The TriDoc Jeff Sankoff joins us to talk about how to still apply the principles of supercompensation and progressive overload in a sport as complex as triathlon.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:04
Hello and welcome to fast doc, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor, here with Chris case and coach grant to hollikey. We talked a lot lately on this show about the key principles of exercise physiology, like super compensation and progressive overload. To summarize, you have to put a stress in your body that’s enough to cause the body to essentially overreact and produce an adaptation too little stress, and nothing happens, but too much stress, and you risk over training or injury. For cyclists and runners, it can be a tricky balance. But for a triathlete, where there’s three disciplines, and each discipline applies stress differently to the body, it can get extraordinarily complex. A triathlete can spend five hours every day in the pool and be fine, but run two hours every day, and most will end up in the physiotherapist office to help us address the challenge of figuring out how to get the super compensation right for triathletes, we invited the tri doc himself, Dr Jeff sankoff, to talk with us about how he manages this with the athletes he coaches. We’ll start with a discussion of the principles and how they can be applied to triathlon. Then we’ll talk about the challenges of measuring load on triathletes. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple CTL score the way there is for other endurance athletes, and RPE is not the same across all disciplines. We’ll discuss how to know when training is productive and how to know when the plan isn’t working. Finally, we’ll talk about the obsession we often see with gear and why. Dr sankoff says we should hunt the antelope and not the mouse. Joining Dr sankoff, we’ll hear from Brad Colt, former editor in chief of triathlon magazine, Dr Michael Rosenblatt, owner of evidence based coaching Ironman champion and cycling legend John Howard, and of course, Dr Steven Seiler, who will all share their thoughts on how to effectively balance the principles of training with the three disciplines of triathlon. So put on your swimsuit, your cycling shorts and your running shoes, and let’s make you fast. Well, Jeff, pleasure to have you on the show again, and thank you for inviting me on your show a few weeks ago. That was a lot of fun.
Jeff Sankoff 01:58
Absolutely, it was great to have you, and it is a pleasure to be back.
Trevor Connor 02:01
So we’re taking on an interesting subject here today, where I created an outline. My guess is we’re going to end up somewhere a little bit different. But let me kind of give a preamble to this. I read a very interesting study. There was a big conference back in 2017 where they got researchers, coaches, athletes in the triathlon space altogether for this big symposium, and basically ask them, what do we need to be doing in the triathlon world moving forward? And something that they heard at the symposium is the fact that triathletes often, because of the complexity of the sport where you have these three disciplines, it’s very hard for triathletes to track what they’re doing. It’s very hard to track load, to track recovery, and there is a much higher risk in triathlon than a lot of other endurance sports for both over training and for burnout and injury. So the question that we wanted to ask in this episode is kind of taking what they talked about in that symposium. And say, you know, there are principles of training that we use, such as progressive overload, super compensation, that really kind of direct the overalls of training. But get more complicated when you are dealing with multiple different disciplines. And one thing they said at this symposium is, how do you deal with the fact that you get different training, adaptive signals from different sports. Do they interfere with one another? Do they help one another, that sort of thing. How do we take these principles and apply them to triathlon and still keep it simple when you’re dealing with a fundamentally complex sport? And sorry, that was a long preamble. I want to hear Jeff’s take on that preamble. It covers a lot of ground, but I think the triathlon, the thing about triathlon is it’s kind of a plus minus. Like the plus is you’ve got these three complimentary sports that together can really help in injury prevention. I always tell my athletes, look, if you get hurt running, running is by far the one that’s going to be the most injury prone. The nice thing about triathlon is is that unless you’re dealing with a broken bone, you’ve always got the ability to just transition to a bike or a swim focus or a bike swim focus to get you through that running injury, you don’t have to stop your training altogether. That’s the plus side. The negative side is that we know, for example, running is the thing that tends to get people injured, and one of the best ways to avoid getting injured and running is to very gradually ramp up your volume, but to do so with a higher, higher frequency, and that’s hard to do. Most triathletes that I work with have a limited number of hours, and when you are trying to dedicate as many hours as you are to biking and swimming, you only have so much left over for running. And so it ends up that most triathletes can only run three maybe four times a week, at least for the average age grouper. So getting the necessary frequency in in order to distribute the.
Jeff Sankoff 05:00
Volume so that they don’t get injured becomes a little more difficult. So that’s, I think, where that sort of the negative side of triathlon training comes in, in terms of contributing to injuries. But personally, I have found, as an older athlete who’s been doing this now for 20 years, that having that flexibility, having the ability to be training in three different sports that one of which has really no load whatsoever, that being swimming is really made me much more resilient and much more resistant to getting hurt. Now the over training thing is a whole other story. According to Brad Culp one of the ways to balance the volume of three disciplines is to not try everything at once. Let’s hear his thoughts.
Grant Holicky 05:46
I think that it’s important for triathletes to have blocks where they might be focusing on specific things, because a lot of people will start the sport and be like, I want to improve on swimming, biking and running all at once, all at the same time. If you’re completely new, that’s that’s obviously possible because your baselines are so low, but it’s really, really hard to get a lot better as a swimmer, cyclist and runner. Even two of those at once is extremely difficult. So yeah, I think that it’s very important to understand where your weakness is and where your strength is. And if you have a strength in sport like triathlon, to not be afraid to really dial that back a bit in terms of your training volume, because that will be there. If someone like me, coming from a swim background, my best Iron Man racing came on, I would literally take the swim down to once a week. I could almost remove it, because I was so bad at running that I needed so much focus there to get in the amount of sessions and the time I needed to really develop as a runner. So yeah, I think if you have a weakness, don’t be afraid to approach that almost as like a single sport athlete. You could even hire, if cycling is your weakness, hire a cycling coach to work with you and train the specifics of becoming a better cyclist while you’re still kind of maintaining your baseline of swimming and running. So yeah, I think that don’t go into the approach of, I want to improve everything at once. You know, really come up with the approach of, how do I improve what I am weak at, while still maintaining my strengths? And don’t be afraid to kind of not make it a one sport focus, but approach your training that way and get better at what you’re bad at.
