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Phil Maffetone on Over Training
2.7k Plays4 years ago
Scott Johnston is once again joined by Phil Maffetone as they discuss over training — particularly the common misconceptions, and social factors that perpetuate this unfortunate phenomenon.
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Transcript
Introduction to Uphill Athlete Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. These programs are just one of several free services we provide to disseminate information about training for mountain sports. If you like what you hear and want more, please check out our website, uphillathlete.com, where you'll find many articles and our extensive video library on all aspects of training for and accomplishing a variety of mountain goals. You'll also find our forum, where you can ask questions of our experts and the community at large.
00:00:30
Speaker
Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com and we'd love to hear from you. We've been very pleased and of course gratified that our podcasts are being received so enthusiastically. We've had requests to enable a way for listeners to have a conversation about episodes.
00:00:49
Speaker
We certainly welcome this idea and want to encourage those of you who do want to do that to do so on our forum so that the whole uphill athlete community can join in and benefit from this exchange. To do so, please start a new thread on the forum using the title of the podcast under the most appropriate category. Thanks for being part of this community.
00:01:14
Speaker
Welcome everyone to another episode of the uphill athlete
Interview with Phil Maffetone
00:01:17
Speaker
podcast. I'm your host, Scott Johnston, co-founder of uphill athlete. And with me today for his second visit on our podcast is Phil Maffetone. And if you haven't listened to our previous podcast on aerobic deficiency and the various aspects of that, you should. And I won't give quite as long an introduction today as I did before about Phil.
00:01:42
Speaker
But the short story is that Phil is a medical practitioner, clinician who has been involved in sports and training of athletes and is credited with, and I'm rightly so, I think pretty much opening everyone's eyes to, or the general public's eyes to the need for aerobic based training.
00:02:08
Speaker
You know, it's kind of the antidote to the high intensity interval training all the time type of message that's out there in the media and
00:02:19
Speaker
I bumped into Phil back in the I think early to mid 80s in Boulder, Colorado, when I was living there in training. And he helped me with some of my running form issues and also gave me some advice on on training. And I think I even mentioned in my previous podcast, I still have the little pamphlet
00:02:39
Speaker
that I got in your office where I was scrolling, scribbling down notes as quick as I could while you were speaking to me about stuff. And that really opened my eyes to a lot of different things that I perhaps had been doing intuitively. And I think many athletes and coaches had practiced what you said, intuitively, we were using those ideas. We understood that aerobic base was very important.
00:03:06
Speaker
But there wasn't a sort of an intellectual framework and structure that I think you would, which is what you created, that I think has really certainly informed much of my, since that has informed a great deal of the way I have prescribed training, and certainly has written, I've written about it in the books and on the website.
Understanding Overtraining
00:03:27
Speaker
But today, Phil and I are going to take a different tack, we're going to talk about overtraining, and
00:03:35
Speaker
the how to diagnose, how to fix, and all the some of the myths that are associated with it. And Phil has a great deal written about overtraining on his website, philmathaton.com. And so you can certainly go there and research it.
00:03:53
Speaker
But I think that when people start looking around on the internet, there's a confusing amount of information about there. And in my more layperson writings on my website, on the uphill athlete website, I've written about it in terms of my observations with athletes and what I've seen them come to me with and how I've dealt with it and what seems to work, what doesn't seem to work. But I think, Phil,
00:04:22
Speaker
is going to be able to elucidate a lot of those ideas to a much greater extent. And so welcome back, Phil. Thanks a lot for making the time. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me and also for putting this podcast together on overtraining. It's such a common problem. It's a big problem. It's a misunderstood problem with the many myths that are perpetuated
00:04:51
Speaker
in our society and there is a big social component to the problem, so it's great to be here again. Good, well let's dive right in and let's talk, I think the place to start would be let's talk about the physiology of overtraining and what is known about that and
00:05:13
Speaker
how, well, maybe we'll get into diagnosis later, but what's the physiology of overtraining? Well, you know, it's interesting when you talk about the confusion around this issue of overtraining. The physiology of it is sometimes the reason because it really is a very complicated issue.
00:05:41
Speaker
physiologically, and it really is fairly well understood on a clinical level. So the details can get complicated, but we understand it well. I understood it, you know, in the beginning when I started working with athletes 40-plus years ago.
00:06:02
Speaker
We know a lot more now. We understand it. We can test things. We can ask the right questions now compared to years ago. But essentially, there are three stages of overtraining.
00:06:18
Speaker
which makes it a little complicated. It's not one definitive diagnosable condition. And the three stages are the onset, very subtle abnormal situation. And then the second stage is one of moderate impairment. And that's when you start hearing people say, gee, am I over-trained or gee, is my athlete
00:06:47
Speaker
overtrained because, you know, we start seeing more signs and symptoms of athletic impairment. And the third stage is the one we tend to think of when we hear the word overtraining. It's a serious condition where there's a lot of damage in the body. Athletes can't get out of bed in the morning. Their performance is seriously impaired. They're contemplating retirement.
00:07:19
Speaker
There's no more fun in training, no more fun in competition. If they're even competing at this point, often they, you know, they're sort of so injured or feel so bad that they can't. So we tend to think of overtraining as this chronic end-stage condition, and that's not the issue at all. I think that
00:07:47
Speaker
The concept of overtraining is what we need to talk about first. And the concept of overtraining is very simple. And once we understand it, we can then start seeing how we can avoid it and, of course, correct it if we're there. And overtraining is simply defined as impaired health and fitness.
00:08:11
Speaker
And of course that reduces athletic performance. It increases the risk of injury. It makes athletes feel bad. And I developed what I call the training equation way, way back in the beginning. And that equation is training equals workout plus recovery.
