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Paradigm Shifts In Tactical Training With Vince Paikowski
4.7k Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Scott Johnston is once again joined by US Army Captain Vince Paikowski, winner (with Alastair Keys) of the 2021 Best Ranger competition. Last year these two military athletes trained using the tried and test Uphill Athlete methods. This year Vince either personally coached or supplied these same training methods to a number of different teams preparing for the 2022 Best Ranger comp. When the dust settled this year, teams using these Uphill Athlete based training approach placed 1,2,3,4,6 and 7th. Vince ad Scott discuss the methods which some tactical athletes in the armed forces are using to bring their fitness and preparation to a new level.
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Transcript
Introduction and Resources
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.
Captain Vince Pakowski's Journey
00:01:15
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the uphill athlete podcast. I have a return guest today, Captain Vince Pakowski, US Army Ranger. Some of you might remember that a month or so, a couple months ago, I guess, did a podcast with Vince wherein he outlined his own personal journey to winning the best Ranger competition. And those that need some background on that, I'm sure Vince will help us
00:01:42
Speaker
get you up to speed on what that means. And I found it really quite a fascinating thing to hear about how he had used the uphill athlete methodologies to prepare for this competition. And he's gone on to do something, he's taken that to another level this year for the Best Ranger competition just took place a few weeks ago. And Vince was coaching
00:02:08
Speaker
a number of men who competed in that and we'll talk about the results that he got with this and I just think that this is an interesting area for us even for our non-military athletes that we deal with because it shows the kind of the universality of the principles that we advocate and how they can be used for
00:02:33
Speaker
essentially any endurance event, whether it's mountaineering, running, or in this case, a very demanding multi-day competition that obviously involves a lot of endurance, but a bunch of other skills that have to be used. So, well, I'll come back Vince. It's great to see you again.
00:02:53
Speaker
I appreciate your taking time. I know it's been a busy period for you, especially leading into the competition, but even afterwards, so I appreciate your being willing to sit down with me again. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to kind of go through the weekend we had a couple weekends ago and recap some of the big lessons learned.
00:03:16
Speaker
Well, why don't you start off with, maybe just for those that, I know we did a little bit of the origin story when we first spoke, but why don't you give us a couple of minute rundown on your story and then we'll take it from there and we can talk and also maybe fill in some of the gaps for people that don't know anything about the Best Ranger competition who maybe haven't listened to the previous episode.
Best Ranger Competition and Training
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm originally from Wisconsin, born and raised there. I ended up going to the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee on a cross country and track and field scholarship.
00:03:58
Speaker
There I studied accounting and finance, but I knew I wanted to commission into the United States Army. So from there I commissioned in the United States Army as a military intelligence officer, and then spent about four years at the 75th Ranger Regiment, where I had the opportunity to first learn about and compete in the best Ranger competition.
00:04:16
Speaker
The best ranger competition is a three day pretty demanding event. And it can go anywhere from 70 to 80 miles in total distance. But what makes it really difficult is that it's continuous and it's split up into all these smaller events. The events can range in anywhere from duration to an hour to four hours long or even two or three minute high interval
00:04:43
Speaker
events that are going to test a ranger's ability to shoot, communicate, provide medical aid, work as a team with his partner, or just move over distance under load. And because it's continuous, it really takes a lot of training not only to master the technical and tactical side,
00:05:04
Speaker
of the skills required to be successful at the competition, but it also requires a pretty heavy load of physical conditioning, not only for running and rucking, but also for obstacle course style work or upper body and your ability to climb or your ability to carry heavy objects.
00:05:26
Speaker
So where like a normal, you know, 80 mile and three day event may not see a super high level of intensity over that duration. Uh, the best range of competition makes it so that because every event is graded by itself, you really need to perform a, almost a submaximal effort in every event, trying to get as many points as you can accumulate over the weekend. So that, that makes it difficult. And I think a pretty unique endurance challenge, um, in and of itself.
00:05:59
Speaker
Is it a combination of, I mean, is the overall time taken into consideration plus events, these scores for these events? So is there a combination of the speed and the skill part of it?
00:06:17
Speaker
So once the weekend starts, no. Every individual event is its own event. And it is not a cumulative time event. So for instance, this year, the opening event was a sandbag carry for about two and a half miles into a series of pushups and squats into another sandbag carry for two and a half miles. That lasted about an hour.
00:06:42
Speaker
And that was its own event. From there, the weekend kind of spreads out. So especially as you get into the range sequence, there were four ranges on day one. Teams are just arriving to the range when they arrive to the range. Their time to the range was timed. However, that is its own event.
00:07:01
Speaker
the movement between ranges and then they're scored at the ranges themselves. So everything's really its own event. And because the weekend gets so spread out, you know, from the first place team to the last place team, you have no idea how fast people are moving between Rangers or
00:07:18
Speaker
how they're performing at a certain task or how fast they've completed something. So every time you arrive to that new event, you really kind of have to give it almost like a 90% effort to ensure you're not hemorrhaging too many points to other teams that are doing well.
Coaching and Team Performance
00:07:35
Speaker
Sounds complicated. And I saw a little, there's some little snippets on YouTube from this year's competition that I watched and I encourage people to do a search on YouTube if they're interested in seeing what this looks like, you know, in action.
