228: Before and After the Key to Maximizing your Workouts

(upbeat music) - Welcome back to another on coaching podcast. I'm Steve Magnus, joined as always by my good friend and colleague, John Marcus. John, what's going on, my man? - Man, we up, we active, we outside, we're here to get the people what they want. - That is right. We've got another exciting podcast today, before and after the key to maximizing your workout. Before we dive into that, you know what we're gonna tell you about the scholar program. We are cranking in there with the holidays, we got a monthly Zoom call coming up where we get to the nerd out for 90 minutes. We've got the clubhouse going, we've got the biomechanics course rolling out with some new courses that are coming this upcoming new year that I'm putting on the finishing touches on. We're just rolling in a scholar program. You're one stop shop for education. - That's right. Remember, education is more than one convention, one speaker or a weekend of ConEd. It is an all the time, any time thing. And that's why the scholar program exists because it doesn't, it satisfies that need that wasn't in the marketplace, but is now here, so join up, don't delay. - That's right, check it out. All right, so let's go into this week's topic. As I said, before and after the key to maximizing your workout. So John, I'm glad we're talking about this because how much, speaking of education, how much education is spent on the workout development? And for a good reason, it's like, okay, here's how we gotta write the workouts. Here's how we classify the workouts. Here's the workouts that what happens when you adjust the rest and speed and intensity. And then that all matters. But how little time do we spend on talking about what goes on before and after? - It's mind blowing actually. I think anytime we have stress or strain in our lives or things don't go well on race day, we immediately look at the workouts. What am I doing on workouts? What's not going well? Or when people do succeed, right? Then we look at the workouts. Oh, what'd they do? What was their workouts? And those don't get me wrong. They are a major part of the development puzzle. But I'm finding myself more and more and more re-educating or highlighting to student athletes here at the collegiate level. It's not just about the workouts, even though we spend a disproportionate, disproportionate amount of time focusing on it. It's about how you deliver yourself to the workout and the steps and moments of exiting that workout that really are the difference maker. And when you look at really, really good athletes, when you look at athletes who perform at a very high level, what you'll notice is that life is really boring. Meaning it's very routine, it's very habitual, but it's very stabilized in how they get to a workout or a series of workouts in their training week. And then also immediately what they do when they exit and leave those workouts. - You know, one of my favorite studies from several years ago, so I'm gonna butcher some of the details as it's based on memory, but they took athletes and they wanted to simulate an athlete coming from like an exam, right? So they took athletes, they put them through kind of a simulated exam to like stress them cognitively. And then like after that, sent them to essentially do a hard workout, a test workout. I forget the exact domain they did it in, but a hard test workout. And not surprisingly, when athletes went from doing the hard exam, they didn't perform as well. When they were given, you know, something, some time to just sit and like a control where they just had time to do whatever they wanted before the workout, they performed better. And I know this is like the simple test, but I think too often what we do is we don't realize or don't think about like the workout doesn't start when we get to the starting line of the track to do our intervals. Like we are prepping and priming for it beforehand. And what we bring into it can affect not only our performance, but also the adaptations where we're able to get out of things or the mental, you know, adaptations we're able to deal with and get out of things. And I think, you know, if we spend time thinking about before a workout, what are we trying to do? Well, you mentioned the boredom of life. Well, what does that work? Why? Because it comes in, it gives people a fresh, a freshness to come in. They're not bringing, often we think of physical fatigue. We also have cognitive fatigue, right? We're not bringing cognitive fatigue to the workout because like we've kind of, yeah, we're going to school or doing difficult things, but we've created a little bit of space there, right? Another thing is when we get into the workout, it is then it is that warmup is preparing mentally and physically for the task at hand. And I think too often what we do is we go through and we say, okay, we're going to prepare physically maybe by doing some a jog and some strides and what have you. But often there's not that, that, okay, what do I have to do mentally to get ready for this? And then secondly, our physical preparation for it is often not tailored to the task at hand. Meaning we go through the same warmup or drills or whatever have you regardless of what the workout is. - Yeah, and