00:08:37
Speaker
And overtraining begins when the delicate balance of working out and recovering from that workout, resting from that workout has lost balance.
00:08:56
Speaker
Perceiving overtraining as being very complex is one of the reasons that it's not addressed in athletes and by coaches and even health practitioners. You know, overtraining is very, very common.
Recognizing and Addressing Overtraining
00:09:15
Speaker
And in particular, people tend to be unaware that something bad is happening until, like I said, to way later when
00:09:25
Speaker
when they're hurt, when they're not performing, you know, after three races, for example, there's a downward spiral in performance. Obviously, you're well into over-training by that point. And some of this is not new, you know, Bill, if I could paraphrase, Bill Bowerman, legendary running coach, who said,
00:09:53
Speaker
The idea that the harder you work, the better you'll perform is garbage. The greatest improvements are made by athletes who work most intelligently. And so there's this separation of our social, no pain, no gain input that we all have, and the fact that
00:10:21
Speaker
there's an intelligent way to be healthy and fit and achieve our optimal performance, which is why we're here. Excuse me. Yeah, that is exactly why we are here. And let me pause this for a second. I'm going to get a drink of water. I'll be right back. Okay. Okay, I'm back. Sorry. So the one of the things that I have found
00:10:48
Speaker
I think people find difficult to understand or diagnosing overtraining or recognizing overtraining in an athlete, but either by the athlete or by the coach is the distinction between what we would often call overreaching in training, which is a valuable tool to use, provided there's adequate recovery after the overreaching.
00:11:16
Speaker
Compared to over training, which as you've just said, it's when that imbalance becomes an imbalance between the training load and the recovery, which becomes inadequate. And I think that that no pain, no gain nonsense, you know, it's great in Hollywood, but it doesn't work in the real world and.
00:11:37
Speaker
I think, you know, a famous, another famous, very famous running coach, Renato Canova has said, the best training isn't the most training. It's actually the least training that it takes to get those results. Sure. And I've, I've been, you know, I, I.
00:11:54
Speaker
This is what I've been doing. The athletes who I've worked with who have performed the best have done so with me recommending less training and less intensity all along the way.
00:12:12
Speaker
You know, my approach to coaching is not giving somebody a schedule. It's asking the athlete what they'd like to do with their training. What do they feel is important for their needs? This is how we personalize training. And then I look at that and I compare it with my findings in evaluating them clinically. And I say, well, this doesn't match up.
00:12:39
Speaker
And so let's reduce this two hour run to an hour run. Let's lower your heart rate. Let's do this. And we end up with less training and with less intensity. And the end result is better performance year by year for as long as they want to do that.
00:13:04
Speaker
And many of them have been quite successful for many, many years. Well, Mark Allen being probably the most, maybe the most famous that you coached in his sort of seven time world champion. Six time Ironman champion. But you know, that really, it takes away from all the other amazing things he did as a triathlete, including his 20 straight wins. And he didn't,
00:13:33
Speaker
He didn't jump into low-key races by any means. He picked the biggest races. So for 20 big professional races, 20 in a row, he won. That's an amazing feat. It is, yeah. At any elite level, athletic to be that dominant, it was very impressive. I remember I followed his career during that time and it was one of the things that really
00:14:01
Speaker
woke me up to your training methods and the whole maximum aerobic function that I've adopted into what we do. Let's, slipping back into overtraining talk some more. So overtraining is not just simply too much training. It's an imbalance. It's not. And so that imbalance is really important. And it's also
00:14:28
Speaker
You know, the myth is that overtraining is difficult to diagnose. It's not a diagnosable condition. It's not a disease with a definable, you know, with a diagnosis. It's a functional condition. And so it's more, in that regard, it's more like depression or fatigue or pain. There's no blood test for pain.
00:14:54
Speaker
And so it may appear elusive, and that's why we call it a syndrome. It's the overtraining syndrome, which has syndromes have a set of related signs and symptoms that lead you to think the obvious. This athlete may be overtrained, and let's look further into that. And the confusion is often
00:15:27
Speaker
associated with this. I think what happens is athletes, coaches, health practitioners confuse the term overtraining with the term overreaching. So, you know, the myth is that high training volume and high intensity are required
00:15:51
Speaker
for athletic improvement. That's a myth because, you know, we don't know what that really means, what is high volume and what is high intensity. There are different things for different bodies. But what's important is the appropriate training for that individual, and that's where personalization comes in. But overreaching is what's
00:16:15
Speaker
important for athletic improvement and that overreaching means you're going beyond your normal abilities so if you could run for an hour every day and it's really simple and easy for you if you want to get better you've got to increase that run at least once a week or twice a week depending to
00:16:42
Speaker
to compete in a race that's more than an hour, for example. And that overreaching is not overtraining. It's not impairing our health. We're not overreaching and getting really sore and the next morning, you know, we could hardly walk like we've run a marathon. That's not overreaching. That's overtraining.
00:17:09
Speaker
So it's that balance, again, it's that balance between being healthy and fit and that balance between training and recovery. And there's no one single point. There's a window there. And that window is very individual. And it depends on who this athlete is, what do they have going on in their life?
00:17:38
Speaker
What other work-related things are they doing? What social issues do they deal with? What, you know, being, you know, if you have a family and a home to take care of and you're working 40 or 50 hours a week,
00:18:02
Speaker
Um, that's part of training. You, you can't just say I'm going to train a hundred miles a week because I read that in a running magazine says you've got to run a hundred miles a week to run your best marathon. Well, it's conceivable that you could run 30 miles a week and run your best marathon. I've had people who do that, uh, simply because you can't fit all that stuff into your day and into your week, into your month.
