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Phil Maffetone talks Health, Training, and Aerobic Deficiency with Scott Johnston
4.7k Plays4 years ago
Phil Maffetone could well be called the "prophet of Zone 2". He's been writing, speaking and coaching the importance of aerobic base since the early 1980s. During a chance meeting with Phil in 1984 Uphill Athlete co-founder Scott Johnston was first exposed to the importance of low intensity training. In this episode, Scott talks with Phil, originator of the concept of aerobic deficiency. In this discussion they trace the arc of Scott’s training philosophy from that chance meeting in 1984 to the current Uphill Athlete training methodology.
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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.
00:00:10
Speaker
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. Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com, and we'd love to hear from you.
Influence of Dr. Phil Mathitone on Endurance Training
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the Uphill Athlete podcast. I'm your host, Scott Johnston, co-founder of Uphill Athlete. And today it gives me great pleasure to have as our guest, Dr. Phil Mathitone.
00:00:49
Speaker
Many of our audience are familiar, at least in passing with his name, as I give him credit in a number of places on the website and in both of our books for influencing my thinking on endurance training. Among as many accomplishments, Phil is the developer of the concept of maximum aerobic function and aerobic deficiency syndrome, both of which I've spoken about at length. But I want to take a couple of minutes first to put this conversation into context by way of a little background story.
00:01:19
Speaker
Phil's been involved in working with endurance athletes for much of his adult life and was nearly the only one speaking out about the importance of developing a big aerobic base for endurance athletes and anyone interested in maximizing his or her health.
Scott's Athletic Journey and Meeting Phil
00:01:35
Speaker
In the 70s, my first athletic career, I was part of an Olympic development program for high school swimmers who showed promise. And we lived and trained in Colorado Springs under the guidance of a brilliant coach who'd been greatly influenced by the thinking, by the training methods and thinking of legendary coach Arthur Lydier.
00:01:56
Speaker
Our coach translated those running concepts into swimming. As a result, we trained five hours a day, six days a week. Typically, a day was 20,000 meters in the pool. But to keep the story short, I want to say that the training worked wonders, but none of us swimmers had a clue why it worked so well.
00:02:18
Speaker
So fast forward to roughly the mid 80s when I was living in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and I was in the midst of my second athletic career as a cross country ski racer. I'm not sure how this happened, but somehow I got wind of the fact that this coaching guru was spending some time in Boulder that year.
00:02:39
Speaker
So I beat the bushes a little bit and was able to seek out some advice from Phil, managed to spend a couple of two or three sessions, I think, with him one week. You had a, as I recall, you had a clinic or office out in gun barrel area north of Boulder. And then we also spent some time on the track. You were evaluating my running.
00:03:02
Speaker
And interestingly, for people out there, I still have the brochure that Phil gave me that day. And on the back side of it is, it's filled completely with scribbled notes that I took during that conversation. I was writing so fast, I didn't want to miss a word, what you had to say.
00:03:19
Speaker
And it was during those interactions with me and then afterwards as I had time to digest what you said and then read things that other really successful coaches had written that the scales really just dropped from my eyes and I began to connect those endurance training dots and it was a big aha moment for me.
00:03:41
Speaker
So that was the beginning for me as a lifelong journey as an athlete and then as a coach that has led to where we are today with uphill athlete and the thousands of mountain athletes that we have influenced. So this is really a long way of acknowledging my debt to Phil for unwittingly pointing me in the right direction. And so welcome, Phil. It's an honor to have you here today. I really appreciate it.
00:04:05
Speaker
Hi, Scott. Thanks for having me. This is great. Well, it's wonderful to see you again after 35 years. We're both showing a few gray hairs. A few?
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's, it's been some time. So
Phil's Athletic Background and Transition to Endurance
00:04:24
Speaker
for, for the listeners, a lot of our listeners, well, some of our listeners in ultra running world will definitely be familiar with your name because you've been a pretty big influence in that area. Others of ours that come from more of the mountaineering side of things.
00:04:37
Speaker
won't know as much about you, but could you start with sort of your background as a kid, as an athlete, how you got started in that? What took you into this direction of the medical end of things and then the coaching?
00:04:54
Speaker
Sure. I like your concept of connecting the dots because that's really, that's been my process along the way. We have a society where people get into a dot, one dot, maybe they have two dots, but connecting the dots,
00:05:17
Speaker
Boy, that's a whole different world, which is a wonderful world and a creative one. And that's sort of what I did from, I would say, from high school. I was suddenly in high school, I think the end of my sophomore year became a
00:05:39
Speaker
became athletic. I was able to do a lot of things and ran track and field and through college. And, you know, when I got out and got into practice, I started doing long distance. I always considered long distance as 400 meters, which for a sprinter is sort of typical.
00:06:03
Speaker
And I, you know, I worked my way up to running marathons. And in fact, I think one of the trips that maybe we had met in Boulder in the field house was a race I did with Stu Middleman. It was a six-day race. And I think it was over the holidays and we
00:06:27
Speaker
You know, we were in there. There were hardly any spectators, but all these crazy people were running for six days. Didn't he run barefoot?
00:06:37
Speaker
He ran barefoot some of the time because I wanted to give his mechanics something difficult, something different to think about. So the difficulty of wearing shoes and for that amount of time pretty much disappeared. So, and I think he ran about 600 miles over that six day period.
00:07:03
Speaker
But I thought, this is really an interesting event. I'm going to start training. And I started training for it. And around
Coaching Experiences and Notable Athletes
00:07:11
Speaker
that time, things got really, really busy for me as a clinician, as a coach. I started writing. I started lecturing. And I was on the road two or three weekends a month in addition to the work I did in the clinic. And I just got to the point where I said,
00:07:32
Speaker
Not only can I not train for a six-day race, but I really can't compete in any races because I go to these events with athletes I'm working with and help get them to the starting line.
00:07:48
Speaker
And I used to jump into the race at that point and I just got to the point where I said I can't do this anymore. That was the end of my days of competition. And I worked virtually in all sports. People know me.
00:08:08
Speaker
in endurance fairly well, but I've worked virtually everywhere. And it's been a lot of fun. But when I got into practice, started running endurance stuff,
00:08:30
Speaker
cycling, swimming, I did some triathlons, I did some other crazy events. And it was a lot of fun, like I said, until it got so busy. And my experience in Boulder was that this is where a lot of the professional athletes that I was with, that's where they were going in the summer.
