Olav Aleksander Bu - Coach of Kristian Blummenfelt & Gustav Iden (Part 1)

This week's episode of How They Train is brought to you by Pillar Performance. If you've been listening to the show, you'll know that I bought some of Pillar Performance's triple magnesium powder and literally my sleep got noticeably better. And so I just reached out to them and said, "Hey, would you guys be interested to support a few episodes of the show and maybe give me a discount code that all of my listeners can use to try it for themselves?" And yeah, luckily for me they did that and I saw I really can't recommend enough that if you're training for something and you want to recover better than we know how important sleep is for that. But even if you just want to feel better day to day and know the importance of sleep and maybe struggle with it a bit, that you head over to Pillar Performance's website and literally grab some for yourself. They also have lots of other micro nutrient products that, you know, things like support your immune system function, other ways of helping your recovery, increasing your energy levels, things like that. For example, I've just grabbed some immune support there and I'm really enjoying it because I was getting sick quite a bit. So yeah, if you do want to try any of Pillar Performance's products for yourself, then head over to their shop. I'll put all the details of their link to their website in the description of this episode and I'll chuck the discount code they gave me. That discount code is HTT10 and it gets you $10 off your first order. So yeah, if you want to try some, click the link in the description and head over there and grab it. Welcome back to How They Train. I'm Jack Kelly and today I'm joined by the legendary coach of Gustav Eden and Christian Blumentfeld, I love Alexander Booh. I know I've said this before and I've genuinely meant it when I've said it but this is the single most excited I've ever been to talk to someone on this podcast. I love and he's Norwegian team have completely revolutionised the sport of triathlon to the point where almost every professional triathlete is trying to replicate their training, particularly their scientific or specific approach to the sport and their huge focus on creating a 24/7 professional winning culture. I love, you're the coach of the last two men's Iman World Champions, the last three men's Iman 70.3 World Champions, the current men's Olympic gold medalist and the Iman World Best Time Record Holder, however they word that. It's absolutely mind blowing when you say it aloud how many, how many current titles you hold in the world of triathlon and I just have so many questions to ask you that it's almost overwhelming how much I want to ask you. So maybe I'll just start off with like a big, broad, hard, straight to the point question Mark, all of what is your secret? Thank you for the very kind introduction. Actually there isn't so much secrets to be honest. It comes down to, for me, I like to approach it by physics. I think I said this before and that is because it's a demand-driven sport and by that I mean that you as long as you focus on what is the demand of what you're trying to achieve and then trying to break that down into smaller pieces and bridging it together again, leading into race, you are pretty well set up I would think. And then of course trying to do it as diligently as possible. I've got so many questions to ask you because I'm lucky, you know we've already talked a bit all over and I'm a huge fan. I consume a lot of the media that you do even though you don't really do that much. You sort of do tend to keep to yourself a little bit. I've always been a little frustrated at the questions people have asked you because I feel like maybe there's like a bit of mystique around you and you're a very smart scientific man that people don't ask you the direct questions. Like it's always chat about technology or maybe more like optimisation type things but I haven't heard you talk too much about just the nuts and bolts of like what the day-to-day training looks like of the guys you're coaching and like just like the simple things about endurance training. So I'm going to try and ask some of those questions. For example, with say Christian and Gustav leading into a big race like let's talk about the Iron Man World Championships this year. How far out from that are you guys training specifically for that and is it all planned out? Is it like one of these things where you're like okay we have this 16 week training program I'm going to write it all out. Let's try and follow this as closely as possible. So of course on the one side of course we use a lot of technology and but that is for me mostly to be able to always be one step ahead or preferably even a few steps ahead of what we are doing in training. So learning and of course trying always to advance it. But in the daily training of course is about doing things as accurately as possible. And I don't write a 16 week plan and then basically we just try to stick to that. Of course we have an idea of where I very often like to work to of course think or plan backwards so I would start with race day or okay what do we want to achieve at race day what do we think is the demand of race day and then we start to of course have like the course plan that I say okay yes fine then this is what we need to focus on. This is the status of the athletes now because of course we do a lot of measurements in the field every day and these kind of things. I have a pretty good understanding of where the athletes are and then I also have an idea of how far they are from where I think that we are where we think that we need to be on race day in order to win but then that also gives me an idea of how big the gap is and that dictates a little bit when we would start a specialization. Actually a specialization that led into Kona was the shortest ever preparation we had done into into an Iron Man and I think still it's even though we won we didn't necessarily go there to win we got we went there of course to set the course record. Of course if you're going to set the course record you have to win but more I think that we still could have shaved off another 5 to 10 minutes of it. I think that going some sub 730 on a normal day not of course if you have like a really bad day with wind and all these kind of things it's going to be tougher but but on a normal day I think it's I think it's doable to actually get below 730 in in Kona but that also would require us not to race for example the sprint distance in Bergen because the sprint distance is in Bergen but also the race that did in I think the week and before was in Slovakia, Collins Capor PTO race they that that was a little bit of a noise in the program. So ideally I would start a start a specialization with the starters they had this summer I would normally have started that probably are two three weeks earlier to be on a comfortable sign and basically see that we really got in all the sessions to build up that requires speed to get closer to 730 in in in in Kona. So when we're talking specifics about what you're doing with with Christian Bloomingfeld and Gustav Eden in the lead up to Kona where they ultimately you know Gustav did break the course record as did Christian but obviously because Gustav was a bit faster he didn't get it. Gustav wins the race Christian comes third and all day it did look like they had a plan like you could see that the boys were very much they knew what they were capable of they knew their numbers they were racing really smartly and and scientifically you could tell that and obviously to get to that point where you know your body so well and and you know the race is almost like I don't want to say a foregone conclusion but they know that if they do these numbers and they just stick to this that's going to get them this time and they're pretty much going to be able to win. So we know that you guys have this really scientific specific approach to it and and everyone talks about that and then everyone talks about the way that you guys implement technology and the big one is everyone has been talking about and copying your your incessant use of lactate monitoring during training to make sure that you are hitting those correct zones. Now all of that aside because I think a lot of that goes over people's heads a little bit. Can you talk to me about the more day to day just like you know old school training that you guys do so is it true for example that you're really high volume that everything you do is sort of very specific to Ironman pace or or easier. Can you sort of walk me through like what a big key week might have looked like for Gustav and Christian into the lead up to the to Kona? So then I almost have to go back into my plan because a plan is a plan. I love it. Open it up. Yeah. Well typically typically the week leading into into Kona or the weeks or let's say the period leading into Kona would of course be one training specifically so meaning specifically because specificity sometimes is also misunderstood people think that specificity is only about for example hitting a number but you also have for to get that specificity you also have to you also have to hit those durations too because you can imagine if you go out doing [BLANK_AUDIO] Let's say you are using an RPE scale just to simplify it. So using perceived effort and then you go out and you go out with what you have been taught is going to feel like a 7 to 8. So let's say that your LT2 or maximum like the steady state or metabolic steady state is that's going to feel like a 7 to 8, that's what you've been taught. So now you go out running. But 7 to 8, that is how it's going to, in the first minutes, it's going to feel like still like a 2 to 3 or 1 or 2 or 3 because it's so short duration that you're not even close to hit fatigue at all. But as you start to progress out in that session, then you are starting to build closer to that 7 to 8. But even a threshold session or let's say something where you are hitting threshold speed, not not not not seeing but from a external perspective, power speed is still going to feel like 10 in the end if you go all the way to exhaustion. So this is why of course specificity and it's not only about intensity but it also is about duration. And it's also, I see that it's of course a lot of debate around specificity and all these kinds of things and so on. But we have to remember that we always become good at what we train at or what we train at. That is basically what we are supposed to do in training. You can't expect to do something completely different to exaggerate and then basically do well on something completely different in racing. You have to practice what you're going to raise. And then when it comes to volume, yes, absolutely, we do a lot of volume. So there's a high volume but it's not about polarized, the pyramidal or these kind of different things. It's more about making sure that we get in the key sessions. The key sessions are basically what dictates much of what's going on around. So that means that if you are really struggling with nailing the intensity and duration on the key sessions, then I would immediately start adjusting on the sessions that are in the high intensity, low intensity. And maybe first of all, bring down the volume or mostly bring down the volume on those sessions to make sure that we hit the numbers that we do in the key session. That would be my first step. But basically it is a volume driven program and the reason for why it's also volume driven program. And that is, I've done a lot of research on what is called maximum sustainable energy expenditure to simplify it. Because there is no speed without power and no power without calories and also one thing that we see there is a very strong correlation between if that if you plot time on a marathon or Iron Man or whatever event that you're doing and you plot the time you're going to spend over those kilometers or how fast you're racing on the x-axis. And then you plot on the y-axis, you plot volume or maybe more accurately kilojoules, kilo calories, how much kilo calories you are doing per year or per month or per week. Then you'll see that basically there's one of the strongest correlations that we can find amongst in any sports, more or less. And of course you need to adjust it if it's like sprint distance. You need to adjust it, of course accordingly because it's about the key sessions. But you'll see that the fastest sprinters in the world are probably or they're doing much bigger volume in total during a week of training than amateur is doing. If you go to a marathoner like Kichouki, you'll see they do the best marathoners in the world. They do a lot more volume or work to be more specific than their slower pairs. If you look at, there is no difference in triathlon that if you look at age groupers, you will very often see that the amount of work, volume is a little bit inaccurate because it doesn't say anything about intensity. And if you can have two people doing the same amount of volume per week, but one would have to do that a very, very low intensity to be able to sustain it while another one can have also quite a lot of variation in intensity because he is able to sustain it. And then so basically it comes down work is the maybe the most accurate metric to talk about that. But the more work you do, there is a very strong correlation between that and performance. And of course that is something that I spent quite a lot of on researching. But of course you can't mindlessly implement just a lot of work of volume, then you're going to make slower at it. So again, the more volume or the more work you do, the more the more it starts to require also in the planning, the planning and monitoring and following up of the athletes because you have less margin of error to do. If you have a little bit less volume, then you have maybe a little bit more margin of error. But again, in the end we are talking about finding those margins and that's about then doing both the work but also being maliciously accurate on managing the load throughout the week, throughout the months, years and so on. All of that makes complete sense. And you can see that you guys embody this in your training. I mean, that's where I'm assuming that's where the lactate measuring comes into things because you're just trying to, you know, you're trying to be very specific to the demands needed for the race, but you're also trying to monitor the workload because you don't want to, you know, you want to be doing the right amount, you don't want to be going and doing way too much because like I assume you don't get much benefit if you go. For example, you're doing a 35 hour training week leading into the Ironman World Championships. If you exceed the intensity required for say three or four sessions, it probably has a big run on effect where it decreases the quality of other training for unnecessary reasons. Like you're saying that you don't really do polarise training with Christian and Gustav in the lead up to Kona. So there's really no need for them to run heaps faster in training than what they have to do based on the zones you're setting. So can you sort of walk me through what that actually looks like? Do you know what I mean? What would a big K week look like for one of those guys in the lead up to Kona? So again, of course, there are some parts of this that we, of course again, we're doing a lot of research in field, only athletes and so on, but also being able to do it all the way from calories to to velocity. Dives, of course, are quite interesting insight