there's no reason to necessarily change that up, but it's, if you go through the motions, the same motions, but the mindset is the same as if it would just be for like, an easy type session versus this really difficult session or embarrassment or insult session, it's kind of sends a signal to your brain and your body that like, hey, this is going to be easy. And then when you're confronted with that insult, you're not really that primed, so to speak, from a reception standpoint, not physically, but mentally, to really, really get the most out of that difficult insult that you're subjecting yourself to. - Exactly, you know, and you use the word primed, it reminded me of something that I wrote about way back in peak performance. I talked to, well, then it was a US Olympic field hockey performance guy and now he works for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. So NFL worked for him when they won the, when they had Tom Brady. So very successful, but I remember he pointed to research that he did when he was working with the US field hockey team and he said, you know, if I have my forwards practice or warm up by doing defensive drills, they don't perform as well. And when he looked at it, why not? Because they didn't get a boost and we'll call it like the helpful competitive hormones, right? Testosterone didn't go up, like cortisol didn't drop. We didn't have this kind of like, I'm going to compete. But when he allowed them to do something that they liked, that they enjoyed, that was part of their task. So the forwards, you know, practice scoring goals, the defense men like did drills where they were stopping shots or whatever it is, you know, for their thing. Guess what? Testosterone goes up, they compete better, they perform better. And in the same thing he found in a different group of athletes based on like, if they warmed up more of doing like easy biking or whatever have you, or some sort of like fart lick, you know, interval style stuff, it depended if essentially if they liked it or not, if they were more of an endurance athlete, it was like, hey, I like the easy stuff. They tended to perform better after they did that, versus if they were more of the speed oriented athlete. And they said, hey, I'm going to do some intervals of just gradually progressing, not hard, but it was more in their wheelhouse of their comfortfulness, they performed better. And why we have that biological primer of like testosterone and hormones, but it's also like this psychology comes with it is like, if I'm doing something that is in my task domain that I like that makes me feel good, I'm going to be primed to perform better than if I say, hey, I'm going to go through these motions on this task that I don't really like that maybe I don't really think has a pertinence or ties to the job I'm going to do. We don't put ourselves in a position to perform. - Yeah, that putting ourselves in a position to perform is really important. And I'm taking like a certification for sprints and hurdles and relays from USTFCCCCA and going through the curriculum again, and I was reminded like how we teach the science of sport curriculum in the west, in the introductory phases, is in this ideal state of this conceptual state that the athlete is showing up to a session, all athletes are showing up to a session with the same kind of homeostatic balance, right? It's like, oh, we're all just here and we're all at this baseline level when they come to your session and whether that session is a metabolic workout or neural workout, a weight session, whatever it may be, right? It's this assumption that we take when we do coaches education that we are getting just these athletes whose gas tanks and hearts and minds and brain and body is all full. And that's rarely the case, rarely the case. So it's as a coach like, well, what do I do, right? Okay, I met with this truth of this reality. Now what? What are the next steps? And that's where kind of the art of calling audibles, right? Plan B, C, D, E, F, G is there where I was working with our pole vault coach and watching her work with one of our freshman pole vaulters here and I was like, oh, I was like, yeah, hey, just would like to get a practice plan just so we can get the loaning parameters and stuff like that. She goes, yeah, sure. But you kind of see how I coach the athlete on the day and I go, oh yeah, all good coaches do that. We have a plan, but what the athlete expresses or not expresses are their feedback, their verbal feedback, their body feedback, how they're handling the task and the task demands. That then creates a choose your own adventure scenario where all right, we have to pivot and go in this direction 'cause things aren't going out going too well or they're showing lots of fatigue and they're not bouncing back with recovery or wow, they're actually feeling really good and they're expressing how easy this workout is and it's designed to be a high insult workout. Okay, maybe we can sharpen the ax here a little bit and go a little faster, give a little less recovery. And that's where the art of coaching comes into play is being able to get those pivots based off that feedback that you get in the moment. Because again, not everyone's showing up to every workout in this kind of metabolic, physiological, neurological, mental, homeostatic ideal. - You know, so I love that example and I'm gonna add one to it as I remember way back in the day when I was training with Scott Rasko now on web and that group, one of the thing that was always that I took away from that is there were certain workouts where you would show up to the track. You knew it was gonna be a hard workout, right? 