00:08:55
Speaker
And so rather than them fly out to New York from the West Coast or me fly to the West Coast, I thought I'd
00:09:05
Speaker
Go to Colorado, what a wonderful place to go every spring. I usually go there in the spring and stay through the summer. I would sometimes get some time away, and that's actually where I wrote my early books. I'd escape to the mountains and kind of hide out and write for a few days at a time.
00:09:30
Speaker
So it's been a wild trip and it continues and here we are. I remember that event, that race, a six-day race. I mean, I at that time thought this was just the craziest thing I'd ever heard of. I mean, at that time, I think most people would have assumed that a marathon was an awfully long way to run.
00:09:55
Speaker
And the idea that somebody could continue to run and walk and move for days and days on end and cover these huge distances was pretty inconceivable to me. I didn't even get it. I just thought, why would anybody do that?
00:10:10
Speaker
But I do remember very explicitly reading about Stu Middleman, and maybe that's where I came across your name. I'm not sure how we connected. But I do remember spending that time in the field house with you where you were analyzing my running gate. And for all I know, it could have been while Stu was on the track. It might very well have been that that was convenient for you, and that's where we ended up.
00:10:36
Speaker
But you also gained quite a bit of notoriety because you spent a number of years coaching Mark Allen. And for a lot of those, for folks here who don't, who don't follow Iron Man and, you know, now a lot, like a lot of sports, things that happened more than a few years ago are just gone out of people's memory.
00:10:57
Speaker
So Mark Allen won six Ironman triathlons, the world championships held in Kona, Hawaii between 89 and 95 under Phil's guidance. And if I'm correct me if I'm wrong about this Phil, but doesn't he still have the fastest marathon split there or one of the very close?
00:11:16
Speaker
I think his marathon split, which included the transition times, but even if we don't include the transition times, I think it was broken a year or two ago. So it stood for, you know, for decades.
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, in two hours. And that consistency.
Concept of Maximum Aerobic Function Training
00:11:40
Speaker
And again, Mark, I started seeing Mark earlier in his career. And at the time, he was chasing these other guys, Dave Scott in particular. And so the early triathlete winners, not to take anything away from them, they were great athletes.
00:12:04
Speaker
But it wasn't until Mark started doing his thing that the sport started getting a lot of really great athletes, especially cyclists. You know, if you're a cyclist and you're a great cyclist, you look at the times in triathlons and you say, God, I could do that with my eyes closed and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, anybody could learn to run and swim.
00:12:29
Speaker
Not quite so easy, but so there was a lot of competition and to win six of those, one right after the other. And he took one year off because it was just, it was challenging to do that year after year, but he came back the next year at age 37, I think.
00:12:58
Speaker
you know, beat all these hot shots again. And that was a fun thing too. You know, a lot of my work with athletes were in the clinic or at their homes.
00:13:15
Speaker
doing hands-on work. But the coaching part of it was, you know, back then it was by phone. And I also would go to events because there were things we can do with athletes to help them perform better using a mild hyperbaric chamber, for example, which I worked with Professor Igor Gamov in Boulder on.
00:13:44
Speaker
Those are very, I don't know if you know this now, but those Gamov bags are used quite a lot in the mountain scenario for people who... Well, that was his goal and he saved a lot of lives with that bag. He was showing me the prototypes. I said, hey, you could do this, you can do that.
00:14:09
Speaker
why not use it for other sports other than mountaineering? He said, well, I like mountaineering and that's what I'm gonna do. You could take it to all the other sports. And I ended up doing that and I ended up taking it to brain injured kids and patients who are overweight and all kinds of, there were so many uses it had and of course it's still used today.
00:14:36
Speaker
He was my undergraduate college physics professor. Oh, really? Yeah. So I wasn't involved in the development of the bag, but I was under his tutelage while he was developing that idea. It was very clever. And like you said, it saved an awful lot of lives. Yeah.
00:14:53
Speaker
And I remember reading in Lore of Running, which for people who haven't got it on their desk, it's a great reference book for endurance training and all the science behind it. And I recommend it, although it's not a light book and not easy read, but it's a lot of valuable information. And I recall, I think the first time I perused that book running across your name and Mark Allen's name in it.
00:15:22
Speaker
Dr. Tim Noakes, who is the author of that book, was explaining how Mark's pace had improved for roughly 10 years running using your maximum aerobic function training ideas, the heart rate formula, and then having him train in a certain way. And then I want to talk about that. But what I think is really fascinating
00:15:48
Speaker
is that what I read, and you can correct me about this numbers if I'm wrong, but that his, when you started working with him, his MAF pace, maximum aerobic function pace, which we would probably term something like the aerobic threshold nowadays, but using your terminology, which I respect, I think it's a great name for it. It's actually a better name than the aerobic threshold, but the aerobic threshold seems to be prominent in science.
00:16:13
Speaker
that his aerobic pace was four minutes and five seconds per kilometer, I guess, and that you, after working with him for a number of years, that it dropped down, I think in his last year, to three minutes and 19 seconds per kilometer, which is extremely fast to be running in a fully aerobic state. All at the same heart rate. All at the same heart rate, yeah, exactly.
00:16:39
Speaker
and dramatic improvement. So let's talk about that. I want to hear how you came to this, how you came up with this concept that this, you know, what we would perhaps term based aerobic base training, training under that maximum aerobic function heart rate. How did you realize, when did you realize that that was such a key to endurance performance and how did you come to that realization?
00:17:06
Speaker
Well, it was over a period of time, but it was really centered around stress, number one, physical stress, biochemical stress, mental, emotional stress. And in particular, the biochemistry component was fat burning, and I think that's what
00:17:26
Speaker
Tim Noakes was so interested in seeing is how you can take someone and improve their fat burning capability and they would get faster. And so my idea was that, hey, we, and initially it was not so much a sports thing, but more of a health
00:17:51
Speaker
issue, how can we improve fat burning? Because when you improve fat burning, you improve somebody's health. And so for me, it was, okay, we've got to help people get healthy with their diet and with exercise. And with exercise, fat burning is better when the heart rate is lower. So the game is how much lower
00:18:18
Speaker
or how high can we go in this submaxed state and develop this fat burning metabolism. And so it was a back and forth thing and a lot of trial and error.