and what's also going on in the body or how the body adapts to the demand. But again, because we have to remember that it's, I see very often two that physiologists or some coaches that be obsessed too much over physiology itself, they drive the development from a physiological aspect rather than from a demand aspect. And what we have to remember here, this is, we are trying to hit a target or adapt to a demand, not doing some fancy training because we see that that can give you a long session with high view to max. We are not in the end. You're right. Race time. It's going to be what it is independently of your view to max. It's very simplified. But a big week, what I mean where I want to go with that is that what's going to happen when you start preparing for Kona is that we know that, for example, your five minute power is not going to be very important at all because you're not going to do five minute efforts, like very high intensity or something like this. You're not going to do one minute effort. So it's too far away, really, from what you want to prepare for in the race. So what we want to prepare for in the race is obviously power numbers that are round target. But we also want to understand, of course, yes, there will be maybe a few surges and these kind of things. But the surges, they are still, we are talking about small changes in the power. Yes, they go maybe up 10, 24 watts for a short period just to break, try to make a gap or something like this. But you can't really like put in a huge surge in an arm, because the day is so long that if you're going to do it in search, then it is probably going to be closer to the finish, but still a big surge, then you have to question afterwards whether you left a little bit too much in the tank and you could have been in a better position towards the end of the race if you're capable of doing that. Again, I don't think most people would do that. But so a big week, it's about a big week far away from our men. Let's say five, six weeks away, we could typically be some sessions where we're working a little bit on overspeed. So it could be sessions closer to your metabolic steady state. It could be in actually in all sports, both in cycling or in all this place cycling running and swimming. But some combined days, some isolated days, but one day could be a hard bike and a hard swim, for example, and an easy run. Then I would break it up typically, keeping one day maybe a little bit easier, but this is something also that I play around because it completely depends a little bit on the athletes and what is the limiter. But then it could be a little bit longer, but easy day where we keep it close to what we do in a race in terms of duration, but we keep the intensity lower. And that is because the long days will put a huge demand on your body if you bring it up to race pace, obviously. So we keep it lighter so that the recovery is short and then the day after they're again, we mix it up with more higher intensity again can be some progressive work around or a little bit above in, for example, now cycling and running or swimming and running. And then again, with one easy session and then the day after, I would keep it a little bit easier, maybe very short now because again, we have to, I work actually when I start planning, I plan very often for my calorie budget. I start with what I do know from the studies that are done on Christian Gustav in terms of maximum sustainable energy expenditure. So when I know this, I know how much calories they are burning. I know that biochemical efficiency from all the field testing and testing laboratory and so on. Then I know approximately if they go this speed, if they go this power, if it's this temperature or this kind of things, then I know approximately the disease, the amount of calories they are burning per hour at a certain intensity, for example. So I would, this is where I would plan. And then you can always put in a calorie debt to put it that way. But at some point, you have to pay that back. You can't go too long building up, building more debt, building more debt, building more debt because that's the same way that you're training more than you also can recover. A unique calories to recover to make it simple. So I can maybe build two, three days of debt and then I would ease it up so that they are able to eat themselves up again, bring maybe even a little bit of our caloric excess even so they come a little bit above. And then we can go into a couple of days where I, where we do more aromains specific work, where instead of like putting in a full aromain, I could break it up into two days. So for example, one day I would do aromains specific, very aromains specific swimming. So that it would be like four, four case with longer, longer intervals again, because swimming short intervals, we have to remember that swimming is a very technical sport. You're engaging small muscles and big muscles, but if you only do small like break a fork, fork, up into small short intervals all the time, the problem with that is that you don't get in that, let's say, that adaptation to fatigue or where you're you are signaling to your muscles that no, you're not going to do on the short intervals. You're actually going to do a fork or 3.8k because that's what you're going to do in a race. So again, you don't need to do like the whole 3.8k. I think that's good to do something once in a while too, but it maybe it could be like four times one k, for example. Just then if I break it up into us, I would probably be able to keep it at or just slightly above race pace. Then they would have a short break where they would eat a little bit and it's kind of thing again to manage the load and recovery times. And then I would bring them on the bike and now they would do at least four hours of riding at race pace, but of course, depending on how long now the time, the precision time would be, I would between the swim and the bike, they would either do a warmup, if it's let's say half a more than an hour between, if it's less than half an hour, they can just go to the bike and just go progressively into the workouts. And then we would again do longer intervals, it could be only broken up by that I would do some testing on them in the field just to see how the metabolism is adapting to the demand because we are still far away from the race. And after those four hours, depending a little bit, I could maybe put in a short run, but again, remember now that we are going to have one more day now with with with Ironman-specific work. So if that run, if the athletes feel that that run might impair the quality of the session the day after, we just skip that run session outright, it's no need to put it in. If they feel well, I feel really, really well and I want to maybe put in a short run to because I think that will also help me, I want to focus on as this specific task, just a short run, maybe 20, 30, 40 minutes, and then focus on what you're going to bring into the run tomorrow, that's fine, but it needs to be so short that and with the purpose of that it prepares you for tomorrow's session, not put any fatigue of you into tomorrow's session because this is not a key session. Then for example, and then the day after, then since we already did the swimming and I'm breaking up in two days, we're going to skip swimming probably today because again now we are building quite big caloric the visit because it requires a lot of eating to put in when you already have been swimming more than 4K, you maybe did 5.5K because of warm up and these kinds of things and then you did biking and that was also longer than what you do in race day because again you split them apart and you break them up into small intervals and maybe there's a warm up and a cool down there as well. So that again is also going to be bigger. Those two combined are already putting in a bigger caloric surge into your body than they would normally do on a race day. So you're coming into the day after with both fatigue of course from this swim and this bike already not a big one in the same way that you do in race day, but now we would still now do a bike to basically set the stage of this now it would probably be a little bit of a fair, let's say a medium-long ride but a little bit low intensity can put in some alternative works depending on again what if there is something specific that I want them to work on and then we put in a very rare specific runs it's going to be like 30, 35, 40, 40K run again because we need to practice what we're going to race and then after they done that with that then basically we call it we call it the week and it's we bring it into a new week. So again of course the plan would be to build this gradually up to basically where typically what one thing that I think many people don't consider is that if you look at what's quite interesting to if you look at a sprint distance triathlon you are completing the distance in swimming, biking and running mostly every day in your training even on the easy days you will probably even cover the distance you're going to do in a race. The swim of course in a sprint distance is 750 meters your bike is 20 kilometer and your run is 5K and I would think that even age group and most age group as around a fairly high level do cover all those distances in swimming, biking and running every day more or less of course with exception of recovery days. In Olympic distance we do almost the same again. Most athletes swim 15 kilometers a day they will they will be biking at least one hour a day but also cover if they go flat, cover 40 kilometers on the bike even and they will even run 10K most days with warm up and cool donkeys can't think and we go to the half-arm and half-arm and this is where you would maybe start now to to differentiate a little bit more, you will see that the age group is maybe doesn't cover all these distances but most of the professional athletes are training 25 hours 20-25 30 hours they would cover at least 1,900 meters swimming just even in their main set so with cool on and warm up and cool on even longer in their in their biking they're going to do more than two hours of riding and so depending on what it's flat the word to call they even going to do closer to 90 kilometers on the bike but let's say two and a half hour three something on the bike and then you got a running running is maybe what you want then now you come to the point where even the professionals will not have every day session that are 20 kilometers in their running but it will be close with warm up and cool down you're still probably hitting 12 15 16 18 K and maybe during the week you might even go longer than 21 22 K you maybe even go 24 26 K in your running with with warm up and cool down going now to Ironman distance 4K in the swim mostly you're going to do with cool warm up and cool down but you're starting to get to the limit to it to it to it more or less biking you're not going to do four hours of riding many times that even in a month you're going to do that a couple of times but not many and running you're not going to run two hours or two and a half hour even verse during a month that's going to happen maybe only when you specialize so it's quite interesting than also the look at but biking you are closer to because you might do session ride bike rides about four hours five hours so you're getting in the time you're not getting in the kildures right enough because you're not staying at the intensity but you get in the time and you get in the the time and your position is kind of thing you get closer to that when you maybe do more specific and these kind of things too but it's interesting to see that if we take if you look at this the sprint distance and we compare it with the Olympic distance, a Olympic distance with high fireman distance you can basically multiply the time on the sprint distance with the distance in Olympic or in Ironman and you can and you get it and it increases by a factor two so if you if if if your if your competition takes one hour in sprint is going to take all it going to take closer to two hours in an Olympic if you go from Olympic to to a full Ironman it's going to be close to four hours to a half Ironman but when we go to from a half Ironman to a full distance this is where the interesting part is happening the swimming is basically swim times on the sprint Olympic half-hour man are almost the same time per distance. If you go on a bike it's almost the same per distance so the time in the sprint to Olympic from Olympic to to the half-hour man if you if you if you normalize it for the distance it's going to be approximately pretty much the same. If you go to the run now from sprint to Olympic from Olympic to half-hour man again you can normalize it for the distance and it's you the pace is is not that much off but go from half-hour man to full-hour man and suddenly there is something extremely interesting happening to the running and then you can ask the question why is this happening and that's why of obviously maybe because that's the distance and the distance and the training we do the least in triathlon especially on the longer courses so that's why again most probably volume or the work that you do on that distance is the biggest explanation for why you're not we are we are so far off on making a liner relationship between the distances isolated when it comes to comes to the run comparing sprint to Olympic half-hour man distance. So again close into the race what's going to happen is that we get more and more specific but now because you also want to taper the the training that goes around this specificity comes down as well so that means it's going to be less high intensity work it's going to be less low intensity work and more and more targeted towards what we want to do in interracing so that's the that's the medium long answer simplified. So read this because obviously I think the interesting thing about Christian and Gustav's race at the iMM World Championships is we probably do look at them as the two best runners in the field but the reality of the day was that they were in a group of five people at 90 came to the bike where if the race was going to be one it was going to be one by them and so they were in the lead group out of the swim by the time the bike was halfway through they were in this group where it's like well this is the podium no one from behind that's coming into this and then from the end of the ride it was the same thing so they're not just runners like clearly everything they're doing is putting them to be one of the best in the world across all three disciplines but because of how much better they are than the rest of the field across the marathon distance and to be honest even the half marathon distance in half iMM. I think we saw a bit of a tired Christian Bloomingfeld at St George but on on their day Christian and Gustav they get off they get off the bike in T2 and it's it's how much are they going to put like how much time are they going to put into a run on the run not if they are going to and so is this because they're special or is it because you guys have realized that if we want to run fast over these long distances half marathons full marathons off the bike that we need to be doing a lot more running and a lot more of that running needs to be more specific to the pace so for example at the iMM World Championships did you guys realize hey everyone's sort of underdoing their running you know they're not doing their long runs long enough they're not doing them specific enough and is the secret that you guys like gradually built into your program 30 35 40 K