your heart rate reserve and and then line that up with your intensity as a, you know, a percentage, it’ll be pretty close to what percentage of VO2 max you’re at. Uh, at least on a on a normal day. Now, if it’s 105, you know, 40 degrees C. All bets are off, right, things things shift.

Steve House:
Or you’re dehydrated.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, so heart rate is, you know, it’s an interesting thing because heart rate, Polar was the first to be able to measure it electronically or or EKG belts and and it became a huge thing. Um, and it’s, it is the de facto measurement. But it’s not a great, it’s not perfect. Heart rate is not a perfect indicator. It’s a kind of it, it, there’s a lag to it. Uh, and plus heart rate doesn’t really care if you’re tired. It doesn’t give you bonus points and say, oh, you know, he’s been running up this hill for 2 hours. He’s fatigued. I’ll pump a little extra blood. I’ll increase heart rate. No, it doesn’t. In fact, as you fatigue and go slower and feel awful. It will, heart rate will go down instead of up. So heart rate tells us something about oxygen demand. It is connected to how much oxygen does this athlete need, and if it has it, if it has it to give, heart rate will go up and and provide more blood flow, which means more delivery of oxygen to the muscles that need it. But, It doesn’t care about fatigue, it doesn’t adjust for fatigue. Uh, and that’s why we’ve gotten pretty interested in breathing. Because breathing does. When I listen to an athlete, breathing, I can, I can learn a lot about where they are right now. How how are they feeling right now? And that, you know, and you know that, at least in cycling, they we even talk about it is listening to the opponent as you’re coming up beside them. You’re listening to their breathing and trying to get us, get a feeling for, are they at their edge right now? Should I attack? Or are they under control? And you hear it in their breathing. And they, meanwhile, are trying to hide that. You know, so it’s a tit for tat competition of not giving away. It’s like playing poker and you don’t want to show your cards. Well, and breathing shows your cards. Uh, heart rate doesn’t because they can’t see heart rate. They can’t tell how, you know, what your heart rate is, and it may not tell the story anyway. So, breathing is, turns out is a reason, is a useful indicator, and it’s also much more, uh, acute. It responds acutely to the changes.

Steve House:
When we started with Uphill Athlete years ago, we used to go around and do some talks and we used to bring our Lactate Pros around and we’d do these little clinics and we’d get people on treadmills and we’d do lactate profiles. And one of the things that, uh, because in our first book, Training for the New Alpinism, we talked about ventilatory threshold as a, as a easy way to, to do that. But what we found was that we had all these people who were coming to climbing from CrossFit and these kinds of doing lots of HIIT workouts, and and they could talk at this very high heart rate, but they had no aerobic system. See what I mean? And so, then that caused us to sort of say like, hey, wait a minute, this isn’t, this guidance isn’t working for this pretty, you know, sizable chunk of our, of our, Audience. So we went back to sort of a pure heart rate prescription for that reason. Like how, how can we think about that? And does that track with your experience with people who’ve done a lot of high intensity training? They have a strong heart, they’re, they’re. From the outside fit, but you know, they they can’t, like, they can’t do long and long endurance exercise.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, I mean, I can see how it depends on what you’re looking at, but if they’ve got a lot, they’ve got good strength. They’ve got muscle mass. They pro, you know, they may be a bit of a fast switch type athlete. So they they compensate in short term activities. They compensate with what we might call anaerobic capacity. You know, that’s basically that, that battery you have that’s worth about one minute of hard effort, and you can use that battery, but then you got to repay. It’s a, it’s like a hybrid car. So if you’re uh, one of these types of athletes with a big, big anaerobic capacity. That’s fine, but you, it’s still a limited capacity. If you use it all up at once, then you’re going to need a lot of recovery time.

Steve House:
Yeah, and they’re…

Stephen Seiler:
Uh in cycling. They’ll, they’ll see, you’ll see certain athletes that are great at using these 20-second, 30-second burns where they can get up and over the top of a short hill, create a gap, you know, and then, and then stretch that gap, but they’ve got to quickly come back down in power from that, maybe 600 watts to 350 Uh, but they’ll use some of that anaerobic battery, to, to get away, to get the gap, right? And so, so they, but you, the thing that we have to remember is that, on the trails up and down or on a bike, you know, in a, in a, what we call stochastic work where the, the load is changing a lot, you can, you can pull from that battery, but you got to repay on, as you go. So, so, so you’re you’re going to have to drop pace. to recharge the anaerobic battery. So there’s an ebb and flow there. And obviously, the bigger your aerobic system, the bigger your capacity aerobically, the easier it is to repay that debt. Makes sense? And it’s the true on the pitch, if you’re a football, a soccer player or a hockey player, is you get in these, these, these forensic frantic periods where you, you know, you’re, you’re getting overloaded, and you get on your heels, and then you got to recover on the fly.

Steve House:
These athletes were like their crossover points were super low. You know, they were going, they were, they were 125 beats a minute and they were anaerobic, you know? So, but they were they were still talking.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, they’re not.

Steve House:
Um, so that was the part that threw us off on that. So.

Stephen Seiler:
So the, like I said, the talk, talk test is not perfect and and, uh, you have to. I think one of the take-home messages for coaches and athletes should be that when you’re monitoring your training, Don’t don’t ever rely on one, just one measure. Don’t rely just on heart rate.

Steve House:
That’s a great advice, too.

Stephen Seiler:
Don’t rely just on lactate or just on any of these power or pace. You want to triangulate. And the way we talk about this triangulation, triangle means 3 and there’s 3 basic kinds of data that we can uh, measure during workouts. One is just what you actually do. Uh, that can be past times time, that can be power, uh, for you in, in, in alpinism. I was thinking about this. In cycling we have the VAM. Have you heard of the VAM VAM?

Steve House:
Oh, yeah, we use VAM.

Stephen Seiler:
Okay, so I would do something along the lines of the VAM, but you can go a step farther, and you can get the vertical power. You can estimate the vertical power, because you have the variables at your disposal to do that math. It’s it’s fairly straightforward. Uh, so you can, you can do something like the VAM, the vertical power times time, you know, and get the load. That’s what you do, that’s what you did or that’s the outputs. And and that’s one of the 3 nodes in that triangle. And I would put that one on the bottom. So I would turn the triangle upside down so that the, the, the, two, there’s 2 nodes on top and there’s the, the point is on the bottom, and that point is the, the pace or the power or the vertical, the VAM. and we’re going to call it load. That’s what you, that’s just what you do. It’s an output. And now we want to measure. Yeah, but what did it cost to do it? What was the cost of doing of of generating that output? And now we’ve got 2 kinds of measures. One is some physiology. We have heart rate. We have blood lactate, we have breathing. Ventilation measures. And so those are some of our main, you know, we could measure core temperature, you know, there’s a few others, but the big 3, I would say, would be heart rate, uh, lactate, and some type of breathing measure. Of those three, the newest kid on the block is being able to measure breathing in the in the field, right? We’ve been able to do it in the lab for 100 years, but it’s really tough in the field. So, but we’re getting there. All right, so that’s that physiology node in the triangle. And then finally, you have perception. Meaning just. how does this feel? And what we know, what we’ve learned about elite athletes is they actually use perception more than recreational athletes. They’re better at calibrating their brains and trusting their feel. And if you ask an elite performer. What do you trust most? They’ll say I trust my brain. I trust how I feel more than I trust any of the numbers from the wearable gadgets. So, and unfortunately for us, recreational types, it tends to be the opposite. We tend to hang our get hung up in the numbers. And we forget that the best device we have is sitting on top of our shoulders.

