Lately, we’ve been talking a lot on Fast Talk about some of the fundamental concepts of training, such as supercompensation and homeostasis. At the heart of these concepts is something that is just as critical to training – the concept of progressive overload. In short, progressive overload refers to our need, as athletes, to keep hitting our bodies with progressively bigger stresses to force an adaptation.
That’s easy to do when we’re unfit, but as we progress in sport, it gets harder and harder to bring about those heavier workloads. The simplest ways to increase the overload are to add volume or intensity. But most of us have a limit on volume, and too much intensity can push us into overtraining.
So, the question becomes: Do we inevitably hit a point where we can’t produce a big enough overload, and we plateau? Or, put another way, once we’re producing as much TSS as we possibly can each week, are we doing all that we can do to improve?
The answer to that question is “sort of.” Here to discuss this topic is elite coach and performance director for the Project Echelon professional cycling team, Isaiah Newkirk. Yes, as he explains, we do hit a limit on volume and intensity. But, as he quickly notes, there are still opportunities to raise our level by targeting what’s less familiar to our bodies. For example, eventually we’re not going to get enough of an overload from another four-hour ride, but adding a bunch of time to that four-hour ride at cadences our legs are not familiar with may give us a novel overload.
Going back to TSS: A ride might produce 200 TSS, but if our body is familiar with it, we may get few gains despite the big TSS. But something completely unfamiliar to our body that only produces 70 TSS may actually bring about much bigger gains. We sometimes think the goal is to produce as much TSS as possible, but the actual goal is to maximize the adaptations from the TSS we can produce.
Newkirk will discuss these nuances with us. He’ll talk about:
- What is meant by progressive overload
- What happens when we hit our volume and intensity plateau
- How to use block training and fatigue weeks to get a more focused overload
- Ways to add unfamiliarity to your regular training
- Ways to change up your interval work to keep getting a training stimulus out of them.
Joining Newkirk, we’ll hear from Dr. Kate Bennett, a clinical psychologist and founder of Athlete Insight, a company that serves the psychological needs of athletes. We’ll also hear from recent Alpe d’Huez Strava record holder Jack Burke who shares his thoughts on how pros keep producing overloads.
So, get ready for something that’s hopefully bigger than your body can handle, and let’s make you fast!
References:
- Andrade-Souza et al., 2019; AUBRY, HAUSSWIRTH, LOUIS, COUTTS, & MEUR, 2014; Bell et al., 2023; Bellinger, 2020; Beltrami, Roos, Ow, & Spengler, 2021; Breil, Weber, Koller, Hoppeler, & Vogt, 2010; Clark, Costa, O’Brien, Guglielmo, & Paton, 2014; Halson et al., 2002; Hansen & Rønnestad, 2017; Hawley & Bishop, 2021; Issurin, 2010, 2013; Komnos & Menetrey, 2022; PATON & HOPKINS, 2005; Paton, Hopkins, & Cook, 2009; Plotkin et al., 2022; Rønnestad et al., 2014; Seiler, Jøranson, Olesen, & Hetlelid, 2011; Tanaka, 1994)
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:04
Hello and Welcome to Fast talk your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor, here with Chris case, we’ve been talking a lot lately about some of the fundamental concepts of training, such as Super compensation and homeostasis. The heart of all this is something that’s just as critical to training the concept of progressive overloads. In short, we need to keep hitting our bodies with progressively bigger stresses to force an adaptation. That’s easy to do when we’re unfit, but over time, it gets harder and harder, because we need a bigger and bigger load. Simplest way to increase the overload is to add volume or intensity, but most of us have a limit on volume, and too much intensity can push us into over training. So the question is, do we hit a point where we can’t produce big enough and overload and we simply plateau, or put another way, once we’re producing as much TSS as we possibly can each week? Are we doing all that we can do? The answer to that question is sort of here to explain why is top coach and performance director for the project e salon professional cycling team. Isaiah Newkirk, yes, we do hit a limit on volume and intensity, but the show may be opportunities to raise our level by targeting what’s less familiar to our bodies. For example, eventually you’re not going to get enough of an overload out of another four hour ride, but adding a bunch of time to that four hour ride cadences your legs are not familiar with may give you an overload in a different way, going back to the TSS question, or I might produce 200 TSS, but if your body is familiar with it, you may get little gains despite the big TSS, but something completely unfamiliar to your body that only produces 70 TSS may actually bring about much bigger gains. We sometimes think the goal is to produce as much TSS as possible, but the actual goal is to maximize the adaptations from the TSS we can produce. Newkirk will discuss these nuances with us. He’ll talk about what is meant by progressive overload, what happens when we hit our volume and intensity plateau, how to use block training and fatigue weeks to get a more focused overload. Ways to add unfamiliarity to your regular training and ways to change up your interval work, to keep getting a training stimulus out of them. Joining new Kirk, we’ll hear from Dr Kate Bennett, clinical psychologist and founder of athlete insight, a company that serves the psychological needs of athletes. We’ll also hear from recent ALP the West Strava record holder Jack Burke, who shares his thoughts and how pros keep producing overloads. So get ready for something that’s hopefully bigger than your body can handle, and let’s make you fast. Well, Isaiah, pleasure to have you on the show. I believe this is the first time we’ve had to join us.
Isaiah Newkirk 02:33
It is the first time, yeah, it’s good to see you guys and good to be here. Welcome.
Trevor Connor 02:37
I’ve been looking forward to this. So you gave a presentation for USAC coaches, was it about a month ago, a month and a half ago? Yeah, yeah, somewhere in that range which thoroughly enjoyed. You were talking about how to customize training plans, as I remember, and I actually I was meant to be there just to make sure nothing broke. But actually, you were given such good advice, I stopped doing my job and just started taking notes about what you were saying. Like, this is good stuff. Goal accomplished. Great. So excited to hear what you have to say about this very small topic of progressive overload, which, as we know, is just a minor thing in training, right?
Isaiah Newkirk 03:14
Completely minor, not hyper critical. Or, you know what training is all about? So, no, not at all, yep. So we’ll get it
Trevor Connor 03:21
covered in 1520 minutes. It’ll be a short episode, perfect. So yeah, we are talking about progressive overload, and we’ll have you give us a good definition in a minute. But the idea here is that we need to overload our bodies in order to produce an adaptation. We’ve been talking about that a lot on the show lately, but a lot of us have limited time. So really, the gist the purpose of this episode is to talk about, do you hit a point where you just can’t do enough of an overload anymore and you’re going to plateau unless you can find more time? Or are there ways to get around this? Are there ways to find an overload or to continue to produce adaptations when you only have 1011, 12 hours a week, whatever it happens to be, maybe
Chris Case 04:07
even eight or six, or six, yes or three,
Trevor Connor 04:11
what I’ve been doing lately, or three, three, yes. So let’s start with give us just the overview of what we mean by progressive overload and why it’s important.