00:07:51
Speaker
So last year you won this competition, you and your partner, and from what I've gathered from what we've spoken about off Mike was that you were approached or you dragooned a number of your compatriots into training under you as a coach to prepare for this year. How did you
00:08:18
Speaker
Did people come to you after your success and ask you what the secret of your success was? Yeah, so I think it's kind of happened in a few different ways, right? I had pre-existing relationships with individuals who saw the success we had and kind of tried to pick our brain or
00:08:38
Speaker
you know, glean what those secrets were. And then, yeah, also had, you know, as people started preparing for the competition, people would just reach out in like a cold, cold manner like, hey, where should I focus or where should I put my effort and time into this?
00:08:55
Speaker
My partner and I, you know, we took a kind of a different approach last year where we kind of scrapped a lot of the high intensity work to trade for just long duration and big weeks of volume.
00:09:12
Speaker
in order to just be durable throughout the weekend. And I think what people are seeing and what the results really two weeks ago showed is that if you're durable, you're going to do better over time in all of these tactical and technical tasks, as well as the physical capacity to compete over time.
00:09:35
Speaker
But you had a few fellows that you had kind of under your direct control this year, right? Wasn't there a few folks that you put together a little training squad?
00:09:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I directly coached five teams this year. And then because I had moved units from the 75th Range Regiment to the 4th Infantry Division. So I took over the training for the 4th Infantry Division teams and a couple of the special operations teams I assisted with. And then the 75th Range Regiment, where I had just come from, had basically taken the training we had done, my partner and I, last year.
00:10:16
Speaker
and then map that out again for their train up this year. So really what we saw was two camps taking the same ideology and really replicating the exact same workouts. John Flynn and Nick O'Brien who are the coaches for the 75th Range Regiment, it was
00:10:35
Speaker
I had sent John a copy of uphill athlete and said, you have to read this. Prior to this year's train up and he said, oh, I just got done reading it and I've kind of revamped our whole schedule. And what was pretty funny was he would do, those guys in Georgia would do a workout and we were doing the same workout on the same day. And we didn't even know that that was occurring until the data was being uploaded to Strava or Garmin and you could start to see
00:11:04
Speaker
you know, this consistent progression of how we're moving towards the competition and then come competition weekend, you know, the teams placed first, second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh, which was a pretty remarkable finish.
Reforming Military Training with Endurance Principles
00:11:23
Speaker
Well, you let one sneak in there. Sounds like the top seven. Yeah, well that, I know from our last talk, your,
00:11:34
Speaker
mentioned then that you kind of had this mission of changing the Army's attitude about training, especially Rangers, but we've seen this when we can talk about this with regards to other special operations units, but
00:11:51
Speaker
It sounds as if you might have caught the attention of some people that have the ability to make these decisions about how the training should be progressing or what kind of training should be used. Yeah, so for some context, you know, the competition occurs over three days.
00:12:16
Speaker
After each day, there's cuts made. So day one starts with 52 teams. They cut down to 28 teams for the second day, and they cut down to 16 teams for the third day. Right now, I'm at the 4th Infantry Division, who last year didn't see a team make it out of day one. This year, all three teams made it out of day one to day two, and one team finished seventh overall.
00:12:44
Speaker
And the difference that's being noted there is just the level of preparation. One of the individuals who took seventh this year didn't make it out of day one last year. And his commentary the whole time was,
00:12:59
Speaker
he didn't realize how unprepared he was for the competition until he went through a proper train up and realized, if individuals are preparing like this, it's no wonder I didn't make it out of day one. So I've had the opportunity to sit down with this
00:13:17
Speaker
commanding general here for Carson and kind of over, you know, the process we took in order to be successful. And I think, you know, what we're looking at as a whole is how do we replicate this across, you know, teams and squads and platoons to create a more lethal fighting force.
00:13:37
Speaker
And I would assume you've put a great deal of thought into that. You're a very thoughtful person and you've got some ideas about how this could be implemented on a large scale. And do you see something that is really actionable on a large scale?
00:13:55
Speaker
Because you were working with very highly motivated individuals who probably were already in the top few percent physical performance in their units, and they were very open and receptive to this methodology. How do you see that scaling from there? Yeah, so I really believe it is like everything in the Army. It's a bottom-up fight, right?
00:14:25
Speaker
these you know the the institutional change or the cultural change that needs to occur cannot occur from from the top levels down right it takes you know the platoon leaders platoon surgeons and squad leaders buying off on the idea that hey if we train in a manner that you know
00:14:41
Speaker
might not be as intense as we're used to, but it takes us into a longer duration. Over time, we're going to see a reduction in injuries. We're going to see better physical performance, especially on day three or four of a field exercise. And we're going to see a longevity in our soldiers that we haven't seen before. How we're really looking at scaling it, I gave the mission to the guys that I had trained up.
00:15:07
Speaker
that the best Ranger competition is not about what happens on the weekend or who wins at the end of the day. It's about taking those skills back that you've learned for the past three or four months to the formation and imparting them on teams and squads and individuals who you can actually affect.
00:15:26
Speaker
I think it, like anything, it's still going to take time. But as long as we continue to show and prove results through a methodology, I think that's where you get more and more by it. I've had conversations here with people who are asking, how did you take a program that never got anybody out of day one to finishing seven?