00:18:35
Speaker
and using these old-fashioned, this is before the wireless heart monitors came out, so it was using these cardiac monitors that were used on patients and hospitals, which is what we used on Mark, actually. I had, let's see, myself. You did, okay. I had the kind that looked like school crossing guards. That's exactly what they were. Being the size of a deck of cards you wore on your desk. Yes, yes.
00:19:05
Speaker
Yeah, and you have to kind of look down your shirt to see the heart rate. There was a beeping sound, but if the weather was cool and you had two layers on, you might not even hear it. So that was the beginning, and what I noticed
00:19:28
Speaker
in the process among the things I noticed was that people who were running, and I had a lot of runners, you know, back in the 70s, the running boom was the thing. And you didn't see a lot of cyclists, and this strange event called triathlon really hadn't come to the East Coast yet, because it was still new in Hawaii and California. So most of the athletes I've worked with were runners.
00:19:57
Speaker
And so I decided I would spend a lot of time on the track every week with as many runners as I could handle, very much like the experience you had in Boulder, which was much easier, 200-meter track versus a 400-meter track, much less work for me, running back and forth and, you know,
00:20:21
Speaker
It was fun, but what I noticed was that running at a submax state, running at a submax state, running slower, running at a lower heart rate to a point, improved the gait. And as their heart rate increased, there'd be a point where their gait would start becoming slightly irregular.
00:20:50
Speaker
And if you're, you know, as a clinician, that's a lot of what I did was gait analysis. So if you are used to doing that, you can see these transition points quite easily. And so I thought, well, that's interesting too. We can not only burn more fat at the lower intensity, but we can maintain a good gait, which means the muscles are functioning better, muscle balance is maintained.
00:21:20
Speaker
And I thought, well, gee, this could be a really good physical therapy. This could be a good way to correct injuries. And indeed it was, but then I noticed that, gee, what was happening is that these runners were getting faster at the same heart rate. And not only that, but they were getting faster at the same heart rate while training only at that
00:21:50
Speaker
relatively low level of intensity. So they hadn't been doing speed work and yet they were getting faster. And so all these things started coming together over the years and
00:22:08
Speaker
And it just, you know, by the time I started writing books, I knew what was happening. I didn't understand physiologically why it was happening, partly because nobody else did either. And as the years went by, I could see new research and it was a lot of fun to see that. And then eventually I started doing my own and publishing my own articles.
00:22:38
Speaker
So it's, it's been a fun ride and I think that, you know,
00:22:44
Speaker
observational or anecdotal evidence that you gather as a coach or a clinician can in many ways, it leads the way, it leads science because you're in the trenches with your athletes on a daily basis and you're seeing these things happen and you're trying to figure out why and why did this work? Why did that not work? And if you've been doing that for years and years with many athletes,
00:23:11
Speaker
patterns begin to emerge and I think that's what you were seeing and I certainly have seen it and what came to the forefront of my mind after our talk and I think it took several years for me to understand this was that
00:23:26
Speaker
The reason we swimmers got so fit and so fast was this phenomenally high volume of low intensity swimming. And we did some speed work too, but only in preparation for meets. But even at that time, 20 kilometers a day of swimming was just completely unheard of that someone would train that much. And we were young, we were high school age, 18 year olds, we could handle, you know how 18 year olds are pretty darn resilient and they can handle anything.
00:23:56
Speaker
And so we were kind of guinea pigs for this coach to take those ideas that Lydiard had begun to write about and put him into play. And at that time, I think swimming was all about high intensity interval training all the time. That was pretty much, and from my understanding, I've been involved in swimming, coaching, or training for quite a long time, since the 70s. So I can't say now, but I suspect that they've kind of come around as well.
00:24:26
Speaker
And from some of the readings I have done on it, on the subject, they've come to understand that the importance of that big aerobic base. And I don't know if people are training 20 kilometers a day or not, but... Yeah, I think that's been cut back. And I think the importance of submax training has really caught on with many coaches, not all of them, but with many of them, certainly. But I think it's pretty interesting how, like,
00:24:57
Speaker
The trajectory of my history as a coach and yours parallels so many of the other great coaches I've read about who, you know, it's like science be damned. We're going to figure this, you know, even if we don't completely understand what's going on here, we're seeing this evidence that these ideas work.
00:25:16
Speaker
And that evolutionarily, you know, after decades, the good ideas kind of float to the top and the bad ideas get rejected. And we end up with a pretty robust, you know, philosophy for training. And I think that's kind of where we've arrived at today. And what I find, I think is that you deserve a great deal of credit for is that
00:25:38
Speaker
in those early years, you were one of the very, very few voices that was talking about this kind of thing. And I'm sure, you know, you met with a lot of pushback at the time because that was... Yeah, I was upsetting the scientific card and you're right. The clinicians are the creative ones.
00:26:04
Speaker
some of us that lead the way to do scientific studies. Scientists are certainly capable of coming up with their own research ideas as well. But those of us who try this and try that in patient after patient and athlete after athlete and say, hey, look at this pattern. And I was
00:26:27
Speaker
I was, you know, my training in science taught me to be objective, number one, and number two, be honest. The fact that we see something in an athlete because we made some change or we gave them some nutrient or whatever is important. But it's, you know, you need to see that a lot to say, hey, this is what I'm finding.
00:26:55
Speaker
And, you know, I would occasionally wear my science hat when I would read textbooks and journal articles, and then eventually I would put that on when I would write my own articles. But, you know, as a clinician, your goal is to help people get faster. For me, my goal was to help an athlete get better, perform better,
00:27:23
Speaker
and the caveat is without sacrificing their health. And that was a very important thing for me because I was the goal for me was to help people get healthy. That was really my primary goal and helping athletes get better as from a performance standpoint really came from that. And I didn't become a coach with
00:27:53
Speaker
anything in mind other than
00:27:56
Speaker
Early on, I started seeing athletes who would come in with an injury, and I was fortunately able to fix those injuries quite easily, because most of them were not difficult. And then they'd go out and train again. Then they'd come back a month or two, three months later, injured again with the same injury or a new injury. And finally, I connected the dots and said, hey, you're going to have to show me what you're doing, because whatever it is,
00:28:26
Speaker
is affecting your health and that's why you're getting injured. And so I need to intervene. And so I really became a coach, not a coach who would just give a workout plan. This is your workout plan for the week or for the month or for the season.
00:28:45
Speaker
But I would say, OK, tell me what you'd like to do with your training. Tell me what you'd like to do with your competitive season. Bring it in. Let me look at it. And then I'd say, well, this looks OK, but that doesn't. Let's modify this. Let's adjust that. Let's make this day a rest day because you don't have any rest days.