Steve House:
Well, my journey with that and what I tell a lot of people is, you know, I started, like with some of the very first Polar monitors when they only did heart rate in like 1988. and then, I learned what that, I learned what all those things felt like, right? Like I learned what. Basically, whatever we want to call them zones or intensities. I learned what those feel, and after a while, I didn’t need them anymore. Like I used them still for recording purposes, but I never looked at it. I didn’t have to set the alarms for my, to stay in zone or something like that because I, because I knew, and I think that this RPE rating of procedure exertion is, is, is, is, interestingly been kind of a long time coming to the more recreational athletes.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, and and I work with a professional cycling team and one of the things we’ve actually done You know, all the cyclists have this, so called head unit on their bike. They have a little a little bike computer. You often it’s a Garmin unit. Uh, and we’ve worked with Garmin, and freed up, Like a channel on Garmin to, for them to be able to type in RPE, periodically. And and then you can even create an app that’ll prompt the athlete periodically. And then they just push a number on the, on their Garmin head unit. That way we infuse integrate in that perceived exertion during the workouts. Because otherwise it’s not going to happen. You know, and so that’s one of the things that in this modern world is that we have to figure out ways to make sure that all the different technologies are coming into one platform. Because when athletes, if athletes have to push too many buttons and sync up too many, you know, 2 different applications while we’re lost, it’s not going to happen. At least not for most. And so, so that’s one of the issues is, you know, to really make this triangulation work, you want to kind of synthesize it or down into 11 app or one one tool. Uh, if possible.

Steve House:
One thing I want to, uh, I’m working on the second edition of one of these these books. So this is personal for me because I’m right in the middle of the edits and. You know, some of this discussion is can make me question how exactly I communicate about some of this stuff because how, you know, we have, These terms, zone to, uh, first threshold, we don’t like, is aerobic threshold, 2 mill molds of lactate. Uh, we’re talking about, what are your, uh, I forgot that your term already, the heart rate reserve, percent of max heart rate, perceived effort, Borg scale, like there’s all these, like, what is the language? What is your preferred language now? Like, what are we, what, what is our language going to be around this for the next 10 years?

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, well, you know, I will continue to use the conceptualization of a triangulation, triangulation. I also have, I’ve, I’ve reached out to engineers, to try to understand how they, Think about load 3 terms.

Steve House:
Yeah, that’s great.

Stephen Seiler:
I’m going to throw 3 terms at you that, uh, are 3 of many that get thrown, you know, used in the discussion. One is load. Another is stress. And it shows up in things like the training, stress score. Uh from TrainingPeaks. Which will soon find out, I would argue, is does not, that’s not what it measures at all, but let’s just call it a training stress. But stress is a term that gets used a lot. Load is a term that gets used a lot and one more is strain. So load, stress, and strain. Those are different, those are terms that we’ll see in the literature and the discussion. So I went and I said, okay, engineers, how do you use these terms? Well, it turns out they use them in very explicit ways. Very clear, well-defined ways. So let’s imagine, picture for yourself that you are a material scientist and you want to test the load bearing capacity of a big wooden cross being, because you’re going to build a cabin in Oregon, right? And you’re going to build it by hand and you want to make sure that the beam that you’re putting up in the, the, the roof. It handles the load. It’ll handle a meter of snow on the roof. You got me? And so they test this stuff. And the way they would test that, they take one of these wooden beams, and they would put it in a rig, where you might imagine that, that it’s balanced. There’s 2 points at the end of the beam, and then they can load up the middle of the beam with a mass. And they would slowly, they would apply, you know, a 1000 kilos or a ton, and then another 500 kilos, you know, they would slowly up the ante, and they would be adding load.

Steve House:
Or, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
And now that where’s the stress happening? In that beam? It’s happening in the beam. Between the little cells of the wood. The load is resisting, the stress is resisting the load. And and up to a point, it does so. But if the if the load gets too big, what happens? The beam bends. It gets deformed or, In their world, they call that strain. So they they apply the load to the beam. Stress is what happens in the beam while the load is applied, and strain is what happens if the load exceeds the capacity of the beam. And so when I looked at this and saw a thing I thought about, I said, well, that kind of translates in my world to athletes. I prescribe a load. That’s just what they’re going to do. I want you to run at 12 kilometers an hour for an hour. You know, on on the track. Okay. That’s a load. you know, past times time. And we can calibrate that, right? Uh, but then I want to know, well, what’s it due to that? How much did they have to mobilize? How much of themselves did they have to give to execute that workout? A little? A quite a bit or a whole lot. You know, how deep did they have to dig if you want another way of thinking about it, you know, I used to.

Steve House:
And on that day, right? Like, because it’s going to be different.

Stephen Seiler:
And and that’s exactly because the same workout on different days can give different results because athletes are more than just physiological specimens, they they bring with them. You know, the argument they had with their better, their partner, they bring with them that they just lost their job or their mother just got a bad diagnosis or whatever, all of that adds up because it goes into, you might call, the same stress bucket. Uh, our brains are not equipped to differentiate these different kinds of stress. And so it all goes into one. It all kind of turns on the same system. This autonomic nervous system. And so, that’s, that is a really important aspect of this is that day-to-day variation. It’s not, it’s not that the heart rate’s wrong, or it’s that we’re different every day. Because things happen, you know. And and historically, we’re, you know, we may have bad, we, this particular workout is tough for us mentally because it has beaten us before, you know, so it can also be that some workouts are just tougher mentally for us because of past experience, right? So there’s all kinds of issues that play in. Uh, but, but at any rate, I found that this load stress, strain, kind of, met, thinking is useful, because load is just what we do. Stress is what it does to us, and strain is more the long term consequences, and what’s long term. Well, and and we’ve kind of said, if something is a, is persisting. If a, if a problem is persisting more than 72 hours, then there’s a strain response there. Uh, for example, a great example of this will be that heart rate can be lower than it should be. Now this may sound kind of wrong. Because we usually think of, well, if heart rate’s too high. Then there’s a problem. But actually, it’s more common for athletes of all types to experience that they’ll say, I can’t get my heart rate up. How many of your athletes have said that to you?

Steve House:
Yeah, yeah, lots of times, I’ve said it myself many times.

Stephen Seiler:
Okay, why is that?

Steve House:
It’s that central fatigue kind of concept, right? I mean, going back to old Noakes writings.

Stephen Seiler:
The autonomic nervous system has kind of put the brakes on. It’s, it’s kind, you might think of it as a protective, System, that, that it’s saying, hey, calm down, slow down, rest, lay down under the tree, you know, and, and, and so we, if we listen to that, it’ll say, take a rest day. Right? You know, if I’ll say, look, if you got, if your heart rate is 10 10 beats below normal, that’s not adaptive. That’s not you suddenly getting fitter, that’s you getting tired. And take that signal for what it should tell you that says, ah. I think I need a rest day. You know, because that’s just about the only cure for that. You know, if you try to keep training, it’s only going to go one way. Right? And so, So that, way of thinking, load stress strain is a useful kind of toolbox or or construct, I think, for athletes and coaches to kind of understand what am I measuring here? What am I, what’s the output here? And how do I, how do I make sure that whatever I’m doing is sustainable? And that’s going back to that 80/20 model is kind of that 80/20 distribution. There’s nothing written in stone about it. It’s not, shouldn’t be seen as a straitjacket, but it is a good, a reasonable starting point. A reasonable way of thinking about distribution. I’m going to do a lot of good aerobic work. I’m going to pepper it with some quality, high intensity, you know, speed workouts, uh, you know, that push barriers on that. I’m not gonna go crazy with it, but I’m gonna do some of that. But my bread and butter work out. Is that aerobic work? Just like our ancestors, you know, across the savannah. They were chasing down the antelope. The antelope had was poor at getting rid of heat. They would get worn out. And so they did this fatigue type hunting where they would basically just slowly run after them until they wore out. And then they put a spear in them and eat dinner. And we’ve got the same physiology today.

Steve House:
And so, going back to, like, the question, you think this, uh, load stress strain, Construct is what, how we’re going to be talking about. Training load and training intensity distribution and these kinds of concepts in the next 10 years.

Stephen Seiler:
I hope so. I think so. We see a lot of it. When I have talked and kind of stress tested this, construct or concept with physiologists with others. They say, you know what? I get it. It makes sense. It’s, it’s, yeah.

Steve House:
And how does. Sorry, how does this, uh, try, how do you, how did, how does this translate through the, the TrainingPeaks filter, are you using something else, or how are you ingesting that, like, whether it was cycles or somebody else?