Isaiah Newkirk 04:23
Yeah, sure, you have to tackle what you were saying is such a minor issue in training. I mean, it essentially is how we get stronger as athletes. We throw stimulus or stress at an athlete and then they respond to it, and that is kind of the root of training. To go further and beyond that, outside of just adapting to that single stressor, you add progressive stress, and it’s important to achieve that, and to continue to achieve that, otherwise you will plateau. You will not become stronger as an athlete. You will not grow to respond to greater and greater just. Stress. Now, as you mentioned, stress can’t just progressively continue till the end of time eventually. That needs to be managed, either through schedule and what you have available, or it has to be through also dosing recovery so that you can then respond to that stress as well. So it’s pretty critical, and at the root of it, it probably is what training plan design is, pretty much what it’s all about. Yeah, exactly. So we actually talked about this on an episode not all that long ago, where we were explaining the concept of homeostasis, which is the body likes to stay in homeostasis. So training is about throwing a stressor big enough on homeostasis that your body goes I don’t like that. You broke homeostasis. So I’m going to adapt so that the next time you throw stress at me like that, I’m gonna be able to handle it. So that is the whole idea of the progressive of the first time you throw that stressor at your body, it’s too much. It breaks homeostasis. But quickly your body adjusts, and at some point that stress your body’s gonna go that’s fine. I don’t need to adapt anymore. So then you have to throw a bigger stressor, right? Yeah, yep, that’s right, exactly right. And what are the different things that we can manipulate in order to produce that increased stress? Yeah, and I think that’s like the crux of it. And I think I was actually talking to a potential new athlete this morning about this, where it’s a athletes tend to get in their head that volume is the only answer there, and that’s the only stressor that needs to be continually progressed. And there’s so many other avenues, or modalities, or just like functions within having that progressive stress and overload, and that could be intensity, that could be just targeting specific parameters. You know, I think we’re going to get into how to maybe juggle maxed volume. So like you, maybe you don’t have 30 hours to work with. Or the new new that’s being talked about so much lately is 40 is the new 30. But the, you know, the the there’s so many different ways of still getting that homeostasis response, but you have to get creative with it and really dive into the weeds. And I think that’s when, like that coach, athlete relationship can really maximize that potential, but you really have to have all the variables to really do that maximization? Yeah,
Trevor Connor 07:22
and that’s interesting. You said most people think of volume because I had in my head that most people go to intensity. Interesting. I just go, I need to do more intensity. I need to do it harder. Yeah, no, I did the intervals last week at 280 watts, and now I got to do it 300 watts, and that produces a bigger stressor. Find
Isaiah Newkirk 07:38
it interesting that most of the time when I talk to especially athletes that I’m maybe just starting with or just having a good conversation with, they start with a conversation oftentimes of like, well, I’m not I’m not a professional. So like, do you work with non professionals? I won’t be able to train 20 to 30 hours a week? Do you still think that I can be coached? You still think I can be stronger? And usually then we get into this whole pattern of like, well, believe me, there’s so many other ways of doing this than just volume, but that’s interesting that you think that a lot of people come from the intensity side,
Trevor Connor 08:09
you’re probably right. The other reason I think I went there is I did do a PubMed search ahead of this episode to find some good studies on progressive overload. And what was interesting is I found almost nothing on endurance sports, but tons and tons of research on strength training in the gym and when you’re in the weight room, what do you typically do as you get stronger, you pick up a heavier weight and do similar reps. And I actually did read one really interesting study, and we’ll put all these in the show notes, where they tried that with weight training, where they had one group increase the weight they were using, I think it was over an eight week period of time. And the other group stayed with the same weight, but increased their reps, and they actually saw pretty similar gains, you know, very slight differences, but they weren’t even at the level of significance.
Chris Case 08:57
It’s funny, you Isaiah, you say volume, Trevor says intensity. And I’m not saying, I’m actually thinking this way, but there is kind of this third thing, which is frequency, stacking days together to create that stimulus. And that, in some ways, I think people also think of that, if they’re familiar with, like a training block or a training camp or something like that, where the progression comes from consecutive days of whether it’s volume or intensity or both, and so that’s another way that you can manipulate training in order to find that overload.
Trevor Connor 09:31
I think another really important thing to point out here as we get into this conversation is this is where everybody’s very individual. That one study I did find on endurance sports, they were actually looking at the individual variation, where they basically gave endurance athletes, runners a workout that they had them do, and they would increase the pace at which they would do the run. And what you saw, I mean, there were two athletes that saw extraordinary gains in their performance. After this period of time, but only 63% of the athletes actually saw significant improvements. Actually, one was worse by the end of the study. So we consider and go, Well, this produces adaptations. That produces adaptations. But you might be in that 40% that actually, no, that’s not going to do much for you? Yeah,
Isaiah Newkirk 10:20
and I think that’s a huge part of it too, is you could try a certain direction on this stuff. So like, let’s say you have five hours available to you, and you’re trying to maximize that five hours. And of course, I’m picking the extreme here because it’s the easiest to talk about. But the like, you have that five hours, you could choose a different direction that could say, like, Okay, well, we’re going to string together five days in a row, we’re going to work that, or we’re actually going to make that five hours only in one day, like you could try all these different ways. And a while back when I used to run some coaching round tables, we would talk about these different scenarios that were super extreme and just to challenge each other and see what direction we would go. And it was super fun because it’s, it is kind of the case dependent where you know, you go back to the the question that you know, or the response that every coach gives, which it depends, but it’s like, you know, outside of that, you do need to kind of experiment, play around and see what kind of works for each athlete, which is honestly the fun part
Trevor Connor 11:14
about coaching. Yeah, that’s the art form. Yeah. Yeah. So we’ve talked about there is a limit on volume. Most of us just have so many hours that we can dedicate per week. So even if you could see further gains from adding five, six hours, it’s just not an option for you. So what about intensity? Is there such a thing as just too much intensity? Yeah, I mean,
Isaiah Newkirk 11:35
I think there’s, like, the classic quote of, there’s not too much intensity, there’s just not enough recovery. And I think that’s, that’s fine, I too, because, like, if you have a certain amount of time to devote to training, you probably have a certain amount of time to devote to recovery, too. And I think that that’s kind of the give and take, is there, is that, like, all right, we’re trying to get a response and get we’re going to throw an overload at you just to receive that response. But when is the breaking point? When is too much? And then when you hit that breaking point, you all of a sudden need to take a week where you’re taking it easy to get back out of that hole. And I think that’s when, like, taking your time to explore that is definitely worthwhile. And then when I would look really intensely at an athlete’s history and their background, and then what they’re coming to the table with, like, do they have a leg to stand on with their training are they just like stepping off the couch, and they’ve never done it before, and like you know, that means that their response is going to be really fast, but that also means their breaking point’s probably going to be pretty fast too. So it’s the that combination of finding that point, but it’s difficult to find that point, and I think it’s but you’re totally right. There is a, definitely a point where you’re at this is too much. Actually,
Trevor Connor 12:44
found a really interesting study last night that I quite enjoyed. It was called excess exercise training causes mitochondrial functional impairment and decreases glucose tolerance and healthy volunteers. So it was looking literally at this, is there such a thing is too much intensity. And so they had them perform an endurance sports training protocol, and that’s what they found was, and this was not high level athletes. This was your average Joe. And what they did find was you started seeing actual health impacts when the intensity got too much. And so they really make this argument of there’s an upper limit. What kind of health attacks did it so is that you saw damaged mitochondrial function, and the other one was a decrease in glucose tolerance. So they were literally showing, basically symptoms of what you would see in diabetics. It wasn’t permanent. When they recovered over a period of time, that would go away, and they would get back into good tolerance, but no, when they started doing too much intensity, it would push them in pretty unhealthy directions.
Isaiah Newkirk 13:48
It can take a long time to dig out of a deep hole. Yeah, I mean, over training is a thing for a reason. It can be easy to achieve that in the right circumstance. We just
Trevor Connor 13:58
talked about the health impacts on average people. There’s a lot that we need to consider when we’re trying to throw overloads at our body. Here’s Dr Kate Bennett talking about how life produces an overload itself.
Speaker 1 14:10
I mean, from my perspective, that would come down to one recognizing that they’re already pretty overloaded, right? Like they don’t recover nearly as much as a professional athlete who trains and then recovers throughout the day. So if we even think about the stress response, just taking into consideration their life stress and how that impacts them and their loading and then, you know, I think so often we focus on time being that critical factor that you have to get the time in the seat. But what if it’s shorter rides more intensity, or splitting that day up, doing a morning ride with high intensity and then an afternoon ride with some endurance built in, maybe on the trainer while their kids are sleeping. I’ve been really creative with I’ve had athletes who’ve done the 24 hour races and whatnot, and we’ve been really thoughtful about what I would say, like kind of spot training, and creating spots of training and trusting that when they are residents. Into the event, their body will adapt to that actual stimulus in the race or the event.
Trevor Connor 15:05
So let’s hit you with the big question, kind of the what this episode is about, and this what might be what turns into a 15 minute episode. There’s a limit on time, because we only have so much time in our day. There is an upper limit on how much intensity your body can handle. So is there simply a plateau? Is there a point where you can’t produce enough of an overload to continue to see adaptations and you’re just gonna be the level you’re at? Is that just what it is for all of us?