00:29:15
Speaker
Instead of doing a race every week, let's make some adjustments. So it was A, to not sacrifice their health, and B, make them perform as best they could. And reaching one's athletic potential can only happen when you pay attention to health as well.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah, I would 100% agree that the way I phrase it is that fitness has to stand upon a base of health. Otherwise, we know, I'm sure you have, I've certainly met a lot of athletes who are just balanced on a razor's edge of health. I mean, it takes nothing for them to fall off to an injury or an illness because their health is so delicate because of the fact that they're applying so much stress to their body. And training for,
00:30:10
Speaker
what I would call kind of mono directional training. Let's say you're, you know, just, um, training for a triathlon or training for a running race or that sort of thing, isn't particularly healthy because you're just doing the same thing to your body over and over and over again. And it's very easy to overstep that and get, so it's, I think it's really valuable to have that health guidance. Um, because, you know, you know, as well as I do, if an athlete's not healthy,
00:30:34
Speaker
than the training sort of useless. Yeah, and I should emphasize that when I use the word injury, I'm referring to not just physical injuries, but biochemical injuries, metabolic injuries and so forth, as well as mental, emotional injuries. If your brain's not working and you're depressed all the time because of training,
00:31:00
Speaker
or you're physically exhausted, mentally exhausted. If you're not burning enough fat and you're physically exhausted, you're not sleeping well. If you have chronic inflammation, which is a serious
00:31:19
Speaker
biochemical problem for an athlete because injuries come about as a result of that. Tendonitis, all those IDIS conditions, refers to inflammation. So, there's this wide spectrum when we start looking at what really is an injury. There's a lot of different versions of it.
00:31:41
Speaker
I wanted to take a step back real quickly to your work with Mark Allen and your use of this maximum aerobic function heart rate and how his pace developed. Was he resistant to that at all or did he buy in real quickly and how did you get buy in and how did you two come together?
00:32:03
Speaker
I was doing the brochure you alluded to earlier was one that I used to promote my weekend workshops in various cities. Boulder was one. I did East Coast and some in Europe and Australia. And one of them was in San Diego. And the one I had,
00:32:32
Speaker
or one of the ones I had in San Diego, some interesting people showed up, not only Mark Allen, and he wasn't a big name, so I didn't really know who he was, but Paula Newby-Frasier showed up there as well. And I think she mentioned Tim Noakes because she's, you know, they knew each other from South Africa.
00:32:56
Speaker
And so that's where Mark and I met. And on those occasions, I would take a group of athletes and we'd have some lectures. They'd fill out forms to give me information about their health background and their fitness background.
00:33:14
Speaker
We'd go to the track. We'd go to the pool. We'd ride out on the road, depending on the sport. We would do different things. And I think with Mark, I think part of it was that
00:33:32
Speaker
He knew Colleen Cannon, who I had worked with, and she was running two minutes faster in her 10Ks in a triathlon. Two-minute improvement in a 10K for a triathlon is
00:33:49
Speaker
pretty good. And he was impressed by that and so he thought, well, let's see what this strange guy has to offer. And I remember distinctly running on the track at
00:34:06
Speaker
UCSD with Mark wearing this crossing guard heart monitor. And we're running along and I'm thinking, man, this guy's slow. And indeed he was, you know, he was running about 830 pace at his, what I determine, his maximum aerobic function heart rate, which was 155.
00:34:28
Speaker
And I said, you know, don't worry about this being slow because you'll get faster. And certainly as the weeks went by, I said, just don't exceed 155 in your training for now. We can do that later, but for now.
00:34:44
Speaker
build this aerobic base at 155, or you can go slower if you want. And certainly, when you run up hills, you're going to go a lot slower, which he was depressed about. But as the weeks went by, he got faster and faster, which was typically the case when you follow the program. And I think his first race, having not done any speed work or
00:35:12
Speaker
or much training really, was in Hawaii, not an Ironman, but a shorter event, big race, and he won it. And so I think he was pretty convinced at that point. That's a good way to get by and for sure from your athlete, at least to have them see success. And I don't know if it was you or him that I read one point that he liked to call this what we might call a base training phase,
00:35:40
Speaker
this aerobic base building phase, he liked to call it, or somebody, maybe it was you that termed it this, the patient's phase. And that it was very important to be really patient during this time because these processes take a while. And I think that the impatience and the frustration of having to start off running slowly
00:35:59
Speaker
is, for many people, just they can't do it. I see that all the time. Yeah, that was something that Mark, I've heard Mark say that when we've lectured together or done podcasts. And it's, you know, and I call it discipline. It's the discipline of doing what you need to do to allow your body to let your body get better. All humans get better. We're supposed
00:36:29
Speaker
We're supposed to improve from the time we're born until, from an endurance standpoint, until we're well past our ages. We may not perform as well competing against younger people, or we often do until we're about 40 or so.
00:36:56
Speaker
That's the discipline of training. And it's not just about running more miles, swimming more miles, climbing more, just put the time in, you need to put the time. It's about the discipline of doing it in a way that helps your body maintain that important balance between being healthy and being fit.
00:37:21
Speaker
And then I think one of the misconceptions that I've run across over the years when discussing this exact same thing is that people equate this low intensity training with slow. And yes, when you are aerobically deficient, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes, it is very slow. And in fact, some people struggle to even run at all at this heart rate.
00:37:46
Speaker
But once it becomes, you know, once you cure this aerobic deficiency and improve that pace, and you get to be running like where, you know, Mark was running it. What is that if you know 319 per kilometer that's like around a five minute mile.
00:38:03
Speaker
fast. You get faster. And you get faster because you burn more fat for energy. So you keep putting coal in the steam engine or whatever to generate more energy so you can go faster. And I should say that you have to do what's important to promote fat burning. And there's a dietary component, there's a training component, and there's a stress component.
00:38:31
Speaker
So when you put all those things in place, when you have the discipline to do that, you get faster because that's how the body works. It's really that simple. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. But this is so counterintuitive to people that they need to slow down in order to run faster. Well, it's counterintuitive because in our society, we have
Challenges in Changing Training Perceptions
00:38:58
Speaker
a no pain, no gain,
00:39:01
Speaker
Attitude. We got that from our gym teachers. It goes back to the 40s and 50s. I won't go back to where it came from. I mean, it came from Benjamin Franklin, in fact, in his discussions on capitalism. We need to work hard to build our business. And it turned into a sports mantra.