runs at or around iMM and pace and and that's just something that no one else is doing I think just one thing that I want to emphasize first I think one thing that's interesting also to see is that basically if we look at the sprint distance time Olympic distance time and half arm and time and compare it to the best in the world the gap is there's a gap but it's not a huge gap if we look at marathon time in an arm and compare to the best in world there's a huge gap that's where it's a huge gap but in the shorter distances is not and of course this boils down also a little bit that on the one side wanting that we always have to be cautious about and there's overtraining and the closer you get to let's say your maximum sustainable energy expenditure basically you're putting in more and more volume the danger is that you're coming into a state where not you are not you are you're not able to recover from it and unfortunately if this would be a simple science you would you would obviously back off very soon but that's of course what people do too late so that's of course why people it's safer sometimes to keep it a little bit on the safe side than pushing the margins when it comes to maximum sustained manager expenditure or volume or work that you do per week but again of course that's that's where we try to be more diligent and accurate when it comes to Christian and Gustav and why they are so fast I don't think it's unique to them that's why I think that next year when we go back to Kona I already said this after Kostumel last year I said that of course when somebody comes in and really sets a new bar like Gustav did in Florida Christian did in Kostumel people first maybe open they of course it becomes a little bit of a shocker but a more like scratched their their head like okay this is this is a one-time it was something crazy happening that day or something like this but then you see it happens again and again and when it happens again and again this is of course like you say in in in introduction where people really starts to to try to copy and understand what is really going on and eventually the people that focus on this will also try to to maybe break it down and make it even smarter because this is what they spend all the time on that's why I also think that this is not unique for Christian and Gustav obviously they are extremely dedicated and athletes and they have the mentality to be the best in the world but it's not like there is not a lot of other people that also have this mentality but that's that's what I do think is that and that's why I also set up the Kostumel that it's gonna be a matter of time where we basically see record stars to fall everywhere so instead I did suspect that it would be closer in St. George and in Kona I actually didn't know I knew of course I had a good feeling new we were well prepared and I knew that with the time we had available between the sprint distance in Bergen and leading into Kona we everything went on rails or tracks more or less so there was not a lot of hiccups but of course I would like to have more time so I knew we could have gone faster but what you'll see in Kona next year of course Christian now and Christian Gustav they go back to to Olympic racing and that's been the goal all the time we wanted to see if we could be the first in the world we need a new challenge we wanted to be the first in the world to go to the podium also win win win an Ironman and then go back successfully to see if we can actually win in Paris 2024 actually there's nobody on the male side that ever had gone from winning in an Ironman or doing very well in an Ironman and then go back to Olympic distance hardly even qualifying for for Olympics and this is of course where we think with the way we work that we would be able to do this but of course it remains to be seen and and Olympic racing is on another level but back to the pace the Christian and Gustav is holding this kind of thing next year and then also with the now knowing that we are focused on Olympic Christian is open because he feel that even though he has no one everything he has he has the half Ironman record he has the full distance full Ironman record he has every championship goal that is to take the both Olympic the world champion in in Olympic racing now even the half Ironman which was the last one he actually didn't have and then from St George the world championship the gold medal but still he also wants to do it in Kona so he is we are actually considering to go back to Kona next year but we don't know again Paris 20 the fourth the main goal so it depends completely on how fast we're able to or how much time it takes for us to go back to the podium in the TCS racing because it's the highest priority but if you're able to come back to the close to the podium or on the podium within reasonable time that gives us of course a confidence that we might we might be able to shift back to Ironman and then back again to to to the TCS racing again there's there's an uncertainty with that but we are willing to to maybe do that so with three weeks between the grand final next year and Ironman Kona we I know that's going to be a challenge because I the people that now are focusing on the full distance they will try of course on one side like you say copy what we've been doing but they will even try to do it better because they are spending all the time that's the only racing they do and of course everybody is gonna see if they can go faster and this is not something that's unique for Christian and Gustav everybody can go faster because Christian Gustav can also go even faster than what we did so far so why should no other people be able to do that as well it's just a matter of being able to bridge everything together in the end but I think that a reason for why we're able to keep such good speed into the races the guys I think is obviously because we do specifically we train on what we're gonna race and if you know that you can bring it together in training then you know that you're you're probably also at least gonna bring it together also in racing too you can't expect to do something completely different in racing than you do in training so you guys obviously put out on Strava the week before the race or 10ish days before the race, the 40 kilometer run at 340 per K. Was that a weekly thing that you guys were doing? Like, I'm really interested to know about the longer running and the more specific running. How many runs leading into the Iron Man World Championships? Did Gustav and Christian do that were 35, 40, 40 plus Ks that were that fast? No, 333, 433, 350 per K. Was that a weekly thing? Was there any that were even longer than that one that the boys put out on Strava? Could you maybe talk to me about some specifics there? Yeah, actually, I know there were some speculations whether this was a psychological thing that we were trying to play games, mind games with our athletes. You were. You were. No, actually, actually, if you ask the boys how much attention I pay to other athletes or coaches, you would be surprised. I don't. It's not because I don't want to, but it's really because I don't have the time. I don't have the time because of the way that I'm working with all the scientific part with research and the things that we are doing behind the scenes as well to always be, try to be one or two steps ahead, being at the cutting edge. So this allows me very little time to basically look at what other people are doing. And also if we start to do, if or main goal would start to do things to basically play games with others, we would obviously not be focused on what would be ideal for our athletes. So again, it just, it's not the way that I work. It's not the way that I would even think. So if you and the simple verification of that would be that if you go and you look at one week before St. George, you will still see there is a 40k run or pretty close to 40k run in there. If you go back and you look at customer, you see there is a 40k run in a week before at customer as well. So this is something, this is not something we did to play games with other athletes because I really couldn't care less what other athletes and coaches are doing. They should prepare how they mean or think are the best for their athletes and to pair them to race as fast as possible in the same way that I only care for my athletes and how can I prepare them to race as best possible. So the week before, of course, a 40k run is again, because we have to spend part or energy budget on biking and swimming as well. We can't put in too many of the like the huge runs, but we need to put it in and we need to put it in strategically where we think we will be able to build on it, but also recover from it. And of course, when the training we have been doing in the week before there have even been combined, swimming, biking and running on each day, which is pretty close to a full arm and distance. Then when you start to break that up into two days, that's obviously going to be easier than doing it in one single day. And if you expect to be able to do that on a single day, then you should be able at least to be able to do that when you break it up into separate days as well. So if you do only swimming and biking one day, and then some meaning basically that should be a walk in the park and compare it to an Ironman where you don't have to run afterwards. And then the next day, when you now, you have gotten a lot of time to recover, then of course, if you do now a medium bike and then you bring in the race specific run afterwards, that's still going to be easy because you don't have the same fatigue in your legs and in your body from that swim and that bike prior to your swim and prior to your run. So again, this is a control taper leading into a race where it's a. Yeah, so that is the simple, simple, but also the complicated answer to it. I think there are absolutely smarter ways to do this, but we with Christian only having been able to race three Ironmans in his life. Gustav or, well, we also have the sub-7s of three and a half. And then of course, with Gustav only having raised two Ironmans in his life. Of course, there are just so much research you can do and learning you can do. And that was. we had to figure it out pretty quickly and then try to raise the quality of it. If I only had been doing Ironman racing with the boys, then of course, we would be able to dig even further, make it even smarter and put it even more strategically, better to together. But that unfortunately is not for now. For now is Paris 2024. In terms of say, these words you use, these scientific words that aren't sort of in the day-to-day jargon we use with our training. So you talk about work and kilojoules and MSEE, those kind of things. Most people talk in terms of pace or power or heart rate. Do you not mean like you use words that are a little. The way you're thinking about planning your training and setting your training is a little different to what the day-to-day age group is thinking of it or the day-to-day person is thinking of it. In more simple terms for me, I love. What does say like a big ride or a big run for you guys look like? Say for example, in one of the big weeks during the lead up to Kona, just really simply like in terms of distance and power, what might a big ride look like and then same with the run in terms of pace and heart rate, what might a big rate like run look like? So the bike, of course, the benefit we have there is, of course, inclination is, of course, going to make a change a little bit to the biomechanics when you're riding. But there would be not so obsessed over distance because it would be very difficult unless you went to a specific location that has the same course profile as you're doing in racing, then you could, of course, do just power and go by that distance. Otherwise, because biking, you do have the benefit of having mechanical gears on your bike and you can just maintain rather our cadence, so that means also a force, a certain force for a given power. On your bike, we can just go with power and duration more or less, as long as you can keep in your position in these kind of things. So there it would be like a very specific big day would be then a warm up. I would do a proper warm up of 20, 30 minutes warm up and there are many reasons for that. There's a lot of research on why warm up is important too, so I'm not going to spend, or I don't think that's that's so interesting, but just, but, or to discuss here, but, but, it's very interesting, warm up is very interesting, but it's not, not the topic now. And then would be then the main, main ride after the warm up and that would be then, for example, four hours at your race, your race power. So if your race power is going to be 300 or 310, what's something like this, then of course you're going to do that for four hours with very short breaks in between. Again, if all your rides, even the bike rides that are going to prepare you for race day are going to be like you're riding 15 minute intervals and at race space, 320, 10 watts, and then you're going to take a couple of minutes of break in between there. Then you then you're aiming for something that is not sustainable on race day, if you really need that. Again, you have to remember you have been swimming for almost 4k before you get on the bike and you're going to get off the bike fresh enough that you can run a blistering marathon. So again, it should be fairly easy to hit your power targets, power targets on the bike during a training day where you are focusing on the bike. So if you're now going to do a big or race specific and a big day, for example, that means that for on the bike, for Christian Goose, that it would aim somewhere between 2, 9, 3, 20 in average. So that means basically riding for example for one hour straight with a very short break just to change your bottles on the bike and have a small sip, maybe have a short talk with the coach or whatever. But that's basically how you would keep it. And then cool down afterwards, depending on whether you're going to be a long, short or long transition to your run, for example. Then the run, of course, you have to look a little bit on what you have been doing in the past. But for Christian and Goose, of course, we do several sessions a week which is pretty close to 20k in even when we do Olympic racing. So that means that bringing it up to 30k is fairly safe. But again, we would down bring it down to lower, a little bit lower pace. So for them, of course, if we plan to race 333, 335 in an armament, then that would mean basically getting in that kind of speed, that kind of speed, maybe even slightly overspeed, but keeping it there and again doing very long intervals. Again, you expect to be able to do this. after you've been swimming for 4K, biking for 180K. So then again, if you do only running, or you have a long break between your bike and run, or swim and run, whatever you do that means of course, obviously you should be able to run 40K straight, and that should, if you go to race pace and you're fresh, or that should feel easy when you do it isolated. So that's basically how we put it together, because specificity is specificity. It's not something completely different, but of course, since your training, you can't have like a short break or like this kind of thing, and it's not gonna make a huge impact. It can even sometimes be beneficial because it allows you to refocus. You stop a little bit, you reflect over what you've been doing, trying to get, have a small sip of carbs or these kind of things and then go back in, but now with a little bit