Stephen Seiler:
That’s an interesting question. Yeah, I will be honest, and let me first say that I know, Dirk, I know Joe, Joe Friel, and Dirk. They’ve invited me. I’ve spoken, I’ve written a forward in Joe’s book, you know. So, I mean, they’re great guys, and they have really done wonders for endurance training with with TrainingPeaks, dating way back to the start of the internet, you know, and so all honor for that. But some of the metrics, some of the things haven’t really been validated, they’re, they’re more sketchy than others. We can all discuss those. And and so my biggest argument, my biggest kind of, uh, snafu with them has has been the TSS, the training stress score. Uh, and and it’s this number that is assumed, it assumes something that is just fundamentally wrong. And that is that the first hour, the second hour, and the 3rd hour of a 3 hour workout at an even pace are the same. That they are the same stress on the body. And we know that’s just not true. So what that stress score they have, what it really is, is a nice load score. It’s so it’s a per, it’s a perfectly fine piece of variable, you know, a number, but let’s call it what it is. It’s a load score. It’s what the athlete did calibrated, reasonably, but it doesn’t tell us about what doing it did to them. So that’s my only big beef with, with, with them is like, let’s get that right. Get call it what it should be called. And now let’s think about how we want to, if we’re going to come up with a stress score.

Steve House:
How would you come up with a stress score? If you could have a blank slate, because this is, this is like the fundamental question that every coach shouldn’t ask every day when they look at an, they’ve given an athlete a workout. The athlete records the workout. Maybe they had your, you know, head unit where they were able to record RPE, maybe not, maybe they record it afterwards, and you look at the data and then you’re deciding whether they do the workout you plan for tomorrow or not, or whether you adjust it or, Up or down or make it longer, make them go faster, what all the variables, right? And what you’re looking at is like trying to understand, especially remotely, like what was, what did this do to that person and how, how did they respond? and going back to your study we talked about from 2007 I think it was where, you know, these, as you said yourself, like, sometimes these athletes would feel better after the workout, they’d have that, that super compensation effect almost immediately and I’m, and I’m guessing sometimes they, they didn’t, right? And so, Finding that line. And moving that, like getting that right day after day is the real magic of, of coaching and that coach athlete relationship. So what is it in the in when you look at data? Because as you said, like the training stress score isn’t really, isn’t what, how it’s maybe a little bit what’s done to them, but it’s not what, how it changed them or how it impacted them physiologically.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, it doesn’t tell them what the cost was. And, and, and,

Steve House:
How do you how do you think about the cost? How do you? get that out of those numbers?

Stephen Seiler:
Well, there’s some really cool biology that happens and, and, Our brains are not very good at handling it because our brains are good at these linear, Cause effect relationships. That’s what our primitive brain looks for is, you know, lightning, fire, uh, lightning cause fire, you know, and or, you know, teeth, lying, get out of the way or die, you know, clear cause effect relationships. But what actually ends up happening in physiology is when things start to go wrong when we start to get overloaded. We get these exponential responses that happen. The lactate threshold is an example of that. But breathing, ventilatory responses are an example of that. There’s a number of these, these, once the, the, Once things start to go wrong, it’s a negative spiral and it’s a self strengthening. So it gets worse and worse and worse really fast. And we’ve we’ve all experienced that. In the mountains, in the tough workouts is that when you first crack, it goes downhill fast. And, and that’s these, these exponential kinds of processes that turn on, and they are negative, they are, they are stress responses. And these stress responses are almost, they’re essentially never linear. They’re, they’re exponential.

Steve House:
Asymptotic exponential.

Stephen Seiler:
They’re as yeah. So, so that’s one of the things to understand about the biology is that one of the things you try to do is avoid the start of that negative spiral because if it first starts, it’s gonna be difficult to unwind it on the fly. Okay, so that that’s one thing we can learn from this. Now, can we put numbers to it? This is where breathing has become really interesting to me, because when I was trying to, I wanted to do exactly what you said, I wanted to measure the stress response. If I first said, A, load, training stress score is not stress, it’s load, then it, it’s kind of incumbent on me to, to come up with a better idea. You know, and so then I said, well, can I calibrate? Heart rate drift and be super consistent with that. Well, yeah, I can, again, using that Karvonen formula and knowing max heart rate and resting heart rate, I can get cardiac drift and quantify that in a in a predictable or a comparable way. But it’s still not good enough. And the reason is, is because heart rate again is so tightly connected to oxygen demand. It doesn’t care if I’m struggling. It doesn’t respond to my. The stress response. It just responds to the oxygen demand. And often the oxygen demand goes down when I fatigue, because my pace is going down. I’m cracking, I’m crumbling. And then I look at my heart rate and it’s actually lower. When I’m feeling terrible.

Steve House:
And you can’t get it higher if you want.

Stephen Seiler:
Because now I can’t.

Steve House:
And that’s what you can’t measure. You can’t measure that.

Stephen Seiler:
So, so, so, so heart rate doesn’t function very well as a stress stressometer. Now, heart rate variability tells us something, but that’s, you know, a different component and it, you know, it, it doesn’t, you can’t measure heart rate variability during the workout. It’s kind of something you can measure after and when you’re not working out, but it’s not, it’s not very useful during. So, so that’s a problem. So what we found, or I found by accident was, well, my goodness, if I know breathing frequency. And heart rate. And I look at, I calibrate them both kind of using the same idea of of my breathing frequency reserve. You know, let’s say my max breathing frequency in cycling has been about 80 breaths per minute. My resting is 15 and so I know that I’ve got this reserve. And then I look at how it responds, how my breathing responds relative to the heart rate. What I found is that, essentially always, Initially in a workout, we’re underutilizing our breathing reserve. But it catches up. The the max, the heart rate will flatten out, but the breathing frequency will keep climbing and climbing. So it is capturing something differently than heart rate. And it’s capturing that mobilization cost. And so I ended up taking that ratio of what percentage of my breathing rate reserve, or an athlete’s breathing rate reserve, relative to the percentage of their heart rate reserve, and finding that ratio. And when that ratio starts getting close to one, That athlete is cooked. That athlete is on the ragged edge. And that can happen at 85% of max heart rate. Or at 95% of my heart rate. You with me?

Steve House:
Depending on how fatigue they are at that stage.

Stephen Seiler:
So if you’re in a. Yeah, that that even, let’s say you were doing a long run. And your heart rate’s not super high, but you’re just toast. Your your glycogen depleted. You got a lot of mechanical load on your, you know, and and breathing is going up, even though you’re not working super hard. And so then it catches up and I know you’re you’re cooked. We don’t need to do more today. Let’s let’s shut it down. And that, and that’s where we’re trying to go with, with athletes and with coaches is help them have tools that so they literally on the fly. You’ve got a prescription of a 2 hour run or, or 4 times 8 minute interval session, but, You can either feel great that day and and want to go farther or you feel like, you know, you’ve pushed a bit too hard and you need to cut it short. Maybe you stop at 100 minutes on that run, or you do 3 times 8 instead of 4, one day. And then later you’re doing 5 times 8 because you’re feeling great. Uh, and you’re letting the data, letting the perception tell you, do I push? Do I push the barrier or do I hold back? And again, it’s all about trying to live to fight another day. You want to make sure that your, your, the work you’re doing is sustainable. And that brings me to the, to the last kind of way of thinking about this, and that is that, on average, all of us. Are on a 24 hour biological clock. We have our biorhythm. We operate in a 24 hour cycle of sleep, you know, wakefulness, all of these things, this. Diurnal cycle. And on average, as athletes, we need to be fully recovered kind of back to baseline every 24 hours. It’s kind of like if you got a monthly paycheck, You, you need to kind of be in balance at the end of the month. You don’t want to be below zero. Right? But you can do that occasionally. However, you’re gonna have to pay it back. And if it, and if you do it too many months in a row, the creditors are going to come knocking on your door, right? And it’s the same for the human body. You can do the occasional super tough workout where you need 48 hours or 72 hours to fully recover. But if you try to do that day after day, you’re going to be cooked in a hurry. That’s what happens during these really tough multi-day events, of course, is is the athletes slowly deteriorate. Because they’re not getting enough sleep, they’re not fully recovering. And, and, you know, you’ve been there because you do this stuff, right? The Tour de France, it’s a 21 day test of who can keep this going in the last week. You know, the 3rd week. And so that’s that kind of captures some of this, is we’ve got to think about that 24 hour clock. Most of our workouts. We want to be fully recovered in 24 hours. Those are those green zone aerobic sessions, right? And yes, sometimes we’re going to do the harder ones, but they’re going to take longer to recover from, and we need to account for that in the math, in the accounting system. Meaning that we’re not usually going to do 2 of those really tough days in a row in training. We’re going to, if we’re a recreational athlete. We going to have that one day with a really tough interval session, and the next couple of days after will be aerobic stuff, low intensity. Right? So these are the, this happens naturally. In nature, you know, animals have their own rhythm. Good athletes figure this out. That they’ve, they, they keep it sustainable. They they not only pace themselves in a race, but they’re pacing themselves in the training. And I think that’s a useful way to think, is pacing is not just for racing, it’s for training too. You’re pacing the process. Over days and weeks and months.