00:39:29
Speaker
And that idea of no paying, no gain is promoted by companies. It's a big thing with commercial campaigns on radio and TV. And in sports, especially in running, in endurance sports in particular,
00:39:58
Speaker
It came from track and field coaches who in the 50s and 60s were starting to get out of coaching. And they saw opportunities in endurance sports because the running boom was exploding. And people were looking for coaches. And here come all the track and field coaches with their understanding of training, which was
00:40:29
Speaker
You need to train fast to race fast.
00:40:33
Speaker
And that's how that whole thing of intervals started. There's a really important place for intervals in your schedule, but it's not as much as people, you know, people say, well, if a little is good, a lot must be better. If 50 miles a week has me running, you know, a good marathon, I'm going to run 80 miles a week. Oh, and then you got people like Alberto Salazar who say, well, you can't run a good marathon unless you run 100 miles a week.
00:41:04
Speaker
And you get these, you know, these four-hour, five-hour marathoners who say, oh, 100 miles a week, okay, I'm going to try and do that. Good luck. And they'll have to quit their job to have enough time to do it. Yes, that too.
00:41:19
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that this is an interesting avenue of discussion about the intensity that the use or I would say the misuse of intensity for endurance training and the misunderstanding on many people's part that no pain, no gain concept. And I remember as I had a good friend who was a four minute miler in high school and he was recruited to run for Bill Dellinger at
00:41:48
Speaker
an Oregon. And Dellinger instilled in his athletes at that time, this was probably, you know, counter, as a counter to that, no pain, no gain thing. He said, train, don't strain. And, you know, there was a kind of this intelligent submaximal training. We're not going to, you know, we don't want to finish every workout in a, you know, a pool of blood and sweat where we can't even get up. And, you know, I agree with you completely that now we have a fitness industry that is
00:42:18
Speaker
specifically sending the message to the general public who aren't particularly well educated on the fact, these physiological facts and how to train properly, that the only way to get fit is in these incredibly difficult, demanding workouts done three or four days a week that last 15 minutes or whatever. And you see it all the time.
00:42:41
Speaker
running magazines where run your best marathon in six weeks. Oh, yeah, six weeks. We have the magic formula that everybody will benefit from. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's cool to finish your workout with a sprint. It's cool to be exhausted, collapse after your
00:43:01
Speaker
your Sunday workout, it's cool to be hurt. And we teach this to children. They're watching, you know, sports on TV, and the announcer says, look at Big Joe, he's hurt, he's tough, he plays in pain, he knows that, you know, come on, that should be illegal. But that's, you know, that's maintaining this stupid idea that
00:43:29
Speaker
pain is okay, pain is good. And so we have a society that's quite over-trained, those who are in fact working out even, and the injury rates are sky high. Yeah, exactly.
00:43:50
Speaker
Since we've talked, we've now kind of broached this subject of intensity a few times. Let's talk about how you see, and my notes that I have right here from our meetings, even back then, you were talking about the need for what you called a speed period. So this would be an intensity period during the training. So why don't we talk about your philosophy and your theories on how we integrate intensity into an endurance training program.
00:44:20
Speaker
I think the first thing, as you mentioned earlier, is that we want to build this really good aerobic foundation. We want to develop the aerobic system. And what that does is it does a number of things. One, it improves your health, first of all. But it also improves fat burning, which is partly how it improves health.
00:44:46
Speaker
improves the immune system. And by improving fat burning, we're now able to have more energy to do more work so we can go faster at the same heart rate. It also develops the
00:45:00
Speaker
slow twitch aerobic muscle fibers, which we're all well endowed with. Sure, sprinters have more of the fast twitch fibers, but we all have a lot of slow twitch fibers because that's how humans are made, and that's what humans did in the beginning.
00:45:19
Speaker
They use that slow twitch long distance energy system to keep busy all day doing things, hunting, gathering, moving, escaping from danger and so forth. And that aerobic system is what
00:45:47
Speaker
as you build it makes you faster and faster at the same low, relatively low aerobic heart rate, maximum aerobic heart rate.
00:45:57
Speaker
And so developing that can take time. It could take three months, four months, five months. It could take six months. If you burned yourself out and you're really unhealthy or you haven't been doing anything for a while, it could take more than six months. But during that period of base building, you get faster and faster. In fact,
00:46:20
Speaker
I've had 75% of the people who, if we look at runners, 75% of the runners who jump into a race after their base building period, having done no speed work, perform a personal best. These are seasoned runners who have a lot of races under their belts.
00:46:44
Speaker
That base period is very, very important. And then the question is, well, I'm getting faster and faster with the space building. Should I keep getting faster and faster, or should I start doing high intensity training, which may, as it often does, slow down that aerobic progression before I do my race season?
00:47:07
Speaker
And that's where we have to look at the individual and say, well, for you as an individual, because of your background, because of what your season is going to be in the next three, four months, five months, whatever, this is what you should do.
00:47:25
Speaker
And so the whole program is quite individualized. There's no cookbook formula. There's no, you know, that's why they never talk about me in Runner's World magazine, because they don't fit into that model of here's the program, here's yet another program. Because there is none. It's different for everybody. And how do you broadcast that to a large market? You really don't.
00:47:53
Speaker
And by having some sort of, maybe we could call them self-diagnostic tools, like finding out what your maximum aerobic function heart rate is, then you can individualize your own training.
Importance of Individualized Training Programs
00:48:06
Speaker
And that's certainly the tack I've taken with all the athletes I've ever coached. And that's certainly the approach we take here at Uphill Athlete is to try to individualize the training as much as possible. So even our stock training plans that we sell,
00:48:22
Speaker
are obviously have to be somewhat compromised because we don't know the people that are buying them but they all start with this aerobic assessment is let's find that maximum aerobic functional heart rate for you and then that's going to determine how you do all of this aerobic based training and
00:48:37
Speaker
and when you would move into, you know, some intensity when you're prepared for it. Yeah, it's a very, you know, personalizing it is the key. And if people are following a stock program and they're not improving or they're not happy with the results, then obviously personalization is going to be really important. And
00:49:02
Speaker
An important component if it's not obvious already is that if you don't get faster,
00:49:10
Speaker
as the weeks go by, it means you're doing something wrong. You're missing something somewhere along the way. It's not because my program doesn't work. I don't have a program. I'm offering information for people to make their own program. It's interesting, you know, the brain knows what we should do because the brain has its fingers, so to speak, and every aspect of us are
00:49:36
Speaker
our physical body, our biochemical body, our mental, emotional state. And it knows exactly what to do. So that's what I want to enlist. I want to help people understand that when they're sore after a workout, it means something, or if they're sore the next morning, or if they're
00:50:02
Speaker
Like I said before, most importantly, if they're not getting faster as the weeks go by at the same heart rate, it means something is wrong. And now you've got to figure out what that is. I can give you some ideas. These are the common reasons why people don't get faster. But you've got to, it's a self-care thing. It's a self-coaching thing. You can still have a coach and self-coach because you've got to personalize it.