'Cause we were meeting at the track. But Rasko wouldn't tell you the workout until we got to the starting line of it. And the reason for it was pretty simple is he would often like see how we warmed up, see how we looked, see what energy we brought to the table, you know, and how our last accelerations and all that stuff and the pop in our legs, look, before saying, okay, this is what we're gonna do today. And it was also helpful because it didn't set, you know, two degree, it didn't set the expectations of, oh, I must look like shit because I'm getting it changed because he didn't know, you know? And he was like, I have no idea if this was the original workout or not. Now there's some positives and negatives and downsides to it, but I always love the appreciation of like, oh, this is going to be based on what he sees and what's coming. And also the other thing is often he would not give you the full workout. So there was much like Igloy did, there was adjustment after that first set. If that first set didn't look like he expected it to look, there was a change, there was a difference, right? And I think that's what we're kind of getting at is that we have two things going on here. When it comes to the warmup, we have the assessment and we have like, what can we can control and change? The assessment is we need to look at our athletes and say, how are they looking? How are they feeling? How are they experiencing? Like, is their body language good, bad and different? How do they have pop off the ground? There's also things that we can do to change that, right? We can add some harder segments. We can add some excels to see if we can then increase muscle tension. We can try a longer stride where we go 30, 45, 60 seconds at a pretty good pace to kind of get the aerobic system fired up to make people feel a little better and not get sluggish. We can try some mindset stuff coming in. We have all those variables, but if those changes don't occur, we as coaches need to be able to pivot based on what we see and what's coming to the table so that we can kind of maximize our impacts of the workout. - Yeah, and when we talk about impacts of the workout, it's good to remind ourselves and step back. It's about the signals, right? The stress or intensity, right? The difficulty of the work you do, which is a good definition of intensity, sends a signal. But how rich is the signal if the athlete comes into a session chronically underslept, you know, chronically under-recovered, you know, dehydrated, not enough food in their body so that they're getting light-headed, right? We take those things for granted. I think a lot of times because we go, oh, man, I wrote this great workout or it's this good intention or the athlete must comply with my session as it's written. But that's the question you're trying to answer as a coach every session. That's a session of difficulty is what's the signal I want to send. I mean, or actually at any training session. What is the signal I'm intending to have sent to help this athlete in some way, shape, or form? And that's what recovery runs are, right? We talk a lot about oxidative recovery where essentially you're breathing in oxygen, providing nourishment to the brain and the body. Yeah, heart rate's elevated, right? So the blood is able to cycle through the body and that's why we do easy runs. We do easy runs to get this recovery benefit, right? Not to get mileage, necessarily, that happens, but it's always good to go back to what's the signal I'm intending to send and will it be received by the athlete? And then two, after you do the session and put the signal in, what are the steps they need to take or need to participate in with some type of recovery modality, ice bath, massage, normal tech, whatever it may be, rollers, and also just good old fashioned dinner and sleep and hydration so that that signal can be digested from that workout and result in a strong reaction or adaptation in the intended direction. - Exactly, so I think you're spot on. Let's go to, you mentioned there, the parts that are after the maximizing the workout 'cause this is the other part, is again, education, we talk about the workout, et cetera, then often for the cool down or what happens after, we just say, okay, go cool down, which is to clear things out, get back to homeostatic norm, like there's benefit to that, right, but again, I think we look at, how do we maximize after? And the first person that I heard really emphasized this years ago was Joe Behill. And I remember sitting down in a presentation, listen to him talk and then talking to him after, and he was so up on the research, but he was so on, the workout matters, but if I don't maximize, if I'm not creating the environment to maximize the effects of it, we just wasted part of it, was essentially the summary. So we would talk about back then, this cutting edge he talked about, I need