Steve House:
That’s a great way to phrase it, yeah.

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Steve House:
With your, um, what do you guys have that, the app now that’s running on Garmin, is it time?

Stephen Seiler:
Tyme, Tymewear?

Steve House:
Is that what it’s? Tymewear?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, T-T-Y-M-E wear. Tymewear one word, yeah.

Steve House:
And that is, uh, measuring these respiratory rate or is it measuring the respiratory to heart rate ratio.

Stephen Seiler:
No, well, it’s, uh, Tymewear is is a company. Now, I should first have full disclosure. I have 0 economic connections to Tymewear. Uh, I know them. I know I use the the CEO is from Iceland. He, The company’s based in Boston. I discovered them by accident because of my dissatisfaction with heart rate. You know, so going back to this issue, as I was looking for a better way to measure stress, and I realized that I was breathing out my ears during these tough workouts, and I told myself, oh, I wish I could measure that.

Steve House:
Uh-huh.

Stephen Seiler:
And that’s the that was the start of me reaching out.

Steve House:
And then you found it.

Stephen Seiler:
And I found them by accident.

Steve House:
I assumed that you had some, because I had learned about them through your, your, you somehow. Uh, so I assumed there was a connection there. And that’s what I was trying to understand, like, and also help athletes understand. You know, we’ve talked about the the triangle, we’ve talked about the data and the perceived perception and the strain. And, you know, again, coming back to that idea of, on a daily basis, how much, how much training load to apply? Today, given today’s circumstances, where is it enough? When do I stop? When do I speed up or slow down? Those those levers, those basic levers that we have to to modify workouts? Uh, and trying to like do that in, in real time is, is really like the, the, the magic. And when I feel like with athletes that I’ve worked with for a long time, as a coach, like, it’s really easy, right? Because we’re in kind of we’ve, we’ve established this almost connection.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, you’ve got a link, a language and a trust, and a communication.

Steve House:
And a shared history of like, having gone too far, having not gone far enough, like all those things, right? Like, often it’s, you know, it’s not, it’s a, there’s, there’s mistakes and over missteps made, and you learn from them as you, as you move forward.

Stephen Seiler:
And all.

Steve House:
But for a lot of people, it’s sort of more of this, this blind thing, or they’re self coached, so they’re trying to follow a training plan, and they’re trying to understand where that line is, is every day, and I’m still feel like I, I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but how do we, how do we help them do that? How do we help them find that? Like, what is the? Uh, And not the cause of fact, but what is the? You know, I, I, I’ve, I’ve, when introducing people for to training for the first time. For example, I’ve talked to people about like, okay, this is your heart rate monitor and think if this is the tacometer of your car and like try to break it into like really simple terms, they can understand. I want you to be a diesel and I want you to run at 2000 RPMs for for 72 hours, so therefore we’re going to, you know, do this kind of a thing. Like use these kinds of analogies. So what is the kind of analogy? That, that, how you would teach this, this sense to people like that are out there training and maybe they’ve got, like, let’s say they’ve got a one hour run, like that you mentioned earlier, like. And then, you know, those last 20 minutes, they start to feel what, and they should turn it off and then call it a day, or they get to 655 minutes and they’re like, hey, I feel great. I think I should do another 15 minutes. Like, how do you? how do you teach that?

Stephen Seiler:
Well, I don’t think there’s any one. very specific answer, because we all are different, but I think the most important thing is to give athletes, A license, to recover.

Steve House:
Hmm, fair.

Stephen Seiler:
Because often they don’t do it for themselves. The, there is a tendency for this world that we work in, these recreational athletes, they are high achievers often. In life in general, the, the thing that, the same thing that drives them to want to do, the triathlon or the ultra or whatever it might be, is also in their work life and in their family life, they are just kind of, they tend to be overachievers. And that’s great. I mean, that’s a great group to work with, but they all, they have the same Achilles heel. And that is that every that, you know, they’ll solve every problem. With the same tool, and that is go harder. Push, push through it.

Steve House:
Yeah, the hammer.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, they’ve got 112 and it’s a hammer. And so, giving the athletes that, Pat themselves on the back every once in a while, that give themselves a license to have a rest day. Occasionally, they are the ones that are gonna end up running faster. I see it just time and again. And I get through the years, you know, I’ve gotten 100s of emails from people that have said, you know, I was so skeptical. Because it sounded like you were saying less, if I train less, I’ll get faster. But by golly, I did. I did get faster. I stayed healthy. I accumulated more time on task, and good things happened. I hate to admit it, but it worked, you know? And they lit, they literally was, say, I don’t like admitting this because they said it went against every fiber in their being. To to ease up instead of try to push through. But when they did, they went faster. They PR’d in the 10 K at 40 years old. you know, I, all these stories and I said, well, if you PR’d at 40 or 45. You’ve been doing it wrong a long time, you know? And so. I’ve even had people tell me, my max heart rate is 10 beats higher now. And again, well, I say, well, yeah, well, that tells me you have chronically. You’ve been chronically. Overreaching. So it’s about time we got we solved that problem. So anyway, that’s my, I guess my, my, uh, plea to fellow overachieving types is give yourself a break. Give yourself a pat on the back, take a rest day, and I’ll even go further with the rest day. And I’ve said this before. If we’re, if you’re a, uh, uh, high achieving mom, and you are soccer mom, you’re the coach of the kids, soccer team, you are, uh, uh, a leader in your business, and now you’ve decided you’re going to do an ultra. My goodness. You know, this is a invitation for, uh, disaster, actually, if if you follow, if you follow your instincts, you know, but let’s say that I convince you.

Steve House:
Yeah, sounds like a few people I know.

Stephen Seiler:
Hey, let’s take a rest day. Let’s have a rest. In fact, let’s just schedule rest days once a week. That Mondays are rest days. Well, why Monday? Well, turns out your Mondays are just filled with busy shit. You’re having to take the kids to soccer and your son is a cyclist and you’ve got all this stuff going on and you have your toughest, you know, you start the day with a business meeting, you know, with your team, and, you know, so all this stuff is going on on Mondays. All right, well, let’s just take that day off. And now, 2 things that are both good are gonna happen. Good thing number one is going to be, you’re going to get some rest physiologically. Some recovery time. But at the same time, you’re going to free up some time to get stuff done. You can pay some bills on the bank, internet bank, you know, you can get some of that busy work done. Uh, you can watch your son play soccer, your daughter, and actually be there attentively, you know, and they’re going to appreciate that, that you’re there both physically and mentally. Not thinking about what you should be doing. So, so it’s a win-win. Taking a rest day for most of us who are these kind of overachiever busy types. is we get both physiological recovery, and we free up time. We get some busy stuff done. Double win, and the rest of the week is going to be better for it. And the training will go better. So, so you give something to get more. You, you, it’s a it’s a good trade-off, but I know it’s hard to do.