better ability to refocus compared to if you just do the continuous training. So again, the short break should only be there to refocus, to bring back top notch quality on what you're doing, but again, remember that quality is also the specificity. So meaning you can't have big breaks or doing something completely different than what you're doing racing. So do you try and find specificity only in terms of single sessions? So like we're gonna go do this five hour bike ride with 30 minutes warm up, 30 minutes cool down, four hours at Ironman pace and then the next day or two days later, you go and do 30 to 40 Ks of running with some long intervals that for Christian and Gustavo, 330, 335 per K and a lot of it, 20, 30 Ks worth of it so that you're doing the specific demand of the race in your training. Or do you blend it and go, well, we're doing an Ironman. So we wanna be specific to an Ironman and you mix those two things together. Is that just too much work or is that too much energy expenditure or does it cause too much fatigue or is there, was there times in the corner build with Gustavo and Christian that you did go super specific and do long brick sessions that were specific on the swim, bike and run to Ironman pace? - No, yes, I would do that normally. That is something I would normally do, but we didn't have the time actually between Bergen and Kona to do that before Cosmell and before St. George, I did that. But now that's why, for example, the lead into Kona was in that sense suboptimal because we weren't able to get in all that specificity. So that the further away I would be from a competition, I would be more focused on working on isolated parts. So then I would work on, for example, the run, I would really make sure that when you do the run, you have like the highest possible quality and then I would allow for enough rest days even in between that run and next time you're gonna do like something very demanding on the run or on the bike, for example. Again, swimming is something you complete more or less every day and for people that are at this level doing a 4K session or 3.8K session in the pool, which is even higher speed than what you do in racing is something you could do many times a week without it. It's really a challenge. The biking and the running is the more challenging part when you go from half to full distance armament. So there, the further away I would be for a race, I would on the bike again, also it's important to put in a little bit fatigue before. So it's actually you, one thing you'll see is that when you do four hours of riding on the bike, four hours, 15 on the bike, at a race bed. And the reason why I say hours is because distance is a relative in this sense because if you are in a place where it's very hilly or a little bit more hilly, so it's doing 180K would take you four and a half, five hours to do. And of course there's a little bit further away from specificity, it's not bad, but it's a little bit away from specificity. So that's why in biking we would talk mostly about hours and power or in our work. The difference between riding four hours at race space, fresh versus riding four hours on the bike when you have a tough swim, 3.8 K, 3.8 K, race-specific swim just before. So you have a short transition between the two is gonna already hurt a little bit more on the bike than in dust with outer swim obviously because you're drawing from the same resources in the body. You are taking, you're using carbs and it's not like you can purely point burn your carbs. You're gonna take carbs, obviously from the muscles that you are engaging, but also from the rest of the body too, but other slower rates. So when you are doing the bike now, I would again, far away from race, put in more specific like a day where we would focus for example on biking and then a few, I would bring more days between the cycling, I could even bring the tough swim sessions further apart from very specific bike sessions for our amenities kind of things. But the closer I get to the race, what will happen is that I remove more of all the other training around there to allow them to have more, let's say energy or calories available to focus solely on the specific session. And this is also the time where I can start to bring these sessions closer and closer to each other as well because obviously if the only thing you do during a week would only be a 3.8K swim and then a four, four and a half hour bike-specific ride and then a 40K, 42K run for example, and that you will never come into a state where you would have a huge energy deficit for a long time. Yes, you would obviously have it the day after, maybe even two days after, a little bit how your appetite is these kind of things. But after a couple of days you would be back to, you would be back, let's say you wouldn't be in a big caloric deficit anymore. If you have a lot of other training in there in between as well before and after, then of course that the visits gonna last longer in simple terms. So when further apart, long away from the races, then I would, then I could have other training in there in between and these kind of things. I would keep these sessions, big sessions further apart from each other to allow that it can go into those sessions with very high quality, really focused on specific targets or purposes, efficiency, all these kind of things there. But the closer we get to the race, of course, that's not what we're gonna do in a race we are gonna do 3.8 swimming, 180K bike and 42K running. So then I want to bring that closer together and that means even into one big day, but that means I have to bring down the training a little bit the days before. So it's like a mini taper, not necessarily a taper, but allow a little bit, make sure that you don't at least go into that day with a very big caloric deficit. But then also after that day, of course, keeping it a little bit easy, easy, but I can still do training, but you would still be able to get back into a caloric balance after that as well. And then the closer you get into race, obviously, now we need to, that's gonna, but that kind of day is gonna, of course, make a big hole in you, compared to what you normally do in training, just because in the nature of an armament. But now when we get close in the race, of course, we want to ease off a little bit on the load or do tapering. And when we do this tapering, that means basically, of course, I'm gonna split them up a little bit again, so that I will maybe keep them on two days, like for example, you saw the week before, where they did one day, they did the swim and the full swim a little bit longer, or actually longer than they did the full bike. And then the day after they did that two and a half or right on the bike and then they did the full run. That was a 40K, 40K run. But now you keep them on two separate days, but it's easier the days before and it's easier the days after. Obviously, plus that we are splitting it up in two days. So it's still a control taker. - I know this might be a little tricky to answer, 'cause maybe you don't really look at it as just like a seven day week or you don't know the exact numbers. But if you can try and just put it simply for us, what would the average amount of hours that Gustav and Christian spend training a week be, but say, particularly in the lead up to like an IMM world championship, sort of 70.3 world championships, or even the Olympics, for example, just like broadly speaking, what how many hours would they, would they on average be doing a week? And then what's the biggest week they might do in a build? - So, and on average, I would say, if you, if you, I can give you it very specifically in calories, calories to kilojoules. - It's just too complicated for us. We need hours all of it. - I can give it in calories per week. That's not the problem at all, but it's not gonna save people very much, I think. - No one would know what it means with that. - So in calories, or maybe I leave this because we're actually writing an article on this and we're gonna publish it. I'm gonna keep that for us a secret until the article is published. But in hours, in hours, they do on average, I would say maybe 30, 35, not 30, 30 hours, maybe on average. But of course, you can't always look on it like that because that would be the normal week. And then of course, you have weeks with competitions, then you have travels. So that's why, of course, the yearly average goes down because you do also have these travels and these kind of things too. But in in normal weeks and months where you are able to focus on training, I would say they are closer to 30 big weeks can be somewhere between 35 to 40 hours even and I'm talking pure. I don't we don't do very much training or at all. We don't do very much or at all core stretching, all these kind of things that we don't do either. That's for me like demand oriented. So I would only put in strength training if I see and I've documented that there here, there is a specific need to do strength training and then also what specific kind of exercises we're going to do. And even that's going to be benchmark and see how we can transfer that into specificity again, because again, the reason why you do strength training is obviously that you're trying to become faster and more racing. So if we can't bridge it in, then it makes no sense to do it. And the same thing with stretching, the same thing, there is no massage or all these kind of things. So when I'm talking hours, I'm talking pure biking, swimming and running. And that's around 30 hours, I would say, on average, a week, yeah, and big weeks, 35, 40 hours even, but those are not so many of. And we of course, with weeks where there are more traveling competitions, we maybe drop down to even 20 hours, 20 hours of training. That would be approximate. And now I have to ask about lactate because how can I talk to all our Alexander Boo without asking lactate questions. Now it's quite crazy what you guys have done to the sport and the way that lactate monitoring has taken over the sport. Like a corner this year was quite like a weird thing where in 2019, I don't know if there was a single lactate monitor on the island. And then in 2022, purely by you guys bringing it into the sport, every single professional athlete just about was monitoring their lactate. And to the point where hundreds, if not thousands of age groupers are doing it as well. Can you talk to me, I love about the specifics of how you use lactate? Like I'm assuming not everyone does it the same. What is it that you guys are actually doing when you're testing lactate? Why do you do it? What are you looking for? Can you give me, is there any secrets around it as well? Like is there stuff you can't tell me that that you're doing? That that you think other people aren't doing and therefore don't want to let them into? Or can you tell me every single thing about why you use lactate and how you use lactate? So this is where like I said, or like we talked about earlier, is that not on this particular before, but and that is that I hold very few secrets at all. I'm very open about everything we do. Of course, I would probably not go into all the details of everything. At some point, we will do for sure. We will do at some point. But there are some obvious reasons to use lactate and then there are some less obvious reasons to use lactate. And and this is actually on one of the reas where we are doing stuff to with lactate, which I don't talk very much about yet. The obvious reason to use lactate is to look at adaptation. And that means for me, that means basically when you're going out training and these kind of things, the worst thing you would do is to make a 16-week plan and you would just stick to that plan. And then as you get into race, this is when you get to answer whether the training worked or not. The benefit of using lactate and there are many caveats to this as well, but the benefit of it when you really understand all the mechanisms that are influencing lactate and there are plenty. And you are able to compensate for this, then you can use lactate as a really good tool to see how the adaptation is occurring. And then you would adjust the training accordingly. So instead of waiting until the race, they would get the answer, you would be able to get the answer as you go. The most obvious reason for why many people implement lactate is to do intensity control. I would say if you do this, you will most likely fail. Not because it doesn't work, but there are so many factors influencing intensity control when using lactate that you really do have to know the physics and physiology. And I'm also talking physics that are affecting this. Everything from what you really are measuring because you're measuring a concentration in a volume, everything from nutrition to hydration to other kinds of adaptation, there are so many things that will affect your lactate concentration. Some on a daily basis, some on a little bit more, let's say called an adaptive basis, which if you had a good way of doing your training before and you used it to go to your training with, then I would probably stick with that. If people came to me and asked me what would be the single best advice to use in training, I would say stick with power in running and biking and go with pace in swimming and look at a function of time and power on short and non-gatheration as a key or a way to understand adaptation. But intensity control using lactate, you really, most people will probably do more things wrong than right if they start to adjust it. Think of this way. You have a, in biking, you have a power meter, which is very accurate. It's, to most power meters today would be within one to two percent accuracy. Normally, at least if you treat them well, you calibrate, you do or seroing of them and this kind of thing, they will normally be very accurate across a range of conditions and so. When you're out riding now, if you have a target, if you go in training and you say that you want to hit somewhere around 300 watts plus minus 10 watts, that's why you want to be. Plus minus 10 watts, that's a small percentage. It's a very narrow target to hit, but completely doable for anybody that are training for an Ironman. They would be able to do that even with changes in the gradient. If you go a little bit up or if it's slightly downhill, underlating this kind of thing, you would be able to stay within those power targets very accurately. And even to the extent where we say that if you have more than a 5% deviation in your power target, the old saying is that then you will, then you're pacing yourself poorly in an Ironman. The same at heart rate, you can hit your heart rate targets very accurately by the within a few beats, by just knowing that there is a little bit of a slow or kinetics involved with when you increase, when you increase the effort a little bit or the speed a little bit or a little bit, takes a little bit time for it to be reflected in your heart rate. But this, it doesn't take many times before you understand it. And again, you can nail a heart rate target within a couple of beats being good at pacing. But in lacked with lacked it. First of all, if you get a small, small, small contamination either by water because you're cleaning the spot that you're sampling from and you get a little bit of water into this or you get a little bit of sweat into it because you didn't clean it properly or sanitize the spot accurately enough. We have to remember that the amount of blood that is sampled in this lactic analysis are, if you use the sum of analysis, they are down to even 0.2 m/L of blood. 