Isaiah Newkirk 15:32
I mean, I think it’s kind of what I mentioned before. It’s the ability to be creative and shift gears when needed. So I think my answer, actually, oddly, is, yes, we do hit a plateau, but if you’re smart about your training, that’s when you shift and you move and you change and you try something different. And there’s a lot of like, kind of what Chris was mentioning, there’s a lot of different ways of trying new things, and you could strain together days. You could really force your training into a way that really maximizes a very low amount of volume. But ultimately, yes, you do plateau a system, and then it’s about moving to something else, and then really priming that system, and then again, going back, and you might even go back to the first system that you were hitting, and just continuing to change in form. And I think that you continue to achieve a new level in an athlete, even if their volume doesn’t change over time. It’s difficult. It takes work, and it really takes diving into the weeds and getting to know the athlete, I think. But once you succeed it, you can unlock some pretty darn cool things at a very small amount of time. I also when athletes are like this, where, again, I was having a conversation with an athlete about this the other day, where I almost mentioned the fact that sometimes coaching professional athletes is almost easier than coaching an athlete that you know has a finite amount of time and has a lot more stress in their life, not always, but sometimes. And I think that’s when you know sometimes it can be even more challenging as a coach, where you look at a training plan design and you’re like, wow, I really have to dig deep for this one, where, with a pro, you’re like, all right, you live in a place that’s 70 degrees all the time, and your biggest enemy is like, what coffee shop you want to stop on at along the way? And it’s just, yeah. I mean, it allows you to have to really get creative and critical thinking and apply like, all right, what do they have available to them? I also, I might be jumping the gun here, but the another big one that I lean on very critically, especially at the beginning of a relationship, is what is the long term scope looks like. So, you know, right now, oftentimes I’m having the conversation of, okay, well, we have, I’ll go with eight hours to work with, a lot of it’s going to be inside, given the nature of the weather. So all right, what about May? Do we have more volume available? No, yes. Okay, sweet. We have a one Saturday a month we can work with, where, all of a sudden we get four hours and, you know, like, you’re able to get a babysitter and just go out and crank like, what? What are we looking for and those, I think that is super critical, because then you can look to alleviate some of those like, oh, wait, we’re plateauing the system. Now what? Well, you can postpone that and kind of push that all right. Well, maybe endurance. We could focus on that in a month, and now we can for this block. We could focus on this and that I think really helps kind of land those highs and lows and those polarization and all of that of your training. First of
Trevor Connor 18:29
all, I’m going to say this is why I could never fully make it as a pro. I just can’t stop at coffee shops. I’m sorry when I’m out for a ride. I’m out for a ride, and that’s just not the way it works. I
Isaiah Newkirk 18:40
have a great story of a teammate that was just like that and couldn’t do it, and the whole team would stop at a coffee shop, and he would do circles in the parking lot. Yeah, while we had coffee,
Trevor Connor 18:50
I would find out how long they’d be in the coffee shop, then do more, and they’d be like, 20 minutes. So I’d figure out, I’d go like, down a road 10 minutes, come back, 10 minutes, nice. Then I’d wait another 20 minutes, because they really right. So whenever, yeah,
Isaiah Newkirk 19:05
naturally, yeah, yeah, I’ve wasted many hours in coffee shops and spandex for sure. Yep. So
Trevor Connor 19:14
you just touched on two really important things. I’m hoping we can spend some time as we go through this episode, talking about but one is the unfamiliar, which I’ve seen brought up a lot in the research. So going back to this idea of adaptation is about stressing or overloading some aspect of homeostasis, and then your body adapts to that. We tend to target what we know are the most valuable homeostatic balances in our bodies, where we get the biggest gain for the buck, but there is a point where, yeah, you just can’t stress those enough to get any further adaptation. But there are hundreds of homeostatic balances in our body, and there are other ones that they might not be the big one. For performance, but they still help your performance, and often don’t get hit very hard. So you can go, I’ve got an extra hour in the week. Here’s a homeostatic balance that actually is so weak in me, or I’ve hit so little, it actually doesn’t take that much to stress it. So this is this idea in the research of target the unfamiliar, what your body doesn’t know as well. And you touched on that, and I hope we can go into that more depth. But another thing you touched on is, I think this is what block training was all about, which is, you can’t stress all these different homeostatic balances at the same time enough to produce adaptations on all of them. So pick one or two and hit them really hard for a period of time. And that might allow you to get more gain out of those eight hours. And then, as you said, switch to other ones after that that your body’s less familiar with. So again, you can produce gains with. So it seems like that’s kind of the direction you’re heading in with, if you got limited time. Here’s a way to just continue to produce gains through the season. Yeah,
Isaiah Newkirk 21:02
100% I think you nailed it. The way I kind of look at it is the more the extreme the parameters of somebody’s life, kind of not always, but the more extreme you kind of have to take the imperialization, or the more you have to focus on the things that have kind of gone dormant, that you haven’t hit in a while, and you really do hit them hard, and you can’t just stick to a traditional build periodization model, because it just doesn’t, it doesn’t receive the same gains, and you aren’t maximizing that very valuable and limited time. So I do tend to say that that’s when, you know, grab those things that you haven’t hit and then go for it, and then, yeah, move on. And yeah, 100% can
Chris Case 21:40
you give an example of something, or from an athlete you’ve worked with, like they had limited time they weren’t hitting X? What was x like? Did you send them into the gym to lift more, or did you have them do certain things, Cadence drills, out on the bike that were hitting something? Could you talk a little bit more specifically about some of these? No, I don’t want to call them tricks, but tools that you have available,
Isaiah Newkirk 22:04
one that I don’t think gets a lot of credit lately, that I’ve been focusing on is efficiency. So I focus on hyper efficiency within a range. The reason I’m saying this is because the easy one to point to is VO two and just hitting a polarized model. But the the efficiency side, I think is really interesting. So one case study that I can use it as an example, as an athlete of mine that has a heart condition that he’s been advised to cap his heart rate and keep his stress low, so we hyper focus on his efficiency and within fairly mild ranges out of safety. But that’s a big part of it, and it’s cadence stressors you can focus on that. You can focus on how you’re achieving that and what your cardio drift looks like over a period of time. It could be stringing together particular style of efforts to really dial that in. And then once I achieve that efficiency, I’ll kind of like move on and focus on a little bit a little bit higher because that’s the whole concept. Is like, if we can make him as efficient as possible, then he is still able to get slightly stronger and then still staying within the parameters. So that’s an example. But outside of that, I mean, you can, even if it’s just, I guess, your everyday athlete, you can look at, okay, cool. You know you need to do a threshold block because you have a certain goal that requires that effort. I don’t know what that might be. Maybe it’s like a you want to do a hill climb or whatever it might be that requires a significant threshold increase. So then you could do a threshold block, and you could just say, Okay, well, all I want to do is focus on increasing my threshold. But you could also look at it from the side of okay, I want to increase my efficiency at x range. And that could be, you know, how big of an impact those efforts are, how resilient you are to them. So what your recovery rate is, post each one of those efforts, there’s all sorts of different things that you can do to focus on a certain minute stressor, which is kind of what Trevor was talking about, where it’s like, okay, yes, you do have this zone, and people tend to think of just a zone as a zone, but there’s so much more that’s going on within your body that you can work to make better. And then that can go long term where, all right, you’ve made that range efficiency, and that could be something like you do a lactate test, and all you want to do is lower that minimal volume for that period of range. But the yeah, there’s a lot that you can do, and there’s some deep weaves to dive in. And hopefully that answered the question. I’ll
Trevor Connor 24:25
give you another example of how I tend to approach things. Is when an athlete comes off of the off season. You know, sadly, we lose fitness fast, really, really fast. So when we’re November, December, I don’t have to target too many of those other very unfamiliar things to the body, because you’ve lost enough fitness in the places that you see the big gains when I get them back on the bike or back to training, we’re really just going to focus on those things, and we’re just going to kind of take a gross approach to it, as opposed to a very highly specific approach. But as we get closer to the. Season, I’m spending that base season talking to them, what are the goals, what are we trying to accomplish? And then really trying to figure out, what are those very specific things that we can really hit hard once we get into the season, and then that’s as we get into February and March. You know, I’m going to give them some sort of interval work, but, you know, my bias, I believe in the polarized approach. I don’t want to give them five days of interval work every week. I’m gonna give them two, maybe three at the most. So we’re gonna max that out pretty quickly. So I start looking for all those other little things that we can add where we’re stressing something that they don’t normally stress. So for example, if I had somebody who’s a crit rider, I’m gonna give them very specific interval work, but I’m also going to do, even on their easy rides, a ton of cadence work, because that sort of thing can really help as a crit rider, and particularly if you have an athlete who’s like, I do crits, but I sit there and ride them at 70 RPM, I don’t know why I’m not performing well. It’s something that their body is unfamiliar with. And so you can get gains.
