Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science), CSCS, PES

One of the key physiological adaptations of endurance training for the Ironman athlete (and for the fitness athlete who wants to ‘lose a few pounds’ is improving their ability to generate energy from fat. I wanted to devote a short article to the ‘whys’ of the importance of improving this ability in athletes along with the practical ‘hows’ of doing so from both a training and a nutritional perspective.

"Have fun, stay liquid, laugh alot but stay ready for the call from the mothership...then we fight. Then you'll see Dupree come in here throwing seven different kinds of smoke"

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/you-me-and-dupree-the-mothership/3589045731

The last blog that I wrote implied that genetic determinism was an ‘unpleasantry’. I have been thinking about that a lot this past week and have come to the conclusion that the line between genetic determinism and a spiritual calling is a fine one.

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Through my athletic journey, I learned lessons that that made me a better man in the "real world".

Being a coach is an incredibly satisfying job because I can help people use athletic goals to break patterns/habits that have been limiting their success in other fields. There is no "magic" from the coach, rather, the desire of the athlete... to get to Kona, to win their agegroup, or to finish their race... provides that little extra motivation to keep going when they might have stopped in the past.

What are these fundamental lessons?

• We consistently underestimate what is possible across a multiple year time horizon.
• We rarely exceed the goals that we set for ourselves.
• We achieve our expectations (both conscious and unconscious) more often than not.

More than getting what we deserve, we get what we expect.

In this clip, I run through:

• Up Coming Webinars - ALL Times Noon Denver
  • Monday, January 19th - Building Your Performance Team & Time Saving Tips For Working Athletes - FULL
  • Monday, February 2nd - Training and Racing With Power
  • Monday, February 16th - Applying Blink (page 8) and Deep Survival (page 5) in your athletic life
• Personal Consulting
  • Self Coached Athetes
  • Short Course Athletes
  • New Athletes (that might not even realize they are athletes, yet!)

“Top results are available to anyone who builds up to my training and dedication levels (not an easy thing, I accept, but that’s the limiter, not genetics, not training protocol, not athletic background)”
- Gordo Byrn

We had an interesting discussion going on on the EC web site this past week on the tail of some 2009 training volume totals that I posted from some of my guys (with some additions from other EC members). I’ve reposted these below:

Gordo provides an update on:

• Blog feeds
• Webinars
• Video Office Hours
• Half Ironman Training Programs
• Logging
• Training Peaks Integration

Of course, one does need to be aware that publicly falling short can be painful... but nowhere near as painful as regret, or the haunting feeling when we know we let ourselves down.

“Planning training sessions appropriately within a week is like playing beautiful music. If the right keys are played at the right time, it creates a masterpiece. If the right keys are played at the wrong time, nothing but noise”

In this post, I’m going to complete the trilogy of training cycles by taking a look at some structural considerations in planning the fundamental microcycle - the Basic Week.

This week I am going to share some ideas that will, hopefully, save you from a large financial loss at some stage in your life. Over the course of your life people will steal from, mislead and generally attempt to swindle you -- if you hit 50 and think that this has never happened to you then you might not have been paying attention!

In my last blog, I gave some perspective to the relative merits of adopting a periodized structure when planning a mesocycle. I concluded that while there is benefit to using a ‘staircase’ structure in planning the weeks within a given training month, in general, the practical limitations of a fixed work schedule and life schedule outweigh the potential 3-5% that can come from using this structure.

So, what about the training season (macrocycle)? Should we adopt a flat loading pattern, where all weeks are the same or are there key points within the season that should have a higher or lower volume than the athlete’s basic week?

This week I am going to share some ideas on how my winter has been going.

This week I thought that I would share some ideas about how fatherhood is going as well as how I have been managing my expectations over the last seven weeks. As you can see above, my daughter wears her trousers just like daddy -- she's a High Rider.

These week I will share some thoughts/ideas that came out of three days at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. I've been quite busy on the business front -- apologies if your waiting for an email reply. I spend my spare time with Monica and Alexandra. I've also been doing yard work -- gets me away from my desk and into the sun!

I guess all of this extra energy devoted to firing a few more neurons brought me full circle, back to that undying question: When it comes to fatigue, how much is too much?

This week we return to a more financial-oriented letter. Now that the US election is out of the way, it seems like the bad news has started rolling again. The bad news can seem relentless at times and, following my trip around the world, appears to be happening in the US, Europe as well as Asia.

With the mood (near universally) negative, I've been trying to figure out my long term strategy for savings and investment. As I mentioned a few weeks back, I'm currently projecting a cash flow deficit for 2009. I suspect that I'm not alone in being in that position! Frankly, being able to absorb an unexpected set back is why I've been conservative over the last twenty years. I have been reminding myself that the world isn't ending but human psychology can be tough to counter.