0.2, 0.3. We are using the Nova Bio for one single reason. One, it's one of the most accurate ones. I'm going to first spend this much money on the analysis. We want something that is extremely accurate or as accurate as possible when you bring it into the field as a portable one. But secondly, also it's this it is the lactic meter that brings the best compromise between short time to answer when you make the prick and you sample the blood you get an answer within 30 seconds. We don't want to wait to give this kind of feedback until the next interval. I want to give it to them before they start next. We need the analysis that analyze it quickly. But more importantly it needs to be accurate and this one samples from 0.7 m/L of blood. Think of it. It's so little blood still, but still going from 0.2 to 0.7 m/L of blood. That's the several hundred percent's more blood. But still so little blood that only a small tiny droplet of moist water moist or which then would basically dilute the blood and will bring down the lactic concentration on the analyzer. Or you get a small contamination of sweat which holds normally 10 to 50 times more lactate than an unfortunate, not constant. That would be very convenient if it was a constant concentration difference between what you have in your blood and your sweat. But it's highly fluctuating. So that means that a small tiny part of sweat into this blood now that you are drawing into the strip will increase the lactic concentration a tiny bit. If you now go from lesser, you are targeting three millimals. You're a simple number. But you are getting 2.7 instead. How on earth would you know this is wrong? You wouldn't. And if you go now from three to 3.3 or 3.45 instead, how would you know this is wrong? And if you now are making a decision based on this. You say, oh, you're 2.7. You need to go a little bit harder. But as you say, ah, but it's hard. Yeah, but you need to go harder. It says you're a little bit too low. We want to keep this specific. You're now driving up. You think of it this way. You're now increasing your lactic concentration. If it was three, but you got 2.7, that's already more than the 10% deviation in your lactic concentration. And now I'm grossly oversimplification, oversimplifying this. And the same way, if you go by 3.3, you're 3.4 and you know, are bringing it down to 3. There's a 10% reduction, more than 10% reduction in your lactic concentration. But you would see that your power numbers are going to vary more or less, and your speed. So you can only, most likely, do wrong unless you are extremely trained in using lactic, and you do understand all the factors that influence it from contamination to hydration, dehydration, nutrition, ah, plasma, there are so many things that do affect your lactic concentration because you're not measuring lactic volume. You're measuring lactic concentration. And that means that also even the spot you're sampling on the body also makes a difference whether you're measuring in the e-lope or in the finger or even if you measure on or how to say even if you measure straight into the muscle, it will be a much higher concentration of lactic. Because again, we have to remember we are measuring something in the blood, not where it is produced, is produced in the muscles. So there are so many caveats to measuring with lactic that most likely, you can only do wrong. So if you decide to bring, I don't say the lactic is bad because obviously we use a lot of lactates, but we'll just have to understand there are many implications, many caveats or pitfalls with lactic that if you decide to bring it in, you have to consider a huge investment. It is an investment both in time, research, understanding before this, you can trust your lactic numbers in the same way you do with power, speed, and this kind of, and that's of course where all the secret comes in of how I basically use this because most people when we see their coping and they use it basically for lack for intensity control and all these kind of things, while we can also do that to try to hit some numbers. But again, I would very easily distinguish when I have a small contamination that both because I'm not only using lactic, I'm using several other sources too that I can compare that data with. And then to get your insight from you on other things that you do, because I'm assuming there's no stone left unturned with the training you're prescribing, the environment you're creating, the things you're choosing to do it. Nothing seems very random. So can I just maybe dot point a few and then like I'll say one and then you just give me, you know, the details on if you use it, how you use it and those kind of things, particularly with Ruth Kustavan Christian leading into these big races. So again, like I said, we don't keep much secrets so feel free to shoot. Altitude training. Yes. So with altitude, do you guys use it and if so, how do you use it? Yes, we use altitude training quite extensively. And obviously it is to increase the hemoglobin mass in the body, which is basically the part of the blob which carries the oxygen. And for every gram of mass, we are able to increase the blob or a hemoglobin with, basically means one gram, one gram of increase in hemoglobin mass means basically 1.34 milliliter extra of oxygen. That's just how many oxygen molecules you can carry per per hemoglobin. But we use that quite a lot this year. I actually don't know how many weeks we have been at altitude in total, but I would say that we are probably closer to, I think we must be closer to six months actually. Let's say five months less than five to be on the safe side, but it's is pretty, this year has been pretty, it will be at the end of the year pretty close to six months, I would say. And with that, is there like specific amounts of time you might spend there, like say before the IMM World Championships or before the Olympics? Is there a specific amount of time you want to be at altitude? And is there a specific amount of time you want to get to the race is there a specific amount of time that you want to stay there until the race? Like you know, you want to be at altitude until six days before the race or 10 days before the race. And then when you're at altitude, how much of your training is done at altitude and is that important? Or do you follow the the old school thinking of sleep up high and trained down low? Live high, trade high. We would do, we only would go down for, for example, in Sierra Nevada, the problem there is that there is no place to do bike riding up in Sierra Nevada unless you go on a turbo inside. So that means riding down to approximately a thousand meters and then they do the riding there. That's there that are pretty good good locations for for riding. Phong Rumur, then we can be high or it's not very high, but that's around eight thousand between a one thousand six and two thousand meters. I would say most of the places where we where we go, but there we stay high all the time. And ideally I would basically stay high all the time if I could. Of course this again, boy, it's down a little bit to how you approach altitude training. I could, I could do it differently too, but but again, you have to look at what you really are trying to to manipulate or improve. And in our sense, we are we are at altitude, obviously in the end to increase the performance and going to altitude, then we go to altitude because we want to increase the performance as a function of that we say that the cardiovascular or central system is a limitation and we need to improve that, for example, then most easily at that time, for example, by increasing the hemoglobin mass of the blood that is able to carry more oxygen per per time around in your body. So train high, live high, then the duration that again, one aspect we haven't talked very much about and which I pay a lot of attention to and that's the psychological aspect of it. So going to altitude can be demanding, especially Cerenavada is very demanding, but that's because the Cousin which is up in Cerenavada is to the likeness of people living in Spain very much and then we very often see one also when I speak with some other coach friends of mine, which also using Cerenavada that they find the Cousin up in Cerenavada quite tough to live with over a long time. And that basically means that we have been trying to stay in Cerenavada for six weeks, seven weeks, but what we see is the limitation there is not the cellulence, not possible to be up there, train and it's very nice facilities to train out, super nice people that we really enjoy staying with to center there, but it's just that they come to a point where they struggle with actually eating, getting in enough food up there and which then increases the logistics because they have to travel down to to to granada to buy food, make our own food and all these kind of things which is also okay, but the possibilities of make food up in Cerenavada is not very good. So these senses Cerenavada limits itself by three to four weeks staying there, but we please just stay that longer and of course because it's difficult to get in specificity just because of the terrain, for Rume, we could stay all year, we could stay there in the whole year if we really want to do, but because we have races, families and all the obligations we can't stay there all year, that's for one, but second also the weather up there is not very ideal for track is for two out of the whole year, so you become like a little bit of a weather no matter, but I would say altitude, that's fantastic, it's a really great tool, but it's also nice to mix in sea level camps too, and the reason for that is because in the same way that you when you go to altitude, at some point hopefully you have a climateized to the point where you're able to do the same kind of work up at altitude for the same metabolic demand, so more or less there would be no difference between what you did pre-altitude in terms of speed and demand, and that is basically now the same up at altitude, at this point you can of course start to do other things up at altitude, or you can basically just say that okay now it makes more sense to go back to sea level, and maybe we would try to bring that into slightly higher speed at sea level, again, if you come back to sea level and you have no intention of racing faster, training a little bit faster, then you can question yourself why did you go to altitude, of course you can use it as a recovery mechanism or let's say perifereo recovery mechanism because you can control things more centrally, and you're looking to keep things at the same metabolic demand at altitude, but that means that the muscular or less an impact for so not the things that are muscles and everything will now be lower altitude before you adapted. And of course, when you adapted, it would be more or less the same. So you could be a way of bringing in peripheral, let's call it peripheral, or reduced impact stimulus to the peripheral system and allow that to adapt a little bit differently. But at sea level, then the whole goal would be to train and race faster. Otherwise, you have to question where you spend your time. Maybe you could have done what you then intended to do at altitude differently in a better or not a place because recovery also takes a little bit longer time at altitude than it does at sea level. So leading into races, it depends again on altitude. If it's very high altitude, then again, if I plan to go race, be able to race faster at sea level, I would bring go down normally. If it was extremely like Olympic, I would go down earlier to start to bring in that overspeed or let's call it overspeed compared to what I did before. I went to altitude and then be able to bring that into races during the competition. If it's less important races, then I can wait longer at altitude because there will maybe be more important race coming later on, which I wanted you to really develop that always be into, for example. So it depends very much on one altitude I stay at. If it's a lower altitude, you can be closer to competitions if a high altitude, then I would go down to sea level earlier. But again, one, you have to remember also that there is a difference between what kind of sport you're doing. So if you're doing a high velocity sport, that means that or less is still under, but endurance high velocity sport, like sprint distance triathlon or rowing, kayaking, these kind of things, then I would probably go down to sea level earlier if I was racing at sea level, because up at altitude, you would normally be further away, unless you are not 100% adopted, you would be further away from your race-specific speed, for example, that you're looking to really develop leading into the race. So that means I would need to go then further. If you're doing an arm and race, for example, that's still at a very low speed compared to many of these compared to the Olympic sports. So in that sense, I could probably be at altitude much closer leading into the race, because I could still work at race pace, or the power still at altitude compared to, yeah, the Olympic sport. So the race you're going to do dictates the race you're going to do, and the location you stay to prepare at, that's going to dictate very much how long, and when I go down to a race between the two. - And what about heat training, Olaf? - So heat training, yes, absolutely. This is probably where I think we are, or have, and still is one or the most advanced in the field yet. Still, we actually thought that more people would bridge up and understand the mechanisms earlier, actually, and because we got one year extra leading into Olympics, we would, I thought actually much more people, so we were even ready to push the button to publish the work that we had done. But after the, after the Olympics, we actually learned that people, when people started to talk a little bit about what they'd been doing, there's kind of things we felt like this is still a card, this is still a race we're going to keep on hand for some more time. And we will publish eventually, and all the information that, that, of how we prepared and all these kind of things. But it's a card we keep, but it would be close to ourself, still because we see people have so many different approaches to heat training still telling us that this is still a competitive advantage. So, but heat training, absolutely, we use that systematically. - So obviously you're not going to go into too much detail there, it being something that you think you've got an advantage on your competition, but if I ask some questions about it and there's stuff you can answer, you can just tell me, "Shut up Jack, I've just set it secret." I'm not answering that, but I'll try and push the limits a little bit here, I'll love. - Okay. - Are you guys doing anything specifically that no one else is doing? Or are you just doing things a little differently but the same? So what I mean by that is, pretty much everyone seems to be using heat training passively, like sitting in a sauna, sitting in a sauna directly after a training session, or sitting in a hot bath, and then a lot of people seem to be using heat training actively, so they might do an easy run, but a bit laid up or go on into a hot room while they're on an indoor bike trainer and do it, or swim in a wetsuit indoors. Are you guys doing that same stuff and the differences in maybe like duration or when or how or for how long, or are you actually doing different things that people aren't doing? - We are doing different things, and I think this is a field where I'm going to keep it a little bit more