Isaiah Newkirk 25:58
I have an athlete that I just started working with that did so much time indoors, on the ERG mode that he trained his body to only be able to operate at a like 55 to 65 RPM range, and anything over that was a big stressor, like it was a, it was the, you know, the unfamiliar. It really was. And he’s a cat two cyclist that wants to do well in the national series. And yeah, there was got to do exactly, yeah. It was like, Cool. I’ve got a I’ve got an answer for you. Man, it was that kind of thing,
Trevor Connor 26:32
yep. So I do definitely, later on, want to get into some more of these, quote, unfamiliar things to your body that you we can do to produce adaptations, but before we get there, let’s talk about the training plan. You did bring up Block Periodization, so let’s talk a little bit about that. The other thing I want to ask you about is, and I have a bias here, this is something I use with athletes who have limited time. Is that idea of a brief period of a functional overreach, which is also a big part of block training, which is, you might not have the time every week to really hit the body hard, but usually, even if you have a family and a job, you can find one week every once in a while where you can say, I’m going to do 15 hours and I’m going to make it really hard and really fatigue myself. So talk to us about that. Talk to us about block, periodization, other things you can do with that athlete with the limited time to continue to produce adaptations, even when they’re getting to a pretty good level of fitness. Yeah, I’m
Isaiah Newkirk 27:31
a huge fan of overreach periods as well, because I think you can really rock the boat, like you could take an athlete that’s gotten pretty, getting close to kind of plateauing a stressor, and then throw that at them, and then it will, it can just shake them into a whole different athlete. It’s amazing. And I think, you know, if you challenge an athlete, and that’s not like a negative thing, it’s more like, hey, let’s get creative. Like, let’s find this. I bet you could find some time. And then they do, and usually they’re pumped on it. Like, they’re like, Heck, yeah. Like, I get to go to Tucson, I ride my bike for 10 hours wheat, like, they’re Jade on it. But no, I think I lean on Block Periodization quite a bit with, I guess, athletes that have a lot that they juggle in their life, because it is one of those things that it does allow a little bit more focus. So essentially, you’re taking a period of time and you are taking one that’s by design, but I think that can be flexible, but you’re taking one stimulus, and then you’re focusing on that, and then you are really giving everything to that response and that adaptation. And that can range, like you can have that for a week, you can have that for several weeks, and then once you start to see that overreach achieved within that stimulus, then you can kind of back it off, cover a bit, and then either go again or shift and go to a different one. And I think that’s becomes super powerful. What is tricky, I think, is to learn when to shift and learn when to change. And then I think that is, there is a little bit of an art in watching an athlete and how they respond and say, Okay, I think we’ve kind of tapped this one for the time being, and then to say, All right, we’ve built this system out. Is there something that pairs well with it? Have I built, like, a really solid top end? So now I want to, kind of like back it off and achieve an opposite system, or what am I looking for? And I think that comes within specificity as well, but it’s super powerful, because then you have the ability, I think, to make depending quick responses in a finite period of time and really hone in, like if an athlete has that week where they have a little bit more time available. I’ll use an example, nurses, surgeons, firefighters. You know that whole bracket of people that work long shifts back to back and then have a rotating schedule. Super interesting athletes to work with. Those are the athletes that I think block work really well with, because you could say, well actually because of their rotating schedule. So they have a five day swing that I can work with, or even a seven day swing, and then it becomes, you know, like the Holy Grail, you have so much time to work with, but it’s one of those things that then you could throw a big stimulus at them, and then the following week, they might be working for 24 hour shifts. So then what are you gonna do? So I think in those situations, obviously we’re still working within the extreme, but it tends to result really positively.
Trevor Connor 30:24
As someone who’s raced at a very high level, Jack Burke is very familiar with using fatigue blocks to produce an overload. Here’s his thoughts on that approach.
Isaiah Newkirk 30:33
So my opinion on this is it depends on what part you’re at in your career, like so for the first years and years of your career, I do think like that super compensation, like Block Periodization, like really overloading the system and recovering is absolutely essential. Like, you can’t be moderate from the beginning on. And I’ve always said it, I know there’s gonna be so many coaches that hate me for saying this. I think over training is not real between the ages of 18 and 23 like it, your hormones are absolute peak. The only time I’ve seen like guys fall off the rails is when they’re not eating enough. But my motto is always like, eat more. Train more. If you eat enough, if you sleep well, like you get good sleep, you can train so much, and like your hormones make you like Superman between the ages of 18 to 23 and Killian Jordan, I really love this. He’s the greatest mountain sports athlete of all time for trail running, ski mountaineering, all this kind of stuff. He has this theory that if you train super hard in the years when you’re going through puberty, your body is very plastic, and you get adaptations that you can’t get if you start later in life for that. And I really love that. So I do think at the beginning of your career that overload is very important, and throughout your career, yes, you need to have these big overloads throughout the season, but most guys get that through racing. It depends on how much you race, so if you’re not racing that much, yeah, you need to do these sort of like overloads at different points to keep progressing. What I’ve learned in my career now, because I’ve bored out the engine for over 10 years of doing that, I’ve kind of reached the limit to that. And I’m actually just better at focusing on rather than growing the engine. It’s about being making the engine more efficient with my training, so I don’t do these super big overloads anymore. So a little bit more on that. This is actually really interesting. This is how, like, cycling has changed at the pro level, a lot that I’ve noticed in the past, when World Tour guys would go to altitude camps, you would, like, leave these altitude camps basically in a body bag, like you would just freaking crush yourself, like it was just who could train the most and just break themselves the most, and then you just don’t leave the coach for like, five days and then you go to race. Now, when you see guys go to out, no one really does these super compensation like super overloads anymore, partially because, yes, the races are so hard. But when they go to training camps, and there’s part of it is the altitude thing, like, if you just crush yourself so much, your body doesn’t have the energy to make more red blood cells, and you just don’t get a benefit from it. That’s a very specific thing to altitude. But for all these guys, even when they’re not at altitude camps, when they’re at the normal training camps in like calpa in Spain or Majorca right now, the benefit in the past, it was when you go to a training camp so you eat, sleep, train, everything else is taken care of for you, and you have all this extra energy. In the past, guys would use all that extra energy to just crush themselves even more in training. Now they actually just rest more. So it’s like they do this, maybe a little bit more training, but basically the same amount of training they would do at home, but they just leave the camp fresher because all these other normal life stresses have been taken away, rather than in the past, where you’d use these camps to absolutely crush yourself. Now it’s that they actually just leave the camps feeling fresher, even though they did the same or maybe even a little bit more work,
Trevor Connor 33:19
something I think is really important to point out here, when we’re talking about this block training approach, which is, most people will describe it as hit one or two systems really hard and really train them and then hit another system or two. And I know people listening as are gonna go, Well, wait a minute, you’ve told us this whole idea of hitting systems is kind of throwing out because most training hits most systems. And so this is where I need to point out a difference between systems and homeostasis. So for example, when you’d go out and do a ton of long, slow endurance training, what you break is your homeostasis in calcium commodulin. So that’s you’re stressing a particular homeostasis, you’re taking calcium, commodity and balance and throwing it out of balance enough that your body goes okay. Now I need to adapt that then sparks PGC, one alpha, which then produces a lot of endurance adaptations. Let’s talk about a completely different type of homeostasis, which is managing heat stress in your body, maintaining body temperature, they’ve shown that when you produce enough heat stress, what’s actually called a heat stress protein, and that also then hits that PGC, one Alpha pathway, and also produces endurance adaptations. So what you’re seeing there is adaptations in very similar systems, and hitting a lot of the systems that are important for endurance training, but what you’re breaking is two very different homeostatic balances. So when we’re talking to me and please correct me if you feel I’m wrong, but when we’re talking about this block training approach of hitting one or two things, we’re talking about really breaking one or two homeostatic balances to produce. An adaptation and then hit a couple more homeostatic balances to produce an adaptation in your next block, but they all might be producing somewhat similar adaptations, hidden very similar pathways. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would
Isaiah Newkirk 35:13
agree with that. And I think you also touched on the fact that you can do similar blocks, change a small thing and receive a totally different adaptation.