Investment strategy is the topic for this week. I am not going to tell you what I think you should do. Rather, I am going to share ideas about how I approach my family's investment strategy and outline some observations from the last few weeks. An interesting article where the author does offer some "to do's".

I was tempted, this week, to write an article on one of the remaining principles of training, the principle of specificity. But, I am forced to admit that I don’t buy into that principle to the extent that I once did. I, like Matt Fitzgerald and other coach/athletes who place a high importance on sensory acuity, have found now, on a couple of occasions, that my bike load does influence my running performance, that my strength training does influence my bike performance and vice versa. There are a couple of preliminary performance and dose-response modelling studies that also support this notion, but in a broader sense, the jury is still out. So, under the old adage that it is better to be presumed a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt, I’ll keep my mouth closed on that one…..for now :-)

Instead, I wanted to write a follow up piece on a principle that I DO believe in 100% - the principle of individuality. This piece was inspired by two things. First of all, I picked up a copy of Brad Hudson’s book “Run Faster”. This is, unequivocally, the best book that I have read on training theory in a very long time. Speaking from the vantage point of someone who is looking at 2 book shelves full of over 200 books on swim, bike and run training, hopefully that statement carries some weight. Do yourself a favour and buy a copy.

The second thing that inspired this piece was a discussion with one of the well-known coaches who espouses cookie-cutter programs as the cost-effective solution for the majority of triathletes looking for some guidance with their training program. I have a number of issues with this approach and the way that triathlon coaching seems to be going that I will address below, not the least of which is that it fails to acknowledge the physiological, psychological and socio-cultural realities of individuality as athletes and as human beings, that contribute to the fact that, when it comes to creating an effective, appropriate training program for the individual, one size does NOT fit all.

In fact, as you will see below, I would go so far to say than an athlete would be far better starting their journey with no schedule and a blank log book in hand than a generic schedule that is not tailored to them.

If you were to take a look at the 200+ books on my bookshelf, you would notice an interesting pattern. The older, more tattered books are much more practical in content (Triathletes Training Bible, Serious Training for Serious Athletes, Road Running for Serious Runners, etc.) . It used to be the case that if I didn’t see immediately practical schedules, routines, workouts when flipping through the pages of the new entries in the sports and fitness section, I deemed the book worthless and moved on. Now, I am much more likely to deem it worthless if it does contain schedules supposed to fit various age or ability groups because, after experimenting with various schedules & programs on myself and in earlier years, my athletes I have come to the conclusion that it is both preposterous & frustrating to think for a second that you can forecast with any degree of accuracy how quickly any individual will adapt to a given workload or even what physiological changes a given weekly schedule will create. It is a truth and certainly not a negative comment that, in a lot of ways, the very best coaches are ‘making it up as they go along’.

Bruce Lee is an athlete and an individual that I respect very deeply. His art of Jeet Kune Do was largely based on ‘formlessness’. An extension of Krishnamurti’s concept that ‘truth is a pathless land’, in a practical sense, formlessness simply means adapting a resolve to not hold to one form or one theory, but rather to have an open mind and use whatever works. While there are certain core concepts that have proven common to the great endurance athletes of the past, e.g. relatively high volume training, multi-pace training, some form of periodization, hard-easy training, etc. there is also room for a lot of grey. Some things have proven to work for some athletes, some for others.

However, this is not to say that there are 100 best ways to achieve your athletic potential. For every one athlete, there is one best way, specific to your own physiology, psychology and life circumstances. The real art, and perhaps joy, in training comes from discovering your Way

One of the more interesting things that I have done as an exercise physiology student is to look under the microscope and examine various muscle biopsy samples. It is very easy for the human mind, in a search for uniformity and schemata to forget just how physically different and unique that we all are. When your gaze is shifted from common faces to the foreign environment of a microscope slide, you are given a startling reminder of the fact that we are all completely unique. Even letting go of all the quantitative differences of muscle fiber type, # of cytochromes, mitochondria etc, it is clear, even to the layman that one guy’s muscle ‘looks’ very different to another’s. It is a logical extension then, that with different capacities, the ‘right’ way to train one person will be very different from another, even if the individuals are of similar fitness and training for similar events.

While most coaches will acknowledge these differences, the complexity of creating truly individual training programs tailored to each individual’s physiological peculiarities leads many to simply give up and adopt a ‘best fit’ approach, which works out fine if you’re one of the athletes who fits within the parameters of the best fit, but not so well if you’re one of the unlucky who lacks the adaptive potential or the optimal physiology to benefit from the fixed training plan. I will tell you from experience, that it is very easy to rationalize the success of a particular training method based on 1 or 2 athletes, of a squad of 20 or more being very successful on it. (I am honestly sorry to those 18/20 that didn’t make it. If only I knew then what I know now).