open, because if people want to do the research on what we are doing, they will find, they will, of course, learn quite a lot. They will already see quite a lot, but I'm going to keep it a little bit difficult for them yet, because eventually everybody, I think that in the end, everybody is going to converge more or less towards. We also still have work to do. I don't say that our program is finished, developed, and we just keep it one way. We are continuously developing this. I'm working very closely with a Swiss company, GreenTag, and on top of that, I still spend also quite a lot of money on pills, temperature pills, that we as well, so we have double redundancy, but I work very closely with GreenTag, or the ones that are making the core sensor in Switzerland, because this is a field where we are continuously advancing as well. So I'm going to keep it a little bit. Again, people will find out, of course, a lot, they will see pictures from the guys swimming in the wet suits. They will see, of course, we are riding indoors. People know we are doing heat training and these kind of things, but I think for now, I will keep that as a see my secrets, meaning that people will be able to understand. People will see a lot of what we do, but the people that don't, I'm going to keep it a little bit open for them, and then eventually we're going to publish anyway what we are doing. I think we are probably a lot of the work that I'm doing. We will start some articles, we come out next year, but I think most of them will come out in, or much more will come out in 2024. Yeah, I'm going to ask two more questions on it again. Feel free to not answer. How important is it all of to train outside in the heat of the day leading into a hot race, but not only into a hot race, into a cool race, to get the same adaptation to heat training, because obviously you don't just do heat training to acclimatize to race day conditions, similar to altitude, you might do it to increase hemoglobin mass or blood plasma volume and those kind of things. How important is it throughout your training program that you're doing sessions in the heat of the day? So again, this boils down to the specificity. Again, if you plan to race in heat, heat is a part of the demand that you need to acclimatize to. So if you're going to do all your big training and these kind of things, when there are cool conditions, and so on, that is something very different than the demand that you're putting your body on. And then how do you expect your body to be able to race at the same output if you're training for something completely different again, or the conditions are very different. So again, you need to consider demands. So if you're racing altitude, you go, of course, altitude to acclimatize so that you can actually output, according to the demand altitude, you don't prepare at sea level. Same way with heat, you have to prepare for the heat. So that means if the race is during the day, you have to prepare for that. And if it's cold conditions, you can't expect to perform very well even in very cold conditions unless you actually also prepare for that. So that means that a cold water swim is going to be cold. So that it's much easier to cramp up and these kind of things get a cold shock and so on. So if the first time you jump into cold water is the time when it's cold during your race, don't expect that it's going to be equal to what you have been trained for. So again, the specificity, specificity is specificity. It means basically trying to replicate or simulate as closely as possible what you're going to do on race day. Both in terms of environment, how you train and all these kind of things. And then with heat training all of my last question around that is, is the point of heat training just to get hot or is it more specific than that? So is it, are you guys wanting to get your core body temperatures to very specific heats for optimal adaptation? Or is it just, hey, we get in a wetsuit and we swim and it makes us hot and therefore we get the benefits of heat training or we sit in a sauna that's at 70 degrees and we sit there for 30 minutes because that sounds about right. Or is a big part of like always one of the things that you guys are doing better than everyone else actually do? targeting specific body temperatures you're trying to get to inside of your heat training. Okay, this is actually a very important question because this comes back a little bit to the physiologist versus the coach that has no physiological background. The academic versus the practitioner. And that is that what kind of core temperature you're going to have on race day, what kind of plasma volume you're going to have on race day really doesn't matter. What matters is the performance on race day. Everything else, what your core temperature is going to adapt to is more function of adaptation or your plasma volume. It's a more function of adaptation. So again, if you, I think that if you go about that you're targeting a specific core temperature or that you want to increase your plasma volume by X amount of percentage or something like this, there has nothing to do with the demand. And the body is what we have to remember is the body is so complicated, so sophisticated, so complicated, and so extremely adaptive that it will always try to adapt to the demand of what you are stimulating or what you are basically exposing it for. And that means also that when you are, but at the same time, the body will also try to do this with the least or as efficiently as possible. That's why I always come back to physics and the first law of thermodynamics. And that means you can't create energy, you can't you destroy energy, you can only convert energy from one form to another, so speed power calories, calories, power speed. So about the body, but the body would always try to do that as efficiently as possible, spending the least possible calories, this is just survival. And then the other part of it is the the stationary action principle or very often called the law of least action. And that is that if you pour a glass of water on a hill, down a hill, the water will always try to find the simplest way to run down the hill. So that means that when you are adapting, of course, you need to figure out how do I adapt to the race? Of course, you need to bring this up gradually, you can't expect if you haven't run a marathon to run a marathon tomorrow. You can't expect to do an arm and tomorrow if you haven't trained for this. Of course, you can always try to to to to crawl yourself through it or with whether or get yourself to it with very poor performance. But again, we are training for something because we want that body to adapt to it. And then to closer get the race, we're bringing it more and more together because that that that is what you're really going to do on race day. And that the same thing also comes with with it. It means that if you are planning to run a marathon and you know that the temperature is going to be around 28-30 degrees, that means that you have to bring it first, first you build it up. So you break it up into pieces and where you are getting, you're being more gentle with your body and you're allowing your body to adapt because you're not adapted the first time you're going to do this. You have to allow for your body to adapt to this. So again, when you're measuring your core temperature, when you're measuring plasma, I mean, hair hair is also an important thing. You can't do understand that hemoglobin concentration hematocrytid you measure out your doctor. That's that has nothing to do with plasma volume or hemoglobin mass because there's a concentration in in in in in in a volume. So you can even if you if you hide it well or if you get dehydrated, that means that these values hemoglobin concentration and hematocrytid will change just a function of that. But plasma so when we talk about plasma volume, there are gold standards for how to do this and this you would do using carbon monoxide rebruing, which is done a few places in a world. We I have one of these machines and but I never use it to target a certain plasma volume. I don't use core temperature to target a specific temperature. I use them as a vehicle to understand adaptation. So when I am putting the athletes out in an environment and exposing them to a new environment, there's a hot environment. The way I use this instrument is to understand how quickly or the kinetics behind the adaptation. What is changing into the core temperature? How quickly do they adapt? How much time do they need to adapt? Because when I do this first time, of course, I have a benchmark. The second time I can try to maybe do things differently because I wanted to happen faster, for example. And then I see no now that adaptation goes slower. But again, instead of making the 16 weeks plan and then just sticking to that plan into the race, all these tools allow me to understand the adaptation as it happens and then be smarter about how I make the program, the adjustments and these kind of things to make the athletes faster, adapt faster, understand how the mechanism are in the body. So again, this is where the academics, he would maybe target it from of course, not all. I'm so I'm being a little bit stereotypic when I say this way. But that's why there's great coaches. You can find so many great coaches. They have no physiological background at all. But they have just had to understand this from a practical way. And that is what you're trying to do in the end. You're trying to be practical because you're just trying to become faster or cope with the demand that is there. But you know that this is what we need. But if you approach it from a physiological approach, instead of an academic approach, it's very easy to obsess over like single metrics that the body easily compensates for in many other domains. So again, temperature, plasma volume, all these kind of things, they are just small pieces of a big puzzle. And the easiest way to understand the puzzle is work on it from a requirement perspective, demand perspective. This is the pace, this is the power. We know that in the corner on a day like this, have been won by this marathon speed. This power, this swim speed is more or less. So we know that, okay, if of course, if you're an age grouper and you normally spend 14 hours, you can't just expect that you if you put you start to ride with the power or speed, that's the the the prosa or lisa that you're going to do that. Of course, then there's a much longer time for adaptation that requires maybe years even for you to bring it up there. But for a pro or an elite where basically they are training approximately the same volume or doing a more approximate the same kind of work each week and all these kind of thing, then it's more about saying, okay, this is the speed we know that we have to be able to do after the bikes. Obviously, we need to be able to run after the bike, not isolated. We need to bring it together. And that's the same thing with everything with heat, with altitude, everything like this. It's it's it's adaptation is something we try to understand to be smarter about it. But you can't train from it by because again, we measure plus volume, for example, or you've the core temperature, but there are so many other things also happening in the body at the same time regulating that are making up or trying to make your body faster. That understanding plus volume, changing plus volume, understanding, changing core temperature as a function of the same power duration or velocity duration, that that that is more a vehicle to understand how quickly something is happening. And if you need to make adjustments in these kind of things. And that's I think that the question you asked, it's it's so important to understand that we very often talk about physiological components, but they only make up for very small parts in the body. And there's so much more things in the body from a physiological and psychological aspect or perspective that we can't measure that you should never use them to control something. You should reduce them to understand rather what is happening because in the end, it really doesn't matter whether whether your whether your core temperature is 40 or 38 if the guy that has 40 wins and the 38 doesn't or the or that if you have plasma volume or the opposite that the guy that has 40 loses and the guy that has 38 that that wins because you will find both cases. And the same thing comes with plasma volume. It doesn't matter whether you have a high plasma volume or low plasma volume if you want the competition in the end. Then every answer is correct. You could say that well for this actually we need we see that here's a little bit higher plasma volume for this at least a little below of that plasma volume. But this is also that comes back to what I call individualization or individual performance signature. And that is that what is the right number for one is not necessarily the right number for another one because we are not doing statistics. We are trying to prepare each single athlete in the same way that if you look at Christian and Gustav, they have two very different seeks if you look at the bodies. But still who's going to win on a race day comes down to race day and who has the day rather than that I could say that well Christian even two, three years ago people would say that Christian no no no he he has the body of us he has the legs of a speed skater not not endurance athlete well he nobody have one more trotlon or more gold medals or championships now then then then then Christian with Olympic records and all this kind of and then you have Gustav on all the side that have won the 70 point trees the last years and also now to Kona despite Christian having won all the gold medals. So so basically if you look at them they are very different but at the same time at the same time you also see that That's why that needs to be a part of individualization into it. And that is what when you bring in that individualization, that's why you can see two people. Yes, you can call them unique in one sense, but they're also unique in their separate ways. Looking very differently to. But that means also that if I apply the same training to Gustav or or or that I don't know, that it was for Christian or vice versa, or I would say that this is we know that this is the core temperature we would like to target because it was for Christian that won't work for Gustav. The same with Plasma will even all these kind of things. We can say that yes, are some statistical things that we see higher is better for for for when it comes to volume and performance. Probably there is a good thing with Plasma, but more plasma is good, but we also have to remember that higher plasma volume also has a higher energetic cost for the body because the body also now needs to use more energy to heat up this extra plasma this extra fluid in your body. And the body really doesn't like that in the same way that it's very costly for the body to have a huge heart because the heart is grossly inefficient. The body doesn't want to have a big heart unless it really wants to and you can even argue that in in a race like an arm and it's not very beneficial to have a very high view to max because that will require a big heart and a big heart is gross inefficient that that means that if you have a cap to how much calories you can turn over per time. That means that more energy of that that cap of calories that you can turn over more time has to go to feed a very inefficient hard big heart so actually it's better to maybe bring down the size of the heart