00:18:29
Speaker
No without disastrous consequences. Yeah. And so I read in I think I mentioned this book that I have on my shelf called over training and sport, and in it there was an interesting definition I'd like to get your take on over training, and it because it resonated with me was that.
00:18:48
Speaker
In a normal training situation,
Balancing Training and Life Stress
00:18:51
Speaker
the workouts impose a training stress, which is a stimulus to adaptation to become fitter.
00:19:00
Speaker
And that usually results in a super compensation at some point after the workout. You know, maybe it's a day, maybe it's two days, but you get fitter through the process of applying a training stress and then recovering and seeing the benefits of that. And that the difference between adequate and successful training, which did allow super compensation, even if it takes you a couple of days to recover,
00:19:27
Speaker
And overtraining is that in overtraining there is never any super compensation. You could wait for a week and the athlete never feels better. And so they don't have that. The training stimulus, what was once a perfectly acceptable training stimulus to them,
00:19:46
Speaker
is no longer handleable by their body. They can't handle that stress. And as a consequence, the reason performance drops is the fitness begins to drop and they're dealing with this overtraining and some sort of fatigue thing. And it seems like I want to get into why, even though you certainly, and I think I have a pretty good handle on when somebody tells me the symptoms they're dealing with,
00:20:15
Speaker
why you and I seem to be able to recognize, oh, yeah, this is overtraining. But if they go to their family practitioner, or even a sports medicine doc, oftentimes, you know, they say, man, I just don't feel right, and my performance is degrading, and what's going on. And as you said, they'll all you can do all kinds of blood tests and everything else, and nothing shows up. And chances are that even in your overtrained state,
00:20:40
Speaker
you're healthier and fitter than 95% of the people that walk into that doctor's office. And so they're going to look at you and be confused. But what I see happening frequently is that coaches and athletes don't recognize that they are overtrained.
00:21:01
Speaker
And in fact, what they think is that they're under trained when they see their performance begin to drop, they think, Oh, I need to do another interval session this week or something. Yeah. And which is of course the absolute worst thing they could be doing. Um, I, I might have mentioned this to you at one point, but I had, I was at the world junior championships, uh, for cross country skiing, I don't know, probably 15 years ago, at least.
00:21:28
Speaker
And I was sharing a room with another coach. One of his athletes came in and had been noticing a degradation in performance over the last couple of weeks.
00:21:39
Speaker
And I sat, I was sitting on my bed and listening to this coach talk to his athlete and prescribed, okay, this afternoon, I want you to go out there and do, you know, this type of interval workout. And I just shaking, I didn't think this poor kid is already toast. And now you're telling him to go out there and just hammer himself into the ground. And of course, once the, when the race has started a week later,
00:22:00
Speaker
if the kid was off the back, you know, just, you know, it's a disaster. Yeah, I mean, that's when tapering should have been implemented even before those complaints. You know, your description from that book is a good one, but I don't know that most athletes can relate to it. I don't know that many practitioners or coaches can relate to it. Certainly, most people can't take that information and then
00:22:29
Speaker
take the next important step, which is apply the concepts to an individual or apply it to themselves and know what to do next. Okay, yes, this makes sense. However,
00:22:46
Speaker
Now, what do we do? You know, it's always, okay, now what do we do? And that question is too often never answered. Like I said, overtraining is not a diagnosable condition. You know, we diagnose depression and we consider fatigue as something that is a result of asking questions.
00:23:13
Speaker
and getting answers that drive us to the idea that, well, you're too fatigued or you're depressed. And so early in overtraining, we don't have very many clues at all.
00:23:33
Speaker
And I'll just mention, and we can come back to this, but the very first thing that we see, one of the first things we see in overtraining is the autonomic nervous system starts getting out of balance. And so our sympathetic and parasympathetic
00:23:52
Speaker
that balance, which is that the sympathetic is the training part and the parasympathetic is the resting part, the recovery part. And that shows itself as too much sympathetic activity. And it leads, later on, it leads to a higher resting morning heart rate. But even before that,
00:24:19
Speaker
That mild sympathetic, mild but abnormal sympathetic stimulation results in a reduction in a runner, as an example, in their submax running pace.
00:24:36
Speaker
So the MAF test is a submax running test where you follow your MAF heart rate and see how fast you could run a certain distance. And if that time starts, had been improving, but now all of a sudden starts to slow down, that is often the very first sign, and it's a very objective sign of overtraining. At this point,
00:25:04
Speaker
the athlete feels good, often feels great, and the real difficulty occurs when this excess sympathetic stimulation also affects performance because these people often will have a great performance
00:25:25
Speaker
If you go back and look at the histories of people who were seriously overtrained, they often show a turning point in their career sometimes where all of a sudden they were a good marathoner and all of a sudden now they've run, you know, where normally they're at 215 or 220, all of a sudden now they're at 207. Wow, on a similar course,
00:25:54
Speaker
that should be a big red flag for you to say as a coach or as a practitioner or as an athlete. Have I really improved that much or is this an artificial effect of an imbalanced autonomic nervous system? Because that
00:26:13
Speaker
High performance, significant improvement in performance is often associated with that reduction in submax performance that we can measure in training. But over the horizon, we'll start coming injuries, pain,
00:26:32
Speaker
fatigue, depression, you know, often that just, you know, they just get worse and worse and then suddenly it's not possible to even perform anymore because you're either injured and hurting or your performance has really gone down the tubes.