00:15:54
Speaker
You know, all that is is consistency over three months. It was a pretty intense consistency, but we can scale that back in order to, you know,
00:16:03
Speaker
introduce individuals who are not at all used to or not maybe as motivated to do long days. But as you slowly introduce it to them, I think people realize that they have a propensity to perform to a much greater level than they originally thought capable of. And once you open up that ceiling for them, I think it's
00:16:25
Speaker
human nature to want to chase, you know, what is my actual potential now that I know that, you know, all of this exists above and ahead of me, and that I am capable of, you know, getting to that place. And it does seem
00:16:43
Speaker
As some folks know that I've spent a little bit of time working with individual special operations folks, most cases helping them prepare for certain selections. And I've had opportunities to interact and rub shoulders with some trainers at different special operations units.
00:17:06
Speaker
And it's been interesting to me that these ideas that we've put forth in the books and you know just in general on our training philosophy.
00:17:19
Speaker
I was surprised that there was an utter complete lack of knowledge of these things in that world that the trainers typically, and I think many of the soldiers, are coming to their... They've never even been exposed to endurance training. They have no clue of...
00:17:43
Speaker
That was shocking to me, but it also meant that, oh, there's a lot of really low hanging fruit here. It would not be that easy. These are people that have a very high work capacity because they're typically used to doing a lot of very high intensity, heavy work, but they don't do it
00:18:02
Speaker
with the endurance training methodologies in mind. It's all interval style work at a very high intensity, which does make you tough as hell and allows you to do a lot of hard work, but it doesn't allow, as you were talking, it doesn't make you durable. It doesn't give you that ability to perform well three or four days into some type of an event.
00:18:27
Speaker
So it seems like this is a universal characteristic in your world. I mean, I'm sure you've bumped into it. And initially you probably ran into some resistance in that world with people saying, well,
Balancing Intensity and Endurance in Military Training
00:18:44
Speaker
You know that can't work because they've never tried it and then as you just pointed out once someone tries it and Develops this level of endurance suddenly they go. Oh my gosh There is a ton here that you know, I didn't even didn't even know this world existed So I think that's kind of an interesting
00:19:04
Speaker
I'm excited to hear how well this recent group did. Six teams in the top seven that were all using the uphill athlete training methodologies. I guess that's about as good a proof of concept as you could have.
00:19:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think, so if we just take special operations and we can take the 75th Range Regiment as kind of a case study here, right? In the 75th Range Regiment, you know, the ranger standard is the ability to run five miles at any time in under 40 minutes, right? So that's one of the standards that's held across the board. You need to be able to do that.
00:19:50
Speaker
Well, what we see in Rangers then is anytime they leave the company area to go for a run, they feel the necessity to run at eight minute pace or faster, regardless of what they're running. If they're going to run five miles or six miles, they're going to try and run eight minute pace or faster.
00:20:11
Speaker
Well, that only works if you have the capacity to run a sub 30 minute five mile, right? Then maybe that eight minute mile makes sense for your easy pace. What we need to start to try and do is break down the perception that, hey, because that's the standard, it means that that's what I have to do all the time.
00:20:32
Speaker
That's not what that means, right? It means because that's the standard, when I test, I need to be faster than that. And it's teaching individuals that, hey, that means that a 10 minute mile, a nine minute mile, that's okay sometimes. If that's what your body's feeling, you're still seeing great results from that zone two effort and that low aerobic intensity.
00:20:55
Speaker
but it's teaching guys to accept that that's really key. And so I think we talked about it a little last time, but one thing we try to do is change the perspective on the workouts, right? If I assign a ranger, you know, a 10 mile run, Ranger is going to try and finish that 10 miles as fast as possible.
00:21:14
Speaker
you know, either just to be done or because they get competitive with, you know, someone else. Um, but because I've given them 10 miles and they know that they can affect the amount of time that they're out there doing 10 miles, they're going to try and get it done faster because that's the mentality. But if I tell ranger, Hey,
00:21:32
Speaker
I want you to go run for an hour and a half and I do not care how far you go. What we're finding is that then all of a sudden they will temper back their pace. They will actually run easy because they know I'm out here for 90 minutes regardless.
00:21:51
Speaker
And I've been explicitly told that no one cares how far I go, as long as I'm just keeping an easy effort. And reframing that goal in their head, I think is crucial to finding success long-term. Then also, the Army kind of has a nasty habit when we talk about ruck marching, is when we're training ruck marching, guys will throw on their ruck and they'll just begin to run.
00:22:20
Speaker
Well, running with 35, 45 pounds on your back long term isn't super beneficial for a lot of reasons. You're going to run into injuries pretty quickly. You're going to run into a lot of overuse issues. And because we do that, guys do it once. And then they're like, I can't train rucking. I'm going to get hurt. And because of that, they don't train the skill at all.
00:22:46
Speaker
where what we have to do is reframe to, you know, your engine is going to carry your ability to run with a rucksack if necessary. So we can build the engine without you having to put weight on your back. But then what we can also do is add weight to your back and just walk and train these muscles, you know, that aren't typically used and train a skill that a lot of people neglect. And that's just the ability to walk fast.