a little bit and bring down so basically bring it down your view to max. Because that would allow you to race faster but what that view to max is going to be in the end is individual so it's it's a complicated answer to a very good question. That's a very extremely important question but that's why I would say that the main the main takeaway from this from me would to give to everybody would be that don't focus too much on physiology focus on the demand and then rather learn what is happening with physiology and when you find an athlete is performing well and this try to understand the physiology of that athlete as accurately as possible. And then you're trying to replicate that and you're trying but again also at the same time trying to raise the quality and maybe even improve it a little bit so again it is individual but again understand demand is is where the focus have to be. That means understanding what speed power and time do you have to hit to to be in the position that you want to be if it's a winning something a record whatever and then all the physiological tools on metrics and everything we have is a weight understand adaptation understand adaptation into the last race demand to altitude to heat whatever it is that you are trying to adapt to so so but you can only go wrong I think by by overly focusing on physiology because that's what I'm trying to do. And then you can't go wrong on physiology because there's so many things we can't measure but again you can't go wrong if you have a sound approach to how you're going to bring an athlete in a gentle way and adapting him to run a 42 K run after he's been biking 180 K after he's been swimming three point K in a certain temperature and so on. I'm going to write down questions before I do any interview or I just I watched the sport a triathlon I follow it as closely as I possibly can and so I feel like I get into a pretty good position to be able to have a conversation because I've already thought about a hundred times over the last year like what questions would I ask all of Alexander Boo if I got to chat to him so it comes pretty naturally but as you talk I'll sort of like you know as pod being a podcast host he's like someone will be talking to you when you you'll start to think about oh what's the next question I could ask you can't just get too caught up. Just get too caught listening to what they're saying you have to be thinking of the next questions and I had in my head three questions to ask based off what you said and then you started to cover I'm not even joking all three of them like you brought them up even though you hadn't even really started to talk about any three of them was pretty crazy how it happened so I'm just going to tick off those three questions if I can remember and don't don't don't forget them but the first one was you talked about diet and and body weight and all you talked about body weight and as a result. I guess and I think one of the craziest things about triathlete in the last couple of years has been the fascination with Christian Bloomingfeld's body and I know I talked to Mikael about this and and he sort of just said like he the same things what you say he said a bit more dryly that it doesn't matter he's got a big a big chest and he's fast type of thing. What do you guys think inside the training camp like do you guys talk about the fact that and I hate to talk about this in I don't want it to come across negative because I'm such a proponent for like having positive messaging around the way we eat and the way we look I think I think eating disorders inside of long course triathlon and and running and cycling I think it's really sad I it's something I really dislike about the sport I think it's it ruins me. It's it ruins more lives than it then it helps so I don't want you to think that that I'm someone who who thinks it's funny and that kind of thing but you know you'll hear a lot of people talk about the fact that Christian is fat like they will openly call him fat and they'll they'll say how does this guy who's chubby when races like this and it makes me a little bit angry when I hear it so I must like I must assume that you guys don't love hearing it but maybe I am just assuming there and you don't know what I'm saying. I'm just assuming there and you don't care at all what what does get talked about between yourself and Christian and and inside the camp when when there's so much comment on on his body shape. It's such a good question that I really want to answer this because this is a happy message and that is that first of all again because we do or put I actually got a first put it this way. But if you gave me an athlete that I can easily gain weight from the food is it and because there is one thing we haven't talked about yet and that is actually because very often we say that your calories in has to be this in balance with your calories out just to maintain your weight actually is not that simple is actually calorie uptake that has to be the same as your calorie outtake to be in balance and by that you order to stand there is one other efficiency parameter there and this is where of course the famous words. Christian have said that I'm doing studies on his his his and now we're going to do a quite extensive one on on his and Christians know he Christians and Gustavs and some maybe some of the other athletes also the Olympic program. And this is because it's actually about uptake how well do you take up the different nutrients from the food that you are eating and there this is such an interesting feel we have to come back to later. But it's super interesting but and we have all the cool tools to really measure this as well with bomb calendars we are burning the fees this is everything but. To the happy message here is that if you gave me two athletes and the only information I knew about them was basically how much food are eating and how easy they were adding weight I would pick the athlete. That had the best appetite and added the easiest way to his body and maybe most most important the easiest way to his body so if he almost like you have this saying that if you almost look some people cannot almost only look at the food and then they start to add fat on the body give me that athlete any day over the athlete that is really struggling to add. And then we are struggling to add weight to his body. The simple analogy behind that is that remember no speed without no speed without power and our power without calories and if we are the same time look at statistics again if we're going to look at statistics and we plot performance on the x axis and. And then we are going to look at the amount of work or volume on the y axis that basically we see that is probably one of the single best predictor of performance is the amount of volume you are training. At least you can look at it like somebody that almost training nothing if they they they also race accordingly age groupers train more the race faster the professionals that train even more and the race the fastest. Now we can imagine that okay no speed without power and power without calories so that means that well if you're going to train more you have to be able to eat more that's that simple but a problem again is that at some point you're going to get fed up by all the food you're going to eat so that's going to be a limitation to you so now if you have the very good evolutionary trait. But you actually can add very easily way to your body by just looking at food yes is going to create it's going to maybe require a little bit more discipline of you because you have to be a little bit more discipline and you can't eat whatever you want all the time. Maybe have to if you want to maintain a certain way for example so you have to be a little bit more discipline but I'd rather keep want you to be disciplined in that field and having that possibility and then eat much much more so when you really need to it so you add more weight or whatever. Because that's again going to be the limitation to your y axis more volume so that you can race faster on x axis. So Christian one of the things that we did in order we have very conservative we are very conservative approach when it comes to your fat percentage for for elite athletes and these kind of things if you look at an act typically coming from Spain Italy, France, and so on you will normally and they would even have like be very strict on your diet and tell you know you need to lose weight and you can't think we never do this in Norway or I will at least not in the Olympic Federation's as on and one thing that's quite interesting is of course that we would maybe say okay race ideal way for you would maybe be a little bit lighter or a little bit less weight but one of the things that I I did research with Christian and Gustav and Casper, leading into Tokyo, Olympics, was that we saw that every time, even by conservative standards, Christian, for example, reduced his weight. Beyond where people in Spain, France, Italy, he would still be considered fat. His absolute view to max went down even faster. Of course, at some point, it's not like you can just all get, but then just eat and add a lot of weight on the body, because fat is also non-active. It's not, it's no muscles or anything. But again, the body is extremely small, so it's also a depth. But where have we talked about what's perchilogram, for example? The problem when you do things by what's perchilogram and you do a 20-minute test or something like this, very short duration tests, is that your body will compensate maybe by feeding much more glycogen instead. So it looks like you're losing weight. Yes, or you are losing weight. And it looks like getting faster or getting more powerful than because your weight stays the same, but your weight goes down. But in reality, you're just compensating with maybe adapting to be using more glycogen in a short amount of time, by percentage. At some point, it will become a problem, but you can't compensate. Again, the body is an extremely adaptive or organism. So one of the things we saw Christian Gustav was that, of course, that as the weight came down, also the view to max came down. And this is not very sustainable, of course. This is not what we want to have in racing. We want to have the highest VO2 perchilogram. Because in the end, it starts with calories. It doesn't start with power. Start with calories. And obviously, the higher VO2 perchilogram you can have, and that means maybe you have to add increase your weight, even. Again, you don't know the answer before you have done this kind of testing, of course, a test of Christian, Gustav, yes, many years over Christian leading into real even, but now over a completely Olympic cycle, leading into Tokyo. And then we do see that they do race faster with more fats on the body. So again, I would rather pick an athlete with too much fat on their body and learn them discipline when it comes to eating, if required, than an athlete that is too skinny. So being skinny is probably going to make you slower than faster. Being a little bit fatter is probably going to make you faster than slower. So again, all starts with calories and people that have good abilities to add weight to the body. They are probably best evolutionistic, also prepared to be-- to really ramp up the volume, go faster in the end. And then the other thing you were sort of talking about there, all I was-- the boy is VO2 max. And the impact that losing weight can have on the VO2 max of the athletes. And really what I want to know about is just how the VO2 max of, say, Gustav and Christian impacts their performance in general. Obviously, because with Christian particularly, there's a lot of videos on YouTube and on his Instagram of him doing VO2 max tests and getting really high results, like I think like 91, 92, VO2 max kind of scores, which is seriously, seriously high. Like as high as you're ever going to see. But can you sort of-- yeah, can you talk to me about the role of VO2 max in, say, Iron Man and Iron Man 70.3 racing and Olympic distance racing and how important it is and what it actually is. And like just having it in insanely high VO2 max, like Christian's matter and compare that to, like, say Gustav's-- Gustav Edens VO2 max. So again, what's interesting is, again, the sample that I am representing is, of course, a small sample because it is mainly Olympic, Olympic, partly. So it's a small group. And of course, I cannot speak for it in a big or a broader sense. But what's quite interesting to see across these athletes that we have and that I also have discussed internally with one of my colleagues. And that is that there seems to be a swoonie spot. And of course, this might not be static. There are many things that potentially will affect this. And we have been speculating a little bit around what. But-- and that is that there, again, there seems to be a sweet spot when it comes to weight. Of course, too big wave will probably not be ideal. And but also the same way that a too low weight is not ideal at all. And that too low weight seems to be far more conservative than what we even have considered by what I would say is conservative standards in Norway when it comes to what kind of fat percent or that would be ideal for them for an elite athlete. And this seems to be uniform across those athletes. We have both Christian, Gustav, Kasper, Betle. The interesting thing, of course, both Christian and Gustav have Kasper. I've clocked in above 90 milliliters per minute per kilogram. I think if I recollect correctly, I had them in the lab to 93 point something. Again, it requires individualization, some individualization to get there. But that's not where they're racing the fastest in an Olympic racing. And I think the simple analogy here would be that VO2 max is something you can do for a very short duration. So it would be like your five minute-- we know that a five minute four, five minute power is how's a very representative for your VO2 max? So if you know the biochemical efficiency or oxygen consumption for an athlete per milliliter per what produced, then you can almost take your somewhere between three and five minute power normally for an athlete and multiply that by a milliliter per minute, not a milliliter per what's consumption. And you get their absolute VO2 max and then just divide by way. That's simple. But what's interesting to see is that an Olympic distance racing, you're not going to do-- you really don't need to have a high five minute power, even a high three minute power, even further away, I would say. More important is your ability to-- yes, you have to cope with some surges and other things which we know is important for the breakaways, but also how the nature of Olympic distance racing is. But again, if that starts to compromise the ability to have a high average power or high average speed over two hours or one hour, 45 minutes, then that's not being productive at all. And I think that's one of the issues to be too many. At least they have a two-port fraction utilization of oxygen. So meaning that the point where they start to accumulate, for example, lactate, happens at a too low percentage of VO2 max. But maybe more interestingly, what we've found during this year with a long distance-- long distance triathlon or armament project was that I, of course, I had been measuring Christian and Gustav in the lab before the Olympics. And of course, I got them back into the lab fairly short after I measured it. And then I measured again after we were done with Cosmell or actually Clash de Toner, which came one. I think it was one or two weeks after Cosmell. And