Norwegian Method or Just Good Holistic Practice? With Dr. Stephen Seiler

For a small Scandinavian country, there’s no question that Norway has been punching above its weight when it comes to endurance athletes. Kristian Blummenfelt is a world record-holding triathlete, Gustav Iden won the 2022 Ironman World Championship, and Jakob Ingebrigtsen has been getting a lot of attention lately for winning 5,000m gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics and setting recent world records in the 1,500m (short track), 2,000m, and 3,000m run.

Ingebrigtsen and his brothers have popularized an approach that many are calling the new Norwegian Method. In short, it involves very hard double days of intense threshold work. The question is whether this success is really linked to this Norwegian approach or just something that has worked well for the Ingebrigtsens.

To get at the heart of this question, we invited friend of the show, Dr. Stephen Seiler, to join us on this episode. He’s lived in Norway for years now and works closely with their Olympic committee. Dr. Seiler has asked himself what the true Norwegian Method is. He shares with us a pyramid he put together with other experts who have worked with hundreds of successful Norwegian athletes.

The pyramid, which we’ll spend the episode discussing, shows the key elements that they believe has made Norwegian athletes so successful. At its base is an endurance-loving culture and at the top is “intelligent failures.” There’s a lot in between, but what you won’t find anywhere in the pyramid is a specific training approach—not even Dr. Seiler’s beloved Polarized approach.

Joining Dr. Seiler, we also hear from the founders of Cerebral Performance, Dr. Scott Frey and mental performance coach Brent Bookwalter.

So get ready to learn about Norwegian pyramids, and let’s make you fast!

References:

Tønnessen, E., Sandbakk, Ø., Sandbakk, S. B., Seiler, S., & Haugen, T. (2024). Training Session Models in Endurance Sports: A Norwegian Perspective on Best Practice Recommendations. Sports Medicine, 1–19. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-024-02067-4

Episode Transcript

Trevor Connor 00:00

Trevor, hello and welcome to fast doc, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Dr Griffin McMath and coach Robert pickles for a small Scandinavian country. There’s no question that Norway has been punching above its weight when it comes to endurance athletes. Christian Blumenfeld is a world record holder. Triathlete Gus of Eiden won the 2022 Ironman World Championships. And getting a lot of attention right now is Jacob ingebrigtsen, who just set the world record in the 1500 meter run. He and his brothers have popularized an approach, and many are now calling the new Norwegian method. In short, it involves very hard, double days of intense threshold work. The question is whether this truly is a new Norwegian approach or just something that has worked well for the ingebrigtsens. To get at the heart of this question, we decide to invite friend to the show, Dr Steven Seiler, to join us on today’s episode. He’s lived in Norway for years now and works closely with their Olympic Committee. Dr Seiler has asked himself this very question, what is the true Norwegian method you share with us a pyramid he’s put together with several experts who have worked with hundreds of successful Norwegian athletes. The pyramid, which we’ll spend the episode discussing, shows the key elements that they believe has made Norway so successful. At its base is an endurance loving culture, and at the top is intelligent failures. There’s a lot in between, but what you won’t find anywhere in the pyramid is a very specific training approach, not even Dr sidler’s beloved polarized approach. Joining Dr Seiler today, we’ll also hear from founders of cerebral performance Dr Scott fry and mental performance coach, Brent Bookwalter. So get ready for some more Dr Seiler, time, and let’s make you fast. Well, welcome Dr Seiler, it’s been about a month and a half. I think it’s great to have you back on the show again.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 01:49

It’s good to be back. Always fun to talk with you guys. So

Trevor Connor 01:53

Rob is laughing,

Rob Pickels 01:55

dude, you’re such a ham. I love him.

Trevor Connor 01:58

Me.

Rob Pickels 01:59

Yeah, you what I do. You’re just you, and I love it. I’m here for it,

Trevor Connor 02:06

and it’s amazing. We all look very similar to how we looked the last time we were recording, except Griffin, he

Rob Pickels 02:11

has majorly changed a

Griffin McMath 02:14

bit, still wearing sunglasses.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 02:16

I haven’t aged a bit. Must

Rob Pickels 02:17

be summer here at older I’m not sure if it’s summer in Norway or not, though. All right,

Trevor Connor 02:21

so our listeners know we’re doing a marathon here, even though these episodes are separated by the month and a half, we recorded two episodes in

Rob Pickels 02:28

one day. You literally, literally not before the record button was like, just reminder, we’re gonna separate these immediately

Trevor Connor 02:38

cracking up about it. So I’m like, Fine, we’ll bring it up.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 02:43

I gotta say, if I’m your girlfriend, I am thinking, you know, he cannot lie, this guy, it’s a good yeah, so that’s a good thing. She’s feeling better about her choices right now.

Rob Pickels 02:56

And listen everyone, this is not a potluck. We actually have some valuable things that I shared today. So, Trevor, what are we talking about? Yeah, I

Trevor Connor 03:03

was gonna say we have Dr Seiler in the room. So intelligent things are actually going to be said. I mean, in the room is relative saying,

Griffin McMath 03:08

like, this sounds like the Ouija board coming to me.

Rob Pickels 03:13

Hey, I’ll be in, gotten very Sweden later. I should shoot over to Norway for a little bit. So

Trevor Connor 03:18

here’s what we’re talking about today. Let’s get back on the rails here. You’re right. It’s kind of like a potluck. And I started it. You put together a presentation, Dr Seiler, and in the presentation, you showed the fairly dramatic rise in the medal counts for Norway at the Olympics, which mostly comes from endurance sports. And it pointed out, Norway is a country of about 5 million people. It’s not a large country. It is performing way above where it should be performing for its population size. And this has caused a lot of buzz in the media about what people are calling their Norwegian method. What is the secret of Norway that its endurance athletes are performing so well? So the purpose of this episode is for you to give your explanation of why it’s performing so well. But I think before we go there, we at least need to tip our hats and talk a little bit about what is being turned the Norwegian method right now? And in short, it’s something I’m going to butcher the name. Please correct me on this. The ingebrigtsen brothers, who are middle distance runners, have been employing this method, and the key element of it is they are doing double days of threshold work. So a lot of threshold work,

Rob Pickels 04:42

yeah, and this method, Trevor, especially now that it’s an Olympic cycle, an Olympic year going on, I think that we’re hearing a lot about this, as if it is a panacea, right? This is the thing everybody just does this. And oh my god, look at how good these people are. And it has this amazing me. Be a hook, but I don’t know when we look under the covers if we’re gonna discover that’s the truth. So