00:23:13
Speaker
Um, recently here on post, we did a 10 mile ruck March. Um, you know, and a bunch of guys took off running from, from the get go and.
00:23:24
Speaker
I told everyone, I'm just going to walk. I'm going to walk at a comfortably fast pace and we'll see where we end. And I think only two guys finished the 10 miles ahead of me because they broke themselves down over time. Where if we can train troops to just walk and hold a steady pace for a long duration, well, then we have a more sustainable force that we can infiltrate into a combat zone that isn't quite as tired when they arrive.
00:23:50
Speaker
and are able to replicate that effort day after day after day because it's just a more sustainable energy system to work. So I think part of it is changing the frame in which how soldiers think about fitness and the journey to achieve better results. And then part of it too is just changing their perspective on what is acceptable.
00:24:16
Speaker
Is it acceptable to walk? Absolutely, because you can walk every single day of your life, you know, for the rest of your life with less detriment to future operations. So, yeah, I think that's where we've kind of got to move towards and some ways to think about it as we move forward.
00:24:38
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about rucking. I was having a conversation with one of our other coaches who couldn't be on this call. That's Jack Kunsel and Jack has recently left one of the SEAL teams and came to work for us because it was a much more glamorous job than he had before.
00:24:59
Speaker
And actually, Jack is off breaking, you know, fastest known times all over the place right now. He just two days ago has set the fastest known time on Mount Hood. And a couple weeks before that, it was the fastest known time on Mount Shasta. So he's got a whole new bone that he's grabbed a hold of now that he's left the seals. But anyway, we've had some really interesting talks about rucking.
00:25:25
Speaker
And he, like you, at least I'm gonna make an assumption. The two of us feel that rucking,
00:25:35
Speaker
especially the way you were describing it a few minutes ago, where people are running with a pack on, is grossly overused. And it leads to a lot of injuries. And Jack told me an interesting little anecdote, and I think a lot of times these anecdotes are insightful training anecdotes, I think are important to
00:26:00
Speaker
to seize upon and to kind of understand why these things might happen when one athlete does such and such. And so Jackson, in order to prepare for, Jackson fairly, he's a pretty big guy, but he's leaned himself down to I think about 175 pounds now that he's doing all this running and schema stuff. But he got up to 215 pounds before he went to Buds, thinking that he needed to be really big and strong.
00:26:26
Speaker
And he thought he was really very ready and going to be the best guy at all the running and rucking type events. And he said the best ruck performances in his Buds class were put up by a couple of 160-pound academy graduates who had run cross-country at the academy and had never
00:26:50
Speaker
really done any rucking training. And he said that was a real eye opener for him. It's like, oh, it's this big aerobic motor that allowed them to be able to move quickly, even when you put a pack on their back.
00:27:10
Speaker
I surmise from what I know about other types of training in the civilian world is that there is this notion that you need to do, and you alluded to it a few moments ago when you were talking about the need to go out and run at an eight minute or faster pace every time you put your running shoes on and went out the door.
Aerobic Base Training vs. Specificity
00:27:30
Speaker
And that is this notion of specificity and how people misunderstand and overuse specificity. So they're thinking, OK, if the competition is going to involve me carrying a heavy pack as fast as I can, I better start training like that a lot. And I see this in the mountaineering world, where people think, OK, mountaineering is essentially carrying a heavy pack uphill. I better do every workout.
00:27:59
Speaker
was a heavy pack carry uphill. And when I tell them, well, there's a need for carrying a heavy pack uphill for sure. But you definitely do not want to be doing the bulk of your training that way. In fact, I work with some professional high altitude mountaineers, professional alpinists. They do 90% of their aerobic base training running with nothing more than a water
00:28:27
Speaker
water bottle.
00:28:30
Speaker
And yes, we do some heavy, hard work with a big pack uphill, but it's very controlled and it's, you know, I would say like less than 10% of their training looks like that. And so I think that there's this misunderstanding about specificity. And from what little I know, which is I've only been around the tactical world for a few years now and seen some snippets and pieces of how people are training,
00:28:59
Speaker
I think there's a tendency in that world as well to overuse that specificity concept. And so Jack wanted me to ask you about this and see if you were kind of in agreement with that and how did you fit rucking, I think you've already explained it, how you fit rucking into your training program. But do you see that kind of over specificity, overuse of specificity?
00:29:24
Speaker
Absolutely. So as an example, once a year units usually do the expert infantry badge or the expert soldier badge as part of the total soldier concept. And part of that is a 12 mile ruck march to the three hour standard. So 15 minute miles for 12 miles with a 35 pound pack on plus your helmet weapon and your fighting load carrier.
00:29:55
Speaker
Well, what always happens is, you know, you get two months out and then the unit starts scrambling, realizing like, oh, we haven't trained for rucking. And all of a sudden people are putting on rucksacks two or three times a week. You see guys running around with rucksacks. You see, you see some pretty crazy things happening in this two month window prior to the testing, trying to get ready.
00:30:19
Speaker
And I think that's a great way to set up for injuries and to change the conversation about rucking from, hey, this is something that soldiers should be capable and competent and ready to do at any time to, hey, we should avoid rucking at all costs because it's injury producing. Well, it is injury producing if you try and cram it all at one time and you're running with your pack all the time.