Trevor Connor 35:21
So I think one last thing I need to ask you about, and that we really need to emphasize, is you’ve talked about those big stress blocks that basically producing that functional overreach in a short period of time that you’d then recover from and see an adaptation. But I think it would be a mistake to move on from that and not talk about the dangers of non functional overreach when you overdo it. And what’s your thoughts on that?
Isaiah Newkirk 35:45
Yeah, I think it’s easy to do when you’re really forcing the issue on one focus. It’s easy to do too much. It’s easy to say, well, what if I do, you know, 12 days in a row, and it’s one of those things that be careful watch how your body’s responding. So I actually lean a ton on heart rate. And when you’re really wanting to focus on how an athlete is responding to fatigue and these stimulus especially in extremes and overreaching, there are blatant signs that you need to look for like, are they, all of a sudden their heart rate through the floor, like they can’t move it. Or, you know what? What is their body reacting to? Because we as athletes are really good at lying to ourselves, I guess, like, just, like, just convincing ourselves that we can do another day we could do another set, like, I just need to take five minutes more recovery and then I’ll try again. Like, it’s that kind of thing that we have, and it makes us powerful to push ourselves, but it also can be, you know, the double edged sword that we have to deal with. So I think keeping an eye on certain metrics and not being blind to what your body’s telling you, and then, from the coaching side, it just takes asking and continuing to ask the right questions that are like, my favorite is, I know that, like, let’s say, for example, I know an athlete is kind of pushing the boundaries, and I’m trying to get that stimulus, but I don’t want to push them too far. So then I’ll actually send them a text or a message in the morning and be like, Hey, how are you feeling? And they’ll be like, Well, I haven’t ridden my bike yet, I don’t know. And I’m like, no, like, listen to your body. Like, how are you how did you wake up? Did you wake up? Like, peppy and ready to go. Or did you crawl out of bed and you’re like, Whoa, man, I feel kind of weird like it was, what was your response? And I think an experienced athlete knows that there’s a big difference there. And when you’ve pushed those boundaries, of that overreach, you kind of know those signs, but most athletes don’t, so just keep an eye on those kind of extra parameters. And it’s usually gives some big red flags.
Trevor Connor 37:42
Yeah, I’ve seen athletes they do that big, 345, day block, and they start seeing heart rate repression, as you were talking about, which is, you just can’t hit as high a heart rate. And so they try to do intervals or something, and the heart rate’s not coming up, and they go, oh, I need to go harder. As opposed to going, No, I’m fatigued. It’s time. Yeah,
Isaiah Newkirk 38:00
that’s what I love about coaching stage racers, because when you’re 10 days into a stage race, it’s amazing what the body can still do, but it’s also amazing what the heart rate does. Yes, it’s like, they cannot get it out of Zone Two yet they’re doing vo two efforts. It’s amazing.
Trevor Connor 38:17
No, I still remember Phil Leggett at the Tour de France commenting, they’re like, on the second week of the tour, and commenting how I think it was low their heart rate. Look how low they’re keeping their heart rates. I’m like, that’s because they’re really, really tired. Yeah, they’re actually pretty close to max. That’s just 140. Is probably their max
Chris Case 38:36
in terms of picking up on the signs of where an athlete is. How much do you rely on someone’s mood or a lack, maybe, of comments or words, choice in you know, their training peaks, log of comments and things like that.
Isaiah Newkirk 38:52
I rely a decent bit. But honestly, I think that goes down to, like, really getting to know your athlete and having a great relationship. Because I have some athletes that, like, you know, their comments are always going to be pretty like to the point, so if I’m looking for, like a personality trait, it’s going to be that might be difficult there. I think what I’ve done with some when I do, like data analysis, for some teams, I’ve done surveys where they touch on fatigue and then they will give, like a score to how they’re feeling and what their mood is. And I do think there’s value in that. And I think self reflection can be really important for athletes there that goes into the realm of, like, how are they interpreting? Are they good at it? Are they not? Are they subjective? You know, what are the different pieces there? I think most athletes have, like, a tell that you can kind of pick up on, and once you pick up on that, I think it can go really far. Another one I use is, I do lean a little bit on sleep metrics during this overreach focus, because those usually have some good tells too. Yeah. I think it’s all about kind of getting the athlete to learn how their body responds and what their tells are.
Chris Case 39:54
What’s your tell? Trevor, grumpiness, angry, no, I’m always grumpy. That’s true at all. Yeah. Right? What am I thinking?
Isaiah Newkirk 40:02
What’s your tell you’ve been doing trips that do have. I
Chris Case 40:05
tell when I’m cracked I don’t know somebody needs to hold the mirror up to me at that point, I could
Trevor Connor 40:11
tell you eating an entire tub of sour cream. I’m thinking this yogurt? Is that your tell
Chris Case 40:16
something like, yeah, just yeah. That could possibly be it. So
Trevor Connor 40:20
my tell, I don’t know anybody else who has this, but it is a tell. I don’t know why, but my forearms get sore. Really, if I’m doing a really big fatigue block or I’m in a big, tough stage race, huh, my forearms just start getting sore. And I have not found a single study explaining why that is, but I don’t care. I’m like, That’s it. I know interesting. I know it’s time bizarre.
Chris Case 40:43
That’s totally fitting for you, that it would be something like that. You have odd forearms. That’s true. The
Trevor Connor 40:50
best explanation I’ve come up with is, if I’m getting fatigued, maybe I’m just clamping down harder on my handlebars and not aware of it, and that’s fatiguing my forearm.
Chris Case 41:00
You did break those handlebars that one time when we were doing a training block and you kept riding. Remember,
Trevor Connor 41:05
we were racing up a climb, and I literally snapped left side of my handlebars, and I continued to try, like the
Chris Case 41:12
Hulk. He’s like, there’s whatever, you know, it’s like
Isaiah Newkirk 41:16
Hulk mode. The more tired you get, the stronger you get, but only in your forearms. I get quiet the type of person. It’s not as unique as the forums. I don’t think or sour cream, but
Chris Case 41:27
that was just a mental that was a mental glitch. That was what I was going through.
Isaiah Newkirk 41:33
But, yeah, I get I usually during long training camps, I’ll just want to talk to my teammates less, because I just tend to focus on I just need to get the work in. And I’m that kind of an athlete,
Chris Case 41:43
get even more socially awkward and introverted. Exactly
Trevor Connor 41:48
when I was at the center up in Canada, we would do five, six day training camps, and by the last day, nobody spoke. Yeah, there’s a six hour ride of silence. Yeah, I can see that. I always find it fascinating because,
Isaiah Newkirk 42:01
especially because especially because it’s top of mind, because I’m going to be traveling to races to direct but the It’s always fascinating to see how each athlete responds as they receive fatigue and stimulus through the race. And it is funny. Some get, like, more chatty because they want distractions or they want to focus on other things. Some get more secluded because they’re tired and they just want to lay down like it is interesting. And there’s always this, like, hump. And I think it kind of depends on on the length of the race or the type of race, but it tends to be like, if it’s a five day, the hump is, like the third day. And then, you know, with a day to go, everyone starts to be more cheery, like in work, shipper, like the final stage, everyone’s usually on cloud nine.