Trevor Connor 05:04

Dr Seiler, I know you are very friendly person. You’re very diplomatic, but tell us a little bit about this method and your thoughts about it.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 05:12

There’s a lot of positives to tell about, and then there’s probably a little bit of maybe we’re overthinking this, or over talking it. On the one hand, what we see with this so called Norwegian method that has been in the last few years. It’s been discussed within a couple of small environments in Norway, these three brothers, the middle distance runners, the ingebrigtsen brothers, the latest of which is Jakob, who has the world record in the two mile. He was just over the world record for 1500 meters. Recently. He’s an outstanding distance runner. 1248, 5000 meter. 320, 6.7 1500 it’s just off the charts. Great. And his brothers were good, and they’re at least years ago. Their father was the coach. Now they’re basically self coached. And one of the key issues is these. They got very good at saying, when we train a high intensity day, when we’re going to have a hard day, let’s get the most out of that day. They’re very good at keeping hard days, hard and easy days easy because they’re running 180 kilometers a week, so they’re doing a lot of volume, but when they do the hard days. They want them to be effective. So then they’re doing double sessions. And then they said, Well, how can we get the most out of the session while minimizing or at least optimizing stress? And so then they start doing these. They call them threshold sessions. But what we’re really looking at is, for example, 20 times 400 meters, you know? So it’s an interval session, but it’s at a controlled intensity, so that when they measure their blood lactate, it’s about three millimolar, but the speed at which these athletes are running is way above threshold pace. Does that make sense? So they’re finding a way to get some high quality running, high speed running, done while keeping the physiological demands more moderate, and so they can accumulate more work and they recover better. So a lot of that is really consistent with polarized training and a lot of the things that go on. But maybe the key for them has been that they do two sessions. They’re calling it threshold, but it just means very controlled intervals, not maximum effort intervals at all. And

Rob Pickels 07:35

Dr Seiler real quick when they’re doing these 20 by 400 which is 8000 meters, right? That’s a pretty good volume in a workout. What’s the rest duration during a workout like that? Because this sounds a lot like, say, 3030s that we might do as cyclists. Granted the work durations a little bit longer. When you’re running 400 meters, than 30 seconds, it’ll

Dr. Stephen Seiler 07:55

be something like a 45 second recovery, so basically jogging around halfway around the track and then starting a new 400 so that’s my understanding. So it’s going to vary a little bit on the 400 timing, but something like 65 seconds and then 45 seconds recovery. So

Trevor Connor 08:10

I don’t know why, but for some reason this reminds me of approach it used to see in some of the Eastern Bloc countries, where they would take a whole lot of athletes, get them at a center and train them. And basically start with 100 200 athletes, and destroy them until there’s three, four athletes left, and they go, those are our Olympians,

Rob Pickels 08:31

those that could survive the training. You know, the rose to the top, and everyone else got spit out. And

Trevor Connor 08:37

so it wasn’t necessarily that they were employing the best training method, they were just weeding out anybody who wasn’t genetically super gifted. And so that’s my question to you here, is, is this truly a revolutionary new, great method, or is it a case of you have these genetic freaks and these three brothers who not only can tolerate this, but actually thrive doing this that most of us couldn’t handle.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 09:06

Obviously, there have to be genetically talented. I mean, there’s huge potential in these three brothers that has been developed. But it’s also important to say that all these kids, they were running early. You know, Jacob ingebrigtsen, everything that he did was a product of the learning that his father did for the first two brothers. The first two brothers, I have to say, have both had surgeries. They’ve both been pretty significant injuries. The third brother seems to have stayed healthy. So it seems like they first two brothers, although successful in somewhat, were sacrificial lambs in that they did push the ragged edge and they did go over at times, whereas Jakob has managed to stay remarkably healthy. So that shows kind of a progression in learning. But these athletes, these young men, they started running well, they were ski. Also at an early age, but they were at 10 years old. Jakob was doing interval workouts, okay, following his brothers. So he was adapting to these kinds of sessions at a very early age. Now I know firsthand because my daughter moved to Oslo, joined one of the top clubs there with a lot of good female athletes, and I know that, yes, this ingerbitson model with some of these specific sessions, like the 20 times 400 have become kind of the rage, but I have to say, and I’m just going to be honest, for a lot of athletes who did not have that platform, that base, that they have when they’ve tried to do these double threshold sessions, or these 420 times 400 sessions, they have initially had improvement and then they’ve either gotten injured or kind of collapsed, because they don’t necessarily have the fundament, the foundation to tolerate the load and the Huge mechanical load of these sessions. So it has not been a universal victory in Norway with these methods. Let’s

Trevor Connor 11:06

pause for a minute and hear from former pro writer Brent Bookwalter and physiologist Dr Scott fry with their thoughts on whether there’s a magic bullet approach to training or if it’s something deeper.

Brent Bookwalter 11:18

I couldn’t tell you what the Norwegian method is, but my observation, as a lifelong endurance athlete and a professional that competed with a high amount of support and infrastructure and different cutting edge physiologists and coaches around me is that in almost all cases, there’s no magic bullet. There’s no one philosophy or way or process. You know, there’s 10 different ways to skin a cat. I think training is the same way. It’s one of the most important fundamentals of training is the individuality, and that’s why we have, indeed, coaches is to apply individuality and find what works for us. And that Norwegian philosophy, I’m sure can work well for certain people, but I can guarantee that it’s not the only successful way to

Scott Frey 11:56

train. Yeah. I mean, my take on it comes from a background in cross country skiing, and where the Norwegians have been dominating for a very long time, and the ethos in cross country skiing continues to be very similar to what it was 25 years ago when I got into it. A lot of low intensity volume work, punctuated by some very high intensity, but small volume, sorts of dosage.