00:30:48
Speaker
The way I looked at ruck marching for the train up and the way we kind of, you know, put it in there is, is, Hey, this is going to be our zone to work. You're going to go out there and you're going to learn to walk at 11 minute miles or 12 minute miles. Um, just walking with your pack on, we're going to start with 35 pounds, you know, go to 45 pounds, maybe try a couple weeks at 55 pounds.
00:31:12
Speaker
But we're only going to ruck two or three times a week and it's only going to be one to add volume, two to add time on the feet to condition the traps to handle the weight and the lower back to handle the weight. But the impact you're going to be seeing from it in terms of your body is going to be low because you're just going to be walking.
Injury Prevention and Athlete Safety
00:31:35
Speaker
And so I think from that lens, you know, then we have a sustainable plan, but I agree 100% that at the end of the day, you know, if, if there's a ruck race coming on, you can line up everybody at the start of the ruck race and just have them run five miles.
00:31:51
Speaker
And that will probably predict the order in which they'll finish that 12 mile ruck march as well. Because at the end of the day it is about aerobic engine and the packs aren't heavy enough to take away that advantage.
00:32:07
Speaker
Eventually if you talk about, hey, we have to do an infill with a hundred pound pack. Okay, well now that 150 pound frame isn't going to be able to handle a hundred pound pack as well as 195 or 200 pound frame is going to handle that.
00:32:26
Speaker
But that's where we have to look at, especially in the military and special operations, is where is the sweet spot in the middle to train as an athlete and a warrior at the same time, right? It's probably not down below 150 where you're gonna get your best aerobic results.
00:32:43
Speaker
And it's probably not above 200 where the trade-off for just moving your own muscle around is so great that you're losing efficiency. It's probably somewhere in that 160 to 180 range, depending on a lot of factors and the ability to have enough strength and capacity to carry a heavy pack, but have the engine too to be able to move quickly over time.
00:33:07
Speaker
And if you can mesh those two things without rucking every day or constantly putting a pack on, you'll know that, hey, when the time comes to throw that heavy pack on, your body's going to be ready. And so I absolutely agree that, you know, we get overly specific and kind of tunnel vision comes on when we see like, oh, the goal is this 12 mile ruck march in two months. Well, now we have to ruck all the time. Well, if we just maintained a good aerobic base,
00:33:34
Speaker
and through on the pack, maybe once a week or twice a week to just keep the traps in the lower back familiar with it, but do it in a manner that is just really recovery work. We can still get after that total soldier concept and the ability to stay fit in a multitude of domains.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, and certainly injury has to be at the very top, or injury prevention has to be at the very top of the list of goals when you're training any athlete, because once they're injured, then there can be no more training. Training will be greatly compromised. You maybe have to go from, for all these type of events you're doing, and especially the kind of mountain events we train people for, they're all foot born.
00:34:26
Speaker
if you need to shift someone to cycling because of an injury, that's going to compromise the training. I mean, cycling is a great exercise, but it doesn't provide the kind of conditioning that you need if you're running around in the mountains or carrying mountaineering with a heavy pack or in your case is rucking. You can't train on a bicycle.
00:34:48
Speaker
and get off and expect to do well in a foot-borne activity. It just doesn't happen. And so I always have felt like coaches have their own version of the Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm. Make sure you're not screwing somebody up, injuring them, overtraining them, that sort of thing. And it just seems like there's such a high risk when you get people
00:35:12
Speaker
running around with a heavy pack on their back a lot. And especially in your case, you're often, you're dealing with
00:35:21
Speaker
young men and women, I'm sure, too, kind of in the peak of their physical years. We're often dealing with folks who are well past their physical peak and maybe haven't been active at a particularly high level for many, in some cases, maybe decades. And then they're coming to us and they need to prepare for a mountaineering event, which does involve carrying a heavy pack.
00:35:51
Speaker
it's risky to suddenly throw up heavy weight on that person, especially because we're talking about workouts. Most of your rucking is probably done on pretty flat or gentle terrain. And we're talking about having to carry a heavy pack uphill and back downhill. And the downhill impact is significant. It mimics the impact of running. And I think that's something that a lot of folks don't understand is that the impact of running
00:36:20
Speaker
even with no weight on your back is about, depending on how fast you're running, of course, is somewhere in the range of two to three times your body weight on every foot strike. And when you multiply that by thousands of foot strikes, it's no wonder people get overuse injuries. I mean, it was no wonder running has a reputation for for injuring people. And it takes a long time to build the conditioning to prepare somebody for that kind of loading.
00:36:47
Speaker
and people in their 40s and 50s and 60s who we often run into, the elasticity of those connective tissues is nothing like it is with your 20-somethings that you're typically working with. So people have to be careful about, obviously I'm making quite a case for not hurting yourself because having hurt myself many times through training, I think almost every athlete will have injured themselves at least a few times in their career.
Importance of Basic and Consistent Training
00:37:17
Speaker
you realize how detrimental that is to your both physical and mental preparation for something. You can get pretty depressed if all of a sudden you can't do the thing you are training for.