Chris Case 42:38
This might not be too relevant to our conversation, but I’m curious about you always talk about the center and how you were doing these camps and training blocks with other people. I feel like a lot of people, due to time constraints or whatever, might end up doing them solo. Do you see pros and cons to either approach
Isaiah Newkirk 42:57
totally 100% the power of doing it with others is, you know, a little bit mentally freeing, like you’re you have that, you know, you’re doing it together, kind of situation. But then a pro and a con of that is, it is more of a freesty, less structured kind of focus. You know, the best team camps I’ve ever led do have chaos to them. And you can’t just say, Hey guys, I need you to go do five by 10. You can it probably won’t go as well as you want it to. So and then you have to be a little bit more flexible with that. Like, I mean, what training camp has any of us done where there hasn’t been, like, a crash or a flat like, it happens, you just have to be a little bit more flexibility to the response that’s received. I mean, there are, you know, very dialed and focused camps that you can receive a particular outcome, but if you’re doing it on your own, 100% of it’s what you want it to be. It could be designed through and through every second of it, if you want. So I think those are kind of the big trades. But you know, that social aspect, or that drive in companies unmatched, oftentimes. So it is a hard trade to do it, kind of like on your own, and really push your limits too. It takes a hard mind to be able to do that
Trevor Connor 44:10
if you are doing it alone. I mean, I do most of my camps alone. Now find somebody to join you for the third or fourth day where I really hurt him, particularly if you can find somebody who’s got fresh legs. It’s going to be miserable, but they’re not going to let you slow down to half base.
Isaiah Newkirk 44:27
Yeah, I think if you are going to be doing it on your own, try and find either just like roads that you love to ride, that you like don’t get to do big roads big just rip sessions, or go somewhere new that you just never have been. So the whole thing is stimulating and entertaining to you, and really drives that drive to achieve the stimulus, because it can be kind of tough to be, like, cool. I do this every day. Gonna do left hand Canyon for the 200th time. So it might be, I mean, left hand cannon is world class, and it’s amazing, but I’m throwing that as an example, but yeah,
Chris Case 44:58
so come to the Dolomites with me. And do a 10 day or this eight day block. Be Awesome. There
Trevor Connor 45:05
you go. So let’s switch back to that conversation about things that are less familiar to your body. So you’ve been doing your training. You’ve been doing your training very effectively. You’re now finding interval, work, threshold, work, tabatas, whatever you’re having to be doing, you seem to be plateauing. You’re not getting much gain out of it. What are some unfamiliar things that you can throw at your body that can still produce gains in your performance? And I will just quickly mention one I unfortunately couldn’t find the study. I looked for it last night, but there was a really interesting study that looked at exactly this effect in athletes, and said, for runners and cyclists, if you’re training four to five hours a week, spend all of it running or cycling, because you’re just not spending a lot of time. Once you get up to eight, nine or more hours per week, you’re actually going to see more gains using one of those hours in the weight room, because it’s going to be unfamiliar to your body, and it’s going to produce a lot of adaptations, where that extra hour running around the bike isn’t going to produce much for you. But what are other things that you could look at? What are other things that would be unfamiliar that can help you get a little more? Yeah,
Isaiah Newkirk 46:10
I think you want to look into how you’re receiving that stress and what that looks like. So let’s use like an example of you have certain amount of time to work with, a low amount of time, you’ve really focused on a certain stress, you’ve kind of plateaued on that stress, and then you’re trying to maybe get just a little bit more out of that particular range. So I think that’s what you were asking about. And I think that goes back to, okay, were you able to hit that under a certain leg speed, were you able to do that at a leg speed that you’re going to be doing during the event that’s important to you? Training that pathway, training the efficiency within that pathway, of just the mechanics of being on a bicycle, that’s a hard stimulus to achieve. So that’s a great example of like, All right, cool. You’re super dialed on. You do tempo all day. All right? Can you do tempo at 110 rpms? How does that look? Can you do that for an hour? No, okay, that’s what I thought. So that’s when you can do that little changes that we were talking about. So that’s an example. Like you can change, I guess it would be kind of changing the extremes, like, if you’ve really dialed in the norms, and you’ve made that normal, then make it extreme again, yeah. Like, do it at high torque. Do it on a climb. Do it in the heat. That’s another one that you kind of mentioned earlier. Do it in the cold. Like, there’s all different things that we can really shift things on end to really stress the body in a slightly different way, and then see a positive gain down the line too. Actually
Trevor Connor 47:38
tried that myself this weekend. I wanted to do a five hour ride. We, as you know, we got a ton of snow, and it was really cold, and I only had three and a half hours. So I was on the trainer on Zwift, and I did group rides, not races. Actually found some group rides, but just said, I need to figure out how to get more gains on it. So I went into one group ride and said, I have to do the whole group ride at 100 rpm. Then went another group ride. Said, I have to do the whole group ride at 55 rpm, and really felt it, yeah,
Isaiah Newkirk 48:07
huge difference. Heart rate goes up. You might have more muscular fatigue. It changes a lot. And I think the I always enjoy, you know, prescribing these things, and then just seeing the shock on my athlete’s face when they’re like, wait, I did this yesterday, and it was totally fine, and now it’s totally different. Why it’s yeah, it’s awesome.
Trevor Connor 48:25
What are some other things? So we talked about strength training can be really beneficial. We talked about changing up the cadence. What are some other unfamiliar things that you could throw at your body to produce a little more?
Isaiah Newkirk 48:38
Yeah, I think the interesting part here is getting creative and start you could start looking so I guess to draw out, an example would be throwing in cross training as well. So we talked about strength training, and I agree with you, if you have a very limited amount of time, you do need to be more specialized in what you’re doing. And there definitely is a tipping point 100% where you have to kind of say, Okay, well, I probably need to stick to kind of what I care about. If you’re floating that range of like, let’s say you’re maybe upwards of, like, your eight to 10 hours, or within that range, which I think is eight to 12, I think is pretty common for most, most individuals, where you know the five we were talking about as an extreme. But I think if you’re floating that range, and it is especially this is particular to this time of year, I do talk to athletes about running, and we touch on that if that’s something that they’re comfortable with and they might have a little bit of experience in and then we talk about approaching that a healthy way. And then what the return for that is, I was having a conversation with an athlete the other day where that we’ve included running in their training because of he’s a surgeon, and it’s easier for him to do running, because his hospital has a treadmill, and he can do it when he’s on clock or on call. And that has been great, because it’s giving us a really big response within a higher heart rate range, within a short period of time, just because that’s a little bit more common to see that response or that. Higher heart rate. One running, and it’s just been a really nice thing to add into is training. So that’s a good example. Is like running could be a facet there. I mean, you could do stair work. That’s also a good one, including that to kind of mix things up and see a quick response. What I love to do is think about all right, I’m trying to change this stimulus, and that’s my focus. What other things happen to that? And does it have to be on the bike? Could it be off? And then could we achieve that in a different way? And so, yeah, that’s that’s been a fun one to kind of play with, whether or not that’s running or rowing or, you know, there’s a stair masters. There’s a lot of different things that you can throw into the mix to really capitalize on a short period of time. Because, you know, again, doing an hour on the road there. I mean, there are plenty of athletes that do that, but that’s not always the case. So you can maximize a little bit case depending on if that equipment is accessible and doable and of interest.