00:26:53
Speaker
I've seen that even not even outside of races or outside of, you know, important events for athletes. Sometimes you see it in training where they just have, you know, this incredible workout where they feel like Superman. And for me, that's a red flag too. Yeah, exactly. You have now your body, you have
00:27:11
Speaker
you have gone to a place you've never gone to in terms of performance and so this means we need to back off and let your body absorb whatever rather than but i think that the interpretation i've seen before when people see that their their natural tendencies to get excited and think oh yes i'm now i'm superman and now i can do anything and then they start piling it on
00:27:31
Speaker
And my inclination when I see that type of thing is, okay, we're going to go back into more of a base training phase here, then lighten up or just do easy volume or whatever it takes to get you to let your body have a chance to absorb that rather than. Yeah. Yeah. And it's important to differentiate between sub max performance and max performance. So we, you know, I was talking about
00:27:56
Speaker
athletic performance competition. But the same applies to the athlete who does time trials during training as a way to monitor progress. You're not really monitoring progress, you're monitoring max performance progress, which is fine, but it needs to be put in perspective. But you'll see those
00:28:21
Speaker
you'll see those time trials diminish too in these early stages of overtraining. And most of the times I've had to deal with overtrained athletes and perhaps you are the same, it's when they're in that final or third stage and they finally say, hey coach, or what's going on with me? Why am I feeling like this? And often by then,
00:28:49
Speaker
And I want to talk a little bit about what people can do when they do recognize it in the various stages. But often by then, it calls for complete stopping of training and nothing. That's very hard for an athlete to take. It is. And this is where the intellect comes in.
00:29:12
Speaker
This is where a good coaching comes in, and a practitioner who may not be a coach, which is fine, but a practitioner can say, hey, you've got all these things that are not normal. Something is wrong. What can be done about it?
00:29:31
Speaker
Again, we too often get caught up in this academic definition of, you know, what is overtraining? Can we define it? Well, we can't really define it, so maybe it doesn't even exist or maybe it's not common. And, you know, and it's really sad that we get caught up in those emotions, because while we're doing that, all these overtrained athletes are
00:30:02
Speaker
losing out and they're becoming unhealthy and too many of them retire at an early age and we can go into any sport and start naming names, but it occurs in amateur ranks as well. And by the way, it occurs in people who don't compete, people who just, they go to the gym every day or they do their workout every day and they
00:30:31
Speaker
you know, and they can cross that line between training and recovery. And in fact, even people who don't exercise can be over-trained. If we look at training as a spectrum, on one end is under-training and on the other end is over-training. And in the middle, there's this big window
00:30:54
Speaker
where we could balance our training and perform really well. If we're under-trained, if we don't work out and we're overwhelmed with stress, which is what happens in an athletic over-training situation, they're overwhelmed with some combination of physical, biochemical, and mental, emotional stress. These under-trained so-called non-athletes are over-stressed and, you know,
00:31:24
Speaker
the term that's applied to them is burnout or mental breakdown or some other things. But the same physiological mechanism, which we've known for 100 years, is taking place. The brain is sending hormonal and neurological messages to the body to make more stress hormones to adapt to the stress and eventually
00:31:54
Speaker
We just crush and burn. And so you see this, this is something I'm fascinated by, but I make sense intuitively makes sense to me that this over what we're calling over training syndrome could even exist in people who don't train.
00:32:12
Speaker
because the stress levels are so high in their life. Yep, yep, it's the same. You know, overtraining is a stress syndrome and Hans Selye who as a medical student was doing studies on animals showing that when under stress the animals go through a pretty clear physiological process where certain hormones are
00:32:39
Speaker
juggled around and the adrenal glands get bigger so they can make more stress hormones to compensate. And basically, there's maladaptation to stress. And maladaptation to stress is what burnout is, it's what overtraining is, it's what poor health is. And so, in a sense, that stress
00:33:06
Speaker
uh, excess stress syndrome, that maladaptation is really the big picture. And if we're an athlete, we call it the over-training syndrome. If we're a CEO or a student or a parent, uh, who's not tolerating the stress, we call it burnout or whatever. Um, it's really the same thing.
00:33:25
Speaker
It makes that makes complete sense because, you know, stress is stress and our body's reaction to it. Yeah, whether it's physical or mental. So, yeah, that's really an interesting way to look at it. And I certainly mean, I think very, very few.
00:33:41
Speaker
people have the opportunity to train like a professional athlete where they can remove all almost all the other stresses out of their life and just deal with training stress and most people have got a multitude of sources of stress going on and then if you start piling on the physical stress of training on somebody who's already sort of running at the you know at the borderline of what they're capable of handling
00:34:05
Speaker
whether it's because of work or family or anything else or some other medical condition, then they can slip into this. Yeah. It's really terrible. It's a sad situation on a
00:34:24
Speaker
societal level. No pain, no gain is a social problem that we have. It's an ongoing social problem that actually began with Benjamin Franklin. Can you elucidate that? Sure. Old Ben talked about the need to work hard and sweat to succeed in
00:34:52
Speaker
in work. It was his thing on capitalism, I believe. I have an article on No Pain, No Gain that I wrote with sociologist
00:35:04
Speaker
Rick scarce on the website and people can can read that and get the get the Ben Franklin reference. But we, you know, we and so what we do is we're exposed to, you know, we look up to the great local runners who that or in our running club and you know, wow, I want to be like,
00:35:27
Speaker
that athlete. Well, that athlete is looking at, you know, some nationally ranked athletes saying, wow, I wish I could be like. And then those athletes are looking at the pros and we're all looking at the pros because their workouts are splattered across the covers of running magazines and, you know, other sports magazines. And for all of us to see and dream about
00:35:50
Speaker
And even emulate, we have this crazy idea that if I could just train the way so-and-so trains, I could perform, well, maybe I can't perform exactly that way, but I could perform much better, you know. And these are, this is a social phenomenon that we've learned beginning as very young children. And so,
00:36:18
Speaker
there's a huge social problem with overtraining. And in fact, overtraining is embarrassing. Overtraining, nobody likes to talk about it. You know, it can happen to me. Oh, no, I can't be over, I mean, that's the first thing people say, oh, no, I can't be overtrained. And it's, you know, it's a mark of a failure. It's a
00:36:47
Speaker
It's a demerit. It's an embarrassment. And so people not only won't accept it, but they often will not say, I have these unusual symptoms. I have these unusual signs. My knee is really hurting after that workout, but I'm not going to tell anybody about it because
00:37:17
Speaker
Um, I'm a little embarrassed. Um, you know, I should be stronger. I should be, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a good, I'm a good athlete. Um, you know, it's going to heal up blah, blah, blah. Um, you know, when in, when in doubt, uh, slow down.
