Total Athletic Podcast

Building Your Base: Why Training Age Matters

• Mike Catris

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0:00 | 46:33

We explore why training age and a broad fitness base decide how far you can go in hybrid sport. We compare sport backgrounds, break down base building, and show how recovery, psychology and smart progression beat ego-driven volume.

• training age as the hidden advantage 
• base building through zone 2 and steady volume 
• transfer from football, cycling, CrossFit to HYROX 
• strength, muscle mass and efficiency trade-offs 
• high vs low responders to training adaptation 
• intensity traps, overreaching and under-recovery 
• real recovery vs fake easy sessions 
• linear progression: add time, watts or cut rest 
• life stress and CNS load using the health bar analogy 
• race psychology and the skill of pacing and restraint

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SPEAKER_02:

Hello. Welcome back to the Total Athletic Podcast. Want to say a big thank you once again for everybody that's been contacting us, uh letting us know what you want us to talk about, giving us feedback, and generally just being really positive about the episode so far. So yeah, really big thanks for that. Um we hope you like the attempt at editing that I did on the last one when we thought we'd sorted the videos out. Um this one we will. Yeah, it's gonna be full through video starts finish. It's never gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00:

We're never ever ever gonna get a perfect one out of what? Four weeks in that on. Yeah, we we spend more time sorting this stuff out. Literally more time making the cameras. I sit here and I watch Mike do it because he says he's not good with tech, I'm even worse. So yeah, yeah. But this time round I'll be a good one. But I thought, yeah, we thought today we'd we'd kind of do a a bit more on kind of the the fitness and training side. Um similar sort of approach to last time, I've got a good question that I kind of wanted to put to Mike. Um, and what that was was looking at kind of people's backgrounds in training. Um, it's come up a lot recently in terms of having a base and how important having a base is, and unless you've got that base, and why are you doing any kind of threshold training and top end training? And and I think a lot of that comes down to people's training backgrounds. We we talk about high rocks and we look at what's the perfect athlete coming into the sport, where is their background. And I kind of wanted to delve into that a little and talk about how important it is training age, how long you've been training for, because what I find, and you've probably seen it a lot, is people running is not just high rocks, but running in particular at the moment is such a hype and so important that there's people coming into running and trying to do these 50, 100k weeks because that's what they're told to do. But actually, this time last year, they've never been to a gym or run a 5k, and then they'll speak to people like ourselves and who were training for 15, 20 hours a week, and then you're suddenly able to go and pick up running and start running, and they go, Well, how do you do it? And you say, Well, actually, I've been training for for 15, 20 years, maybe not as a runner, but you've kind of got that training age and and vegetables. So I thought we could touch on Mike's background, my background, and and how important that is. So, yeah, I guess my first question to you is how important is that?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, it's it's interesting. I think um there's there's a very broad spectrum of um athletic backgrounds in in the sporting world and in high performance sport. Um and it's it's very rare that you see somebody come from absolutely nothing to the top of sport in a short space of time. It you know, almost never happens. What you do often get is people who played different sports growing up, um then becoming sportsmen in their own right or in their own sport in their later sort of teenage years or early sort of 20s, um, and sort of all of a sudden taking the world by storm. Um, and I think that there's there's a a general reason that we see that is that doing some form of GPP, uh, general physical preparedness training at a young age, um, or at a young training age. So let's say you're starting as a complete beginner, doing that for a number of years doesn't have to be specific to have a carryover to your general fitness or your um adaptability to training um or your uh resilience, both mental and physical. Um what it can do is, as you just touched on, as a as a term, is build a base. Um and the the reason we call it a base is because a pyramid is only can only be as tall as the base is wide. Um and if you look at fitness as a pyramid, the the broader your base is for most sports, that is considered to be your aerobic fitness. Um, the broader your base is, the higher the peak of your fitness can be. Um so that's a really long-winded and cryptic way of saying. I think that if you've done some training for some period of time, then your ability to go into a sport and do well is much, much greater than if you've done no training for no period of time. Um now there are outliers for this. Somebody called Sarah Sigmund's daughter in the CrossFit space was not a trainer at all and started training and doing CrossFit, and she became a very, very good CrossFit and you know, podium at the CrossFit Games. Um, but these are sort of quite um rare examples. If you look at um tennis, for example, um Roger Federer was uh very much a jack of all trades growing up. He played football, he played cricket. He wouldn't play cricket, he was Swiss, but he played that he played everything, basically, is the point I was trying to make. I think and and tennis was one of the things that he played. Um and he didn't ring fence himself into tennis until much, much later on. Now you compare that to uh Rafael Nadal, was the opposite of that, was very much tennis all the way through. Um, and they both became two of the best tennis players ever to live, right? Um, so there's it's not a linear path that you need to specifically do running, for example, to become a very, very good high roxer. You could have a background in football, like you had, or cricket like you had, um, and become one of the best CrossFitters in the UK because you've got a base and you also did a lot of gym work and training work and all of these other things that's held you in good stead as far as the stations were concerned. Um so I think that having um a broad my my my my thoughts on it if I was to have a child, um, even when I have kids, was I I'd want them to play everything for as long as they possibly can, because what that'll do is give them a little bit of exposure to all of these different aspects of fitness, whether or not that's aerobic fitness or power output or strength or um agility or accuracy balance, all of these things that sort of get don't get trained in the gym and get overlooked proprioception. Um I think all of those things, the broader that that that base is and the broader that net that you cast at an early age will stand you in greater set later on, even when you do decide to get specific with it.