Trevor Connor 50:57
Yeah, I’m glad you went there, because that was gonna be my question about cross training. I’m speaking for myself here, but I’m sure a lot of cyclists would agree with this. You know, 30 minutes on the bike, why bother even putting on the shorts? But in 30 minutes, because I’m not a great runner, and a lot of cyclists aren’t familiar with running, you can actually get a pretty good run, yeah, and it’s unique. It’s different. You know, I’m actually looking right now at a study from Israel who was the creator of the Block Periodization model. He looked at the benefits of cross training. He also pointed out it helps prevent burnout, because if you just always on the bike, always doing the same thing that just mentally burns you out going in, skiing, running, snowshoeing, something like that. Can just add some interest.
Isaiah Newkirk 51:39
Another interesting thing is, you know, you might be time crunched, not because you don’t have time available to train, but it might be because, you know, here in Colorado, I’ve got athletes that go up into the mountains and they want to do downhill with their family, so they’ll do downhill time, which is something that can take away from on bike training time, so that can be difficult. But then we talk about, okay, well, can we do Nordic skiing? Can we do touring skinning sessions to achieve the same thing? And then what I’ve been doing a lot of lately is trying to sort out maximization of that transfer over to the bike, and that’s been kind of like my own study and process. Because is it, do you pair things directly? Do you do the same exact focus? Like, do you say, Okay, well, you’re hitting a tempo heart rate while skinning. We’ll just do tempo on the bike to really try and transfer that over. Or do you do an opposite focus? So you’re doing actually two Block Periodization focuses at the same time in a different exercise, and then one with the cross training and one on the bike, and it just gets Yeah, you could dive. Obviously, I’ve gotten into this a lot, but it’s, I think that’s another thing is it’s not always because you don’t have time to devote. It’s just you don’t have time to devote to the bike. And that can be really eye opening, of like, well, actually you have 12 hours available to you. It just might need to be four on the skis. Instead, Dr
Trevor Connor 52:59
Andy Pruitt has talked about this a bit on the show. He loves to go skiing in the winter and doesn’t spend a ton of time on the bike. And what he’s found really works is to do a skiing and then come home and just spend 30 minutes on the trainer. So it’s the skiing is giving some central conditioning. You’re getting some adaptations. And so he just hops on the trainer to kind of remind his legs what the pedal stroke feels like. And he said, you know, he’s gone to races in March where he’s only been on the bike for two weeks, and actually performed quite well,
Isaiah Newkirk 53:29
yeah. And then this brings up another good point. I have an athlete that’s doing the lifetime Grand Prix, so obviously, lots of volume on the bike, and they have, there’s some big events, and it starts, I would say, like, fairly early with sea otter, but they will do overload period. So what we just talked about purely on skis, so not on the bike at all. We don’t touch it. And that’s a kind of, like, week long camp that they’ll do where it’s just, you know, two to three hours on skates, clean, massive benefit. That’s been a huge game changer. And then doing that in blocks, where during the week on bike, on the weekend, on skis, and just having those periodizations at play, it’s it’s been really beneficial. It’s been cool. Do you think
Chris Case 54:15
one barrier that people have to that is just the mental like, if I don’t ride my bike, I’m just, it’s just not gonna work. So they just have to do this and try it and see for themselves that it actually can work 100%
Isaiah Newkirk 54:27
and I think the another interesting thing about that is the time on skis, you know, and we could touch on time in the gym, time on time. Running the metrics that we currently use don’t always reflect that stress fully and across all of those disciplines. To really put that down, just as a CTL number just doesn’t really work.
Chris Case 54:52
You’re saying one hour of riding doesn’t equal one hour of running doesn’t equal one hour of skiing, not even close well or. Is, are you saying something else
Isaiah Newkirk 55:01
I don’t want to say, not even close. But especially for if we’re going back to the unfamiliars, if an athlete’s not familiar with doing an hour of skate skiing, they’re going to be destroyed. That’s like hard effort. So then, and the metrics are never going to show that, because they probably, in reality, won’t be able to get their heart rate over a certain thing and under a certain thing. So they’re sore because they’re tech Exactly, exactly. So then that goes back to like, All right, do the metrics actually reflect that? Probably not, but I’m sure there’s a situation where it does it just it’s rare, and that’s going back to your original point that’s really hard for people to let go of when they’re like, Oh, well, my CTL was here, but then I just did this block where I was skiing a lot, I was doing some running, and I was strength training, and now my CTL is like, way lower. It’s hard for athletes to wrap their head around that and trust the process and and remember that. And I think I’ve learned that it just takes, it kind of takes a season for them to look back on to be able to trust that sometimes.
Trevor Connor 55:59
But I love that you brought that up, because I think that’s a really good way of looking at what we’re talking about, which is when you’re using training software, TSS is TSS CTL is CTL, you could be throwing a ton of training stress at your body, but if it’s training stress that your body is very familiar with and has really adapted to, you’re not actually getting any further adaptations. Your plateaued even then go, Look how high my CTL is, where you can take something that, as you said, if you’re not experienced with running, you can go out and do a 40 TSS run, and you’re destroyed. Yeah, and that’s just not reflected in the software. And that’s what you’re looking for, is that, how do you maximize the TSS are you doing TSS? Is going to produce no training adaptation, or are you doing TSS? That’s big adaptations, and you’re trying to find the TSS that’s the big adaptations, and that just isn’t in the graphs. You know, I had that, as you know, I this fall, decided I wanted to try some long runs. I wouldn’t
Chris Case 56:56
even call them runs, actually, yeah, thank you.
Trevor Connor 56:59
Yeah, they were slow. But what is I did a two and a half hour run. It was 90 TSS and I couldn’t walk for two days. I bet two you recovered in two days. I would expect more for Yeah. But a few days later, I went out and did a four hour ride produce 180 you know, twice the TSS and yeah, that didn’t affect me, yeah, yeah. So one other kind of way of producing unfamiliarity, I wanted to throw at you is changing up intervals. I know this is a big part of what is around was about, but kind of doing you work one type of interval until you’ve kind of plateaued, and then just change it up to something completely different. Just again, get that unfamiliarity and try to produce some adaptation. Is there something to that, or are you just creating a messy training plan? I guess it could
Isaiah Newkirk 57:45
be both. I love that you mentioned that, because I guess we have been kind of focusing on, like the big picture versus, like, individual, micro, kind of level focus. And it definitely you could there’s so much that you can change just on the day to day. I mean, outside of just like making it fresh, that’s powerful too, right? But stimulus wise, I mean, you could do anything. You could focus on having less recovery. That’s a big one. So just chopping recovery can change an effort entirely. You could front load an effort versus making it more of a ramp. There’s all sorts of things that could totally
Chris Case 58:16
change. Explain that for people that don’t know what front loading means, yeah, for sure.
Isaiah Newkirk 58:21
So using, you know, I guess I’ll throw out, like, a, I would say, like a fairly normal effort would be to do a ramp style, so you’re starting at maybe a zone three and then ramping up to a zone, basically doing vo two and over a space of time. And that’s something that’s been used for a long period of time, and you can what you will see is you will see a heart rate response that rises as you go through the effort. So what if you flip that and you have them do the hard vo two early can they sustain that? Does heart rate fall with the effort as you go down in power, or does it stay high or even rise? And you can get an understanding of how fit or unfit an athlete is. And then you can triangulate and focus on that to receive, you know, maybe better recovery through the rest of the downward tick in power. So you’re starting a view two. And then, you know, maybe going to threshold, and then down to tempo. Like, are you able to get an athlete that can recover at threshold? Or, like, quote, unquote, recover, but you see a heart rate drop. I love those styles of efforts, because then you are changing the response and the stimulus, versus just a raw like, all right, I need you to do a three by five. You have two for the most part. Like, we know what that response is going to be, but then you can get creative and kind of flex it within how an athlete starts or ends it, and it definitely changes the sensation, so it’s for sure, and on top of the response,
Trevor Connor 59:42
yeah, I kind of round my teeth when I read all the research on that. But the research I’m actually looking at a study right now. It’s cardiorespiratory responses to constant and very low at interval training sessions. Lead author was Bill trami and saying exactly what you’re saying. So they’re looking at that decremental where you start. I and then bring the power down through the interval, and it showed much better gains than the steady
Chris Case 1:00:06
isn’t this also what Ben rota like Fast Start intervals, and he’s done a lot of work in looking at that. Yeah, and
Trevor Connor 1:00:12
that’s a trick I’ll use. I mean, I start with my steady threshold intervals, with myself and my athletes in the winter, but then throw in someone grants Batman’s where you do 30 seconds harder, then go to threshold, and then finish with 30 seconds harder, just to give that little extra stimuli.