00:37:36
Speaker
I, that's one of my most, the most common things I have told athletes all the way from Olympians down to very beginners. Most of the people that are involved in endurance sports are already type A overachiever types where, and they have learned that in general more is better. But when you take that to the extreme in training,
00:38:02
Speaker
you know, more might be better up to a point that all of a sudden more can become your worst enemy. And what I often will tell people is if, if you wake up one day and you know, the training plan says to do this or that or the other thing, and you have even the most the lightest niggling of doubt about whether you're ready to do that, or your or your motivation is low that day. That's a red flag that you should pay attention to that and say, Okay, I think I'm just going to take the day off or
00:38:30
Speaker
you know, do something very light, you know, no stress, and then see how I feel tomorrow. Yeah. The Bowerman, I agree. The Bowerman quote was interesting because he used the word intellect. The greatest improvements are made
00:38:47
Speaker
not by people who work out hard, but who are intelligent. What he was referring to there, I think, and what I talk about a lot, is that we have a brain. And athletes sometimes forget that the brain controls everything they do. And so,
00:39:09
Speaker
Let's allow the brain to give us feedback as well. Let's allow the brain to answer these questions. Is this workout really helpful for me? Am I feeling the benefits? Yeah, I'm overreaching. And so I feel a little bit sore the next morning, but am I sore the morning after, after I've had an easy day of training or even a day off?
00:39:38
Speaker
If I wake up at 2 a.m. and don't get back to sleep very easily on a regular basis, is this?
00:39:46
Speaker
you know, this must be something else. This is not training related. Well, there's so many signs and symptoms that give us a clue, and there's just so many signs and symptoms that give us a clue about all of health and fitness. And the game is to pay attention to them.
00:40:10
Speaker
back to Bowerman for just a second. I had a very close friend for quite a while who's a high school four-minute miler and was recruited and ran for Bowerman at Oregon. And one of the things that he told me that stuck with me all these years later after when, you know, this was, you know, I was a college student and he said, Bowerman says, train, don't strain.
00:40:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's a very succinct summation of what we're talking about here is that there is this.
00:40:44
Speaker
sort of Rocky Balboa mentality that you need to end every workout in a pool of sweat and blood on the floor and vomit, or you're really not doing your, you're not really training because that the guy next to you who's doing that is, you know, they're tougher. And, and I used to tell my, my skiers and because this is common, I think across all endurance sports, and I've seen it certainly because my, most of my experience has been with cross country skiing.
00:41:10
Speaker
is they don't give the prizes away to the toughest person. They give the prize away to the fastest person.
00:41:16
Speaker
And you know, puff and fast don't necessarily go together. It's so simple on paper. And I've worked in all sports. And these factors, these ideas, what we're talking about apply to all sports. We would give different examples for a basketball team or a tennis player.
00:41:42
Speaker
or a race car driver, but essentially, they're all the same. In my approach, when I work with a race car driver, for example, to just pick somebody who's way over there in sports, I train them the same form better. It's essentially the same. I'm individualizing the process.
00:42:11
Speaker
The process is we want to get to better performance. And if you're healthier and more fit, if you have a good aerobic system and a good energy system, you will be a better race car driver. And it's just the same applies across all sports.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yeah. And one of the things that I know, one of the myths that you want to dispel, and I want to make sure we talk about this today, is that the use of carbohydrate supplements as a guard against overtraining. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, this is a lingering
00:42:55
Speaker
a lingering thing based on studies. And these studies were done on, you know, 18-year-old college kids who they're different than 40-year-old amateur athletes, which I suspect is most of the people listening or 50-year-olds or 60-year-olds. It's a
00:43:22
Speaker
It's a tough question to answer only. The answer is simple. The use of carbohydrate supplements during and after training does not necessarily prevent overtraining. The idea that we want to replace glycogen stores and that's why our meals are high in carbohydrates, that's a myth too.
00:43:45
Speaker
You know, one question is, well, why are you using up your glycogen stores in a typical workout? Okay, if it's a high intensity workout, that's another question. You may use up a lot of your glycogen stores, but do we really run out of energy
00:44:06
Speaker
during a HIIT workout, for example, not necessarily. It depends on how much carbohydrate we use and how much fat we use for energy. And the short answer there is that people who are capable of burning more fat for energy will burn a lot more fat for energy during a HIIT session.
00:44:29
Speaker
That's a high intensity session where we think, you know, we're using exclusively carbohydrate for energy. Not true. So if we use more fat during these high intensity workouts, then we may not run out of glycogen stores. In fact, we may have plenty of energy for the workout.
00:44:56
Speaker
and not need to consume carbohydrate supplements. So the first thing that the athlete needs to do is make sure the metabolism is working right so that we can access both our fat stores for energy and our carbohydrate stores.