Trevor Connor 07:16
So let’s go there. And I’m going to start with just very quickly, a couple of the key principles of training, all training, not just endurance sports. One is this idea of super compensation, where you need to put sufficient stress on the body that the body is not only going to repair from whatever damage it was done, it’s actually going to, as the term implies, supercompensate, and basically bring your body back to a higher level, not just back to where it was before. So that’s a concept of super compensation. And we’ve recently done some episodes on this, if anybody wants to take a deeper dive. And then there’s the idea of progressive overload, which is, as the body super compensates, it can handle more and more load, which means you need to throw more and more load at it to once again be able to get a super compensation. How do you deal with that in triathlon? Is it you have to have an overload in all three disciplines, or do the loads work together, where it’s just one overall load? How do you manage that and also make sure you’re not putting too much of a load on the athlete. So I do it, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think most triathlon coaches work the same way, through periodizing Our schedules, and by doing it with pretty short turnovers. So I use a three week periodization where I really ramp up the load over three weeks, and then I take a week of recovery. And those recovery weeks are not off weeks, but they’re just recovery weeks of low volume, low intensity, and then over the next three weeks, I ramp up the intensity gradually in all three disciplines. The one discipline that tends to stay steady throughout the whole cycle is swimming, because it’s pretty hard to really overdo it with swimming, as you know from most like collegiate swimmers, who are swimming a ridiculous amount of time, you could swim a lot before you really become over trained. And most triathlon swimmers are only swimming three times a week, so swimming three times a week for three to 4000 meters at a time is not going to lead to that kind of over training. So what I’ll do with my athletes is ramp them up on the bike and the run over a three week period, and then in that fourth week, bring them back down as that giving them that time to have that super compensation. And then within each week, I also build in some recovery time. I am a firm believer that days off are not necessary, as long as you do easy days. So I as opposed especially as you get older, I think someone like me, when I take a day off, I feel like I actually get stiff, I get sore. I don’t love having a day off. And so I like an active recovery day, and I build those in for my athletes. So if I give an athlete a hard run day, the next day, especially for an older athlete.
Jeff Sankoff 10:00
Is going to be an easy spin, low wattage, short duration, maybe it’s going to be a swim. And then we can build them through the week like that. So it’s sort of a it’s almost like you have like this sinusoidal wave of over the month, and then within that sinusoidal wave you have another wave that’s superimposed on it that is going this little ramp cycle up and down within that. I hope that makes sense, Jeff,
Chris Case 10:24
I don’t mean to put you on the spot. You have such a young voice. I’m just curious. You keep saying you’re old. Could you specify how old you are for the listeners out there? Yeah, my
Jeff Sankoff 10:34
15 year olds, their friends think I’m in my 30s, which is hilarious. And they probably think that’s where I turn. Yeah, I turned. I turned 58 in two weeks. Okay,
Trevor Connor 10:45
well, happy early birthday.
Grant Holicky 10:47
Yeah, man, that voice, that voice doesn’t match up the face doesn’t match up with the age either. I’m impressed. Thanks.
Jeff Sankoff 10:53
I definitely feel younger than my chronological age, and I think that plays a lot, is great.
Grant Holicky 10:59
Well, I’ll jump in here. I think one of the things that Jeff’s saying that’s so important is how much focus he puts on rest. And one of the big battles when you’re coaching a triathlete, and that I had one way back when, when I was a triathlete, was, where do you fit in the rest when you feel like you’re so time limited for all these sports, right? And then, how do you do that rest? So if you know, for me, when I’m coaching somebody who’s struggling in swimming, I’ll take this when we were talking before we went on air, Jeff was talking about frequency on running, I’ll take the frequency approach for swimming. Okay, now, if we’re swimming four days a week, five days a week, but we’re doing short durations. Where’s the rest? I fit in, and so that same active recovery piece becomes really, really important, and it’s incumbent upon the athlete to make sure that they’re actively recovering, not just actively continuing to train. I
Jeff Sankoff 11:57
know from dealing with my athletes now over the years that one of the hardest things for age group athletes is to accept the need to recover and rest. It’s incredibly difficult because they first of all, we’re all very motivated to train. But then the other thing is, is we recognize the limits we have on our time, and so we feel like we need to make use of every single hour we have. And getting people to buy into this notion that rest and recovery are actually advantageous to their performance, takes a little while to get people to buy into that, but I generally, especially when I really ramp it up on them, most of my athletes will come to me when I give them their rest where not rest week, but their recovery week. Most of them come to me and say, Wow, that was really well timed, because I could really feel I needed it. So,
Grant Holicky 12:45
yeah, it makes you feel good as a coach when you nail that doesn’t it. That’s right.
Trevor Connor 12:50
So Jeff, I was going to say, you sound a little bit like the first triathlete I ever coached to I’m a big believer, and you take one day completely off every week. So I told him, We got to have your rest day. And he goes, Oh, so I swim on that day. Like, no, it’s a rest day. Oh, so you mean, run, no, and then you could just see this look on his face. Like, so easy spin on my bike. And I go, No. And he just looked horrified. He’s like, so I don’t do anything on that day. And I’m like, right?
Speaker 1 13:21
So Trevor, I’m interested. Do you still feel that way? Do you still feel that one rest day a week is really important for athletes? It is something
Trevor Connor 13:29
that really stuck with me, that I was told by a very experienced coach, a very good coach a long time ago, was if you have one day a week where you are rested, it is very hard to ever truly over train, and that’s a simplification, but I do take that to heart, that when somebody gets into the mindset of I need to train every single day, and I’ll just have some days that are less, some days or more, as you said, sometimes that day that’s a little less isn’t as much less as you think it is, and you can get yourself into that grind. I just think it’s really important to have that day where you just let the body shut down, let it adapt, let it recover, and that’s the mission. I think that’s
Jeff Sankoff 14:09
really fair. I’m very specific with those easy days, and I do monitor them, but I can totally I have some athlete to when I say, Go Easy, and then I look at that, I’m like, Yeah, you know, your heart rate doesn’t suggest you really went easy. So in some cases, I think the the force day off is probably the right call. And I think it’s athlete specific for sure. Yeah, I
Grant Holicky 14:31
would hop on that bandwagon about the individuality of the rest day. I mean, I certainly feel and lean towards the way Jeff does, but part of that is my personal preference too, right? If I take a day off completely, I feel very stiff, and it takes me a long time to get going the next day that easy 10 TSS spin over the course of 45 minutes or an hour, completely changes how that feels for me and for other people. It’s very, very different. And so a lot of it. To me, is about education. I mean, I’ve even stopped writing Recovery Week and make it adaptation week and really try to teach what adaptation means. Like, hey, we’re actively moving forward here, and this is why. Because, without that, yeah, I mean, we’re dealing with a motivated population. We’re dealing especially if we’re talking about masters triathletes, there’s almost a very, very distinct personality type that gets into this sport while having a full time job and a family and other responsibilities, and they’re highly motivated, and so almost having to shift that motivation towards Hey, listen, let’s be motivated to recover. Can work
Trevor Connor 15:36
rest is critical for triathletes, but let’s hear from Dr Seiler, who shares other ways to manage the demand of training for the sport. Well, the very first thing, and I say this anytime I’m given the opportunity, is the first thing I would do is change the micro cycle length from seven days to 14 for triathlon, because we often work in terms of weekly micro cycles, right? And the triathlete becomes just perplexed by this. Need to put in all these key workouts. They want to get a good swimming session, they want to get a quality cycling session, they want to get a quality running session. They need a long run and, well, you can’t do all of that in seven days, so they’re constantly struggling. And what you do is you stretch that micro cycle that that repeating unit of organization from seven to 14 days, then it still matches up with a facilities availability and all that stuff, with the culture of weekends, but it gives you more room to get the intensity distribution right, to put some air in the program, so that you’re not constantly feeling like you’re pushing yourself a little bit too hard because you’re trying to do hard sessions in all three modalities. That’s the first thing I would do. Then we do see for sure that there is some crossover benefit between cycling and running. It does seem that the volume increase in general, seems to give you a bit of an effect for running. Maybe. If I’m going to choose one of those modalities for the generalizable high intensity session, it’s going to be running. I’m going to lean towards doing more of my hit work in running, and I’m going to do more of my threshold ish sessions for cycling. So there’s some gaming of that system that can be done as a function of how the races work and so forth. And also the generalizable effect, you know, running is just a really good stressor for eliciting a high oxygen consumption. So it’s a good way of, if we’re going to do some high intensity work, and we have to choose that I’m going to choose to do it with running as a triathlete. So here’s a question I have for you. And this was another thing that was raised at that symposium. And for anybody who’s interested, it was a really interesting research article on this called future proofing triathlon expert suggestions to improve health and performance in triathletes. And one of the things that they raised is the difficulty and triathlon of measuring both load and recovery. So for example, in something like cycling, well, it’s not perfect. And grant, I want you to jump all over this, because you’re going to love this paper. They go exactly where you love to go. But in something like cycling, you can measure power and we can calculate CTL, ATL, TSB, and at least get an okay sense of how much load are you putting on the body. And because it’s one sport, it’s easier to measure that. But when you’re dealing with three disciplines, there isn’t really one good metric. And they did mention in here that somebody has tried to create one, but it hasn’t been validated yet. To look at what is the load that a triathlete is putting themselves under every week and every day. So it was interesting, what your thoughts were?