Steve House:
Yeah, yeah, I’m glad to hear you say that. I just feel like that’s what I say all day every day. One thing I want to ask you about. I want to make sure I get this in. I want to ask you about durability in this whole construct of durability and as a mountain athlete, this has been something I felt like, oh, wow, we’re finally have language for this. And you’re part of some work with Maunder, and you guys. We’re talking about how, you know, as soon as an. An athlete deteriorates physiologically over the long effort, like what you said earlier, like the performance, the 3rd hour is not the same as in the first hour. The thresholds move, the heart rate, the power, or pace relationship.

Stephen Seiler:
It’s a virtual change.

Steve House:
Comes apart.

Stephen Seiler:
You know, your your test scores that you did training, your lactate profile or whatever, they’re not the same after 2 hours or 3 hours. So, you’re not the same you, uh, after 3 hours into a, uh, a tough race or whatever. So, and durability is tries to capture that. And over time, some athletes, partly just their genetics, and and we think partly their training. They have a higher durability. And let’s just define durability as they’re able to maintain a higher percentage of that fresh capacity that they have. Even after 3 hours or whatever.

Steve House:
And so. Is this a separate trainable quality or is it just something that comes along with having eventually accumulated enough low intensity volume over years?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I don’t think the jury is completely out, but there is growing evidence that suggests that it is separate. It is, uh, a separate thing or a a 4th variable if we think of VO2 Max and fractional utilization or the threshold, the what percentage of VO2 Max can you hold a long time, and then economy, efficiency. Those are those 3 classic components that we we string together as endurance athletes and try to optimize. You can’t really maximize all three. Maybe, but, but you, you try to do your best, and then now durability is seeming to be a 4th variable in this pantheon, and, and from a standpoint of, of, how long does it take to peak them out in, in years of training? It’s really interesting because the one we talk about the most is VO2 Max, right? You know, we we tend to talk about VO2 Max and about the perfect VO2 Max interval session and all this stuff. But the fact is that VO2 Max, if we look at performance and development and and youth, VO2 Max is the first one that peaks. So it’s it can’t be that hard to do. It pretty much everything you do contributes to higher VO2 max, both volume and intensity. Uh, and it’s for me, it’s kind of a interesting paradox. Because we get so tied up in VO2 Max, but it seems to be the easiest one to move. And, you know, now it’s genetically limited, of course, like everything else, but if you just train more, you tend to get a higher VO2 max.

Steve House:
Yeah, and we talk about this a lot because, uh, people come to us with these questions around VO2 Max and some, like, our, like, uh, you know, the shortest running event we really typically coach someone for is like a 50 K. So, obviously, VO2 max isn’t really that relevant for someone running the first UK.

Stephen Seiler:
No.

Steve House:
And so, but it’s this, it’s become this thing that in the popular culture has been equated to fitness for, but these other things are, are, I think, you know, efficiency, you mentioned, which is obviously trainable, but then the, the percentage of utilization, kind of what we’re talking about with this low intensity work, but then the, the durability, uh, piece. I’ve got to think that it’s, That it’s trainable, it develops.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, it seems like you can go in order that VO2 Max, if you do a couple of years of reasonably dedicated training, you’re going to peek out of VO2 Max.

Steve House:
Oh, I see where you’re going.

Stephen Seiler:
But then it, you’re going to need some more years to peak ventilation, the fraction utilization out. And maybe even a little more time for efficiency to peek out. And then maybe, you know, so it seems like you can, you know, You can use 10 years. To, to, to, to, to kind of fully, uh, exploit your potential with, with slow increases in volume, you know, and and accumulating more work, figuring it out, you know. So that’s what it looks with. case studies, you know, one of the famous case studies was Paula Radcliffe. Andy Jones had had some test data on her over a 10 year period. And her VO2 was already 70 at 18 years old. It didn’t get better. She trained more. Her fraction utilization, meaning her speed at 2 millimolar lactate, which is how they measured it, was it got way better. Went from like 15 to 18 kilometers an hour.

Steve House:
That’s amazing.

Stephen Seiler:
That’s a massive, absolutely massive change.

Steve House:
That’s amazing.

Stephen Seiler:
And then her economy also got better, 15% lower oxygen costs at a given running speed. Well, what’s that? worth? Well, it’s huge. So, she went from being a, you know, a, a reasonably okay junior to being a world record holder in the marathon. But it wasn’t because of VO2 Max got hire. It was because the economy and the fractional utilization got better. She got more speed out of the same VO2. Uh, and and so, that’s, that’s what we see time and time again, is that’s the kind of the general pathway it’ll take, and it takes time. It takes some years. Now. Having said that, we have 19 year olds that are running and doing amazing things. So, There are not everybody seems to need 10 years to do this, okay? Uh, we’ve got athletes all over the world that, that in all, all of these sports that seem to be, uh, performing at amazing levels at a really young age. Uh, almost more than ever before.

Steve House:
Well, you know, this wasn’t one of my questions, but it’s one of the things I’ve been wondering about, you know, we’re living in this era, like you mentioned, the Tour de France, and it was just happened a few weeks, finished a few weeks ago, or a week ago, and you know, Pogačar is relatively young compared to the winning cyclists of the Sky, Team Sky era, right?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, he’s 25, yeah.

Steve House:
Yeah, so when did this like, we, I was raised on this idea that it took 10 years to maximize your kind of genetic potential in an endurance sport.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, I…

Steve House:
And maybe he started when he was 12. I don’t know, probably on some level he did, right? But that just seems like even in the Armstrong era, like the athletes were much older in these really ultra endurance style events. What is driving that? Is there something changing and.

Stephen Seiler:
I want to say, and this is a little bit egotistical, maybe, but I want to say it’s partly because of a huge amount of information that is available to young athletes. But from these good books and internet sources and power and videos, and that they do not have to wait until they are the apprentice of the master Italian coach from, you know, to see basic good training principles. And so I think that has really changed compared to maybe the 60s, 70s and 80s is that at least in cycling, it was kind of like a, a closed society and you, to get, you didn’t really learn how to train for something like the Tour de France until you came off.

Steve House:
Yeah, that makes sense.

Stephen Seiler:
on to a team and and and then you paid your dues. Uh, for some years as as a domestique and slowly earned the right to challenge for a higher position. Well, now things have changed. And now, if you’re good enough, you’re good enough. You know, and so the 19 year old comes on the, they don’t have to just say, oh, now I’ve got to do my 5 year apprenticeship. No, they just say, oh, beat me if you can.

Steve House:
Uh, he’s the fastest guy now, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, if I’m fastest, I’m fastest, my age doesn’t matter. So things have changed both culturally, but also information access has also improved. Uh, I, you know, I, I, I dare to say that that has made a difference. It’s somewhere in the mix. is we, we know it is possible for people to, like you, to read and, and, you know, learn. Uh, and now you teach others. So, So I think we can thank the internet and YouTube videos and things like that.

Steve House:
Yeah, information. And your all your work, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, information is more accessible. Yeah, I’m just one of many, you know.

Steve House:
Well, you’re one of the leaders in in this. I mean, in terms of like, not just having the voice, but, um, having the, having the gravitas to, you know, and the, the, the history of of working on this for so long. Something I wanted to ask you about is you’ve used these phrases intensify and extensify. I want you to explain those to the audience and what you’re trying to get at with these concepts.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, basically what I, you know, I’m a, I’m a Texas boy, simple country boy at heart, and I like to, I don’t, I don’t want to keep, make things too complicated. So, A simple way of thinking about it is every workout you got 3 choices. From a prescriptive point of view. You can either intensify. Meaning, you can use intensity as a lever to try to drive an adaptation to push intensity in the form of an interval session or 40/20s.

Steve House:
Make it harder somehow.