Rob Pickels 12:25

So, Dr Seiler, I’m interested because you’re obviously deep in it, having lived in Norway for a number of years now, what is the explanation? Why has Norway become so strong? And looking at some data from 92 to 2022 Winter Olympic medals, Norway is outpacing Sweden and Finland combined. Right? Maybe there’s a little bit of geographic rivalry there, and you guys are coming out on top. But if it’s not a specific training method like this, then, then why? Why has Norway just gotten so good at what they do? It

Dr. Stephen Seiler 12:58

starts, I think, in Calgary, 1988 and that was the low point for Norway. They didn’t have a single gold medal, as I recall. And so this was a crisis, an existential crisis, for Norwegian winter sport. And at the same time, it had been announced that they would be the host of the Olympics in 1994 so you had two different events, a low point and a future high point that resulted in the development of what became called Olympia tolpin, which is kind of like the Olympic Training Center in Boulder, I think, or Colorado Springs, sorry, So it was a physical location, but also a competency or a knowledge aggregation, I would say that was started in Oslo, and it was developed in order to try to put together, try to understand best practice, and try to train athletes and do a better job of preparing for the Olympics. Now I want to say that I moved to Norway back in 1995 just after the 94 Olympics, and I had watched on the television from Texas, and was kind of fascinated by their culture and so forth. But when I moved there, what I’ve suddenly discovered was, man, it’s their way of idolizing athletes. Is different, because I came from the southern United States, where it was bigger is better. The athletes were big. They were very muscular. You could just tell by the bulging deltoids that they were American football athlete and the neck and their bench press, and you measured their football ability, or their athletic ability was in the form of their 40 yard dash and their bench press strength, right? And then I moved to Norway, and in the newspapers and in the news, they’re talking about endurance athletes, these scrawny athletes, and they’re idolizing their their popularizing this concept of they are enduring. They are able to go into the forest. For two hours and come back with snot running down their face and win gold medals. And so it was just a different culture. And I found out that that culture goes back to Amundsen and to some of the great explorers, you know, reaching the North Pole and all of this. And it was a combination of people who had endurance. They were good at long term planning. They were process oriented. And they kind of were practical scientists. They had to figure out how to make things work. They would plan together. But then somebody had to ski to Antarctica alone, or across Antarctica alone. And so that was kind of a cultural foundation for being good at endurance. And then when olympiatompin comes along this training center, then they start saying, all right, how do we develop athletes? Well, athletes are whole humans. There has to be a holistic approach. It’s not just physiology or just biomechanics or just nutrition. You’ve got to think of the athlete over a long term and give them the opportunity to develop at the pace they best develop. And you have to let them experiment. You have to let them sample sports. Don’t let mom and dad railroad them into one sport too early, because that’s the sport they did and things like that. So this was a holistic culture that kind of we seem to see, and it seems to be really consistent with success. It works, at least for Norway. And then you start going up the scale of this kind of Maslow’s hierarchy, you might say, and and what we start seeing is, is that by creating this environment and then saying, hey, let’s have lunch together. Let’s discuss across the table. The rowers are talking to the skiers, and here comes a cyclist and a coach of the triathlon team. And there’s this interaction across domains, across sports, across nutrition, you know, the biomechanist is talking with the sports medicine doctor and so forth, that you start to get knowledge sharing across sports, and there’s a synergy that starts happening. And then from that, you start developing a common language. They start saying, You know what? We’ve got, one intensity scale. Let’s agree on it. Zone one is going to mean this, and zone two is going to mean this, and now we’re able to have conversations where, when I say zone three, everybody understands what I’m saying, because we have a shared mental model of the intensity scale. Does that mean? It’s absolutely perfect intensity scale? No, but there is so much value in that common language, that common kind of definitional agreement, that man, it facilitates good discussions. And now we’re getting this synergy, and we’re learning from each other, okay? And now we’re starting from that. We start to see a shared training philosophy. We start realizing, you know what endurance training is more the same than it is different across sports, runners, cyclists, rowers, cross country skiers, we have more to learn from each other than we realize. Yes, there are subtle differences, there are mechanical technical differences, but there are a lot of universalities. So if we can get those right and then understand the details, we can be good in a lot of different sports, and we can learn from the ones that have been kind of the first adopters, maybe the cross country skiers and the rowers, as it were in Norway. So that has developed. And then you standardize testing, you start saying, You know what? It’s a great idea. If we develop some routines where we say, when we do a lactate profile, this is how we do it, and we do it the same way in Lillehammer, Christensen, Trondheim and Oslo. And now when that athlete, if they happen to get tested at different places, they can trust the data, it’s going to be essentially the same, because we’ve agreed on protocols, we’ve agreed on even equipment. We’ve equipped our regional labs with the same stuff, the same biosyn lactate analyzer, the same metabolic carts and so forth. So we’re creating an environment that maximizes, you might say, interoperability, right? And then finally, and we have simple routines that everybody kind of understands the way we’re doing it again, not because it’s perfect, but because we gain so much from consistency across laboratories and universities and so forth. And then finally, I said that mistakes are made. You have plans, you have strategies. You have an altitude camp that you plan on peaking and coming down and getting this many days. And then we’re going to be in the final. It’s going to go, and you miss it. It doesn’t quite go. You weren’t quite where you wanted to be in the final. Okay, well, let’s think through it and see what we misunderstood in our logic, our understanding of altitude responses. Let’s learn from this mistake. This is an intelligent failure. Here, it’ll make us better. You with me. So that’s the pyramid I was

Trevor Connor 20:03

going to say. So what I love is, I’m looking right now at this pyramid that you drew up, which you just described really well. And what I love about it is, when you’re talking about what explains Norway’s success, you’re not saying, Oh, it’s the double threshold, or it’s this particular workout, or it’s just a little thing. When you look at this pyramid, and you break it down, the base of this pyramid, and we’re going to dive a little more detail into each of these parts. The base of this pyramid is cultural, creating that endurance loving culture in the society you were just talking about. The middle of this pyramid is a lot more about sharing and common language. And then you get into some of the details higher up, but it’s not a little trick, it’s not a particular workout, anything like that. As a matter of fact, I don’t even see a mention of the polarized approach in here, which we’ll certainly ask you about. But I would love if we started there diving a little more into this talk about the base of the pyramid. So the two parts were endurance, loving, culture and society and holistic approach to athlete development. This seems very cultural. This is about creating a mindset, or an overall approach to how you work with the athletes, how you view sport.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 21:16

Yeah, and you could almost say that if you are from the far north, if you’re from Scandinavia, and probably northern Canada, would fall into this or Greenland or Iceland, you know what? If you don’t plan ahead, you die. Okay? If you’re not pretty darn good at long game, you are no longer part of the gene pool. You with me? And so it starts, I would almost argue it starts there the culture of understanding that you know what Winter’s coming. You got to be prepared. And if you’re used to that thinking of process, that you got to be in a process, you got to be thinking ahead the whole time. That serves you well in endurance, and then in kind of living in Norway is kind of an endurance event. I can tell you, as a Texan, you’re going to have to shovel some snow. It’s going to be dark at times. You’re not going to have every day sunshine and great weather. So there’s an endurance in kind of your mentality. And then you have these explorers, the Vikings, that just said, I’m going to get in this boat and take off and find some new country. You know, they were not afraid to go into uncharted territory, but they did plan. They did prepare for those voyages. There was enough food on board. They were good at navigation. It wasn’t just on a whim. And that’s also plays into this, that there’s a culture of preparing for these tough, long events and practical science, I would say, you can go back to Fritz nonsen and almanson, and they were figuring out what kind of clothing that, you know, this is a over 100 years ago. They were figuring out what, you know, how are we going to get enough food with us? What’s the right clothing to survive, and so forth, and finding out what fibers and natural products work best, so they were kind of doing science over 100 years ago, applied to some endurance effort. So all of this kind of has played into the culture.