00:37:32
Speaker
That's where too, we can look at because running is such a high impact activity. If we change the mode of running a little bit though, we can lower that level of impact that we see. And that's where I had my guys training a lot of their long runs and a lot of even their easy runs in the mountains because they're right across the street here from Fort Carson.
00:37:59
Speaker
Well, all that does is reduce the level of impact as they're running uphill. And then as long as they're given instructions that we're not bombing down any hills today and we're not going to, you know, eccentrically load like crazy. They did a pretty good job of understanding that, like, hey, yeah, that was a 10, 11 minute mile. But I also just chewed off 200, 300 feet of elevation gain that mile. So it's OK. I'm still working, you know,
00:38:27
Speaker
I think something that John Flynn, Nick O'Brien from the 75th Range Regiment have done really well is introduced. They're down in Georgia, so they don't have the mountains, but especially for guys that are coming off combat related injuries or
00:38:44
Speaker
even just overuse or overwork injuries is introducing them to a 30% incline three miles an hour on the treadmill. And you are gaining so much return on investment for so little impact that you can do things like that pretty continuously.
00:39:03
Speaker
and not really run into the injury risk that you're gonna see, you know, trying to chase heavy mileage with high intensity on the road or on a flat surface because of all that loading over and over. I think that one of the things you and I should touch on before we go, before we leave each other's company is this notion of
00:39:31
Speaker
just training the basics. There's so much hype around, due to social media and other platforms like YouTube and whatnot, that you can go on there and see people doing absolutely incredible stuff.
00:39:53
Speaker
It's mind boggling what people are capable of doing. And I think that this exposure to people, whether it's in the climbing world, the running world, the skiing world, or I'm sure in the tactical world, these incredible feats of strength and speed and power and endurance,
00:40:10
Speaker
that people get sucked into thinking, Oh, that's what I need to do to be good. Um, they see somebody going to the track and running, you know, 10, 400 meter repeats, you know, um, with 10 seconds rest and they're under, you know, 70 seconds. And they think, Oh, well that's, that's what made this person fast. So I better go do that same workout. And they, what they don't see is that, uh,
00:40:40
Speaker
years and years and potentially decades of training that went into getting that athlete to the point where they could do 10-400s in 70 seconds with a short recovery. And that athlete got there because they did all of the very
00:41:01
Speaker
unglamorous, basic stuff, the stuff you've been talking about, the zone two rucking and zone two running. And we certainly bump into that a lot in our world that people come to us knowing that we can produce, you know, good results with a variety of different types of athletes in these types of events. And then when we introduce them to these notions of this very basic stuff is, you know, there's what you need to do and it ain't very sexy.
00:41:30
Speaker
There's some pushback and resistance, and I think, well, wait a minute, I thought I needed to be lying on the floor in a pool of blood and sweat at the end of every workout, or I haven't really trained. And that's a hard concept to get across to people, especially for these endurance events.
00:41:50
Speaker
how much unglamorous, very monotonous type work that has to be done. And is that an area that you, I mean, I know you understand that the success of these athletes you trained and yourself, of course, comes from this covering your bases with this kind of basic training. Is that an area you feel you get a lot of pushback to from folks?
00:42:22
Speaker
Initially, absolutely. You know, I think like you're saying social media, although a tool has done a
00:42:30
Speaker
has done a terrible job of scripting reality for us. And when you see, like you're saying, those huge track sessions that are glamorous and fast, that's a professional athlete putting the last 2% or the last 1% together that they need in order to really win in the last 400 meters or be competitive on the world stage.
00:42:56
Speaker
But that last 2% or that last percent means nothing if you don't have, you know, all the work behind it. And so, you know, and I think we touched on this last time, what I tried to do with the guys is
00:43:12
Speaker
First off, manage expectations upfront. Tell them this is going to get boring. I know you think like you just signed up for three, four months of training and it's gonna be all sunshine and rainbows and fun. If it is, you're not doing it right because your body hasn't reached the level of cumulative fatigue that we want it to reach, right? So it's gonna get boring. It's gonna get monotonous. It's going to get, you know, it's gonna feel like groundhog day from time to time, but if it does, then we know we're doing it right.
00:43:40
Speaker
Because not only then are we training the body, but we're also training the mind to just endure the repetitiveness that endurance events requires. But then I also tried to create repeatable workouts that the guys could hit. So we repeated a series of workouts in, you know, every three weeks the guys would hit
00:44:02
Speaker
You know, one quality session a week and every three weeks we would go back through the same batch of workouts so that they could see and visualize what just this zone to work was doing to their capacity to move over time and those events were
00:44:19
Speaker
either a one hour run into a two hour ruck, a five mile run into a five mile ruck into a five mile run, or just three to four hours out in the mountains, you know, at the same series of trails just for max distance. And in those three workouts, you know,
00:44:40
Speaker
Instead of having them focus on just the time, we had them focus on, today we're just gonna focus on feeding. How often do you feed? What are your source of calories that you're getting? What's your sodium intake like? What's your glucose intake like? And how did that affect the way you felt out there?
00:44:58
Speaker
Now, because they're thinking of something that has nothing to do with the workout, their minds in a different place in the miles are clicking off faster because they're not worried about the fatigue that they're feeling. After the first 555 workout, we saw the guys went out, ran, then they rucked, and then everyone died on the final run. Then the second time around, we made the rule, hey, this time you have to run your first five mile as fast as you could close your last five mile last time.