Stephen Seiler:
you know, we know what. Yeah, you want to use, you’re at a higher percentage of your VO2 max in simple terms. You’re, you’re pushing that that lever. Okay? So that’s intensify. There’s another lever, which is you let duration do its thing, because duration also is a lever, that what we see is that if we go in and look at it, muscle signaling responses, the same 65% of heart rate max work, where you go 2 hours instead of one hour. Well now you’ve used the extensify lever. You’ve extended and used duration as a, as a variable by which you try to elicit a bigger stimuli. and a bigger response. So longer sessions. So intensify is vertical, extensify is, you know, we’re extending the duration, and then the 3rd lever, is restify. Rest. The 3rd lever is to literally shut down and let the body do a reset. And that’s actually an important physiological lever.

Steve House:
Or Like it.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, is, and I, and, and the, one of the, the athletes that I learned the most about from, on this particular level, is a guy, a speed skater, I don’t know if your audience is maybe not super familiar with speed skating, but it’s an Olympic sport and done on a 400 meter oval and, you know, famous American Eric Heiden was a speed skater. He won 5 gold medals in the 80 Olympics for those of us that are as old as I am, and remember, um, and I know, Eric, you know, we’ve we’ve had meals together and so forth. But at any rate, um, that, This idea, uh, of intensify extensify, and and then rest comes from that environment, the the elite performers. And, and, uh, and Nils van der Poel. He, as a speed skater, he, he was a world champion as a junior. And he said in an interview that I did with him, he said, and that was really fun for about 10 seconds. Maybe, and then he said, well, maybe the whole day. And then he was, he became disenchanted by what he had given up. To become junior world champion. He’d given up friendships. He’d given up spending time with his mates, you know, because he was so focused on the goal of of winning a gold medal as a junior, and he did. So he said, well, I don’t like this. I quitting. He quit skating and went into the military. And became a paratrooper. And he loved jumping out of airplanes. And and then, but then he got convinced to try to come back and he, he found out that he had pretty good technical stability. He could get back on the ice and very quickly his technique was good. And so he said, all right, I’ll come back, but it’s got to be on some my conditions and one of his conditions was that he had to, he wanted to do paratroop, you know, jumping out of airplanes on the weekends. And so to make that work, he said, you know, I’ll do whatever you want me to do Monday to Friday. But then on Saturdays and Sundays, I’m doing something else. I’m not training. And so the coach said, all right. So, so in other words, it became a 5-2 program. 5 work days, 2 rest days in a row. And he did this for some months and he got fitter and fitter. He was cycling, he was running, he was just doing general conditioning and everything was going the right way. And then the end of the, the, the, the jumping season came and he said to the coach, if you want to go to a typical training, you know, it’s that season for jumping out of airplanes is over. And the coach says, you know what? Let’s just keep doing this because it’s working. So long story short, for 3 years, every week, he trained 5 days and then had 2 rest days in a row every single week. And he set 2 he set 2 world records. He won 2 gold medals. And then he quit again. But, and he wrote it all down. He, he wrote a, I called it the manifesto, he basically described everything he did. And then he said, I’m done here. He didn’t quite break. There was a couple of, like, breaking the 13 minute and the, and the 6 minute breaks for 5000, 10,000. He didn’t quite manage that. He says, somebody else will have to do that. I’m done. Here’s what I did. And it was amazing. He was just an amazing guy.

Steve House:
Yeah, we circulated that when he published it online, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
But, but it just, he says, you know, when I got 2 days in a row of recovery, he said, I could do just about anything in those 5 days. He could push, he pushed really tough. He had big volumes. You know, he’d accumulate 30 hours of training in 5 days sometimes. Uh, so he just said that he, he started to really understand the value of the 2 days, and then he would schedule his workouts, and he would have lots of energy on Monday, and then slowly it would deteriorate, and he, he, he, he built that into his model for how, what he expected from his own body, that a workout on Friday was different than the, the, the same workout on Monday and so forth. So, so, so he was just a fascinating guy, but he understood the lever of rest. I guess is what I can say. I’m not saying that we should be trained all due 2 rest days a week, but I’m just saying, he really took that lever to the extreme, and it worked. for him.

Steve House:
And he was thinking maybe not consciously, or maybe consciously, I don’t remember reading this, but about durability, like durability is sort of built into that, as you said, like Monday, you’re fresh, but Friday, you’re far from fresh, so there’s like a, that’s almost the durability training is later, later in the week and.

Stephen Seiler:
Oh, and he was doing some workouts like on a bike. And under the interview, he told me, he said, yeah, I could do 90 minutes at 400 watts. And my jaw dropped as a cyclist, I know what 400 watts means and doing it for 90 minutes and and my jaw dropped.

Steve House:
Jesus.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, it wasn’t just my jaw because just based on that interview, he got offers from cycling teams, you know, they were, even if he’d never raced a bike in his life, just that physiology, they said, my goodness. You know.

Steve House:
Yeah. Yeah, here’s some money.

Stephen Seiler:
Here, come, come join our team, you know. Yeah, you know, and he, he said, he said, no, but, but, uh, at any rate, he was, he was a beast, he put out some big numbers, you know.

Steve House:
Here’s a check, like, come, come be a domestique to something, yeah. That’s a, that’s, that’s impressive.

Stephen Seiler:
So.

Steve House:
A lot of our athletes are, you know, the the other side of 40. You’ve done some work about Max Heart rate and how it declines, you know, pretty steadily after 30, but then the decline starts to accelerate is my understanding after roughly 55 years. Of age.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, not yeah, max heart rate does go down, but it doesn’t accelerate.

Steve House:
Yeah, can you?

Stephen Seiler:
What does probably accelerate is the loss of muscle mass. After, yeah, yeah, that’s the, the, you know, heart rate, yeah, slowly does go down.

Steve House:
Sarcopenia.

Stephen Seiler:
Resting heart rate stays pretty much the same, but Max heart rate, you know, we’ve, we’ve published an article on this, but Max heart rate does go down. Uh, It doesn’t, you know, the old Formula 220 minus age was this formula, which implied that you lost about one beat per year of max heart rate. More recent research over the last 20 years, it’s probably more like 0.6, you know, less than one beat per year. So it doesn’t go down as fast as the 220 minus age.

Steve House:
Uh-huh.

Stephen Seiler:
But the thing about it is, it is highly variable. The, our, it’s such an individual thing, our max heart rate. And that’s one of the things that people miss is they think that uh 220 minus age should be my max heart rate. I have never, that’s only in, only at by now at age 60, the max, the 220 minus age is pretty accurate for me, but for most of my life, it was wrong. And I was too stupid to understand when I was, uh, you know, early days, I was cycling. I was trying to do interval sessions and and I couldn’t get my max heart rate to be as high as 220 minus age suggestion. I thought, I am just wimpy. I’m just not tough enough. You know, that was my way of diagnosing myself is I just can’t get my heart rate to 195.

Steve House:
Yeah, are you internalized?

Stephen Seiler:
You know, I never had that high of a max already.

Steve House:
Must be something wrong with me.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, something’s wrong with me. No, there was nothing wrong with me. It was just my max heart rate was 185. You know? But my resting heart rate was 35. So so everything was kind of dialed down.

Steve House:
What is, does there, um, and this study that you publishes what I was all alluding to, and maybe I’ve misunderstood some of it, so I want to clarify. So, the, the, maximal capacity. Change over time. At a different rate than sort of the sub-maximal. Capacity of the heart in older athletes.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, that’s a good. Yeah, I’ve talked about this. I’ve put together. I remember I’ve presented around this is that, that, What tends to happen with veteran athletes is what do we do? We tend to go up and distance. Have you noticed that? We tend to, and we feel like we can do the longer stuff is where we gravitate towards, and the really short stuff, we start saying, I just can’t, you know, whether it’s the rower or the cyclist or the runner, we all we all tend to do the same thing. Why is that? Well, that’s because relatively our VO2 max is going down faster than our fractional utilization and our efficiency. So, so that means there’s a bigger penalty for those efforts that are like five, 6 minutes long than there is for those efforts that are an hour long or 2 hours long. And so we’ll tend to gravitate to longer events because the penalty is the aging penalty is lower. Now, eventually it catches up with us. I’m not, you know, eventually you slow down and everything, but relatively the, the, the aging effect is a bit lower initially in the marathon than it is in the mile. Or the 1500 meter, if you were running a 1500 meter, you with me?