to get protein in them, right? And then he would talk about, I need to make sure, these are professional athletes, I need to make sure they're getting naps to maximize the sleep and recovery afterwards. And what always struck me there is I'm like, oh, here's this legend in the sport who's thinking holistically on what's the workout is done, my job, like the last general was done, my job isn't over, I need to help these athletes like absorb everything that we just did. - Yeah, and that's when you look back at through the arc of history at a lot of the great distance running training camps, you'll notice that whether intended or not intended, this is the life that was lived. I mean, go back to Percy Serity, right? And Portsea, like that's all they did, right? They go work out, and then they hang out, eat food, talking on the campfire, go to sleep, rinse and repeat, right? Day in and day out. A lot of times college students, especially in the 60s and 70s and 80s were the best, if not some of the best, middle distance and distance runners in America, why? Very simple life pattern, very simple life pattern. Bob Shule, right? When's the Olympic gold medal in the 5K, as a full-time college student in Florida? Because if you look at his daily life, very simple pattern. And I think we have to be very cognizant around that truth and reality, that it's not just what we do during the session and creates a situation of overtraining. Overtraining exists, but it's not as prevalent, I think, as we make it out to be in the world. It's more we misinterpret fatigue or inability to bounce back between workouts as overtraining rarities under recovery. Under recovery tends to be the more difficult metric to measure because there's so many different factors in ways you can measure recovery or under recovery. And I only know this 'cause I've seen it myself, I've lived it myself multiple times. Like, if you go to a professional training environment with really legitimate professional runners, like, say, out-to-camp in Flagstaff, there's nothing going on. Like, Flagstaff is a really boring place. There's a reason, like, a lot of people go up there nowadays to do training camps 'cause it's super boring. You run, you eat, you sleep, that's it. Not a lot to do up there, seriously. But when you have other things on your plate, you're trying to, quote-unquote, fit in the workout, fit in training, and you got, you know, 10 other highly stressful things throughout your day. Yeah, work is done, it is performed, but because the conditions surrounding the work afterwards and leading into it aren't as conducive to that signal being heard, it's kind of like the signal gets turned down a little bit, right, the volume's not as high and its effect is dampened. And so, yeah, you did work, but the question is what is the value or what is the magnitude response from the work you did? And that's where this idea of the holistic training day comes into play. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I hear, you know, if you're a high school or college coach listening to this, you're like, well, you know, my athletes have to go to class and have these stressors and we're like, absolutely, they're not gonna live the life of a professional athlete, but they still, and if you look at the good programs and they still live a version of this lifestyle. We talk about it all the time, the runner's life. I mean, I remember it in high school with my team who was pretty dang good is, what did that mean for us? For us, it meant like, we're not going out on the weekends much, you know? Or we do, we're like back by 10 o'clock. I remember my senior year, I think it was like, I was in bed at 10 o'clock, like every single night until like after the state championship or something like that during the entire year. That was just kind of the no thing. Like we were going to prioritize X, Y and Z because like we were committed to this lifestyle. We still had a lot of fun and doing other things, but we made that priority. Now it wasn't the monastic life of maybe Elliot Kimchogay, but it was in its own environment of committing to, okay, this other stuff around here matters. And I'm gonna do my best given the constraints which is school, work, life, et cetera. Like given those constraints to like embody this lifestyle, which means like after workouts, I'm gonna make sure that I have some sort of meal or protein or protein carb shake to like get this recovery going. I'm gonna try and get sleep at night. I'm gonna try and minimize the stressors as much as I can to kind of adapt in a positive style. You see good teams at different levels, kind of adopt their own variation of this kind of runner's lifestyle to allow them to succeed. Again, given the constraints that they have. - Right, it's a difference, right, between wanting to live the life or wanting it to be a part of your life. And there's nothing wrong, right, with running, training and competing being a part of your life. And a signal will be had. A response will, a reaction will occur, right? And what we're talking about here is the magnitude of it. The relative magnitude just won't be as severe if you're staying up late or really distracted with other things. And that's fine, that's all part of life. But if you're really looking