00:50:29
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact, I think with what we do, which is remote coaching, the athlete is kind of the first line of defense, which is one of the reasons on our website, in our books, and with our coach interactions, with our athletes we coach, is the educational component is very strong, that we feel like the more the athlete understands about what we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it that way, the better they're going to be
00:50:54
Speaker
at you know diagnosing problems and knowing when to okay maybe today I should take a day off or recover rest or something because they're the ones that are right on the front lines with this you know the coach is you know thousands of miles away oftentimes and while they're accessible by a text message or an email you know
00:51:12
Speaker
you might need, you know, some of these decisions have to be made, you know, in a matter of minutes of like, okay, I just did a warmup, but I can tell my legs are still heavy from that workout I did two days ago, you know, what should I do? And if you are a slave to the training plan, and the training plan says, oh, you're doing X today, and you go, oh boy, my legs feel really heavy, but the training plan says I should do X, and Mike's, that's just a recipe for disaster. Yeah, it is, and it's really,
00:51:40
Speaker
A couple of years ago, I wrote a scientific paper with my colleague, Professor Paul Larson, called Decision Making in Health and Fitness. And in it, we showed the two systems, they're called system one and system two, that people use to decide how they're gonna go about making dietary changes, how they're gonna go about exercising, how they're gonna go about
00:52:09
Speaker
buying a treadmill. And what you said is one of them, which is you use education. You think you actually use your brain. And you say, well, gee, I don't know if a three-week
00:52:29
Speaker
marathon course to run your best marathon makes sense uh is that logical and then the other way of course is is uh uh the sizzle you know you sell the sizzle not the steak the sizzle is oh three i only need three weeks to run my best marathon wow i i i could lose 10 pounds a week
00:52:52
Speaker
By eating this, oh, wow, I want that. Give me that. I'm not going to think anymore. Yeah. And of course, people, you know, chase one thing after another, looking for that magic bullet, that magic diet, that magic
00:53:08
Speaker
training program and it doesn't exist. Yeah, exactly. It just doesn't exist. Most of these things that you and I propose for people with training, it's not rocket science. It's not magic. It does work. It just takes time and, as you said, discipline to see those kind of results.
00:53:29
Speaker
Can we, I want to pivot for a moment about, to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart and something that you opened my eyes to was this thing you call the aerobic deficiency syndrome.
Understanding Aerobic Deficiency Syndrome
00:53:43
Speaker
And I know where, I'm sure I understand where that came from, but can you give us an explanation of like, how did you come up with that term?
00:53:52
Speaker
I mean, it's a great, I think it's a really good term because of course nobody wants to be, have a syndrome. So when you tell people they have this syndrome, they want to fix it. But is that what you, is that why you used it so that it would sound like a medical diagnosis or?
00:54:09
Speaker
No, I started using it because it was the easiest way to, you know, athletes would come and see me and they'd have these complicated problems that would require assessment, a lot of evaluation. And I spent a lot of time with athletes when I was first seeing them in evaluating them.
00:54:38
Speaker
And I would explain afterwards, after I knew what was going on and what I wanted to do, I'd explain, here's, you know, this is not working right, and that's not, you need to do some of this, but none of that, and you need to, and after, you know, explaining this whole thing, a lot of people would say, yeah, but what do I have? And so, we are, this is a social phenomenon that, you know,
00:55:12
Speaker
there's a name for our condition and there isn't always a name for it. There's a diagnosis sometimes if you have a, generally it's because you have a more serious medical problem, but if you're tired all the time and if you're not performing well and if you're not sleeping well,
00:55:36
Speaker
and you go through a battery of tests, standard medical tests, and everything comes out normal, what then? Well, if you look at the person from a functional standpoint and you measure their pace and look at what their heart rates are at different paces, if you
00:56:05
Speaker
measure their fat burning, or if you see that their body fat is higher than it should be, yet they're running five, six days a week, and they're cycling three days a week,
00:56:20
Speaker
and they're gaining body fat, wait a minute, something is wrong here. You're not burning, obviously, you're not burning enough fat. If you go into a lab, and you might have seen this in Boulder, you could measure fat burning in the lab quite easily, and I've done that a lot in my career.
00:56:45
Speaker
Sometimes you just need to say something quick and easy, like you have an aerobic deficiency syndrome. And then even though they have no idea what you're talking about, they say, oh, okay, how do we fix that? Oh, well, that's the easy part. And in fact, figuring somebody out begins by assessing them and saying, oh, I see what's not happening here.
00:57:11
Speaker
And once you've figured that out, correcting it is easy. Improving athletic performance is easy. You have to do the assessment part. And that's often what's not done. It's not done in medicine. It's not done in coaching in most cases. And so you're left with giving somebody an off-the-shelf program. You're left with ruling out disease, which is really important to do in medicine.
00:57:40
Speaker
You know, that's what I did. I rule out serious problems. And once you rule out serious problems, you're still left with functional problems. What things are not functioning in this athlete that's preventing
00:57:53
Speaker
optimal performance and aerobic deficiency is a common one because people have not trained the aerobic system enough and as a result, they're not burning enough fat and progress from an endurance standpoint really slows down or stops or even reverses.
00:58:14
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I've seen it in reverse. So I think that, as you point out, with going into a laboratory and using a gas exchange test, it's pretty easy to see the percentage of fat versus carbohydrates that are burned at different intensities for the athlete. So this is a condition that can actually be clinically diagnosed with one of those kinds of tests. And then there are simpler ways of doing it, like basically your MAF formula.