00:45:28
Speaker
And what we saw was a dramatic increase in capability, just from having them change the scope in which they attacked the workout. And we were seeing, from the start of the train up to the end of the train up, 17, 20% improvements in some of our athletes, especially some of our larger athletes.
00:45:50
Speaker
In these workouts, you know, with our top guys still seen eight or 9% improvement in just three months in a, you know, in a two hour long workout, which is massive. But what it also shows is the credence to it doesn't take
00:46:07
Speaker
those track sessions that are tuning up your last 1%, 2% that induce or increase the risk of injury. All it takes is the consistency over time to build your engine. And then when the time comes and we sharpen the knives at the end of the training block,
00:46:25
Speaker
All of that is going to come together and this level of strength and durability that you've built is now going to be sustainable through an event and then you'll actually be able to tap that last 1%, 2% when you need it because you're durable enough to get to that point in your event.
Vince's Coaching Philosophy and Success Stories
00:46:44
Speaker
Very well said. Dan, when you were ready to get out of that army business, you know, I could probably hire you as a coach, I think. That's very well put. It's really hit and hits that nail on the head exactly that I encounter. I've encountered it, you know, in my whole career as a coach where
00:47:03
Speaker
people get really caught up in that notion of that one or two percent gain that they might get from whether it's I'm going to go to a ketogenic diet or I'm going to take this nutritional supplement or I'm going to do this secret special workout and
00:47:21
Speaker
As you said, when you're at the very peak of your, when you've exhausted all the other methods of gaining fitness, then yeah, it's worth trying some of these things that are sort of around the edges that might give you, you know, even a half a percent here or there, it can make a huge difference at a world-class level. But if you,
00:47:43
Speaker
if you can concentrate on these basics, you just said, you saw in the high double digit, high teens, percentage improvements in people's performance in just a few weeks of doing the basic work. And I've seen it similarly work with Olympians who came to me, again, thinking that they needed more intensity in their training. And I would say, no, let's,
00:48:11
Speaker
let's back off from that intensity and let me show you something. And even these folks at an extremely high level, probably very close to their genetic potential in terms of their athletic performance, by taking a different approach and going back to the basics and making sure that the aerobic engine was as big as we could get it,
00:48:35
Speaker
they would see literally digit changes in their overall performance in the double digits up into the low to mid teens sometimes. And they couldn't believe it because they thought the only way to get those kinds of improvements in performance was by training at their limit. You're kind of at what I call the endurance limit, you know, so that if you're, if you're, and this is sort of what you alluded to in the very beginning,
00:49:02
Speaker
That's how your athletes typically would train before you started working with them is if they went out the door for a 30-minute run, they would run as hard as they could for 30 minutes. If they go for a two-hour run, they run as hard as they can for two hours. They've got the needle pressed right up against that stop, that limit. The limit changes, of course, depending on the duration of that run.
00:49:27
Speaker
but they don't understand that they can actually get faster by going slower. And that is such a, it's so counterintuitive and I've been struggling and I love hearing, I love talking to somebody that thinks the same way because it is so counterintuitive to think that you can get faster by going slower. And I think some of that comes from the notion that
00:49:54
Speaker
Let's say you're in the strength and conditioning world, you don't get stronger by going into the gym and lifting lighter weights. You always are training up near and close to your strength limit if you want to get stronger. But training strength and training endurance are two completely different animals.
00:50:11
Speaker
That's the tricky part for me, has been trying to convey to folks, nope, you got to run slower if you want to run faster. So I'm pleased that you've actually stated it much more eloquently than I could. So thank you. I'm not sure about that, but one thing I also try to do with the guys is let them know that
00:50:35
Speaker
you know, like an Elliott Kipchoge a couple of years ago published some of his training logs and you go through it and you start to look and you're like, wait, he did a two hour recovery run, right? But his first few miles were nine 30, nine flat as he's working in, you know, to pace. Well, if the best in the world at what, you know, we're striving to do endurance wise,
00:51:01
Speaker
has the patience to run 930 9 flat and trust that it's going to improve you know his capacity over time then you know why should we do any different then we should be celebrating you know the nine minute miles the 930 miles the 10 minute miles as as a greater return on investment over time and something that can increase our longevity as athletes
00:51:26
Speaker
rather than looking at it as like, oh, you're not trying hard today. Well, I don't need to try hard necessarily today to see the return on investment that I want in the weeks and months to come. So using the athletes that are really living out the principles of 80-20 or trusting the zone to work, I think is really helpful to just gain some perspective on.
00:51:54
Speaker
It's not just smoking mirrors and the sensei sitting in the corner of the room telling you the best athletes in the world are following the protocol and they're seeing huge results from it.
00:52:07
Speaker
And this was with somebody in his particular case, this is somebody that can run 26 miles at a four and a half minute mile pace. So for him, you know, that's a nine minute mile is one half as fast as his maximum sustainable pace. So for most of us, when, if we were to know your guys, that would mean they would be running 16 minute mile. You know, these are guys, your guys are going to run an eight minute mile pace for several miles.