Griffin McMath 23:29

I think it’s no coincidence that Norway is, repeatedly, year after year, one of the happiest countries in the world with principles like this and bringing back the comparison of in America, US praising the big, the bulky, the speed, the force those, I don’t wanna call them vanity metrics, because that’s incredible, and kudos to you if you can bench multiple griffins. Fantastic. But in a place

Dr. Stephen Seiler 23:57

Griffin a measure a unit of it

Griffin McMath 24:01

is a unit of I am a unit of measure.

Rob Pickels 24:05

She’s a force to be reckoned with. Exactly. Thank

Griffin McMath 24:08

you. But I love the way that you talked about this earlier, as in Norway praising the art of enduring and kind of that mentality and how that is something that is big and incredible and something to be admired and raised up on. And in that holistic sense, everything rises, and I love that’s why it’s at the bottom of the pyramid that everything gets built up from those attitudes. Yeah,

Rob Pickels 24:37

the thing that’s difficult for me with this is culture is hard to create, right and Norway is very fortunate that they have this culture that is innate to the people. But as an endurance athlete in the United States, it begs the question of, how do we create. This culture, and I don’t necessarily know that that’s something we could ever answer, not just on this show today, but it is something I believe that is important for continued or improved success in some of these endurance sports moving forward for the Americans, I forget Canada. I don’t care about Canada. You heard of

Trevor Connor 25:18

it started in Calgary? No, it didn’t start in Calgary, Calgary again, but

Rob Pickels 25:29

disappointment started in Calgary. Trevor, yes, I agree with you, Canada, it was the worst time of their life. They went home and were better off.

Trevor Connor 25:42

I set myself up for that one. No response. But I agree with what you’re saying here about the importance of culture. I think I’m going to throw this out here and Dr Sadler, interest in your response. I think when you don’t have an effective sports culture, or you just simply don’t have a sports culture. You might every once, all have an athlete who shows up and they’re able to overcome that and become a great athlete. But I think it’s much harder. And you look at like, I think of tennis, and everybody talks about, when you watch Wimbledon or watch tennis, what country all these athletes are for? And then everyone saw somebody makes a comment of Yeah, but they all live within 10 miles of one another in Florida, because there’s a huge tennis culture down there, and you see all the athletes gravitating to where there is the culture to be part of that is not good enough just to be on a tennis court or on skis training. You need to have that sports culture that helps you flourish? Is that what you’re saying? Dr Seiler,

Dr. Stephen Seiler 26:44

yeah, and these small environments that are generated like in cross country skiing, even within Norway, most of Norway is not producing a lot of great skiers, but there are a few areas in Norway that are producing an incredible over population of amazing athletes. And so then there’s this, what’s the secret sauce in these little environments? There’s a place in Western Norway in America where they have a high school that is a ski specialization, 20 athletes a year, and that high school, in the last 30 years has produced 50 different or more international championship medal winners at one high school. So it is possible to create these little subcultural environments that have all the ingredients, the knowledge, the right conditions, a critical mass of athletes that kind of push each other forward, the coaches and so forth. So Florida and tennis would be an example of that, but we also, even Norway has an overall culture. But even within Norway, there are little places where they’re just punching way above their weight. So you don’t have to have millions of athletes to produce winners. You just have to have the right conditions and enough athletes. And then, if you’re a Norway that doesn’t have gazillions of athletes, like we do in the United States, you take care of them. When you first discover a talent, you’re going to be careful, you’re going to be patient, you’re going to nurture them, maybe a little more carefully, because you don’t have 10 more of that caliber waiting in line like you do in the university swimming system in the United States, or track and field, you have an amazing talent development pipeline in the United States. But I would argue that the difference is the US system, and I was part of it, the university system is in high school university system. Let’s put them together. Is a wonderful talent development pipeline for sports where the age of peak performance is like 2122 you with me, in other words, sprinting, American football, power, explosive sports. It does a wonderful job. And you go out in the Olympics and you compete, you win so many medals. We United States, Norway, the Norwegian model is particularly effective, I would argue, at sports where the age of peak performance is four, five years later, endurance sports have tended to be the peak performance and the sustainability of the careers has tended to be such that peak performance occurs a bit later. It occurs after you graduate college. And so I think this is kind of important, is in the US system, there’s a black hole that happens after college, where you have athletes that are still developing, they’re not at their peak, but now they don’t have that system, the University Athletic Department system, to back them up. And so there’s this bridge they’ve got to cross. There’s a gap year. They’ve got to figure out, how do i Where do I go? Can I go to Boulder? Can I go to Portland, Oregon? Can I go to, you know, where there are some environments for endurance development? I don’t want to disparage the United States. United States is amazing Olympic medal factory, but it’s built up around a. Different timeline, and it’s a faster timeline than maybe endurance sports require. No, I

Trevor Connor 30:07

mean, it’s a good point, even from my own experience growing up in Canada, that was very much part of the culture. And I remember being in high school, I just wanted to be an athlete. That’s all I cared about. I remember at 18 thinking, I’ve only got two, three years left, and then I’m over the hill. I gotta get moving here and now that I’m in the endurance cycling world, like you watch the Tour de France, and you see today winning the tour in his early 20s, and you’re like, you’re still a kid. What are you doing?

Dr. Stephen Seiler 30:33

But you also see 38 year olds competing well and so forth. So it’s a spectrum.