Metabolic Balance and Fat Adaptation
00:45:14
Speaker
And then if the workout is long or in such a way that we do, usually if it's a long, hard workout, which I would wonder if that's necessary to begin with, but certainly in competition, that's the case. But in training, we're running out of glycogen. It's usually because we're not burning enough body fat. And so we need to focus on getting the,
00:45:43
Speaker
the metabolism balance so that we can use that extra energy source, which is body fat. We have of course, and I know you do too, we push people towards fat adaptation strategies and whether they're diet related or training related, which is obviously the whole math program is geared towards helping people become more fat adapted and using fat.
00:46:13
Speaker
And like you, and I think most of us, when we read literature, we say, oh, when one goes, when a person, the intensity exceeds the anaerobic threshold, they're using 100% carbohydrates. I mean, that's just been, you know, the RER, the respiratory equivalent ratio is one or above even when you're above your anaerobic threshold, so they're using all glycogen.
00:46:42
Speaker
And I had dealt with two high caliber Olympic level skiers who I had them do a gas exchange test and at their max VO2, so maximum intensity for these people, they were still using 10% fat.
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, and they don't get to that level as an athlete without burning stump fat. That's not a high amount. I've seen it upwards of 30% or more. Even at max intensity. Yeah, yeah. OK. And so we did a study, Professor Paul Larson and I and some other colleagues that have been published using, again, using younger college kids
00:47:33
Speaker
But, you know, these high levels of intensity can, if your diet is low in carbohydrate, result in high fat burning. We took two groups and one ate a normal higher carbohydrate diet and one ate a very low
00:47:56
Speaker
carbohydrate diet below 50 grams of carbohydrate a day. And their performance was essentially the same, but they burned a whole lot more fat. And to me, that's a sign of good health. But for an endurance athlete who's looking to compete in the area of one, two hours, three, four,
00:48:22
Speaker
six hours, seven, eight hours, this becomes essential because you don't have enough glycogen stores to go very far. So, you know, save your, you know, watch your athlete for example. And I learned, I've learned a lot from training athletes. One thing I learned from Mark Allen,
00:48:48
Speaker
is in trying to figure out this issue, I discovered that riding the bike in the Ironman meant not exceeding your submax heart rate, not exceeding your MAF heart rate. And if you train well,
00:49:08
Speaker
you'll start riding pretty fast at your MAF heart rate. Well, in a race, you do the same thing. In the water now, you jump in the water, you swim two and a half miles, you're not exceeding your MAF heart rate if you're fairly well trained as a swimmer. On the bike now, you stay at that MAF heart rate, don't exceed it, because now you're not tapping into your glycogen stores much. And now you get off the bike
00:49:37
Speaker
And you're two thirds of the way there or more and your glycogen stores are full. And now you can almost do anything you want, but you're going to run a whole lot better. Your marathon times are going to be a whole lot better. I think Mark had the Kona marathon record for
00:49:59
Speaker
more than 20 years, even though way back then they were including the transition times with the marathon times. And so, you know, we need to look at how can we use these energy stores properly so we don't bonk halfway through or three quarters of the way through or the last kilometer of an event.
00:50:29
Speaker
It seems like with this, I mean, there's along with the social pressure of this no pain, no gain mentality that I think a lot of athletes, you know, have basically not even athletes, but just recreational folks have kind of destroyed themselves trying to emulate, you know, what they think the best people do, which isn't often the case. So that if best people don't really train like that, many people can't believe
00:50:56
Speaker
that, you know, let's say when we call it the Killian syndrome, because of Killian Jornet, when he worked with me and we co-wrote that book that we just published about training, he said, one of the things I want to make very plain in this is that people should not be trying to emulate what I do for training.
00:51:18
Speaker
know, that, and I think that there is, I've seen it in an ultra running world now that people say, Oh, Killian did this, I should be able to do this. Well, he, you know, he may be a genetic freak. Plus, he's been doing this, he started this when he was six years old, he's got a lifetime of this. And, and so trying to emulate what the best person does, as you said, that's no longer personalized. That's just, you know, you're kind of becoming an automaton and just following along with
00:51:46
Speaker
Predictable bad results, probably. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think there's any genetic freaks in endurance sports. We may see them in the power of sport. We may see them in track and field or basketball. A Usain Bolt might be a genetic freak.
00:52:07
Speaker
Well, there's always genetics involved. The question is, which genes are we expressing? And that's based on our diet. It's based on stress and our environment. And so, but the issue in emulating somebody else, the issue is,
00:52:35
Speaker
not just from a training standpoint, but I just wrote an article called Illusion Injuries. And I think it's coming out soon if it hasn't just come out. But what the gist of the article is, it has to do with way back when I was in practice, and I had my clinic was in the New York City suburbs.
00:53:03
Speaker
It was the running boom and the New York City Marathon was almost like, you know, a big party. The Boston Marathon, big event. Everybody, you know, anybody who ran or wanted to run, it was a big time, April and October back then and then November now.
00:53:29
Speaker
These events were also televised back when they had normal TV. And what I was noticing was after a few years was runners were coming in with injuries. And when I asked them about the history of the injury, which is so important, you need to think about
00:53:54
Speaker
you know, you need to be Sherlock Holmes. Where did this injury come from? And you kind of backtrack and you analyze, oh, I did this like four months ago. I wonder if that did anything. Oh, I did that too. And that's really, you know, so I started asking athletes when they started feeling it or when did they start doing something different? Well, they started doing something different after watching the lead packs of the New York City Marathon on TV.