Jeff Sankoff 18:48
Yeah, I don’t have a great answer for it. I think I rely, personally on a lot of feedback from athletes I definitely follow. I set a baseline of obviously, FTP for bike and a threshold pace for run. I do have them do a TT swim, so that I have some notion of what their kind of threshold pace is in the water as well, so I can at least get some kind of metric that shows me what they’re doing in terms of effort and exertion on each workout, and that does give me some idea of load, but I have to just kind of be watching and and there is no great way. I mean, I monitor decoupling of heart rate power on the bike. I monitor for any evidence that they’re having real fluctuation in cardiac drift on their runs, that they wouldn’t, that they weren’t showing previously, or any drop offs in cadence on their run, I look for anything that they’re telling me, like, Oh, I’m not sleeping as well. So I’m looking for all of the traditional signs. But unfortunately, there’s no great metric to really look at, overall load and as a. Result of that, I think that that’s why it’s so important to have these kinds of relationships and and why I make communication such a huge part of my coaching practice, because I’m constantly seeking that kind of feedback for my athletes, and I want to know exactly all of those things. And I would be remiss if I didn’t add with my female athletes of monitoring menstrual cycle and weight, because those are the two really important factors to keep an eye on for especially for younger women.
Grant Holicky 20:33
Yeah, I think to jump on that. Where you’re going with this Jeff is kind of where I tend to go. It is hard to measure load and triathlon, right? And you’re going to end up with somebody holding a CTL That’s huge. That’s way up there. I mean, when, when we’re working with professional triathletes, you’re watching people hold CTLs in the 120s and 130s and they’re just hanging out up there. But what gets hard is that’s time based, and there’s some of that’s volume based, and time based, particularly on training peaks, because there is a bent towards volume on training peaks. So if you get an amateur athlete that maybe only has 10 hours a week, 12 hours a week, they’re not going to see that same load. But that doesn’t mean they’re not cracking and they’re not in trouble. So I really spend a lot of time on the comments of what’s coming back from that athlete after a workout. You know, I felt awful, are I felt sometimes it’s I felt great three or four times in a row, and the eyebrow goes up and goes, Okay, when’s the shoe going to drop? Because that sometimes is that indication that we’re rolling right on that edge. But that communication back and forth is just so vital, and data only goes so far, especially if we’re talking about the Master’s athlete, because we can’t take into consideration what everything else in their life is happening, and we can’t measure that. So when you do have somebody has a full time job and has a family and is training for their you know, to go PR and their Iron Man, you have a lot that you’re trying to juggle and balance, and you can’t rely on the data for that, so you have to rely, just like Jeff said, on the relationship. Yeah.
Jeff Sankoff 22:06
And I was going to add to that, what you were saying, Grant, is all of those other things that we’re not measuring, like we fall into this trap of looking at training peaks and and isolating the athlete to, oh, that’s all they are, right? They’re just swim, bike, run, but the amount of stress that comes from everything else going on in their life. They have a sick kid, they have a big project at work, they have a vacation coming up. I mean, all of those things add to their CTL in a way that is very difficult to measure, and adds to that load and makes it difficult unless you’re continually communicating and getting feedback, then you’ll never know. What’s
Chris Case 22:44
the thought on how people rate RPE between the three sports? Is there ever been a study that looks at, you know, like comparison of what is a three in swimming versus a three on a bike versus three on a run? How does that relate? How close are they actually? What does technique have to do with that, especially in swimming, I would think, is that something you guys think about when you’re reading these comments? Yeah, that’s
Jeff Sankoff 23:11
a really good question. I’m not aware of any studies that look at the reliability of RPE across sports. And Trevor and I were talking recently when he was a guest on my show, about RPE being related to respiratory rate and respiratory exertion, which I think is really bang on. And the problem there is, of course, in swimming, your respiratory rate is kind of fixed to your stroke. It’s interesting. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything. I don’t know if you’re familiar with anything grant that looks at RPE across the sports, the
Grant Holicky 23:43
only thing I feel like I’ve seen something, but it was completely from a mental standpoint. And I mean, obviously it’s perceived exertion. But I think Jeff brings up a really good point. I was going to say, in swimming, RPE tends to be masked. You can have somebody say that easy swimming is a seven and hard swimming is an eight, like one of the things that I’ve said for a long time about adult onset swimmers, people who didn’t swim when they were young and they’re trying to pick up the sport as they’re older, is, how do we learn? How do we teach you to walk in your swim stroke? Right? How do we get this? How do you get you to go as easy as possible, I have seen you can look at the differences in terms of heart rate and where the threshold line tends to fall with those three sports. On heart rate, it tends to be higher with running than it is with cycling and swimming is incredibly technique based right if you take a very proficient swimmer, they can drive their heart rate through the roof, but new swimmer is going to get it very high very quickly, but then it kind of gets stuck there. So to me, perceived insertion as the technique improves, you’re going to see a broadening of what they can see as an RPE. This is anecdotally. I don’t have evidence of this, but in my. Experience as their technique improves, whether that be in running or whether that be in swimming, that you get a broader spectrum. You can go from three to 10, whereas before you were living in this world of like six to nine. And as experience with the sport grows, and I think that’s something that’s important with triathlon, is a lot of the people we coach are very, very new to one or two of these sports. That’s important as we look to RPE and we look to the those pieces of the puzzle of how new are they to the sport, how new are they to sport in general? One of the things I do think we get with triathletes is, I’ll talk to triathletes that are masters triathletes, and I say, What did you do at sport wise as a kid? And I’m always surprised at how many say not a lot. You know, I didn’t do a lot. This is something I came to later in life, and for somebody like that, that it’s really important to start to build that repertoire of, what does this mean? How do I how do I vocalize how I feel? See,
Jeff Sankoff 25:56
I have my own score for swimming. It’s the PAs, the perceived aggravation score, which is when I when I finish 100 meters, and I look at how long it took me to swim that 100 meters, how aggravated Am I based on how much effort I put in and how long it actually took? Because as an adult, as an adult onset swimmer, it is incredibly aggravating that I’ve been doing this for 20 years when I think my 100 meter time has moved not very much. Well, feel free. Feel free to use that. When
Trevor Connor 26:30
I was walking on the bottom the pool, I was either a nine or a two nine, because slow I was but two like this is easy. I’m just walking here. Oh, this
Grant Holicky 26:41
is fantastic. I will admit, as a 20 some year swim coach and a lifelong swimmer, these conversations crack me up, but, but, no, I think, I think that’s a fair statement, right? It’s when a cyclist goes out and tries to learn how to skate ski, they can be the fittest person in the world, and they’re just flailing out there and just angry and ready to break a pole or something, because it’s so technically based, and that is really the struggle with swimming across across the discipline. It is the one out of the three that just throwing more time at it isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem.