Trevor Connor 30:38

So another part of this base was a holistic approach. So you mentioned not just physical health, but mental health, that this is where you really get into that biopsychosocial model. Is what I’m hearing from what you put together. Yeah. I

Dr. Stephen Seiler 30:54

mean, it starts all the way. I guess one of my pet peeves with the US system is we tend to pressure our kids way too early. We have this little league syndrome where parents are just they want so much for their kids, and they’re driven to that they’re going to be successful and maybe they’ll get a college scholarship. And boy, that would be nice, because college is darn expensive these days, so I’m going to just pump money into their athletic prowess development, and we’re going to get that scholarship, so they end up spending as much money on the way to teenage years, you know, they just put that money in a fund, and you’ll have, you know, college would have been paid for. So there’s some interesting ironies in all of that. But it’s about letting your kids be kids, letting them try stuff, letting them sample different sports. And we’ve even got lots of good data that show in the United States and in other countries that the top athletes tend to have been multi sport athletes. As youngsters, they didn’t just do one thing from day one. They did lots of stuff. They were on the basketball team and the football team and the track team, and then eventually they get to a certain age and they realize, you know what, I don’t like getting hit when I’m going across the middle catching a ball, but I am really good sprinter. I’m going to focus on sprinting. I’m going to drop American football or something like that. There’s a weeding out process, and they find their sport. So even in the United States, if you look at behind a lot of the really successful athletes they have sampled, they’ve done multiple sports, but in Norway, that’s a very important cultural idea, is we’re not going to push our kids into a specific sport. We’re going to let them try. And my daughter was a great example. I probably did six different sports and lasted one day in one of them and many years and another so, you know, it was varying success, but she found what she liked eventually. So that’s part of that holistic idea. And then as those athletes begin to make decisions, they say, You know what, I want to be a cyclist. Okay. Are you aware of the costs? Yeah. And so slowly we start to develop, they start to understand, you know what, if I’m going to be a good cyclist, I’m going to have to increase the training volume, I’m going to have to give up certain things as well. It’s not just what I do, it’s what I’m willing to give up for a period, we often forget that part of the equation with junior athletes. Niels von der pol said this really well, you know? And talked about he became the Junior World Champion in speed skating. And he said, Man, that felt great for about 10 seconds. And then I realized, good grief, is this all it was? This is what I got for everything. I gave up as a young athlete because he gave up a lot of time with his friends. He gave up being that teenager to train twice a day. That has to be a reflective thought process around, what am I ready to give up? What am I ready to do? And you got to give them time to get there. I give you an example. I first moved to Norway. I start coaching a 14 year old kid in rowing, lanky kid. He wasn’t very coordinated in basketball or anything, but when he got in a boat, he just moved beautifully on the water. He was relaxed. He had good technique as a young athlete. And so what’s my American mind thinking, son, summertime, we’re going to work hard. No, in the summer, I’m going to the cabin with mom and dad, you know? So he was like, I thought, oh, man, this kid, he’ll never be, he’s just not going to be, you know? He’s not willing to pay the price. But that young man who’s 40 plus now and a fireman and great guy. Helga tunnson, I’ll shout out to you, but he taught me, because he slowly did more and more, and he was in the running for the Olympic team. Only an injury kept him maybe off the Olympic team at one point, and he trained with two time Olympic gold medalist that he developed, and he went way beyond what I ever saw in that 14 year old, but he understood it was a slower process than I understood. And that’s that holistic approach,

Rob Pickels 34:53

yeah, I think something that’s really pertinent to this holistic approach that you’re mentioning is sort of this balance, right? If you. Want more over here, something over there probably has to be given up so that everything stays in balance. And from one of your presentations, you have this great slide on physical and mental health and how there’s a lot of considerations, and you list off work and school, stress, infection, relationship, stress, sleep, nutrition, injuries, parenting, stress, all of these things. And what I often find in athletes is when things aren’t going well, when these stressors are entering their life, if anything, they tend to double down on training as a means to deal with their stress, as a means to cope with their stress. And when we’re thinking about this from a holistic standpoint and balance, that might not be the best time to be stimulating adaptation because of everything else that’s happening in your life and in your body.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 35:50

Yeah, and there’s this model, the so called stress bucket model, which is a nice conceptualization in the fact is that our evolutionary heritage didn’t really equip us to differentiate the stress of a job from the stress of the lion chasing us on the Savannah, and so it all kind of goes into one bucket, some of the physiological responses to stress, they’re universal, and they add up. And so as coaches, I guess when we’re working with young athletes that are coming to us, you know, they come into the coach’s office, or they come onto the field and they’re ready to train. They are this whole person who happens to also have parents that may be just stressing the crap out of them. They also maybe are not sleeping so much as well as they should. They’re not eating quite right. They’ve got issues going on. So they’re a whole person. And there’s other sources of stress. And there’s even research to show from the United States that scholarship athletes during exam periods, they are less responsive to high intensity work bouts, to hard string sessions, they recover slower. So there is clearly a psycho biological connection. You can literally measure it that if this athlete is stressed mentally, they will respond differently physically. So I think that’s a really powerful thing to understand. And guys like me who are trained in physiology, we probably come to this a bit late. We start out thinking, I can just cut off the head and just focus on the body, but you can’t. They’re so fundamentally intertwined. And I believe that great coaches get that they understand it and they work within it. You know, try to understand the mind of this athlete and how their mind works and how their body works. Can

Griffin McMath 37:41

I ask? You know, bridging this holistic perspective at the base of the individual and looking at just above that when we start to relate to other people, mental health is just the state of our mental health. You could have really great mental health and you could have really bad mental health, but mental fitness is this kind of taking that into action, like, how is your mental fitness? What techniques are you doing? So what do you think are a few of the more common mental fitness behaviors of athletes in Norway that might be different, that allows them to be these happy, enduring, successful athletes?

Dr. Stephen Seiler 38:21

Well, that’s a great question, and I don’t like it very much because I don’t feel really well.

Rob Pickels 38:28

He’s like mitochondria. No, could you see what? No,

Dr. Stephen Seiler 38:32

Griffin. Do you not see on my face? I’m a mitochondria guy you’re bringing up. But no, you know, I do have kids, and I do have a daughter, and I think giving yourself a hug is part of it, is being willing to pat yourself on the back and say, You know what, I got my stuff, my daughter. You know she’ll be the first say, You know what, Dad, you didn’t realize it, but I’m OCD. I’ve got a bit OCD, but it’s my superpower. If I use it correctly, it’s being allowed to that, you know, everyone’s different, and that, I think maybe in Norway there’s more acceptance for that. Hey, we’re all kind of on a spectrum. Okay, and so Stephen, he’s got his stuff, but we love him anyway, and he can thrive. He can do great, but we just have to accept that he’s going to be a little quirky. He’s going to have a different approach than Jonas over here. Because Jonas man, he is, just got a different brain. And so I think there’s that acceptance of difference is kind of important. It’s not perfect, but in Norway, it’s not perfect anywhere. And mental health is a relative term. And I’ve had to talk about this because I say physical and mental health that that’s the platform for success. Well, obviously we all have our stuff, but like you say, it’s a relative thing, is within the context of Steven Seiler and my stuff and my issues and my. Experiences. Am I able to trust? I think one of the things I talked about in that lecture is trust everything in this model builds on trust in relationships, coach, athlete, trust interdisciplinary, trust across biomechanics, physiology, nutrition, that we can talk to each other and trust each other across disciplines and so forth. We wish each other well, we’re not going to just try to beat each other up when they leave the room. Does that make sense? Or we also trust that if I’m having a bad day as an athlete, I can say that to the coach without fear of reprisal, without fear that, oh, you’re weak. I’ll bring in joy. He’s tough. He’ll give me a great effort every day. He never complains. I may be a fantastic athlete, but I’m having a bad day. If I can’t tell you that and trust that you are not going to belittle me for my honesty, then that’s not going to be a long term growth relationship. So that’s part of it, is trusting to be able to be honest. You know, if we go over to women’s sport and we talk about the menstrual cycle, and is that an issue and that? Well, one thing for sure is coaches and athletes will talk about is we have to be able to have that conversation. We have to trust each other enough to have that conversation, male coach, female athlete, or female coach, female athlete, trust each other. So anyway, that’s, for me, a so important part of that holistic approach.