00:52:35
Speaker
Well, their recovery pace, if they took that to the same ratio, they'd be running at a 16 minute mile, 15, 16, which is going to seem so crazy, stupidly slow. But from a physiological standpoint, it's going to probably be doing the same thing it does for Iliad Kipchoge.
00:52:54
Speaker
So I think that that's a great analogy. I do the same thing with both. I've used him and other athletes where I have access to their training logs. And I say here, this is what makes you think you're special, that you could be doing something completely different than what the best endurance athletes in the world do. And a lot of, I think it can be helpful for people to know some of the history of endurance training and how, you know,
00:53:22
Speaker
the sport of the science of training for endurance has gone through so many iterations and flip flops and pretty much everything has been tried from a lot of high intensity interval style work. And eventually the science and the empirical results have sort of settled on this approach that we've been discussing and that we write about in the book. That's what's over the last hundred years,
00:53:52
Speaker
It's finally come around to, okay, this is what seems to work best. And all these things that we've tried. And I believe that there's no better, you could take all the, you know,
00:54:05
Speaker
research and all the studies that get done in laboratories and I think they don't hold a candle to the biggest laboratory out there which is you know the competitive field because you've got you know millions of athletes training under you know tens of thousands of coaches around the world trying all different kinds of training protocols and then they go to the starting line and the stopwatch tells you what works and what doesn't work
00:54:32
Speaker
That's a whole lot better than a six-week study done on some inactive college students that showed that, oh, if they do these high intensity intervals, they got an improvement in their max VO2. I don't weight that kind of study heavily at all. It can be interesting, but I'd much rather look at, okay, well, who's...
00:54:53
Speaker
who's the coach out there that's producing the best runners in the world? And what does he do for training or she, and how are they training their athletes? And then you go, huh, there's probably something to be learned here. That's sort of where the knowledge base that I've, where I've come from is sort of this trial and error, empirical, you know, well, let's try this and see if this, what this does and how this works. And I think that what's cool about what you've done
00:55:19
Speaker
is you took you know you kind of probably took a bit of it well you came from an endurance background so you knew you weren't going out on too big of a limb when you personally trained you and your partner in your first competition that you won you knew some of the underlying principles you knew okay i think this is going to work but now you've taken that from you know
00:55:40
Speaker
one data point to six data points. And you've trained people who didn't have your endurance training background as a young man. So I think that speaks volumes to the effectiveness of that training. You're to be congratulated on great results.
00:56:02
Speaker
I appreciate that. The guys, they trusted the process. They put in a lot of work and they handled themselves like professionals over the weekend and it was really cool to see the fruits of their labor. It was the first time I saw that from the coaching perspective and it was almost more fun from the coaching perspective because I didn't have to be in the hurt locker to get to enjoy the elation of having a great weekend.
00:56:31
Speaker
It is, I think there's a lot of, yeah, it's gratifying to be able to put some of these concepts to use and to see that, you know, to help other people, you know, as a, you know,
00:56:44
Speaker
an athlete, a lifelong athlete, and some of that spent in a professional sense. It's a pretty selfish pastime, pretty selfish occupation. But now you have a chance of giving back to those people and showing them how this works. And then I'm sure it was
00:57:03
Speaker
very satisfying as they came across the finish line to see the results rolling in. There's no better feeling for a coach than to go, okay, that did work and I've made these people better for it. They're better off than they were before.
00:57:19
Speaker
absolutely so where do you go from here Vince what's what's what's next on the agenda for you you're gonna have a big you know instead of you know a few teams are you gonna be training a whole bunch of teams for the next year or what's happening well we will we'll see when the time comes the
00:57:37
Speaker
The Army is an interesting place in that now that the competition over, no one will probably talk about, you know, how to prepare or how to better, you know, do it until we get to, you know, six months out, seven months out. We're always in a training cycle for something. So, um, but yeah, I think definitely next year, you know, I'll be interested in continuing to coach and continuing to, to
00:58:00
Speaker
you know, mentor some of the younger guys that want to come up and try and compete in the competition, but more than just the competition, but really to try and impart on, you know, as many people as we can, the importance of this style of training in our profession and the results that it can yield, not only from the physical side, but how that translates to your technical and tactical competence under duress and
Future Plans and Reflections
00:58:28
Speaker
in a fatigued state. So whatever opportunities are thrown my way to help out, definitely going to take them. And yeah, just enjoying the time as it comes.
00:58:42
Speaker
Well, congratulations again. I know that's a huge accomplishment that you pulled off and I'm pretty psyched for you. And I think that one of the reasons I wanted to get you on today to talk about that is to the parallels between
00:59:03
Speaker
this particular type of event, the physical demands of something like the best ranger competition are not too dissimilar than the physical demands of many of these mountain events that we train for, especially alpinism, where there's a very high technical component combined with a big endurance component that's needed. And I think that people can understand
00:59:30
Speaker
the universality of these principles and how they can be applied is really useful for folks so they can have a little better grasp of kind of the intellectual underpinnings of this stuff that we talk about all the time. So thanks for helping me drive that point home. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's good seeing you again, Vince. And maybe we'll get a chance to do this again sometime. I'd like it. Absolutely. That would be awesome.
01:00:01
Speaker
That'd be really cool. OK, thanks a lot. Bye-bye. Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website, uphillathlete.com.