Jeff Sankoff 27:20
And I think skiing is a great skiing and skating, ice skating, like I grew up, ice skating and snow skiing. And when I see people come to it as an adult, and oh, my god, so easy. Just edge, and I should be more sympathetic, because I can’t bloody swim. And it’s like, I know I can coach people how to swim, because I know exactly what they need to be doing. I do the same thing that all the coaches do on the side of the pool. I can do all the things. But then when I get in the water, it’s like, yeah, anyways, my pas is very high. Listen, I understand.
Grant Holicky 27:55
You know, I come from the swimming thing. I remember when I started triathlon, everybody. So we swam in college. You’re gonna be great at this. Great at this. And like, Guys, I swam the 100 yard breaststroke in college. That’s like telling 100 meter hurdler you’re gonna go do great in the five and 10k just because you ran College Track, right? It couldn’t be a more different stroke in sport. And I would coach distance swimmers and go, yeah, just do this. And I’m sitting there thinking to myself, I could never do that. I don’t know why I’m what I’m saying, but that’s part of coaching. But no, I love that perceived aggravation score is fantastic. That’s really relevant.
Trevor Connor 28:36
So I’m gonna flip this question around. I think you guys gave exactly the right answer, in my opinion, on how do you know when you’re doing too much, or how do you figure out the need for recovery, things like that? And it really is, you just got to interact with the athlete. I don’t think there is a number that can tell you this, but the flip side of that, going back to that whole concept of super compensation, how do you know? And I’m going to give a short story here after I asked the question, but how do you know when the training is being productive? And I asked this because I’ve had multiple triathletes come up to me and say, Please help me. I’m training really hard, but I seem to just be stagnant. I’m just not seen any sort of improvement, and I’ve tended to see one of two things, either they’re just training way too hard and they’re just constantly fatigued, or conversely, they’re trying to train all three disciplines equally, and they only have eight or 10 hours a week, and they’re actually not really doing enough of a Stress in any one of the disciplines to get an adaptation. So how do you, as a triathlon coach, or both of you, actually, how do you deal with it? How do you know that, hey, you know you’re not just banging your head against the wall. All that work you’re doing is actually productive and not maladaptive. So
Jeff Sankoff 29:58
- I will start with every athlete from the same place, and that is, what are your goals? And often, when I have a new athlete who comes to me like I had a new athlete who came to me this year and never done a triathlon before, his first race was going to be a 70.3 and he tells me his goal is to go under five hours. And I said, Okay, that’s that’s a great goal. I said that might be something we want to make, perhaps as a long term goal, as opposed to our goal for the first race. I think you have to start by getting a sense of where the athlete is in their mind, and then helping them understand what is potentially more realistic. Or maybe they are coming in with goals that aren’t realistic enough. Maybe they’re coming in and saying, hey, you know, I like, I’ve had athletes who are phenomenal athletes, who say, I just want to finish. And I’m like, I think we could be a little more ambitious than that. But the point is is get a sense of where they are, then get a sense of what they have in terms of availability. Because my biggest philosophy, and I will tell you, as a full time physician, a full time dad, you know, with all the balls I have in the air, writing for publications, doing podcasts, I mean, coaching athletes, and in my own training, I have learned the hard way that I think that your life, your training, has to fit your life. It can’t be the other way around. If you try to make your life fit your training, it’s going to be a failed proposition. So I work very hard with my athletes to determine realistically, what are the hours that they have available, what are your goals? Let’s make sure that the goals you have match up with the hours you have available, and then let’s make a plan that fits within those hours to help you match those goals. So to get back to your question, Trevor, how do I know that the hours they have are contributing to actually get them progress? It depends, I think, a little bit, but I know that for me, I watch through repeated workouts. I use wkO as my software. Almost all my athletes have power meters so I can see that they’re having progress through the the workouts we’re doing. I don’t formally test them, but I do the W, K, O, sort of intermittent testing just to make to see that they’re getting progress. And I watch them through their repeated cycling efforts to see that they’re actually improving over time with running, I can see that their endurance is getting better. I can see I have them do progression runs where they’re doing their long runs, starting at a slower pace, finishing at a higher pace. And over time, that pace gradually shifts so that they’re starting at a faster pace and finishing at an even faster pace. And I can see that over time, I will tell you that with the swim, I pay zero attention to it. I’m just happy that they’re swimming. I’m happy that they’re feeling better in the water. But I tell them all, I’m like, listen, and I have some that who are already good swimmers, in which case they’re fine, but for all my people who are like me, who just came to it, I’m like, Look, I have you swim because I believe that swim fitness translates really well to the rest of your race, and so I want you to be as fit as possible with the form that you have. And if we get any gains in speed, fantastic, but let’s just work with what we have. And I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to whether or not they’re making huge progress, because, like Grant said they’re not going to get that kind of huge progress, but for the bike and the run, I will see that kind of progress based on over time, improvements in their power, improvements in their endurance at percentages of their FTP and on the run, just ability to hold certain paces for longer periods of time. I’m curious what you use grant. I think
Grant Holicky 33:40
the swimming thing is a really good point for the majority, honestly, up until the very, very highest level of amateur elite and then professional ranks. Really, what you’re trying to do with this one is create as much efficiency as humanly possible, right? If you can create efficiency in the water, you’ll see the run times come down because they did less work in the water, and that it almost doesn’t matter if the swim times improve. Can you do it with less work? So how do you increase efficiency? I think that does change in the pro ranks, because you see the swimming just that much better in the pro ranks, right? And you have to take a pretty big jump for me. You know, productivity is about finding those places that you can show the athlete improvement, whether that’s repeated workouts, whether that’s success and comfort, whether that’s an efficiency proposition, like a brick run coming off the bike. How did that feel? Oh, man, I felt great. I could roll. Everything was awesome, and I did this much load on the bike. Again, I’m not a big believer in testing, especially for an amateur athlete, because it’s such a snapshot in a incredibly busy life and an incredibly full life. So how do I just trust that this rather. Tested for this LT test. So it’s going to be perfect, but I had a kid that was up sick, or I had to drive to this travel baseball tournament, or whatever it is. There’s so many variables that fall into that, quote, unquote, rest and preparation for the test. So to me, and for me, it is so much about feel and this is why I think the education of perceived exertion is soon so important. So you can have somebody say, oh, man, that long run felt totally different this week. You know, I just felt so much better with this load. Those things are important. And then, of course, we can use in wkO and go back and go, How did we attack this workout a month ago or two months ago, versus how did we do it now? But I do think making sure you have enough time between those measuring sticks is important, because, as we know in endurance sports, it’s it’s all about the plateau. You’re going to take a big improvement and plateau for an extended period of time, and then a smaller improvement in plateau, and you’re getting better on that plateau, but you have to find ways to show the athlete you’re getting better on that plateau, because sometimes it’s hard to see, I think
Speaker 1 36:11
also race results. Yeah. I mean, I have athletes do multiple races in a year, and just seeing their progression, although every race is different, of course, but they’ll see progression from one race to the other. I would
Grant Holicky 36:24
advise people not to get too caught up in the times, because every race is different, right? The triathletes love to compare swim time to swim time. And I, I will laugh because I coached on the open water World Cup Open Water World Championships. No offense, those courses were never the same distance, and this was open water world championships, 10k dude, they weren’t 10 Ks. You can’t measure that the same way. There’s too many variables in the water, so be careful about comparing time to time. Because of the environmental factors can make a huge difference, but when you start seeing trending improvement across all three disciplines. That’s when it’s measurable, and you’ll see that in racing, right? I mean, it jumps out when you’ve been doing this long enough, and sometimes it’s about just educating the athlete. Look at this. This is improvement
Speaker 1 37:15
tracking your progress gets harder when things get complex. Here’s Dr Michael Rosenblatt talking about how the best reach the highest levels by keeping things simpler.