Trevor Connor 41:35

Somewhere out there. GRANT holicy, the hairs in the back of his neck just stood up, and he’s like, I needed somewhere

Griffin McMath 41:42

on vacation, somewhere he is like rising to the occasion right now, there’s

Rob Pickels 41:46

a slide with a big purple joy on it, and just homage to grant, I suppose.

Trevor Connor 41:50

So I really want to dive into the middle of this triangle, so it’s got three parts. First one is idea and knowledge sharing across sports. Second one is development of a common endurance training language across sports, and finally, emergence of a consistent shared training philosophy. So the key theme here is sharing, and I think this is a really important one for us to discuss, particularly here in North America, because with the professionalization of coaching, you’re really seeing coaches saying, I don’t want to share, I don’t want to give you my secrets. I want to keep secretive about this. But what you’re really saying is, part of the secret sauce in Norway is that willingness to share, to develop, as a nation, the best athletes in the sports Yeah, and

Dr. Stephen Seiler 42:40

you could even go down to the individual level that eventually we’ve seen that high performance athletes, gold medal winning athletes, have been willing to give their data, give all of their training diaries to leadership and say, hey, if this helps you understand the process better, what happened, how I Did things, how I succeeded when I failed, awesome. Here it is. Here are my diaries. Olaf Tufte, two time gold medal winner in the single skulls in rowing, and a hardcore dude. I mean, this guy challenges. He was tough, but he said, Hey, I can tell you exactly what I did. Here it is, just because I tell you what I did doesn’t mean you can do it. So there is that confidence in saying it’s one thing to know what I did, it’s another thing to be able to do it yourself. I’ve seen that interesting culture here is that I may have a competitive advantage with some new technology or some secret method for maybe six months, maybe maybe an Olympic cycle that will give you a certain advantage, but then it leaks out. So it’s much better to share, because you’ll get more back. And that’s kind of biblical. I’m not a biblical guy anymore, but I learned that down in the southern United States is, if you give you’ll get back more. And I think we’ve started realizing, you know what. That’s actually true. It works.

Trevor Connor 44:03

So what would be your recommendation to something like the North American system? Is this something that you think we could learn from? Well,

Dr. Stephen Seiler 44:11

I think the college and university system is going to continue to be the dominant talent development pathway, junior high school, high school, college. It’s kind of it’s ingrained, and it’s going to serve you well in a lot of sports. But I do think there are some sports. I think some of the endurance sports are exemplary. Of this is that you would probably benefit from having some physical locations like you kind of do. You have Colorado Springs, you have San Diego and rowing, you have some other places, you know, where there’s Oregon, may be in running, where there’s kind of this aggregation of competency or expertise and athletes and good training conditions and so forth and then. But there has to be developed in a sharing kind of mentality. And that’s the next step. Is not being afraid to get. Something away, because then you don’t get those benefits. But I think you could see that. I see some of it in the United States, but you’ve got to give it some extra investment to make it really work.

Rob Pickels 45:12

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Trevor Connor 45:51

so now we’re at the top of the pyramid, and there’s two elements up here. One is simple, accurate testing routines, and the last one is intelligent failures. I’m really interested in talking about intelligent failures, but let’s first touch on the simple, accurate testing routines. Why is that an element of this pyramid?

Dr. Stephen Seiler 46:12

Well, you need to have some objective markers, and we’ve seen this in rowing. I’ve worked with some of the talent development people in the rowing and I said, you know, when we’ve had clear testing schedules where every year, at certain times of the year, we’re collecting, you know, the athletes are doing these specific tests, it seems to facilitate the process, but those routines have to be consistent most of our sports, but also the physiological laboratories, where they have The treadmills and the cycling ergometers, in the double polling for skiing or whatever they have, we’ve tried to be consistent in both the devices that we choose and in the actual protocols that we use, and in a sense, the interpretive process. How are we looking at lactate profiling, and again, there’s this issue, because in the scientific literature, the sports scientists will beat each other up around which is the ideal way to identify the second lactate turn point, right? You know which method, and that discussion will never come to an end. It’s a cottage industry, and I guess it’ll support some research studies, but for the athletes and for coaches, that’s not useful. And so instead, we say, You know what? Let’s just agree it’s not perfect, but the advantages we get from a standard, simple way of testing that’s repeatable, understandable and portable, meaning we can move it’s going to be the same in different places. That has so many advantages that whether or not it’s the 1% plus minus Perfect answer is less important. And I think that is the difference between the practical science of getting athletes ready to win and the impractical science of beating each other up in journals. Does that make sense? It

Trevor Connor 48:13

does. And I guess this also goes back to when we were talking about sharing part of what you said there was having a common endurance language. And in your slides, you showed training zones. There’s a Norwegian Federation set of training zones that I would imagine a lot of the coaches use to give that common language. So it makes sense that you would also want to standardize how the testing is done, so that you’re getting to those zones and that language the same way.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 48:40

So they all kind of go together. The testing methodology being standardized, a universal training process, and I’ve described it as polarized training. I think it’s polarization of stress, perhaps even more than intensity itself. All of this kind of goes hand in hand, the philosophy, the intensity zones and the testing methodology are part of a package, a toolbox that seems to work well, that we’re able to use in running, in cycling, in rowing and so forth, and then tweak because, let’s face it, the mechanical load for Running is different than the mechanical load for cycling. So yes, we have to understand and adopt to these differences, but a lot of the basics are the same, so we can fix a lot of problems even before they’re a problem by just understanding these basics and then we fine tune.

Trevor Connor 49:37

So let’s get to the part that I’ve really been interested in is this idea of intelligent failures. And you’ve heard me say this, I’m a big believer in failure. I think one of the mistakes we’re making right now is to be avoidant of failure. With young athletes. We don’t want to disappoint them, we don’t want them to be upset, so we never want them to fail. I’m a believer that failure is a. Essential part of the learning and development process is that what you’re getting at, or are you talking about something different here?