Steve House:
Yep, man.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, So that’s, that’s why we tend to, or that’s at least part of the explanation why veteran athletes will tend to gravitate, not shorter, which kind of makes sense that you say, oh, I’m going to go something short. No, you go longer because it plays to your strengths.

Steve House:
And coming back to the loss of muscle mass, as you age, like, you know, is that part of the re- like, I was raised on this phrase, the heart is a dumb muscle. You know, you’re talking about like how it demands oxygen, right? Like in it, and it is maybe more of a simplistic mechanism than we originally, um, when at least I originally understood it to be. So, is this muscle mass? Is that related to the decline in the in the ability of the heart rate to go, the heart rate to go high? Is the muscle just not as strong or?

Stephen Seiler:
No, I wouldn’t say that. I think. Yeah, the heart is definitely a muscle. That’s true. It’s a, it’s a, it’s cardiac muscle, which is a different kind of muscle than skeleton muscle, uh, skeleton muscle is, is, kind of organized differently. It has these bundles of different all, you know, there’ll be a bundle of type 2 fibers, a bundle of type one. There’ll be multiple bundles of, and all the muscle fibers in a particular unit will be the same. They’ll be the same fiber type. And they all have to be turned on by the brain. So they don’t reflexively, you know, do anything. The heart is autorhythmic, meaning it’s it has its own pacemaker. It’s adjusted by some nerve supply from the brain, a couple of nerves that can either kind of turn up or turn down the heart rate. Uh, but it is, it’s autorhythmic and the heart is the ultimate aerobic or endurance muscle. I mean, by a factor of 10. You know, it’s not even on the same scale as the best skeletal muscle from a mitochondrial standpoint is not even close to the heart. You know, the heart never rests for 80 years. You know, so or six, you know, however we live, you know, it is the rest is between the beats for as long as you live. So it is a remarkable, the mitochondrial density in inside those muscle fibers of the heart is just through the roof compared to, you know, it’s it’s 5 times better, higher density than the best card, uh, scale to muscle. For endurance. So, so they’re different. Uh, they’re different types of muscle and they’re different endurance muscles. But if, if a, if a athlete does a lot of squats with really heavy loads where there’s a lot of static pressure that the heart has to beat against, the heart is kind of like a skeleton muscle in the sense that if it is pushing against a bigger resistance a lot and resistance would be when all my skeleton muscles is just squeezed like during the heavy, heavy part of a squat. You know, and I’m coming up out of the bottom. And if you’ve done squats, you know, and you’ve done close to a one RM, you know how this feels, you’re just like, and everything is turned on. Well, that means you’re squeezing down and the heart is pushing against a super high resistance. That resistance can be sufficient to kind of, create a, a hypertrophy of the heart, a thickening of the walls that is, Not, it’s not going to make VO2 max higher. Okay, it, but it will, you know, it, it does represent a change in the, in the cardiac. It’s kind of like the, the, A response to strength training.

Steve House:
The cardiac muscle gets stronger a bit.

Stephen Seiler:
you know, and it, If you quit doing that, it’ll it’ll come back down. You know, it just like the the muscle, if you quit doing the biceps curls, the biceps atrophies a bit. So the heart can also, to a certain extent, increase or decrease the thickness of those those walls, those ventricular walls. And that doesn’t need to be bad or scary, but there is, there’s a disease, there’s what’s called a cardiac myopathy. Some people develop a disease where the heart walls thicken, but it’s not adaptive. It’s it’s maladaptive. And it’ll get, you can die of, of this type of a condition. So, so you got to be a little careful in, in how you, you know, there’s, it can go different ways. But for the most part, when we do as athletes, endurance training, our heart gets bigger, but the reason it gets bigger is because the, the volume of the, of the cavities, the ventricles gets higher. There’s a compensatory. There’s some thickness change, but it’s in, um, correspondence with the volume change. We get more blood volume. One of the training effects of endurance training is that we make more blood, more plasma, and then eventually more red blood cells, so we have maybe instead of 5 liters, we’ve got 6 liters of blood in our bodies. That primes the pump, the heart better. So the heart, it has a bigger filling volume. It stretches more because of that bigger, uh, blood volume, which then helps it. It stimulates the heart, so it’s a feed forward phenomenon where first blood volume goes up. And then heart volume goes up. And that’s it’s,

Steve House:
Does that happen in adults as well, or is that only up to a certain age?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, I mean, it’s still, we still have that adaptive ability at 40 You know, we don’t lose the ability to adapt. Uh, maybe our peak capacity is going down, but our adaptive ability. We’ve got strength training studies on 90 year olds and they can still get stronger at 90s, 90 years old. So, uh, almost to the grave, we have adaptive capacity if we just are able to use it, if we’re able to, you know, get up and move. Uh, and and, and so that, that never goes away, fortunately.

Steve House:
So, connecting that back to the uh, importance of strength training and how that goes up as, you know, as we age is how we’ve all, I think our landing here, how do you think about that for uh, athletes, uh, especially past that sort of 40 year, 5th year markers.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, you know, I’m there. I’m 60 coming up on 61 and and I can, I can use myself as an example.

Steve House:
I.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, you know, I got to where I was doing a lot of indoor cycling. Uh, uh, partly because the science geek in me, I could, you know, do some science. I could test out different technologies. It was easy. It was really effective time wise. So I had my own cycling room and I was on this thing called Zwift, this, this application where I was cycling against other people all over the world and with and against and could race and anyway, so, so I became a Zwifty, not a, not a Swifty, but a Zwifty. And, and, uh, and I’ve done a lot of, but then I just, then my daughter pulled me into HYROX, if you’ve heard of the HYROX thing where you, you run and then you do a, uh, an event, you know, a, uh, like ski ski org or whatever and then you run again.

Steve House:
Hell, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
Anyway, it’s brutal. And so she pulled me into this. And my running. I, you know, I was like, 0 my gosh. Because everything that could go wrong went wrong for me because my body was used to cycling and now I had to stretch back out and lengthen my body and, you know, and my hamstrings, my hip flexors, everything just was a, was, was just sucked. And so it took me a while. So, but after that experience, I thought, you know what? I need to have a more well rounded training program. A program that prepares me to be 70 and prepares me to be a grandpa and be able to lift the kid from the ground, you know, just and and then I need it’s strength that becomes the limiting factor. It’s not endurance. I don’t need to run marathons at 70, but I need to be able to get up 3 flights of stairs with 2 bags of groceries. Or if the elevator, you know what I’m saying?

Steve House:
All right.

Stephen Seiler:
So strength becomes the limiter for most people. As we age. Both strength and mobility. We, we have poor mob, meaning we don’t have just basic joint mobility. So we’re almost if we sit out on the floor. We can’t get up again. You know, and and so that’s really, I guess if I was speaking to aging athletes, I would say, think ahead and think, what is, what is my, Bottleneck. What is the aspect of my fitness, my function, that is the weak link. And for me, it’s mobility. So I’m working on it, meaning really having the range of motion in my hips, being able to get down into a deep, deep squat, like the, you know, the classic, being able to just kind of sit on your haunches, not using a chair. So I do a lot of that. Because that’s my weak link. For others, it’ll maybe be something else, but, I think that’s one of the things we need to do is, is aging athletes is remember that, as we age, the functional part will go more and more towards, Are you strong enough? to do this or strong enough to do that. It won’t be what’s your lactate threshold? You know, from a from a just a functional daily life point of view. So I would say that we all, once we push above 50, I think we all should be doing a couple of days a week of, of, you know, strength training. I mean, and I mean, and don’t be afraid to push hard, you know, to lift. But, you know, that, that’s again, walk out of the gym uninjured. You know? That, that’s the, the art of that too.

Steve House:
No rule number one.

Stephen Seiler:
is that we have a tendency to do the last set that gets us hurt. And that’s when we walk out of the gym. But if we can somehow avoid that instinct and have some so-called reps in reserve, then again, it will be sustainable and will be better for it.