to maximize to get the most out of your training, you have to be, have consideration about delivering yourself, how you deliver yourself to the workout and then also how you exit in the moments afterwards on the short time scale within a couple of minutes to a couple of hours, to a longer time scale within a couple of days. I know one college coach who, we were talking this past weekend in a meet and who is a little further down the path of creating culture change or culture shift with their program that I am at Portland State. And I kind of asked him, okay, picking in his brain about what his journey was and what it took. He goes, you know, one of the biggest things was the recruiting trips and visits. In the past, everyone when they came to his program or the program that he inherited, a big part of it was the Sunday Saturday football game. So big time football game, they're gonna go there and that's a big recruiting draw. What he did was like, nope, we're gonna do a Saturday long run and then get him out and back on a plane back home before the football game. We're not even gonna take him to the football game because he's like, I can't, I don't want guys on this team who wanna go sit at the Saturday football game and go tailgate and do live that life and, you know, basically blow five, six, seven, eight hours on a Saturday and not recover after that long run. And what happened was slowly over time, like he changed the culture, right? Because he changed the people and what their agenda was and mission was and their attention was and why they were here. So these guys on this team now, it's a, you know, power four school and they don't go to any home football games, right? They go in the fall. They're focused on their Saturday long run, their studies going to sleep for covering. And there's a big reason why his program's gotten much more competitive because that's the mindset now versus he just knew I can do everything in the world. But if the culture and mindset is we're gonna go hang out the Saturday football game for several hours and do that lifestyle. You know, basically anything I did on a Friday workout, Saturday long run is totally shot. - You know, I love that story. It reminds me of conversations I've had with my wife who was all American distance runner at Texas A&M where obviously football is king. And she'd always, you know, we have these conversations on like, well, did you go any games? And she'd be like, oh, going to games was the worst. Like doing a long run and then standing it up like as the worst, I hated going to games. I only went to, you know, whatever, a handful over five years. And that is, it's like a simple thing, but like there's truth to that. Like you don't, it's not about not having fun or what have you are experiencing with college stuff, but like you don't want the person who's like gonna make this priority of like showing up and tailgating and going through that lifestyle every week. If they're running, you know, 90 miles a week or whatever hard training they're doing or coming off the 16 mile long run. Like it's just not the case. And I remember during my university experience at different teams, like that was sort of like the, after the, we'd do our long runs on Saturday, after that Saturday, the long run, it was like eat meals and then just go, go crash and sit around. 'Cause you're just like recovering and bouncing back. And I think if people are listening to this, I think there's that lifestyle of these programs that we know like does well. And I think there's also the small things that you can do as a coach is, how do you change the culture on seeing things holistically on recovery? How do you change the culture? So I remember at Houston, I was, I loved it when all of a sudden I realized, you know, my athletes were going back to their dorm room and then at that time taking like a car buffer and massaging their legs, right? 'Cause they were, it was part of the culture that they had created in where they were living together. Where they're like, okay, this is just it. We go, we get done with the workout, we go through everything here. And then when we go back home, we still like are doing things to help us bounce back and recover and feel better. So how are you creating that where it's not just, hey, this is some tasks that we do, but this is part of the thing is holistically. It's, we're gonna eat the meals that we need to, but we're gonna minimize, you know, the things that impair recovery, like alcohol consumption and things like that and lack of sleep. We're gonna prioritize these things as best we can. Again, given constraints that it might alter a little bit, but like knowing the stuff so that we can bounce back and absorb the work that we're doing. - Right, it's, you know, you're trying to see this now in this modern era after all the, you know, hot topic and discussion and, you know, expounding on double threshold workouts, right? So now a lot, I mean, I was talking to a high school recruit and they're doing double threshold workouts in high school. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wow, okay. But what's happening is people are like, they're not working. I did double threshold, it didn't work for me. And it's like, well, did you do double threshold or did you not really do double thresholds? 