Dr. Stephen Seiler 50:05

Yeah, I think you can look at it at different levels. But those of us who are parents, we often think, yeah, you gotta let the kid fall down and scrape their knee, but I’m not gonna let them fall off a 10 meter wall. Does that make sense? I’m gonna control the magnitude of the failures. So I want to let them learn by failing at small things that they can overcome. And that’s a balance. As a scientist, I let my students as an advisor. I’ll let them struggle a bit and figure out how to do things. And that’s can be an intelligent failure as a coach, if I’m pretty sure this is the wrong approach, but they’re adamant about it, I’ll let them do something, let them try. So that’s one way of thinking about intelligent failures. Is using failures. As you say, we learn from failures far more quickly than we learn from success. But then also, when you’re putting together an Olympic team, and you’re headed for the Olympics in Paris right now, and you have made some very clear decisions about what’s the altitude training process going to be. When do we arrive in Paris? How many days do we leave altitude and allow time to recover and be ready for peak performance in the 5000 meter first round, those are decisions made on an interpretation of past experience, past data, existing research that we’re going to make our best guess. And it may not always be correct. We may realize you know what it looks like. We came down too soon, or we didn’t come down early enough from altitude. Several of our athletes, they were at peak performance two days late. Okay, we gotta learn from that. We gotta figure out, how did we misinterpret the data, or we didn’t take this athlete to the Olympics? Said, no, they’re too inexperienced, but then they win the darn World Championships. You know, six months later looks like we missed that one. What can we learn from this? Why did we underestimate this young athlete? Why didn’t we think they were ready when clearly they were ready for prime time? And that’s happened in Norway again. These fall under that yeah, we can beat ourselves up about it, or we can learn from learn from that situation, and say, We got to maybe widen the net on how many young athletes we’re bringing in, because we don’t know who’s going to end up being ready for prime time and when, as much as we think so. These are the kinds of intelligent failures, and this was documented by the business school because they were thinking in terms of models that they’re used to. And so it really didn’t come out of the sports environment. It came from outsiders looking at how Olympia toppin was working from their perspective and learning models.

Trevor Connor 52:52

Last question I have for you, what I find really interesting about this is how this is your pyramid of explaining Norway’s success, nowhere in there is anything specific about training you’re known for, the polarized approach that’s nowhere to be found in the pyramid. Well,

Dr. Stephen Seiler 53:13

I do write a consistent training philosophy. I just don’t go into details on exactly what that philosophy is, but yeah, I think what that philosophy obviously, is we’ve talked about ad nauseam in terms of saying, well, it’s about frequency, duration and then intensity. It’s about consistency. It’s about using the green zone and so forth. So I want to be careful of trying not to oversell polarized training, but at least I would say polarized stress, polarized session load, seems to be kind of a universal that we’re seeing, that the rowers, the skiers and so forth, they can’t go hard every day, and they understand this, but they can use duration in their favor, so they can stay below the so called stress radar, and they can accumulate duration and adaptations. So that philosophy is very consistent, whether it’s ingebridson running 180 kilometers a week as a middle distance runner, or the skiers training 25 hours a week and so forth. There’s a great deal of consistency in how they’re approaching that training process, and it’s consistent with that idea of a polarized model.

Trevor Connor 54:31

So here, then is the question, so you say consistent training approach, is this a case of the training is really important. But by this point, most people really have this figured out. So what you’re really talking about in this pyramid is, once you’ve got the training figured out, how to just take it to that next level, or are you saying that these are the really important elements, and we probably put too much of a focus on the particulars of the training. Training. And if you have all these elements, there’s a lot of ways to get there with the training. The details of the training aren’t as important as we might think.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 55:07

Well, it depends on whether you’re thinking the many or the one. And so you need to start by thinking the many. Meaning. I want to try to have a system or a development process that is going to let athletes flourish. We’re going to try to avoid early departures from the sport. We’re going to give them time to develop. We’re not going to sift them out too early. And we think we have some process ideas that help support that, that we’re going to do certain things, pretty consistently, it’s going to be good for 90% of the athletes, 90% of the time. You might want to put it that way. And then we’re going to reach a certain point where, yes, there’s going to have to be individualization. We’re going to have to forge the optimization process for this athlete, this 400 meter hurdler that is going to try to do what hasn’t been done in three decades, break that world record. It can be done, but that’s a highly individual process, and that athlete had come way up that pyramid, and then that last part, boy, that is just the magic happening. And that’s true everywhere is the right coach, the right environment, the right relationships and the right decisions that are made that are the difference between gold and fourth place, and we’re just trying to increase the chances that that happens,

Rob Pickels 56:35

yeah, Trevor, I think too, that you can have this shared knowledge of training that can help a lot of people be successful as part of your athlete development program. But each level of this pyramid also goes back to the training as well, because there’s more than just training intensity distribution that needs to be followed. There’s execution, there’s consistency, there is the mental strength it takes to get your training day in and day out. There is avoiding sickness. There’s knowing recovery modalities so that you can handle the training load. All of that, and that is, I think, what this pyramid is encompassing, and it enhances the training. And without all of those blocks and steps, the training can’t be what the training ought to be for success.

Griffin McMath 57:21

So this whole time we’re talking about Norway and what they’re doing right to find this type of success. My question, just from taking a step back, are there any other countries or regions that are getting it right in this type of way?

Dr. Stephen Seiler 57:37

Oh, great question. I think there are some of the ones that come to mind, the Netherlands, I think does a great job. You know, they’re more of a Summer Olympics country, although they do have speed skating. But I’m impressed with the Netherlands and their process. And I would also say New Zealand, for sure, is a very small country, even smaller than Norway. They punch above their weight. I think Australia, still, you have to say, is a great sports nation that isn’t that big in population, and historically, I would say Cuba. You know, not everyone thinks of Cuba, but my goodness, given the low financial situation, the very modest facilities, they still produce an amazing number of gold medals in sports like boxing and track and field and so forth, wrestling. So yeah, there are, for sure, other really strong, small nations,

Trevor Connor 58:32

another country I’ll throw in there. And we did an episode on this, so we’ll put in the show notes. I can’t remember which number is, Ethiopia, with their runners. And when we talked about that episode, they were very low tech. You’d have a whole club that would have a single heart rate monitor that one person would carry around and lead the runs. And when we talked about their success, it was much more about this holistic approach, this sharing mentality. There was a huge culture there of you never put the individual before the group, even when you had Olympic runners that were getting gold medals, putting them ahead of the team ahead of the group, was just culturally wrong. You just didn’t do that.