Steve House:
Yeah, I rebuilding all our strength training guidance on the reps in reserve concept because we originally did everything as percent of one rep max and I was like, it’s much better. I could talk to you all day. One more question. You know, one of the things I’ve heard you say, you know, we mentioned, we talked about Kílian and van der Poel, and you’ve talked about all these incredible athletes. And you’ve said how they all end up talking about joy. And that that’s the key to enjoying the process of being an athlete. And this is, you know, at first I thought this is a really unexpected conclusion for a physiologist to arrive at after 40 days, 40 years.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, it is, and it was.

Steve House:
How did you? how did you get there? Like, what is that, what does that look like for you?

Stephen Seiler:
Well, I think. Whether we, uh, creatives in general, and I take creativity, you know, in wide stand, the pianist, the the, the artist, the painter, the sculptor, the, the surgeon, the, you know, the teacher, the coach, we all, have a certain creative scope. We all depend on the ability to to see and imagine things. And I think all of them have in common that they enjoy the process. It’s work, but that it’s a process that we derive satisfaction from. We develop, we get into that flow state that’s been described where time, we don’t, we don’t, We forget what time it is. Right? When, when you’re, if you’re in the flow state writing or if you, or coaching, working with your athletes or, well, then you, time is not registered. Oh my goodness, it’s it’s 2 o’clock. I forgot the time. That is a wonderful experience. And it is, It’s if, if, if joy is a too big of a word. It’s at least very satisfying. And and when you talk with athletes, they say that, When they were at their best, it was so enjoyable to train, they were enjoying the process. That doesn’t mean it was easy. But, The process was in relation to their capacity. They were in that flow state over time. And they also often had people around them, that they trusted cyclists like Tim Declercq, the famous, uh, the tractor he was called as a rider. He was the guy that was at the front of the peloton, pulling the train, you know, 350 watts for 3 hours, you know, day in and day out in a Tour de France. And he would talk about these tough long rides and and and how just the ride together. It’s raining, it’s crap weather, but stopping and having that cappuccino halfway into the ride was joyful. It was, you know, to look out over the mountains and say, this, hey, we get paid for this. We get paid to do this. And, and, uh, he talked about joy. And, and I was, listening to cross country skiers. World champion. But then it went wrong and he struggled and he says, I lost the joy. And so anyway, it was a, it was this common thing and I just realized, my goodness, this, This is part of it is loving what you’re doing. And feeling satisfaction with what you’re doing and enjoy, you know, enjoyment. Uh, and when that, if that goes away. Then, things go, you know, down the toilet, if it just becomes purely a job, you’re on the way out. You know you need to find something else to do. And athletes will often say that that’s when they knew it was time to go do something else. Because I,

Steve House:
We used to say to each other when we were climbing, we used to say, hey, it doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.

Stephen Seiler:
No, yeah.

Steve House:
Because it wasn’t objectively fun to be out there, those conditions doing those things.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a weird. So I understand that the term joy is for most people, they say, they’re not going to associate joy with an interval session, but, but it’s a different kind of enjoyment. It’s a satisfaction. It’s a, you know, I mean, there’s, I always tell people, my goodness, I don’t drink very much, but there is nothing that tastes better than the one beer. After a really well executed interval session. You know, that is so satisfying. It tastes so good. And then I’m satisfied. I’m done. I just need the one beer, you know, because it’s like a, it’s a toast to a well executed workout, and it, it’s so satisfying, you know, so I think we, all of us, you know, we don’t have to be world class athletes to, to experience that.

Steve House:
No, I think that’s one of the universal things of being an athlete. I think that the recreational athletes experiences the same amount of that as the world class athlete, arguably more a lot of times, right?

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, maybe. Uh, so, so yeah, and that’s, that’s why I, people, you know, why, why study elites?

Steve House:
So.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, You know, it’s like Formula One, we learn and it trickles down. If I understand what drives and what helps an elite athlete, those are principles that I can translate down. But no Formula One car was ever built by taking the family Ford and scaling it up. It doesn’t work that way. And and it’s such is also the case for, you know, if I watch a recreational athlete and how they train and say, oh, I’m just going to tweak this and make it into elite. No, it doesn’t doesn’t happen. Uh, so, so that’s, that’s why I find that I, I can comfortably say to myself by studying elite athletes. I can, I can learn things that I can use and help, uh, regular folks and and, uh, and I, I feel confident that we’ve done that.

Steve House:
You absolutely have, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, that, that it works, not just me, but, but by understanding high performance were, were, uh, able to inform the process all the way down to my mom, you know, whoever it might be.

Steve House:
Yeah, and I mean, you know, I got to say, like, I, I started this by this podcast by saying this, but I mean, you know, learning from you is one of the first things, first steps in my journey with this that started 25 years ago, and, you know, and one of the reasons I turned to this as I left being professional climber was that it was something I could do to help people. I could pass on the knowledge that I had learned through my own trial and error, through my own hours in the library, reading you and your, your, your, your colleagues, works to try to like put, start to put things together in, in a way that helps mountain athletes in, in my community. And, and so in a way, you’ve had this pyramid effect that you probably never intended, right? But like your, your impact has been, has been much bigger than I think you would ever know because there’s, there’s so many, like, I feel like I’m just like one of the apostles out there, like, talking about what Dr. Tyler is saying and explaining it again and then, and, yeah.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, I appreciate it. But I, you know, I think what helped make me decent was making lots of mistakes when I was young.

Steve House:
So we’re we’re all.

Stephen Seiler:
Uh, the best coaches. We’ve all, you know, it seems like the best coaches are often those who have made some mistakes and they, and it has driven them to learn. The natural athletes, they often don’t make the best coaches because they don’t really know how to explain what they do because they didn’t have to understand it. They just could make it happen. So maybe that’s our way of, of, uh, paying it back is, uh, you know, we at least have something useful from all those mistakes we made, uh, in our youth, you know.

Steve House:
And the ability to admit and learn from the mistake is not universal either. So, like, that’s, that takes a certain level of, um, you have to have been beaten around, knocked around by life a little bit, most of us, before we could, before we could take that, uh, lesson and actually integrate it.

Stephen Seiler:
That’s right.

Steve House:
So I think that’s that’s part of it too.

Stephen Seiler:
Well, thanks, thanks for the, the, the warm words and and I’ve, like I said, I’ve got your books on my bookshelf, so I, You know, I still in, I find in almost any of the works from good coaches. I find little pieces that I can pull in. So it goes both ways over time. So I’ve I’ve read. Of course, when I, you know, found one of your books, I said, all right, has he quoted me? Is it correct? Okay, this is pretty good. Yeah, I like this. And then I look, you know, oh, and I like the way he explained that, you know, so I think it’s a, Constant, you know, I’ve got a whole bookshelf of different books and different ideas from scientists and from coaches and and it all contributes. So we learn from each other. Uh, and I think that’s, that’s, that’s, if one of the things about sports science is it, by its very nature should be applied, meaning the things I do should contribute to, others being able to perform better.

Steve House:
Absolutely, yeah, has.

Stephen Seiler:
There’s no such thing as theoretical sports science, you know, so. And so if I’m not, if I’m not contributing to people actually being able to exercise better or healthy or whatever, then I’m not doing it right. Uh, so it’s very rewarding when someone says I’m doing it right, you know, and I’ll keep trying.

Steve House:
Uh, you’re doing it right. Yeah, you’re absolutely doing it right. We’re super grateful for all the work you’ve done. Thank you for your time today.

Stephen Seiler:
Yeah, it was fun.

Steve House:
It’s been amazing. As I said, I could talk to you for hours. Um, we’ll, uh, we’ll be in touch and I will certainly be sending you a revised edition of one of those books here in the next year or so.

Stephen Seiler:
Awesome. Thanks.

Steve House:
Thank you, Dr. Seiler. Really appreciate it.

Stephen Seiler:
Same to you. Enjoy. Enjoy your day.

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