Dr. Michael Rosenblat 37:25
I think I’ve had athletes that have done both. I think I’ve had athletes that have kept it simple and then those who’ve made it complicated. But really what it comes down to is making sure we find where the strengths and weaknesses are in those individual athletes and just say, Okay, what do we need to focus on in terms of where their strengths and limitations are, is also what the demands are of the specific event that they’re doing, and just stick to that. Those are the athletes that I find have been very successful. Got to go as a coach to Nationals and World Championships, Ironman with those athletes, whereas those who try to make it very complicated, that’s where we’ve certainly had issues. But just keeping it really simple, just where’s your weakness, and let’s put a little emphasis on
Trevor Connor 38:06
that. So I know you’re a fan of polarized training approach, which means not that much high intensity through the week. How do you manage that? When they’re doing three different disciplines, they just do the intensity in one or do you try to have them do intensity in all three every week. No,
Dr. Michael Rosenblat 38:21
I don’t actually it’s I just keep it simple, because intensity is intensity, and it’s going to have a certain effect on the body and a certain physiological stimulus. But in terms of sports specificity, I’ll make sure that they’re doing the mode of exercise. And so I think of those as two very different things. I think of the biomechanics of the sport and the demands of a specific sport, and then also, what physiological adaptations do we need? And then how can somebody recover? And so I’ll do so. I’ll try to distribute those things as needed. So for instance, if maybe I wanted to have an athlete do a race paced effort, maybe that would be their run. Might be the race pace effort, but then maybe I’ll have them do their interval training or much, much higher intensity cycling, but I won’t have them do both. I mean, I’m generalizing, but I think it’s very important to differentiate between physiology and biomechanics.
Trevor Connor 39:12
So how do you know when the training plan isn’t fitting, meaning that you’re getting maladaptation? The athlete could be pushing themselves towards over training or injury or fatigue. What are the signs you look for for that, and what are the consequences if you don’t see that as the coach or the athlete? Well, I’ll
Jeff Sankoff 39:30
say that it’s not always so evident and it’s not always so easy to see, as we’re seeing right now with former world champion Sam Laidlaw, who has really hit bottom. I mean, it’s really unfortunate to watch. This is a guy who is at the top of the game. He’s a really, you know, great athlete to watch, super interesting guy. It’s unfortunate. Drama seems to follow him everywhere. But here he is. He had a phenomenal race last year in COVID. Kona leading off the bike, set the bike record for the course. Wheels came off on the run, and then he really was, I thought they should have pulled him off the course, but he ends up finishing. And then after that, come tries to keep training. And I think he just turned himself inside out to get to cona in the top form. Had a gigantic, huge effort that day, and then afterwards, when he kept trying to train, I think he just put himself into a huge hole, and he has not been able to get out of it. And as a result of that, we are seeing an athlete now who’s searching for answers, doctors, lab tests, can’t show anything, because I don’t think there’s anything to see. I think he’s just dramatically over trained. And so if the best pro in the world with a huge team surrounding him, you know all of this great medical experts around as well, can’t identify it, it’s going to be super hard for a coach who’s working with athletes remotely. That being said, I think we all watch for the things that I previously mentioned. We talked to our athletes, and we’re asking, you know, the subtle things, you sleeping, okay? Have you been more irritable? Are you able to concentrate? Are you feeling the same level of motivation for your training as you were before? Are you finding the workouts more difficult than they should? And any of those things are potentially red flags in isolation, they’re not because, as we’ve mentioned already, athletes have so many other things going on that any one of them could be attributable to just other stuff. But if I hear from an athlete, you know, I’m having trouble sleeping, I’m going to pay attention to that. I’m going to keep a close eye on their heart rate during their workouts, and keep a close eye on how they’re doing week to week. And if that persists for more than a week or so, then I might start to be a little bit worried. I might think it might be time to take a bit of a rest recovery. Yeah,
Grant Holicky 41:49
and I think it is hard, because so many of the same things that could tell us that we have fatigue could also say that we’re getting adaptation right. The heart rate’s a little bit depressed, Oh, I’m getting fitter. That tends to be the first reaction in a lot of cases, that’s fatigue. So I like to look off the off the bike, out of sport, and this is exactly what Jeff’s saying. You know, what’s going on outside of sport? For me, it’s relationship, especially with settled folks like just just kind of annoyed with everybody not interested in certain things. And I think motivation is such a huge one. We deal with a population that is very good at grinding through. But when you start to see people like, Hey, man, I was struggling to get on the bike today, to me, that’s a way to really take that step back and see in this. The thing to me is the little three day stand down just isn’t gonna hurt fitness. And I think we need to educate that. We need to normalize that idea, right? That I remember as a swimmer, I was taught, if I took a day off, I took two steps back, right? One day off it’s two steps back. I’m like, how does that make I don’t understand how that makes sense. Okay, I believe you. But many of these athletes have kind of been educated in this mindset that a day off is a step backward. I’ve always loved the three day. Stand down. We’re struggling a little bit in life. We’re struggling a little bit in sport. Take three days. Go somewhere, you know, get with your significant other, get with your friends. Go somewhere. Go away. Don’t just try to do a three day stand down in your house. That’s where people really struggle. Go somewhere else. And don’t bring a bike. Don’t bring your running shoes. That’s definitely a way to try to get people to it’s almost a forced vacation, and it works wonders when they buy into it. It
Chris Case 43:43
sounds like you are having you’re looking for signs in a relatively casual way, but do you? Either of you use anything like a palms standardized test or other psych evaluation tests to formalize it in any way so that you get repetition of the same thing over time and can look for signs
Jeff Sankoff 44:01
I do not do that. Chris, it’s an interesting thought. I’d have to think about it. I guess if whether or not that’d be useful, or whether or not my athletes would even be open to it. Hey, I want to do a psychological test, but