then we went straight back into the lab again. And the rest of the we found was quite shocking when it came to VO2 max. Of course, on the one side, you can say, well, that's just how it's going to be, because the amount of time you can prioritize on higher intensity is less. So because of that, VO2 max will naturally go down because you don't have the same stimulus at high power or high speed. So again, saying that you're a five-minute power or three for five-minute power and also this equivalent in terms of swimming, maybe even a little bit shorter because some more muscles involved. But let's say what you can do-- you'll probably reach VO2 max quicker in swimming. And with that, you already might reach it after 100 meters, or so let's say, one to two minutes of swimming. In running, you also reach it slightly faster than what you do in cycling again just because of the way, because of the modality. But that kind of ability to run fast on 1,000 meters, feet on meters, it is important, of course, like, for example, with so Christian powering away from Alex Yee in Tokyo with good margin. But we have to remember that he still had been swimming 1500 meters before. That he has been biking 40 kilometers and he's been running for 8.5 kilometers before he does that. So if all the training had been geared towards just being able to run the fastest possible over 1,000 meters or 1,500 meters, that would probably not even have been putting him in a position where he would have been able to do that. He needs to have a little bit higher, but still-- or a little bit higher than maybe his peers. But it is more that that raised demand, that dictates how you've got to balance your training, and then the rest becomes a function of that. So your height is. view to max. Yes, if you are 1500 meter runner, if you are a short distance swimmer, if you are kayaker, a K1 like 1000 meter kayaking is what you're doing. So you're racing for three and a half minutes. Then an extremely high view to max or high view to max is maybe one of the best determinators of good performance. But and also rowers. And this is why you often find extremely high absolute view to max. So row view to max in rowers, kayakers and so on. But of course, since they are doing a non weight bearing sports, they also have more muscles, they have more weight and all these kind of things to do. So for a triad lead, we have to remember again, if we say that there's if you got a higher five minute power, then typically we also see a high view to max. There is a very strong correlation between the two. And we can also say that while in a sport where a five minute power is not important, then a high view to max will not be even important. So again, there in Rm and you're even further away from needing to have a high five minute power. So again, a high view to max will not be equally important. And probably also one of the things that is quite interesting about it is that we know that the heart is grossly inefficient. In in average population, I think that some of the reasons I've been done there are showing that the mechanical efficiency of the heart is approximately 10%. And again, coming back to where I said there are two fundamental laws that I very often come back to and one is the first law of thermodynamics and the other one is the stationary action principle, or the law of least action, basically whether nature always tries to figure out how can I do this specific task, but spending the least possible energy or the way of least resistance. Then we can imagine that having a big heart, if you don't need it, is not very efficient because then the body needs to turn over more calories per time than what it really needs to do. And also more calories more time, means more heat, which is some heat you need, but a lot of heat excess is again when we talked about heat training is not ideal either. So because if the body we see the biochemical efficiency of of triadleads or elite triadleads, elite cyclists sits around 20% 20, 21%. That means in fact that then for the power that you are producing, mechanical power you're producing to propel yourself forward, your bike forward, 80, 79 to 80% of the total amount of calories that you are turning around or per time, only 20, 21% of that goes to move you forward and 79 to 80% of that goes into heat production. And if you need now to produce more heats because you have a big heart which also produces heat and it's bigger than it's necessarily, then that is not very efficient especially when we know that the cross-efficiency in average population is 10% for leads is probably more efficient, but again still it is something that you really don't need because you don't need a high-vehautomized dose, you don't need a big heart, you just you basically need a big enough heart. That's what you really need to basically find that peak performance. So, VU2 max in Armin it's not, it is still is important because it is again the maximum to put it another way. There is only theoretically you could say that you want the highest possible VU2 max, you want the highest possible fraction utilization of oxygen, you want the highest possible, so meaning the highest possible maximum lactose steady state, you want the highest possible fat max and of course we can always come back and discuss fat max, but you want or to put it in more in physics terms, you want the highest possible average speed for 7.5 hours, swimming, biking and running combined. That means also that if you want the highest possible 7.5 hour speed, then we know that your 7.5 hour speed that's never going to be higher than your one hour speed, and your one hour speed will never going to be higher than your higher than your five minute power of speed. So it means of course that there needs to be a balance between these kind of things and so that basically your 7.5 hour speed doesn't be are not being compromised by that you're having a too low or a limiting one hour speed or five hour speed, whatever speed, but there needs to be of course a healthy relationship between the short duration and the longer duration, but this is where again when you come to then balancing your training or your distribution of training needs then to be balanced so that you optimize of course for the 7.5 hour speed or power, but only to the extent where that the short duration or medium to short duration power is a speed that you have doesn't become a limiter for them. You don't need a big margin because that's not it that's then not efficient like for example having a big hardness, but again it cannot be too low either because that's going to be a limit. So again, it comes down to how you distribute your training, how much time you go to the training and then how you distribute your training to balance this as perfectly as possible. If you love this episode or the podcast in general, well it's only here because of the support I get from some of the legends who listen to the show and have chosen to support it on Patreon. So I'ming up for my Patreon cost either $2 or $5 per week and that money goes towards putting the time it takes into getting guests, recording episodes and producing episodes. I put on average about 15 to 20 hours of work per week into the podcast and so if you enjoy the show, want to be a part of the reason it can continue happening and in a position to help the podcast become even better and bigger, then by signing up to Patreon you are literally doing that. Once you sign up to Patreon, you get access to a weekly extra podcast I do called the training diaries, which is 90 minutes of triathlon training talk and heaps of laughs. It's sort of both a serious and lighthearted look at triathlon training in general. Your support also helps me get more big name guests on that you actually want to hear from and release additional weekly episodes in service the one every week because I can justify putting the time away from work and family and back into the podcast. So if you'd like to sign up and put your arm around me and the show, the link to click on to do so is in the description of this episode and if you're one of the people who already does support me on Patreon then seriously thank you so much. You're the reason everybody is listening today and if you aren't yet but you decide to then seriously thank you. So with Christian Blumenfeld you know measuring a VO2 max of 93 at his highest which like I've already said is crazy highest. High as I've sort of heard of going into Kona or the IMM World Championships or the IMM 70.3 World Championships or Cosmol do you guys try and get his VO2 max to become a little bit lower and if so what would his VO2 max have been when he stood on the start line for Kona this year compared to at his highest at 93. So that's again an excellent phrase for question because that allows me to bring back the take take away message then and that is that that if you focus on reducing the VO2 max then you then then we are starting to obsess over physiology or physiological metrics and again VO2 max is just one one component in a big big system where the body is compensating in many different ways. For example you can have two athletes with the same VO2 max the same fractionalization you can basically say that they seemingly they have the same metabolic profile but still the power of good speed of one of the athletes is greater because he has a better biomechanical efficiency or better biochemical efficiency and the body will always try to adapt to its demand. For example wanting that people very often focus on a Christian that he has very big lungs but now if he has big lungs if this is something we focus oh that's a fantastic thing that he has that's probably why it's good then we are focusing on a very isolated isolated parameter where again we see that Christian and Gustav are having the same VO2 max so how can it be that Christian have this higher V it doesn't have a high VO2 max we have these big lungs because when you talk about lungs we talk about respiration gas exchange oxygen uptake or getting in more air but again we see that he doesn't have a higher VO2 max of course whether if we peak them only for this potentially we could get them but if you look at it from a demand perspective we basically see that they come in around the same same VO2 max and that is of course because Gustav maybe he compensates a little bit with a higher breeding frequency so it gets in a little bit more oxygen but in reality that's not actually the case either the case is that Gustav because the body have needed to adapt to the demand that we have in training he is actually having a higher his compensating with a higher fractional utilization of fraction yeah well the extraction of oxygen the extraction of oxygen for the lesser volume that he gets into his lungs are higher than it is for Christian so again if the goal was to reduce the VO2 max we obsessing over a single metric which really is too far away from all the demands that goes into being on being out your best whether you are or 20, 10 hours or 30 hours. And that means that we don't focus, or that means, or the takeaway here is that we don't focus on reducing the view to max. The reduction view to max becomes a result rather of the change in distribution and specificity of an arm and compare to the shorter distance racing like Olympic distance. And even Olympic distance, we see that having 93 million per minute per kilogram in oxygen update is actually not ideal. It's actually a little bit lower even there, because again, it's not a five minute power, three minute power, or speed that you're doing. You're doing in average one hour, 45 minutes of racing with some surges, some surges and other things in there. But to be able to stay without demand and bridge home the best time to win that race, if you now only, or you try to distribute your training closer and more and more towards bringing up your view to max even higher, that would mean less specificity. And most likely, yes, you would probably be the guy that could go in a one break away early on in the race and you made up a gap. But the problem is the average speed of the rest of the pack there is higher than what you are capable of sustaining. And because of that, they're gonna eventually catch up with you and then they win. So again, it's about climbing this healthy balance. And then again, using view to max, view to max is actually not a very interesting. It's one parameter and I'm sure that, but not for the reason of view to max itself, but more to have a bigger picture of the balance between the energy systems, efficiencies and all these kind of things. So view to max again is only also, when actually you see a lot of the testing that I do with Christian and Gustav, but I wear in the mask, so the view to master or we're in the lab with the metabolic cards, view to max, I can even sometimes, if I know that we have something more important come up in the next day, I can even say, just skip the view to max because the profile was more important or other metrics there. So view to max again, it's just one single parameter. And of course now things, probably a lot of people will start scratching their head and thinking, "Oh, this goes against everything we have learned before." And so, and it sounds like very complicated. No, it's not, you really don't need to know that the eutomized more important is that everything you can do that just by, if you have a power meter or even, you could do it only with a GPS, with a GPS itself and you would just look at the relationship between the shoulder, medium and long duration, you're trying again to find that balance that allows you to execute the best strategy in a race to set you up for a win more or less. You could do that potentially only with a GPS, but of course, the more instruments you bring on board, the more you are able to understand how things comes together and then start to maybe individualize on one deeper level and extract even a little bit more photos at it. But in reality, you actually just need a speed time curve and you would already be able to say a lot about an athlete and where you would need to prioritize the training just from that itself. - Like I said at the start of this episode, this chat with Olaf is brought to you by Pilla Performance. I always say this, but Pilla didn't reach out to me. I actually reached out to them. I'd never tried a supplement. I felt really did anything until I tried Pilla Performance's Triple Magnesium Powder. I honestly bought it just to try some because I'd seen it on social media and I literally noticed a significant improvement in my sleep. And we all know as people training for any endurance sport, particularly triathlon and running and cycling and swimming, while trying to balance our day-to-day lives if our sleep sucks, we suck, and my sleep really sucked. So seeing an improvement in that has just been awesome for my life. So if you wanna see for yourself or try for yourself, then click the link in the description of the show or just head over to Pilla Performance's online shop and try some for yourself. They also have heaps of other micronutrient products that help you in lots of ways, specific to where you might be needing a bit extra in your training and life. And while you're there at checkout, use the code HTT10 when you do go there and it'll get you $10 off your order. And you can use that code multiple times too, so literally just go nuts with it, get you $10 off your order and it helps support the show, which Pilla graciously agreed to jump on and support when I did reach out to them. So yeah, helps me, helps you, helps everyone. (upbeat music) [Music]