00:54:23
Speaker
And that image of these great marathoners who look, you know, who look incredible running full stride down Fifth Avenue was an image that you just have to go out and try. And it's a natural thing because our brain is set up to look at somebody move
00:54:53
Speaker
and get our body doing the same thing. In fact, we have a thing called mental imagery in sports where we go through this process in the high dive, and you know the process so well, you can close your eyes and go through it extremely well, and then you can perform it the same way. And in sports, it could work really well, but
00:55:22
Speaker
we have the illusion that we could perform and run as fast by striding out a certain way, like we're doing 200 meter repeats on the track or something. I mean, the lead pack is going that fast, but you can't go that fast, yet that's how a lot of these people get hurt. And it occurs in
00:55:48
Speaker
in packs of runners on any level. There's always a pecking order. There's always somebody in the pack who's one of the better runners. Maybe there's a couple of them. And everybody either directly looks at their gate or with their ability to sense a runner next to you. You want to run. You want to copy them.
00:56:18
Speaker
And it's a terrible, terrible thing. It throws individuality right out the window. It takes, you know, personalizing your race to a level where it no longer works for you. It's working against you. And so, yeah, we don't want to emulate the greats. We want to
00:56:44
Speaker
allow our brain to, to give us the best performance we are prepared to have. Finding and finding that. Yeah, that what works for you. And so we've got this idea that this no pain, no gain thing has is probably right at the root of causing a lot of overtraining.
00:57:03
Speaker
And then this whole idea that you can't go out for a run without two gels in your pocket or you have to have a gel an hour to finish this workout. Or a bottle of water. Yeah.
00:57:16
Speaker
Exactly. And I think that so that's another social construct. In fact, you know, maybe it's coming from the advertising industry. That's exactly where it's coming from. And in fact, a lot of the studies about it come from advertisers as well. I put money, you know, they tangle money and I would tell a quick, funny story about that. I was at a coaching conference probably five years ago.
00:57:44
Speaker
And there was a presenter there who had present was presenting a study like we're talking about about carbohydrate usage during training. It was funded by Gatorade. And he was preaching to a room full of pretty high level coaches.
00:58:01
Speaker
about the importance of regular fueling and blah, blah, blah. And all of us were looking at each other going, wait a minute, this is not our experience in life. What the athletes we work with is we're trying to wean them off of these high sugar things that they're being pushed on them. But I just thought it was
00:58:23
Speaker
After that, there was a break period and I was talking to a few of the other coaches and I think we ended up confronting the guy and saying, this is not real science that you're conducting here. It's common on all levels. It's the reason we live in an overfed world, 80% or more of the world
00:58:52
Speaker
adults in the world have excess body fat because of sugar. So it's not just in sports. It's everywhere. And the idea that humans are a glucose-based energy being that, you know, this is our primary source of fuel, is just a bunch of crap. And so when we suddenly now are doing studies
00:59:21
Speaker
on people who are eating high carbohydrate diets and have been since birth, can we really do objective studies on these individuals?
00:59:32
Speaker
not really in many cases, certainly not really because their metabolism is over here. What about if your metabolism was over there and you're burning more fat for energy? It comes down to being healthy or not. If we do studies on subjects and we've asked them if they have any diseases and
01:00:00
Speaker
And we only pick the ones that say no. Does that mean they're not, does that mean they're healthy and that they don't have metabolic problems or neurological problems that they may or may not know about? No, it doesn't mean that. And so therefore, what is the outcome of that study telling us? Is it valid? So this is, I think we're looking at a revolution in
01:00:28
Speaker
in scientific research when it comes to sports where we have to say, gee, maybe we need to redo 40% of the studies that have ever been done that have shown, you know, this, that, and that because it's not really true. So it's interesting.
Revisiting Scientific Research on Energy Use
01:00:50
Speaker
You know, you have clinicians and you have
01:00:54
Speaker
which I would include coaches, and you have scientists. And the scientists, many of them are living in an academic world, which is great. I go there a lot. But then you have clinicians who are not so concerned about the academic reasons or the academic explanations of why they're doing something. They're doing something because they know it works.
01:01:20
Speaker
And so we have to balance those two worlds as an athlete because there's a lot that both have to offer and we have to see what works for us.
01:01:36
Speaker
Well, one of the studies I think that's, I know we're deviating a bit off of the overtraining thing here, but I think this whole, these ideas are interrelated. This health and overtraining are very much related to one another. And I'm sure you're familiar with the faster study by Bullock on, you know,
01:01:58
Speaker
When I, and I think if you look back at any textbooks and literature and studies that were done anything before the last five or 10 years, you would find that the consensus was that a person could burn one gram of fat per hour, per kilogram. And that was it.
01:02:21
Speaker
And it was just taken for granted. And then Volcker and several others have come along and shown that a well-trained endurance athlete can actually burn as much as two grams of fat per hour. And it turns out that the reason was that these numbers were so low in the past was they were just taking, like you said, college students who probably didn't have the best diet.