Grant Holicky 44:14
that soft science stuff? Smokey, no, I I do actually have a couple questionnaires that I’ll use if somebody is talking about that here. You know, let’s take a minute. Let’s do this. And obviously they came through school and through grad school, when I did that work with applied sports Psych. They can be really, really helpful. But the big thing that jumps out at me, and this can be done formally or informally, is just taking stock. Let’s take a second. Let’s get on the phone. Let’s look at the last month, last three weeks, and give me your feedback. Give me your feedback on me. Give me your feedback on your training. Give us your feedback on you. Let’s talk this through. I do like the more informal setting, because. I think you get a little bit more out of it, especially, again, with a highly motivated population those questionnaires, sometimes they’re pretty easy to see through, for lack of a better way to put it, and people are going to give the right answers, the right answer you put it in quotations. So the more informal process tends to work a little bit better, in my opinion, but often I’ll go through that process, maybe with that form in front of me, so I make sure I’m right, asking the right questions in a way that’s a bit covered, right? It’s not as obvious. So
Trevor Connor 45:34
I’m going to shift gears again, and quite literally, because we’re going to talk about gear, that is another place where you can have a huge amount of complexity and grant is pretending to snore. I know from the cycling world how much people can obsess gear and equipment and clothing and every single possible little thing you can buy. I have to believe it can get absolutely crazy in the triathlon world. So Jeff, I’ll throw this to you. Triathlon
Jeff Sankoff 46:03
is insane when it comes to this kind of stuff. There’s so many toys, and it is a very tech heavy sport, and it is a very technological sort of thing, because a lot of the rules that apply to other sports don’t apply to triathlon. So for example, the UCI bike rules don’t apply to the bike in triathlon, and therefore bike manufacturers get wild and crazy with their designs. And with the wild and crazy designs come wild and crazy price tags, and now you get a lot of innovation too, which does end up spilling over into the cycling world, which is kind of fun, but the fact that matter is, is that age group triathletes, especially in the older age groups, have a lot of disposable income, and they are ripe for the picking. And so it’s very easy to separate an age group triathlete from their hard earned cash dollars, and have them load up on all of the fancy toys and the manufacturers have figured out early on that the popular pros are great vehicles to help in this endeavor. And so you have a lot of age group triathletes who are time poor but cash rich, and so they figure, well, if I can buy this buy speed thing, yeah, yeah, I could buy this thing, it’s gonna, it’s gonna make me fast, like that person, and I won’t have to put in all of that time. And so I had as a guest on my show a little while ago a coach from the Pacific Northwest by the name of Chris bag. And he came on and he brought with him this metaphor that I absolutely love, and I continue to talk about all the time. And he talked about how back in the olden times as hunter gatherers, we stood on the plains and we were desperate to find our food resource right, and we had only so much energy to expend on getting our food. And if we stood there and we looked out over the plane, and we saw at one end of the plane a large antelope which could feed us for quite a long time, and a small mouse that would really only feed us for a very short amount of time, were we going to expend our energy chasing down the antelope, are we going to expend our energy chasing down the mouse? And of course, intuitively, it makes a lot of sense you go after the antelope, because the antelope, while it’s going to take the same amount of energy, is going to reap a very large reward. And the metaphor is that as athletes, where we are existing within probably 60 to 70% of our physiologic potential as age groupers. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to expend a lot of resources chasing after marginal gains that are going to get you half a percent or 1% instead, we should be expending small amount of resources to go after the antelope, the antelope, in this case, being invest in a coach, invest in maybe a little more quantity or quality of training, perhaps more consistency of training. And instead of buying the $20,000 bike or the $5,000 aero wheels, which are going to save you really almost nothing, yeah, right, seconds, you could probably get minutes if you were a little bit smarter about how you raced, or maybe lost a couple of pounds, or maybe invested in one more hour of training instead of one more hour of watching Netflix. So given that choice, I would say, save your money, invest in yourself and reap those rewards go after the antelope and not the mouse. Now, if you are a pro where you’re operating at your 99th percentile, and you really you’ve eked out every bit of physiologic benefit that you can because you’re training 28 to 30 hours a week, you are a specimen like these guys and women are. Then, yeah. Sure, I think it makes sense. You need to get that 1% you need to get that five watts there. It makes a huge difference. But for the average age grouper, and the biggest thing is the supplement industry. I mean, the people that are just like spending all this money on all of these supplements, that are doing absolutely nothing for them. Anyways, listen, as long as it’s not hurting them, that’s fine. And most of them are not hurting them, so that’s fine. They can do what they like.
Grant Holicky 50:26
So Jeff, the recovery industry is not too far off, is it, Jeff? I mean, oh my gosh. So
Trevor Connor 50:33
Jeff, loved your metaphor. I was going to ask you about it because you sent an email with the mouse versus the antelope. I was wondering what that was, but I’m going to show you just how much of a nerd I am about these things. There is also a second explanation for why you hunt the antelope. Are you aware of this? I am looking forward to it. Ravi starvation. So smaller animals have very little fat tissue. They’re almost all protein. The larger the animal, the more fat mass it will actually have and so they were trying to figure out why hunter gatherers would go after much larger animals that were dangerous, because they can fight back and fight back pretty well. And this is the reason why, if you eat too much small animals, rapid Starvation is basically protein poisoning. You end up eating too much protein. So back in those times, they would have to go after larger animals, because then there’d be a lot more fat, and you wouldn’t risk the rabbit starvation. Well,
Grant Holicky 51:25
let’s not when we’re talking to triathletes, let’s not talk about fat as an advantage. You’re going to scare
Jeff Sankoff 51:33
it takes us down, takes us down a whole other path, or a whole other
Trevor Connor 51:38
whole tangent. Baby gave absolutely no value to this conversation whatsoever. I just had to bring it up.