00:58:42
Speaker
You can barely run. By monitoring your heart rate and looking at things, you can do what you can do in the lab. Most people will never go into a lab because it's not accessible, it's expensive, and it's not something you can do on a regular basis, which you have to do because otherwise you're guessing whether you're improving. You want to know you're improving and with a heart monitor and
00:59:11
Speaker
just a simple understanding of all of this, you can easily do that. You can get you 90% of the way there, maybe more.
00:59:21
Speaker
without having to go to the expense and the inconvenience of going to a lab, of which there aren't that many that can do these kinds of tests. But when we have opportunities to get people, especially when we get someone who we don't suspect we're getting great buy-in from on this aerobic deficiency end of this discussion, and we send them to a lab and they get the test, and usually the lab technician explains to them, oh my God,
00:59:49
Speaker
You're really terrible at burning fat. Then they've heard it from somebody else. But then when they see the numbers, that's when it really is an eye-opening experience. So if we have an opportunity to actually put it in front of them in black and white like that, we try to do it. But obviously, as you just pointed out, that's going to be 5% of the audience that has the ability to do that and the willingness to do it.
01:00:14
Speaker
Yeah, and today, it's different than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. We didn't see a lot of overfat athletes in the 70s. We started seeing them in the 80s, and then by the 90s, it was becoming frighteningly common. And today, go to any road race, go to any marathon, any triathlon,
01:00:40
Speaker
And you see these athletes, some of them are quite good, who have really high body fat. And you just, you know, so one thing people can do easily is to measure their waist at the level of the belly button and their height. And
Overtraining and Health Assessment Methods
01:00:58
Speaker
the waist to height ratio is indicative of whether you are over fat or not. And the waist should be less than half your height.
01:01:09
Speaker
It's really very, very, very simple. I've published a lot on that, and that's now there's a good consensus on that as an indication for excess body fat. And again, we can go into
01:01:26
Speaker
a lab and where we can go and get a DEXA scan, but I don't suggest people do that because you don't need that kind of accuracy. Waste to height ratio is a good correlation and a very, very good test. And these, what we have seen, and I wasn't
01:01:53
Speaker
I knew you had used this term aerobic deficiency syndrome in your writings and I'd read about it. But most of my athletic career and my coaching career was working with very high level athletes who were very well fat adapted and they were already had a big aerobic base.
01:02:09
Speaker
And it wasn't until Steve and I published our book and people started coming to us. And this whole uphill athlete coaching thing has been a response to a demand that we seem to have created with these books. But we began to get people who were aerobically deficient. And I'd never seen it clinically. I'd never seen athletes like that who couldn't walk. They couldn't run. They could only walk and stay at this aerobic heart rate.
01:02:36
Speaker
And so we had to come up kind of scramble to come up with, you know, why the heck is this happening? I mean, and then I realized, you know, that clicked for me when I remembered your discussion of aerobic deficiency syndrome. And so we began, we
01:02:52
Speaker
grabbed your term and began to use it, crediting you with it. But what I've since discovered over the last five or six years in dealing with more of the amateur athlete in the general public is, well, not general public, we don't really deal with the general public, but we deal with kind of beginner athletes in lower level, people that don't have a history of training, is that this aerobic deficiency syndrome is really epidemic proportions.
01:03:20
Speaker
I mean, there's a huge chunk of the population that doesn't know. And part of it just comes from that fact, I think, that they've been fed this story about how high intensity training is the answer to everything. And if you only have 15 minutes to train it per day, why would you want to do that slowly? You just should do it hard.
01:03:40
Speaker
And I think that, you know, now I feel like I'm trying to carry the torch that you've lit about, you know, this is a big problem, not just for athletes, but for the population as a whole health-wise.
01:03:51
Speaker
Well, it is. And to give you a more accurate idea of how common it is, I did a study a couple of years ago again with Paul Larson in the US showing that 91% of American adults were over fat.
01:04:12
Speaker
All of those people have aerobic deficiency syndrome. Otherwise, they wouldn't be overfed. And the rest of the world is not far behind. I did one in India, and we showed that 80% of adults in India were overfed. I mean, that's frightening. But those are the numbers. They don't lie. And so worldwide, the aerobic deficiency syndrome is a really common
01:04:42
Speaker
uh and serious problem. Certainly is um well I hope that you know we can continue to battle that in our own little way just like you have um so another subject that I want to be sure we touch on I know we're I'm starting to encroach in your day so I want to make sure I'm respectful of your time but I do want to have you talk a little bit about your
01:05:04
Speaker
like the you've done an extensive amount of writing about overtraining and so have I having had you know some experience with it myself and then having worked with athletes that are over trained it seems like it's you know and I even wrote an article that is called the elephant in the ultra training room which is or the ultra running room which is over training that people don't want to talk about they don't want to acknowledge and it seems like part of the problem with it is it's not
01:05:33
Speaker
medically diagnosable. There are cases where it can be, but in general, if an overtrained athlete goes to his physician, the physician's going to think he's a picture of health and wonder like, what's wrong? Yeah, you're tired. Well, I have people who can hardly get off the couch and walk to the refrigerator. And so that's frustrating for these athletes.
01:05:57
Speaker
And I've tried to do my best to, you know, illuminate this problem and give people some ideas about, you know, the symptoms and the, because it's a, it's a, as you know, psychologically it's an incredibly damaging thing to happen to an athlete.
01:06:13
Speaker
as their training because they basically have to stop for their training, which they're training for a big event or race. So tell me your trajectory with overtraining. How did you become aware of it and what led you to do a deep dive? Well, I think early on, I was in the same boat as everybody else. Overtraining was an elusive condition.
01:06:37
Speaker
It will show up medically with hormone, significant hormone imbalance or overuse injury, physical injury, that kind of thing. However, I already knew as a student, I already knew
01:06:59
Speaker
all about overtraining, but I didn't realize it because I had studied the work of Hans Selye. Hans Selye in the early 1900s is the guy who coined the word stress, and he basically showed the patterns that stress, the signs and symptoms that stress took, and he, you know, he
01:07:26
Speaker
He did interesting studies to demonstrate the physical and the biochemical. And then later on, we were able to piece together the mental emotional part because he wasn't going to ask rats how they felt or he wasn't going to
01:07:46
Speaker
cut people's brains open. So I realized early on that, hey, this over-training thing follows Hans Selye's stress pattern, physical, biochemical, and mental-emotional stress. And he had three stages associated with
01:08:10
Speaker
the stress pattern, stage one, two, and three, stage one, was the very mild beginnings of over, what I've done is I've taken that model, his stress model, and applied it to overtraining. And it's not just overtraining because in the corporate world we see burnout,
01:08:30
Speaker
We see burnout in stay at home, mothers and fathers. We see burnout in students. Of course, in healthcare, all across healthcare, the student population has a high number of burned out students who then become burned out young doctors or therapists, which doesn't help things. And so it's not just athletes, but it's the same pattern. We use different terminology.