01:02:47
Speaker
and noticing that oh yeah these guys can only burn about a gram of fat per hour. And they were also taking college kids and putting them on a low carbohydrate diet for a few days or a week and and then comparing them with another group
01:03:06
Speaker
of high carbohydrate diet eaters, and they said C, low carbohydrates reduce performance. And so, of course, they were not allowing the body to adapt to those dietary changes, which could take weeks. And in terms of people feeling good by reducing their carbohydrates, it could take weeks. Well, before we wrap up, I want to end with
01:03:37
Speaker
some advice that you could give to people who helping them recognize that they're headed for the overtraining cliff and get them to recognize it and then deal with it in these early stages before it's too late and before they have to completely pull the plug on all training. So what would you say would be
01:04:02
Speaker
good ways to recognize it and then deal with it early on. I think there's two important things. One is learning about
01:04:15
Speaker
training and over-training. And so I published a paper in sports medicine a couple of years ago with Professor Paul Larson called Athletes Fit But Unhealthy. And I have that under that title. I have the press release of that on my website. And of course, you can go to the medical library and find it. It's a free access article
01:04:44
Speaker
And we outlined a lot of the physical, biochemical, and mental, emotional signs and symptoms. We talked about my old definition of health and fitness as two separate things and all kinds of interesting information. And then my article on the website
01:05:11
Speaker
which is also free, is called the overtraining syndrome. And it's a big article because there's a lot of stuff there to think about. So that, you know, learning about it and understanding where these signs and symptoms come from and when they show up, especially, is very, very important. But if you want to monitor yourself, which is really how you prevent overtraining from happening in the first place,
01:05:41
Speaker
It's how you prevent wasting time in training because listen, we shouldn't be training for months and months hoping we're going to perform better only to find out we don't or we do one time and then after that, you know, things are not so good. We want to know along the way whether we're really improving and for that,
01:06:07
Speaker
we can monitor our submax performance. In a runner, we have a, and you can look at the MAF heart rate articles, which has the 180 formula to come up with a personalized heart rate for aerobic training. But if we take that submax heart rate and test ourselves once a month,
01:06:36
Speaker
whether it's running on a track or using GPS on a flat run course or a bike course, measuring power or whatever. We should see that improve gradually over time. And if suddenly it starts getting worse, that's a big red flag. Sure, it may be a bad day for you. The weather may have interfered, the whatever.
01:07:03
Speaker
You check it again a few days later, but most people who monitor that submax performance, it's very accurate and there's usually no questions about it. When you see the wrong outcome, you should ask yourself, what's going on? What do I need to do? And from a response, you know, we don't want to be reactive with this. We don't want to wait until we can't get out of bed.
01:07:33
Speaker
We want to catch it early, so we want to be proactive. And all those signs and symptoms, like I said, are really, really valuable. But once we get the sense that there's a problem, we should stop what we're doing. First of all, we should eliminate all anaerobic training, all high-intensity training, including weightlifting, if it's the fatiguing type of weightlifting. And then maybe even cut
01:08:02
Speaker
back on training volume. And at the same time, analyze your life and analyze your diet. If you're eating junk food, you could be training exactly the way your body needs to train, but because you're eating junk food and not getting the nutrients and having a problem with sugar burning and fat burning,
01:08:28
Speaker
you know, you could be overtrained from that. So overtraining is not just from training too much. It could be diet related, it could be health related. You know, if you have iron deficiency, you know, an anemic athlete isn't going anywhere. And so, you know, that could become an overtraining syndrome because of
01:08:56
Speaker
iron deficiency. So it's usually, there's usually a combination of problems and a number of ways of tweaking the body. But, you know, these are the things that we should be doing in the very beginning. If you're a serious athlete and you want to perform your best, everything should be considered. You want to eat the way that's perfect for you. You want to find a heart rate that's just right for your ability.
01:09:25
Speaker
And on and on. So this submax performance is, I think, a great tool. I'm totally on board with that. I think that's a really it's an easy thing for people to monitor. And I know also in your articles or your article on
01:09:43
Speaker
overtraining on your website and in our book, my books or our books and the article we have on overtraining on our website, we also list a number of signs and symptoms that a person should be aware of. And so it seems like a checklist for people, you know, of, you know, do you have a number of these signs and symptoms and is your aerobic performance declining
01:10:09
Speaker
Those could be very good early warning tools for people that seems without a doubt morning heart rate is a great one. But again, the morning heart rate it kind of lags behind max sub max performance.
01:10:31
Speaker
Fatigue, kind of feelings of depression, you know, those things lag behind. So they come a little bit later. Really the first indication and the most objective one
01:10:45
Speaker
is that submax performance. So it's, you know, it should be automatic once a month you do your MAF test, regardless of what you're doing in training, regardless of anything and everything.
01:11:02
Speaker
You know, if you think that getting on the track and doing interviews seven, intervals seven days a week is how you're going to get to be the best athlete, fine. Do your MAF test once a month and you'll see how trashed you are after a month. And if you get to two months, you'll see it's even worse.
01:11:26
Speaker
Well, Phil, this has been really wonderful, great information for folks, and I certainly appreciate your taking the time to share your knowledge on this with us. And I would encourage people to who have any inklings of the fact that they might be getting overtrained or headed in that direction, excuse me, to
01:11:48
Speaker
Get a hold, get onto your website, read about it, get in our website, read about it. And as Phil and I said earlier before, if you think there's any remote possibility that you're in this condition, you should take drastic action right away. The sooner you act,
01:12:08
Speaker
the better, the easier it's going to be to counteract this. Without a doubt, and having a coach helps even a spouse or a friend or talking to somebody who doesn't know anything about sports can be helpful. If you're out there alone, it's just more difficult.
01:12:31
Speaker
Especially the egos involved and then there's that whole Rocky Balboa mentality and it's over driving us. I think getting an objective outside observer to say, hey, you've been especially moody or cranky lately, maybe that's another one of those signs and symptoms.
01:12:52
Speaker
Well, I really welcome this conversation, Phil, and I do appreciate that. We'll have to think about another topic we can discuss. I think this whole health side of athleticism, you know, people often equate health and fitness with health. We know that they're distinct. Yes, sometimes people that are very fit are also very healthy, but we've both known very fit athletes that were quite unhealthy. And so I think that that would be an interesting
01:13:22
Speaker
uh, rabbit hole to go down a little bit too at some point. Um, sure. Thank you, Scott. This is, uh, very, very important information for people. So thanks for getting it. We both, we both see this too often with athletes and it's, it's a sad situation when you do so. All right. Well, thanks Phil. I really appreciate it. Take care. Have a good rest of your day.
01:13:48
Speaker
Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website uphillathlete.com.