Grant Holicky 51:46
Well, jump on this, guys. I think the running joke in my group, the my cycling group, is always well, what about the maximal gains? Right? When any OS came out and talked all about these marginal gains, marginal gains, we would sit there and be like, great, but you might want to train first. Yeah, right. And it is hard, because especially, I think in triathlon, so much is driven by what people see with those pros. And we do have pros that are optimizing everything. Everything in their life must be optimized. And when you look at the the amateur in the age group triathlete, it’s not possible, and there is so much lower hanging fruit. I mean, I remember vividly when I was racing NextEra. You know, I can get vilified for this in the triathlon world, but when I was racing NextEra, after the swim, I’d take time to put on socks, because we were dealing with a mountain bike and off road, and the runs were through God only knows what terrain that 10 seconds, five seconds to put on a pair of socks, saved me so much time and comfort down the road, because I could deal with the rocks in my shoes. I could deal what was going on. I wasn’t walking out of that race with blisters so bad that I couldn’t function for three or four days when I knew I had to race the next weekend. So sometimes giving away a little bit in terms of the tech or in terms of what’s optimized is going to reap benefit in the return. So it’s kind of important to keep that in mind, especially when we’re talking about gear. You know, the greatest gear in the world. But if you’re not comfortable on it, you can be running the wild van art, double disc, but if you can’t control that in a five mile an hour cross one there’s absolutely zero benefit to it.
Jeff Sankoff 53:24
And I want to be clear, I’m sitting here talking like, so wise and I’m so smart, like, Hey, don’t waste your money and everything else. When I started in triathlon, my friend who got me into the sport, the first thing she did was get me a copy of Triathlete Magazine, where there was a whole article that talked about, don’t buy your way to speed. You can’t do it. It’s not worth it. Here’s how much you’re paying for every second if you buy XYZ. And within a year, I had all of those things. Every single one. I had the disc wheel, I had everything. But I will say, Listen, I know, and I still tell people don’t do all these things, but I know full wealth are going to do it anyways. And let’s face it, you know what? You want to keep up with the Jones. You want to walk into transition looking as cool as everybody else. So I kind of get it, and it’s okay, if you have the money to spend enjoy yourself, you might as well. You’re in the sport. You might as well do it. But just don’t think that’s what’s going to do it, because it’s the training and it’s the everything else. And I do also just want to finish just by saying that there are a few items that are definitely worth it, like the arrow helmet. Like there’s no question, the arrow helmet is a reasonably priced device that is a huge benefit over just a standard helmet. So by all means, get one of those. Get a tri suit, you know, like, like, there are a couple of things that make sense. After that, the return on investment is much lower, but if it makes you feel good, I’m not gonna tell you not to do it. Yeah, right.
Trevor Connor 54:53
I think the way I look at this, and it also goes back to how we were talking about understanding where an athlete. At which is it’s where’s the focus? Like, for example, when you’re trying to figure out if an athlete’s training effectively or if they’re starting to push over training, data can help. But what we’ve established is, with the complexity of this sport, you can’t get the answer from data, so you really need to focus on your conversations with the athletes, and you get in trouble if you just focus on the data, and I would say here as well. Yeah, the gear can help. If you have all the money in the world, by all means, go and buy it. But if that’s all you’re focused on is upgrading your gear, and you’re forgetting about the training and the other stuff, then it’s actually going to hurt you, so just putting it in its place. Yeah, I think that’s a great summary right there. Finally, let’s pause for a moment to hear from past Ironman Champion John Howard, who focused more on the lifestyle than the gear.
John Howard 55:46
Personally, I made it a lifestyle. I was in motion virtually the whole time, and that included somewhere slightly south of 40 hours a week, and not all hard training, but there was some, you know, I could get away with a whole lot more than than I can now, but I was doing something in that realm of multi fitness all the time. There was always something going on, and it became very much a lifestyle. I was single then I didn’t have to worry about family. That helped, because it’s a real difficult process to absorb what it takes to do an Ironman Triathlon on, you know, on the family. So anyway, that’s my take on that.
Trevor Connor 56:36
Okay, so sorry. Chris is giving me a look.
Chris Case 56:40
No, nope, I was just waiting. He
Trevor Connor 56:42
was waiting for me. So we are getting close to the hour mark here, so let’s just shift and hopefully we can offer a few practical recommendations to our listeners here. So again, very complex sport. You got three disciplines to deal with. What are your overall thoughts on how to balance this to make sure that you are maximizing your triathlon training? That’s a good segue grant is, what are the maximal benefits here? What are the things you should be focusing on to making sure you’re heading in the right direction? Well,
Grant Holicky 57:14
I don’t want to steal what Jeff said earlier, but I do think it’s super important to recognize that you have crossover between the sports, right? That you’re gaining general cardiovascular fitness from the swan. In fact, if we look at what young age group swimmers are able to go do in other sports as they grow up, there’s a they have a huge engine, and that huge engine is going to help them in other sports as they move on to them. So you’re going to get crossover between those sports. For me, I think it’s really important to have quality workouts in each discipline. It’s important to have a quality grind each week. It’s important to find a place to put a quality ride each week. And that sometimes feels like it steals away from the pure base volume. But it’s also important to realize you’re getting base volume around those quality pieces in that session. So you do have to look at the big, big, big picture. And I and I think it can get hard with triathlon, because you do have a group of people that say, I’m weak on the bike, and they want to focus all their time on the bike, and they they forget that. Well, you’re a great runner. You’re getting a huge benefit out of that. You also, by the other side of that coin, have people that just want to play to their strengths. I’m a great rider. I want to ride more. I don’t really want to swim and run. And you get that crossover, you’re going to continue to be a good rider by putting time in on the run and put time in on the and swim. So it’s such a balancing act to figure out how to put those pieces together. But this is why coaches are so vital, because you get an objective outside opinion that can look in and say, Hey, look at this. And it may seem obvious to that coach, but to you as the athlete, you’re totally oblivious to it. And so I think coaching is such an important piece of this puzzle to manage all the parts of it. I
Jeff Sankoff 59:04
was also going to say that the thing that I have loved about triathlon both participating and coaching. Now I’ve been doing triathlon for over 20 years. I’ve been coaching it now for going on six, is that I continue to learn it’s a sport that challenges you individually, challenges me as a coach, because, like you’ve said a couple of times today, Trevor, it’s really complicated, because just the racing itself, like every race I go into, I still haven’t executed the perfect race, like I’m always learning, like learning how to be able to run well off the bike is something that just takes so long to really perfect. And even though I’ve had some really good runs off the bike, I’m not sure that I’ve had the best executed race just yet. So all of this just makes triathlons. That’s why it’s such an addictive sport. Because you you finish a race and you immediately start reflecting on all the things. It went well, and all the things you think you can do better next time. And I think that in order for athletes to really get that harmony between the training and the three sports, they have to figure out early, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses? How are they going to address their weaknesses without necessarily giving up too much of their strengths, but then also take that into the race like for me, it took me a long time to I’m a strong cyclist, and I had to learn. It took me years to realize that easing off on the bike was going to pay off huge on my run. For the longest time, I just wouldn’t accept that, because I just didn’t feel like I was a strong enough runner. I had to do enough on the bike that when I got to the run, I’d have this cushion. But once I started finally understanding that if I pulled back on the bike, that I actually could run a lot better, it actually turned out to more time gained. And that’s the kind of thing that, again, like Grant said, a coach is so vital to learning and to understanding and to I know this is very self serving, right? We’re sitting here as coaches, telling everybody how important coaches are. But I’m saying this because as an athlete, I got all of this from having a coach, and I feel like I share these things with my own athletes, and it’s such a rewarding sport to be a part of, because as many bike races, as many running races as I’ve participated in, finishing a triathlon always feels very different, because the accomplishment of putting together the three sports and finishing that is just a very different experience, and something that I just really continue to love 20 years in
Trevor Connor 1:01:37
great summary there, I just want to quickly tack on something to what Grant was saying, which is the biggest mistake I’ve seen with triathletes that I’ve worked with, is the belief that every week, they need to train all three disciplines equally. So if you have 12 hours in a week, you gotta do four hours of running, four hours of swimming, four hours of cycling. I’ve never found that particularly effective. Unfortunately, the first triathlete ever coach. She was frustrated. She’d been working with somebody who had her doing all three disciplines every single day, and she only had an hour, hour and a half to train each day. So she was literally doing 15 minutes in the pool, then changing, then doing a 20 minute bike ride, then doing a 12 minute run and just sitting going, no wonder you’re not seeing any progress. So don’t feel you have to train them all equally. We had a great conversation a while back with Melanie McQuaid, who said, it’s one sport with three disciplines, and it’s a great way to look at it and really try to figure out, what am I trying to accomplish each week, and then how do I do that with the different disciplines? And
Jeff Sankoff 1:02:37
we should mention there’s a fourth discipline, right? The transitions, yeah, which I think people forget about. I have to tell my athletes all the time the transitions count. They’re part of your time and and teaching them to do less in transition is something that takes a long time. I
Trevor Connor 1:02:53
was so good at the transition when I did that Fort Collins triathlon, like I got it
Grant Holicky 1:02:56
as you noted, I really
Trevor Connor 1:02:59
towed like Branson, I put on socks, I put on arm warmers, I put on knee warmers. I was there for a while.