Griffin McMath 59:13

So what I’m hearing us say is that we have to record the next two episodes in Cuba and in New Zealand. Tyler. We’ll meet you there. I’ll meet you there. That’s my take home today.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 59:24

Might be a little bit difficult to get into Cuba right now, but New Zealand is doable, for sure. I’m not sure what’s the climate in Cuba. Don’t

Griffin McMath 59:31

worry about how I get in. I’ll

Trevor Connor 59:33

get in there.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 59:34

I’ll go. Okay,

Griffin McMath 59:35

don’t you worry. I’ll get in

Trevor Connor 59:39

all right. Well, I think it’s time to wrap this up. So we’re going to go into our take homes. Before we do that, we have our question for the forum, so we’ll put this up. Please go to the forum and give us your answer. And here’s the question, after listening to Dr Seiler explanation, what do you think you personally do? Or your national federation should learn from Norway’s example. So please go to the forum and give us your response. And with that, it’s time for our take homes. Dr Seiler, you know the routine here, so we’ll throw it to you. You’ve put together this pyramid. You’ve tried to answer this question of, What is the secret sauce in Norway? What is your big message, your big take home?

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:00:25

Well, I’m going to say this. Kids are not small adults. Let kids be kids. And to all the parents out there, sports is a wonderful arena for development, but let it be the kids that are making the decisions on how they use it and develop. And I think if you start there, then a lot of those other things are going to happen in a good way, but I just see from the outside that we’re forgetting that we’re creating traveling road teams at eight years old and so forth. That is not a recipe for success.

Rob Pickels 1:01:06

I would like to go next because I love sauces, and based on a past episode, I can’t quite keep up with Dr Seiler on the spiciness of my sauces. But in this situation, secret sauce is not necessarily the answer. We know that there is not a specific workout. We know that more is not better, but oftentimes we can regress into very simplistic thinking like that, when really our thinking ought to be holistic about what we’re doing, what we’re doing in the context of all the other things we’re doing, but also what we’re doing in the context of our lives, in our connections with other people, in our training groups and within our country and our culture. And so I implore people to think about the big picture. Center yourself on the big picture, not on these simplistic ideas that are easy in the moment. I

Griffin McMath 1:02:02

think something that we kind of touched on a little bit smack dab in the middle of this pyramid is really where we’re looking at establishing commonality. And as someone who studied anthropology way back when, when you’re trying to understand another culture or perspective, first, one of the things you try to do is understand how to communicate, and how people communicate with one another, and what that language actually looks like. So I really loved how that was touched on, and how just establishing common language, not only across and ideas and knowledge across sports, but also using this specific training language, at that point, you’re moving as an entire sport, as a nation, in greater strides. And I really liked that part. Think that that’s a neat thing we can build off of.

Trevor Connor 1:02:51

So my take home is very similar to Rob’s. You know, we started this episode talking about what’s been hitting the press, the media, what people have been excited about is this Norwegian method 2.0 which is this what the ingebrigtsen brothers are employing, which is this double day threshold type workout? And Steven, what really caught my attention is when I asked you about the fact that you didn’t put anything about training methodology on the pyramid, your point was by this level, it gets very individualized. And so I think what people are thinking of is this amazing 2.0 methodology is really just what works well for these brothers and nothing more. It’s not something magical. It’s not what’s going to get everybody to the next level? It’s just the individualization that worked potentially for them. And what I’m hearing from all this is, what will take a country to another level, what will get it punching above its weight is much more holistic, and that’s where I’m glad Rob brought that up and Dr, saila, you brought that up in your pyramid, but it’s really it’s a culture. It’s addressing everything. It’s a shared language. It’s working together. I think those are the hard things, not figuring out some magical workout.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:04:13

I just do want to say that in defense of the ingebrigtsen brothers and their father and Marius Balkan, and that is most of what they’re doing fits within this pyramid. They’re using, you know, they’re doing those same things. They’re using that green. So there are days when Jacob ingebrigtsen, one of the fastest distance runners alive, is running easy. You know, a lot of the days. So it’s in the details, yes, but even in that which seems to be kind of a special environment, most of what they’re doing is highly consistent with how the other athletes in Norway have been reaching the gold medals, but they’re just tweaking a few things, and those are getting marketed in an extraordinary way.

Trevor Connor 1:04:57

No, and I don’t want to sound like I’m criticizing them close. Clearly they’re doing pretty much everything right, considering how well he’s performing. The point that I think is important to say here is it’s right for them, but going to that level of detail, you have to be really careful about saying that’s right for everybody. Oh,

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:05:14

and it’s super dangerous to copy the processes of elite performers singularities, because almost by definition, they are unusual,

Trevor Connor 1:05:27

absolutely. Well, another really enjoyable conversation. Dr Seiler, thanks again for joining us.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:05:33

Thank you. You know we weren’t able to hide I’m wearing the same shirt from a couple hours ago. It was supposed to be a month and a half ago, but I hope the listeners will bear with us. For that,

1:05:42

I own the fact that I told everybody not to reference the previous episode we just recorded, and then two minutes in, I did it. I just gave the secret away.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:05:54

This just shows that we follow this philosophy. We’ve got endurance on our side. We have carried on. We’ve soldiered through. You know, now I’m gonna go work out. I have become a Norwegian.

Trevor Connor 1:06:08

It’s what, nine o’clock at night. There, 730 soon, 730

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:06:11

at night.

Trevor Connor 1:06:12

So that’s not too bad.

Rob Pickels 1:06:14

Have any of you seen the Leroy Jenkins online clip? It’s funny. It’s like this online thing. These guys are playing World of Warcraft or something together, and they’re all huddled around, and they’re making up a plan, like, we’re gonna do this, and then we’re gonna do that. And this one guy goes, Leroy Jenkins, and he, like, runs into the room and starts and they’re all like, god damn it, Leroy. And that was your Leroy Jenkins. Had a plan, and then Trevor, just like, did this,

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:06:45

yep, but see, honesty is the best policy, guys. So we were upfront about it. We did two episodes in one run. It was an endurance effort, but we made it to the end of the line. Made it.

1:06:58

We got there. Gonna

Rob Pickels 1:06:59

endurance myself out of here right now.

Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:07:04

All right, I’m out of here. Too.

Rob Pickels 1:07:05

Good seeing you. Bye. Bye. That

Trevor Connor 1:07:07

was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a radian or review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at ad fast talk labs, join the conversation@forums.fasttalklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for Dr Steven Seiler, Dr Scott fry Brent Bookwalter, Dr Griffin, McMath and coach. Rob pickles, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.