The good news is that you don’t have to perform daily blood analysis and muscle biopsies to determine the optimal training program for each athlete. A little flexibility, a little responsiveness is all that is required. Bruce Lee hit the nail on the head when he penned that quote 40 years ago. There is much to be admired about a single drop of water. From the day that it is deposited on an alpine slope and it begins thawing, it has only one mission, one way to use the potential energy that it has been given, and that is to find a path that leads it to the sea. However, like you on your athletic journey, the eventual path is undetermined at this point. The water droplet must be responsive. When times are good, the water will flow quickly. When times are tough, and the tributaries shallow, the water must slow down. When the water hits an obstacle and stops moving forward, it must quickly and subtly change course. If the hand of man comes in and attempts to hurry the water beyond it’s natural rate of flow it will spill over the sides and be removed (at least temporarily) from it’s forward path of progress.

This metaphor describes, quite succinctly, the way that I coach and train as an athlete. While the mission may be set in stone, the path & the rate of progress are not. The smart athlete rather than adhering to a particular schedule ‘no matter what’, will:

1. Pay attention to his/her body on a daily basis to determine if they are ready for a particular workout. If not, they will do an easier workout or rest without hesitation, irrespective of what the schedule says. In addition, they will make note of what they are able to absorb and plan the next training cycle accordingly.

2. Pay attention to the physiological adaptations that are occurring and once one plateaus, will move their focus to another, all with the aim of becoming an appropriately balanced athlete. I discuss the practicalities of this in my previous blog on complex training. In this way, a schedule forecasted forward more than 3 or 4 weeks is worthless because no one can guess the rates at which each physiological capacity will improve for each individual.

Ultimately, training responsively will prove to be the quickest route to your goals. It is true that nature does a poor job of anything when hurried. The water learned this a long time ago. Maybe, as athletes, we can too.

Train Smart.

AC

Fit pregnancy and childbirth are the topics for this week.  The letter is likely to end up fairly long but it should make an interesting change from politics and the economy!

Tucson -- we have ten slots left for our Spring Camp in Tucson.  Dates are March 29th to April 5th.  Six days of training, $2,350 includes everything but your airfares.  The camp is appropriate for sub-13 hour IMers (and sub-6 hours Half IMers).  For more info drop me a line.

Over on Endurance Corner Radio you will find three new podcasts -- Greg Bennett; Going Fast in Kona; and Chris Baldwin.  If you want then you can subscribe to the podcasts through iTunes -- we are listed under Endurance Corner Radio.  Jonas Colting will be live on Monday!

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Fit Pregnancy

The mixed use of terms like Zone 2, Compensation Training, Maximal Aerobic Function Training, Reps, Intervals, ½ Paced Efforts, Tempo Training etc etc. can leave 2 intelligent coaches speaking 2 totally separate languages, the equivalent of Swahili and Japanese, if you will. To make things worse, the Swahili definition of ‘Tempo’ is completely different from the Japanese definition, so even those words that are common to both languages or systems can have definitions that are completely distinct and different. No wonder athletes get confused!!

In this article, I will present our own Endurance Corner terminology and will outline how it relates to the concepts outlined in the last exercise physiology article and also to the many and varied terms used by some of the more popular coaching systems.

Let’s begin by defining the terms that you’re likely to hear at Endurance Corner:

Easy Training (AeT-10 to AeT) – Improves your ability to generate energy from fat (especially for Novice athletes), enhances mitochondrial proliferation and capillary density (although less so than steady training). For the advanced athlete, enhances recovery between sessions.

Steady Training (AeT to AeT+10) – Improves your ability to generate energy from fat (intermediate athlete), enhances mitochondrial proliferation and capillary density in FOG fibers (these points are VERY important for aerobic energy production at all aerobic intensities above this zone), creates biomechanical adaptations that allow training at more intense levels. Training above this level places increasing risks for overuse injuries, especially in the novice athlete.

Moderately-Hard Training (AeT+10 to VT1/LT) – Improves the ability of your FOG fibers to produce energy from fat, enabling you to include more intense main sets in your longer races and your basic week.

Hard/Threshold Training (VT1/LT to OBLA/FT) – Develop the ability of your fast twitch fibers to produce energy aerobically. At the upper reaches, this intensity also enhances cardiac stroke volume and VO2max.

Very Hard/VO2max Training (OBLA/FT to Max)– Maximally develops the ability of your cardiovascular system to deliver oxygen to your working muscles.

Now, comparing our definitions with some of the more well-known systems we come up with the following table:

We offer this table as an approximation of the way that the various definitions ‘fit together’ so that we may almost speak the same language as athletes who use other systems. I say almost because, rather than being based on independent physiological markers such as aerobic threshold, VT1 etc, the bulk of systems are based on somewhat arbitrary percentages of one point, e.g. Max heart rate, threshold heart rate or functional threshold power. In these cases, the computations will not always line up with the physiological markers. For this reason, I am a big advocate of defining each point separately via lactate, VO2/VCO2 or, when lab testing is unavailable, simple breath markers.

Train Smart.

AC.