01:09:00
Speaker
But in athletes, the earliest indication that you're over training is quite subtle. And one of the things is that you no longer can improve your aerobic pace, building your aerobic system. You might actually start reversing and getting slower, but you typically plateau
01:09:23
Speaker
And what makes it really complicated is that during that first page of overtraining, many runners in particular and triathletes perform their best because they're stuck in this system, they're stuck in this condition where they're
01:09:44
Speaker
autonomic nervous system has a high sympathetic and a low parasympathetic state. And so they're revved up. They are stuck in a revved up mode and throw them into a race and they may just perform really well. They'll often crash after that race.
01:10:04
Speaker
But they'll often perform their best, and when you say, hey, I think you're in the early stage of overtraining, they'll say, oh, you don't know what you're talking about. I just had my, I just ran a PR after, you know, 38 10Ks, and now I'm running a PR. It doesn't get any better than this. Well, that's a sign, in fact, that you're in the first stage of overtraining. The second stage is where your heart rate starts to go up.
01:10:32
Speaker
And that's your resting heart rate, your exercise heart rate, exercise training, and your racing heart rate. So if your training heart rate goes up and you're training by heart rate, it means you slow down. If you're racing heart rate goes up, it means you can't race this fast because the brain isn't going to let you kill yourself on the horse. And so, you know, by the third stage,
01:11:02
Speaker
which can take many, many months or years, you are finished, you are retired, you cannot.
01:11:10
Speaker
it's not likely as good as some clinicians are at fixing athletes. These people often cannot be fixed, especially if they go a little bit too far, they go over the edge. They're not, they can't be fixed. You can get them healthy again, you can get them exercising, but competing at the same level just
01:11:37
Speaker
In many cases, it doesn't happen. I've definitely seen the career ending cases of overtraining. One of the things I've read, I even have a book on my desk here called Overtraining in Sport. And I've, you know, Tim Noakes has written about it a great deal in Law of Running.
01:11:57
Speaker
But I found that your explanation of that kind of balance of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems was really helpful because the nervous system is in charge of controlling all these aspects of our athletic movements. And as you just pointed out, when the sympathetic nervous system is overstimulated and you're in that revved up state, which many people spend a good part of their non-athletic life in that revved up state,
01:12:26
Speaker
And then you pile additional physical stress that even more revs up that sympathetic nervous system. As you say, that's kind of when you're taking those first steps into overtraining. Yeah, and I put a lot of signs and symptoms down on paper. You have some of them on your website. I have a lot of them on my website. I published a paper called
01:12:52
Speaker
um athletes fit but unhealthy and I take it from a scientific standpoint you know what's going on in stage one stage two stage three and it's it's it's really pretty clear most people are skipping over the stage one saying oh it's just you know this is but prevention is such an important thing we don't prevent anything in this world anymore
01:13:19
Speaker
Most people were reactive rather than proactive. Most people die of preventable conditions and in sports, most injuries and overtraining are also preventable.
01:13:39
Speaker
And so, we have to stop and say, hey, I need, this is part of individualization. This is part of personalizing the process, understanding what all these signs and symptoms mean, and do they raise a red flag? And if so, what do I do about that? And it's really quite easy, and people just need to decide that they want to
01:14:07
Speaker
pay more attention and be the best athlete they can be.
Impact of Aerobic Decline and Maintaining Enjoyment in Sports
01:14:11
Speaker
And you're right, it is so much of these things we've talked about, the over-training in particular, now in this case, are the result of a decline in that aerobic function. And of course, for the athlete, that means poor performance, and for the non-athlete, that means poor health. And I think that it's so simple.
01:14:35
Speaker
Even though I mean it's right in front of your eyes. It's not very sexy You know and you can't buy a bottle of it on the internet And you know you you can't cure this in three weeks and you know five minutes a day training And I think that the fact is that we we understand this process we understand where people go wrong But yet this message is so
01:15:00
Speaker
poorly articulated in the popular press, in the popular mind, that I think people are in the dark about it. And the fact that you spent much longer than I have dealing with it, but certainly in the last six years or seven years since we started dealing with athletes not at the elite level, I have come to realize that this is a big deal. And again, the solution is not that difficult. So I hope more people will take your advice about this stuff.
01:15:30
Speaker
Spreading the word is all we can do. And I appreciate all that you've done. And so we just continue that process.
01:15:40
Speaker
Well, Phil, this has been a fascinating talk. Thanks so much. Like I said, I'm quite honored that you're willing to come on and talk with me about all these things. It's good to see you again. Good to see you, Scott. Before we close this off, do you have anything you feel like we haven't covered that you'd like to address?
01:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, at the risk of sounding boring to people who listen to my podcasts, and maybe you've mentioned this as well, but we can't forget something that's very important, and that's that we want to have fun. Yeah. You know, we climb mountains, we swim across channels, we go out and run
01:16:33
Speaker
We ride our bike. We do whatever we do because it's fun. And if it's not fun, you shouldn't do it. And if you're not having fun, figure out what's wrong and fix it. Great point. Thank you. Thanks for that words of wisdom.
Phil's Musical Career
01:16:52
Speaker
And for your website is
01:16:56
Speaker
The Health and Fitness website is PhilMaffetone.com. I also am a professional singer-songwriter. My music website is MaffetoneMusic.com. I just came out with my eighth album called Outlier. All right. Great. Well, speaking of data, I thought that was an interesting term to use for an album covered in someone who wears many hats.
01:17:26
Speaker
Well, and I remember before I, when I first, when I started to research for my books and writing this stuff and I was googling you and I came up with Phil Maffetone as a musician. And I was like, oh, I never knew that because I didn't know that part of your, your story. So that was fascinating. I explored that and listened to some of your music and, but, uh, you've got a wonderfully diverse life. Thanks for sharing all this with us, Phil. It's been a pleasure. Thank you Scott. Yeah.
01:17:55
Speaker
All righty. Well, take care and we'll have perhaps we can do this again. Great. All right. Thanks. Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website, uphillathlete.com.