Grant Holicky 1:03:08
I think one of the things that’s really relevant about transition is that old John Wooden quote, be quick, but don’t hurry. And to Jeff’s point, the proficiency at a transition thinking through the transit. I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this, then I’m going to do this. Allows you to not go in there frantic. And when you’re frantic, you forget things. When you’re frantic, you miss things when you’re frantic, you make those mistakes. But there has to be a great deal of coordination to that little bit of chaos when you go into that fourth discipline.
Trevor Connor 1:03:39
And so that leads actually to one other question I wanted to ask you. Before we close things out here, is there a Fifth Discipline here? What do you feel about off the bike, off the running shoes, off the whatever you’re on in a swimming pool work like strength training?
Jeff Sankoff 1:03:52
Oh, 100% I very, very much a believer in the value of strength training, especially for my older athletes. I keep trying to scour the evidence to find science that shows that strength training does all the things that I believe it does, in terms of preventing injuries and everything else, and I’ve yet to find really compelling evidence. There are some studies that seem to suggest that hint at it, but I personally believe that doing strength training throughout the year, makes you more resilient, makes you stronger, and just makes you more durable and able to perform at the levels we have to, especially in the longer distances. And we know in non triathletes how important strength training is for the older athlete and maintaining muscle mass. So I just think that strength training is huge
Grant Holicky 1:04:40
to your last point, Jeff, when you’re talking about what we see in terms of strength as a deterrent to all cause mortality in an older population, it should make sense that it translates to the athlete as well, and to me, functionality we’re going to spend so much time on the. To open up our psoas and to do X, Y and Z, but we’re doing a single plane exercise over and over and over again. If we step sideways, everything breaks. That’s not fitness, that’s not functionality. And so strength training, to me, really falls into that well rounded athlete that gives us the ability to fix ourselves when we’re getting off kilter gives us the ability to not hurt ourselves in everyday life. Can’t tell you how many stories you get of the endurance athlete that hurt their back trimming their hedges. You know, the really silly things like this that probably could have been prevented with a little bit of functional training work, functional strength work.
Trevor Connor 1:05:42
All right. Well, guys, I think it’s time. You know the routine here. This is our one minute take homes. I think we sort of did this just a couple minutes ago, but I will throw this at you anyway. So each of us has one minute to summarize what you think is the most important thing from this episode that you really want the listeners to take away from it and grant Do you want to start us out?
Grant Holicky 1:06:06
To me, it’s balance, balance and training. Balance off the training in life, finding that we talk about it in business as work life, balance, finding that ability to do all those things that are important to you Well, and that’s true in a holistic view for the athlete, especially the Masters amateur triathlete, and it’s trying to fit an awful lot into their life, but it’s also true within the sport itself. How do you balance these pieces of the puzzle with the swim, the bike, the run and the strength? How do we fit all that in when we have a really limited number of hours? They’re so intertwined, right? Because the tendency is, well, I only have 12 hours, but if I only had 14, so we steal two hours from somewhere else. Well, there’s always going to be, what if I had 16? What if I had 18? And they’re not necessarily giving you benefit when you’re tearing away at other pieces of your life. So to me, I will always preach, and again, it’s self serving, as Jeff said, but the coaching aspect of this really is beneficial in creating balance, not just within the sport, but outside of the sport.
Trevor Connor 1:07:14
Okay, I’ll go next. This isn’t so much a summary of what we were talking about, but just something that I found very interesting that I read getting ready for this episode that future proofing triathlon, where they got a bunch of coaches and researchers together, was a really good read. And there were a couple things that I found very interesting in it about triathlon. One was the lack of research, and the fact that so much of the research was very clinical, very in the lab, and really didn’t account for what you’re seeing out in the real world, when athletes and coaches are actually working, and their big push for there needs to be a relationship between the coach and the athlete. And what I really got out of this, which is exactly where you guys went and I knew you were going to go, is as techy as triathlon can get. It is actually a much harder sport to just measure. Like I said, you know, cycling, you have a power meter, and if you’re doing most of your time on a bike, whether you believe in those metrics or not, you know what the metrics are, and it’s consistent. You don’t really have that in triathlon, so it was just an indicator to me of the importance of understanding yourself, of the coach, having that relationship with the athlete, to keep things on track. And like I said, that’s really where you guys went. Of No, there is no one magic number or magic bullet. It’s understanding the athlete. Well, Jeff, you’re up. All right,
Jeff Sankoff 1:08:43
I have 60 seconds, so I’ll do two things. One of them is real quick, and that is, make sure your training fits your life and not the other way around. You want to always be sure, because that is the secret to happiness and to keeping everybody on your team happy. And then the second thing, I think is an important takeaway from this is to really focus on the antelope and not the mice. You want to make sure that you really invest in yourself, invest in your quality and quantity of training over any of these expensive toys, expensive supplements, expensive whatever. That’s going to get you tiny, little marginal gains.
Trevor Connor 1:09:19
Fantastic. Well, Jeff, thanks for talking with us. It was a fun conversation. Absolutely, it
Jeff Sankoff 1:09:24
was a real pleasure to be here. I really enjoyed it. That was another episode
Trevor Connor 1:09:27
of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a radiant review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs join the conversation that forms a fast talk labs.com or learn from our experts at fast talk labs.com for DR, Jeff sankoff, Brad Kolp. Dr, Steven Seiler. Dr, Michael Rosenblatt, John Howard, Chris case and grant holicy. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