Isaiah Newkirk 1:00:28
Yeah, and I call those castles. I kind of like Batman’s better, but yeah, it’s, it’s that thing that you can then play with duration on the front end, back end, and in the middle, and then you can kind of look at what an athlete’s actually where that tipping point is, which I love to look at, because then you can say, Okay, well, this actually occurred roughly around the eight minute point on either on every set. And then you can kind of either back off or focus on it. There is that kind of plateau point, but you can mostly always get creative and achieve something slightly different. And yeah, really glad you mentioned kind of that Micro Focus.
Trevor Connor 1:01:02
So yeah, I’m actually really glad we’ve kind of dived into intervals, because we’ve talked about some other things that you can do to add some unfamiliarity, but you can also do that within your interval work. So two others that I just want to ask you about, one is back to back to back days, and the other one is twice a day. What’s your feeling about those? Can those produce further adaptations? Yeah, 100%
Isaiah Newkirk 1:01:24
I guess. Since we were talking about intervals, I’ll touch on the two days first. And this goes back to you could maybe sometimes be creative with your schedule to where you might not have two hours in a row, but you might have, you know, almost three hours if you split them up. And actually one of the pros that I work with, who has a full time job, she has a situation where she can do an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half at night, but she can’t touch anything kind of in that nine to five range. So we do Lean on that quite a bit. And I like it because it, you know, you have that initial fresh response where you could throw a stimulus at and focus on one primary objective, and then you have the secondary one, where all of a sudden recovery is affected, or you have that stimulus load from that prior session in your legs and on your body for the second and then you might be able to focus on just something slightly different, where it’s like all of a sudden. You know, if you’re looking for when just strict volume might be worthwhile, then that could be an example where you already have that load in your system, and then all of a sudden, this, you know, strict volume is more loaded, and you kind of feel different. You receive more from it. And that’s another example of where I might throw a cadence effort at somebody, because they already have a load on them. So then when they go into that cadence effort, that might be fairly simple. It all of a sudden, is very different, and it’s achieving more depth, I think, in that long run between the two.
Trevor Connor 1:02:45
And what about the back to back to back days? Yeah, and I play with
Isaiah Newkirk 1:02:49
this quite a bit, and I think this is when you kind of need to understand, when you might be toying with maybe too much. But I love it, because, all right, let’s say you have that concept of, well, you only have an hour a day to work out. And I do have athletes, but I’ve worked with in the past where they they have an hour a day that they can work with, and they can do that every day if I want, but that’s all they could do. So then there has been, okay, well, why don’t we do an overload period where I’m having you do seven days in a row, and then, or lately I’ve been doing instead of having a recovery day, I am leaning more once I get to an athlete to a particular point, I will caveat that I will have them lean on an endurance session as a recovery day. So then we’re keeping that baseline, that fatigue load, at a at a baseline, and then we’re working off of it through the days they’re corresponding. And then we can kind of ebb and flow out of interval sessions, not and then it all based off of like, okay, we want to step this up a notch. Let’s try maybe five days, six days, seven days. I kind of tend to cap that, but that’s an example.
Trevor Connor 1:03:52
Over time, as they get better and better in doing this, would you add more and more intensity into that? Yeah, and
Isaiah Newkirk 1:03:57
I think that’s the progressive overload part, right? Yes. You know, you take all of a sudden, you’ve gotten an athlete where they’re used to five days in a row, or something like that. You’ve thrown some session interval sessions at them, but otherwise, it’s been more about just receiving the response of the string of days, then totally like, once they’re ready for that 100% because then that’s another thing you could do. Then all of a sudden, you know, you’re able to do maybe four of six days are quality sessions that you’re focusing on intervals, sweet, like, that’s a big that’s a big load all of a sudden. So,
Trevor Connor 1:04:29
yeah, totally. That’s certainly something I’ve seen with my athletes, where, when I introduce them to that fatigue block concept, the first time I throw it at them, it might be four days and it’s all just volume. Like, just get through the 15 hours, whatever it happens to be. But after you do that for a while, several years later, you’re doing the same volume because that’s all they have available. But it’s like every day you’re hitting them hard just to progress it.
Isaiah Newkirk 1:04:53
I think it’s a fun mental stimulus for athletes, too, where, if you do it right as a coach, you can kind of get them hyped up on this. I. Be like, Look at this. Like you’re gonna be challenged with this one, and they can get kind of like, amped and and be ready to pursue it. And that’s always kind of a fun change up in training too. It’s not only for the physical stimulus, it’s also the mental shift as well.
Trevor Connor 1:05:14
All right. Well, guys, I hate to say it, we’re past our hour mark, so I think it’s time to start wrapping this up. You know, there’s a whole ton here that I think we could dive into again in the future. At some point, if we can get you back on the show, I’d love to have it. Be honored, yeah, but got a question here for the forum, and then we’ll dive into our take home. So the question we have, if you hit that plateau, what are things you’ve done to get more out of your training? So please come to fast talk labs.com go to our forum and give us your thoughts, your answers to that question. So basically, you hit a plateau in your training, the interval work, whatever you’re doing, you’re just not seeing improvements. What are tricks you found to get a little bit more to see a little more improvement, and with that, so you’re newcomer to the show. We like to finish out our shows with our take homes, which is each of us has one minute to offer what we think is the most silly,
Chris Case 1:06:08
nervous. It’s not that official.
Trevor Connor 1:06:12
Yeah, we only have a five minute timer in the room. What is the thing you’d really like our listeners to take away from this episode, so we’ll start with you. What’s your thoughts?
Isaiah Newkirk 1:06:23
I mean, I guess it comes down to don’t let your time constraints dictate that you can’t get stronger. So be creative, shift things, shift your focus. Segment out your training, and apply focus to that period that you have to work with. And then look to achieve new responses, new stimulus, and then look to achieve an overload somehow, in some way. And it might not be this flashy thing, but you’ll still receive gains from it. For
Chris Case 1:06:50
me, personally, somebody who doesn’t work with a coach to do this right, I think it takes experience and creativity, and then you can have fun with it. And you could try one season putting the bike aside, just maybe running and skiing for months. Honestly, if you really wanted to, you could do it, see how that impacts you. If you work with a coach, though, and this is kind of a plug for a coach, I think it’s really fun for you to collaborate on something where you can carve out these little segments of time that people that are so caught up in I just don’t I only, I only have that. I can’t do that in like now what we can split the day up and we can do these other things, and we can try this, and we can try that. I think that’s probably fun for coaches, but also should be looked at as a pretty fun experiment for athletes too, in that position. So
Trevor Connor 1:07:37
I’ve actually got two. First is, I’m kind of excited about this is the first time on the show, we’ve made this differentiation between systems and homeostatic balances. But also kind of terrifying, because I know that you and Rob are now going to call me out on that non stop, not looking forward to that, but my take home is going back to the original question, yes, to produce adaptations, you need an overload. That’s just how our physiology works. And if you only have so many hours in a week, there is a point where you are going to mostly plateau. But I think a lot of us haven’t necessarily hit that point. And my biggest take home is this goes back to that there’s no such a thing as a perfect plan, because if you are always doing the same thing, even if you’re really good at it and really comfortable with it, eventually your body’s gonna say, You know what, I’m really good at doing this, so I don’t need to adapt anymore. So ultimately, you have to find things that are unique and unfamiliar to your body to get further gains. That’s what it just comes down to. Excellent well, Isaiah, great having you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in 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 rating and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at fast talk labs. Join the conversation at forums, dot fast talk labs.com, or learn from our experts at fast doc labs.com for Isaiah Newkirk, Dr Kate Bennett, Jack Burke and Chris case. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