'Cause part of double threshold workout is about the recovery surrounding those sessions, not only on the day, but the day's proceeding and the day's after. And that's, I think, we look at workouts sometimes as this like thing that we consume, like a TV program, and then we turn it off and it's done. And the message I always try to impart on part of my athletes is, hey, my job as a coach is to be really thoughtful and purposeful with the workout design to create and manifest signals that will be, that will subject to your body and signals that will spur you to get better and improve and adapt in a certain direction. But your job as the athlete is then to maximize the signals. So the signals are out there, but it's not just this passive thing that I only do for 50 minutes in a day. It's understanding that that conversation with that athlete comes in and say, I don't think the workout's working for me, coach, which happens all the time. And understanding is the ownership to absorbing the workouts and getting the most out of that signal and adaptation, is that there, is it not there? And I think what we find a lot, nine times out of 10, is most athletes, especially young athletes, aren't aware of that. They don't know. They go, oh, but I see all my peers staying up till 1 a.m., 2 a.m., doing this in the dorm rooms and what have you. And they're getting away with it, but we have to remember the task demand of being a runner is very, very difficult on the body in that hour a day or two hours a day, we may spend doing our activity and doing our craft and practicing and running, comes with a high cost. And if the lifestyle's not lived to really absorb and maximize that signal that every session of activity provides, well, that's the problem there, not necessarily the session. - Bingo, it reminds me of a conversation I had a long time ago with Renato Canova who was talking about his special blocks, which were essentially double workouts. Sometimes special, sometimes not, but double workouts. And he made this point. He's like, the key is the recovery. Like in between, before you go into the special block, after you go into the special block, you must recover. And he meant holistically, not just the workouts or easing off the runs or what happened, is essentially you must do nothing in the Canova kind of style and voice. And I think again, for some that'll be realistic search, some it isn't, but the point of this conversation we're having is, as you just eloquently summarized, is we need to amplify the signals. We need to make sure that we're not dampening down the signals from the work that we did. What does that include? It includes priming us, getting ready to perform, checking in to see what people can handle on the front end. And on the back end, it then encompasses recovery, getting to homeostasis, like doing things that allow us to absorb the work from sleep to nutrition to the lifestyle that you kind of mental and physical stress. Like if you do those things, you're going to put yourself in a better position to adapt. - Yeah, and the simplest practices and habits yield the biggest results, but they have to be done consistently on a day-to-day basis but they compound over time. And I think one of the main things we lose or have lost in this modern era of distance running is the daily log, the daily journaling, right? That daily practice, that daily review, just writing down, okay, here's everything I did, not only from a training standpoint, but also to kind of itemizing what you got for sleep, the quality of your sleep, hydration levels and status, like just understanding what those routines and habits and behaviors are. That was go a long way. I mean, I figured out hydration was really important way back in high school. And I was that guy walking around in school with a gallon of water jug, pouring into my water bottle, and it was very simple. So I had eight periods, and I knew I had to drink the whole gallon of water over the course of eight periods. I figured out a water bottle that was essentially one eighth of the gallon of water. And that's, I knew I did, all right, I'm going to pour my water into my water bottle out of the gallon jug. I'm going to drink this throughout this class period. Great, rinse and repeat eight periods a day. And I was always hydrated, always 'cause I just figured out the math, right? It was something so simple as that, allowed me to not have those cramps. I never got cramp. I never felt lightheaded. Like I never had any problems associated with dehydration as an athlete my whole life because I learned that habit very simply. And I just made it routine. I made it just this thing I did every single day. And that's, I mean, that's the key. - That is the key. I think that is, is the habits. And that's what we're trying to get on is like create the habits around the workouts as well as give that as much attention as you do to creating the workouts themselves. So if you want to learn more, check out the Scholar Program. We dive into this topic frequently. You have courses that are coming, actually on recovery and some of that stuff, how to maximize it. So there you go. Thanks a lot for listening and we hope you enjoyed it and took some knowledge away. Keep on coaching.