SPEAKER_00:

And and so if we were to kind of narrow that down into hyroxicity uh shock, talk about hyrexism, it's the ultimate hybrid event. Is that what I is there a do you think any training age in terms of any modality? So for example, someone who was a cyclist or someone who was just an avid gym goer who was in the gym seven days a week, not necessarily doing aerobic work, but just lifting weights, is that gonna have as much of a benefit for example as maybe someone who was an ex-professional cyclist? Um, or is there kind of an aerobic capacity that you need to build doing aerobic work for your training background to have a positive impact into the sport?

SPEAKER_02:

Um, I think it depends. Um, it depends on the person. I think there's there's no doubt that if you were um a cyclist or a triathlete or uh, you know, I think I touched on it in the first episode where I said I think the the perfect uh athlete to go into high rocks would be a dick athlete because they for that purpose they do a bit of everything, but also have to be very proficient runners. But I think, yeah, if you if you came from a quote unquote fitness sport, um now that could be field hockey, that could be soccer, yeah. Or um, you know, footballers run you know 10, 11k in a 90-minute football match. Um, so you know, they're they're probably running. I actually did a podcast with Carnegie footballer the other day. Um, his his podcast uh has ours to be on, and and they they'll they're running sort of 50k a week um in training. Um so they're doing a lot of volume as well. So if you played relatively high level, or not necessarily high level, because your skill level might not be good, but if your work rate was good and you're you're covering sort of 30, 40, 50k a week playing football, you're probably gonna have a very good aerobic base and be a decent runner as well. Um so yeah, I think having an um an aerobic background or a fitness sport related background would obviously be a benefit if you came into HIROX. Um however, I don't think that you would necessarily be um sort of punished for having a training background that was more gym-based, as long as you did some form of conditioning. Um, now what does that look like? Would that be a MEPCON for 10 minutes three, four times a week? Well, that's better than nothing. Um I think coming from a bodybuilding, and by which I mean like a Mr. Olympia style bodybuilding heavyweight, as much muscle mass as possible, it's probably not going to be the best background to come into something like HIROX because it's inefficient. Uh, we talked about in the last uh episode about mitochondria and about um glycogen in the muscles and uh oxidate oxidation and all of these things. The bigger your muscle mass, the more uh energy they need to fuel that muscle. Um so actually carrying muscle mass or excessive muscle mass is probably or is an inefficient thing. It's why you don't see many jacked marathon runners.

SPEAKER_00:

So with uh leading into one of one of two next questions. So if someone like yourself, who's you won't like to admit it, an incredibly good athlete and has got an incredible background in your CrossFit, your rugby, especially looking at your CrossFit side of it, for someone who's gonna not I'm not gonna say you're taking up high rocks, but you're gonna do a few next year. I'm really intrigued at how good you're gonna be because of how good you were at CrossFit. Do you think your CrossFit ability and your not CrossFit your fitness ability is going to transition directly and immediately into high rocks, or do you still believe that you're maybe missing elements of a low-level base endurance because you've got such high-level top end from CrossFit? Or do you feel that because you've built such fitness, there's certain times where who cares about a base? I'm so fit, I can just transition over, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, I think for me personally, um, and this is this is a personal sort of side of things. I think if you took a very good CrossFitter or uh somebody at a similar sort of level to where I was at my peak, their potential in high rocks could be better than than what mine is, um, purely because of my injury history and having basically a full ankle reconstruction, a Kibbies reconstruction in the last two years. Um and the fact that leading into that injury, I I couldn't run an awful lot at all, even for a crossfitter. I was doing no running. Um so as much as I've got a decent aerobic base in that if you or I sat on a bike for an hour and did max calories, or sat on a rower for an hour, or sat on a skier for an hour, I would probably win or certainly push you. Or certainly push you a lot more than anyone would think that I would push you when you look at our high rock scores. Yeah. Um, but if we had to run for an hour, I'd be shocked if you didn't lap me 17 times. Um now I'm able to now run, having come back and had some surgery and some some rehab and everything else, Touchwood seems to be on the up and up. Um I think that my aerobic base, i.e., the ability to use oxygen, is definitely a benefit in comparison to others coming into high rocks from perhaps a um just a gym background, not necessarily a CrossFit background.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And I was somebody that had to work incredibly hard on my fitness and CrossFit. I was always a strength power athlete. That, you know, my background was rugby, um, played professional rugby for a couple of years. As a kid, I boxed, boxed for, you know, relative to a relatively high level as well. Um, so, you know, I was somebody that was quite athletic and good, good at most sports. Uh, a lot of that for me was very much psychological. I refuse to lose. Um, and I think that that's a big part of it, and something we'll probably touch on in a it's uh it's definitely another episode in that when you talk about the psychology of this. Yeah. Um, and it's something I get asked a lot about on Q ⁇ A's on a Sunday is, you know, how how much how do you learn to compete?

SPEAKER_00:

Um and it's I think that I think there's a massive like we've spoken about prior to to higher up, I've played sport since the age of one, but I've never competed in an individual, and racing is psychologically is half a battle. Like I least half. I'm 13, 14 races into higher up, and I'm still way off psychologically where I need to be in. Because it's it's certainly something, so it's it's definitely a an episode for us to do as we look into that. Because you could be you could be the best outlet.

SPEAKER_02:

If you don't know number one how to race and psychologically, where to put yourself before during, is yeah, it's and and that's a really interesting point to sort of round back to when we talk about having a background in something. Now, even if your background is just going to the gym three times a week for five, six, seven, eight, ten years, right? You know what it feels like to train. You know what it feels like to train when you don't want to train, you know what it feels like to probably train around an injury, to feel sore the next day and still go to the gym or whatever these things might be. All of that is base. All of that is an advantage over somebody that's got zero of that experience. Yeah, exactly. Um, and an interesting sort of going a little bit deeper into the the physiology side of things is that there is such things you you always just hear in in bodybuilding or training teams as hard gainers, right? I was the hard gainer. Yeah. So I wasn't the mass gainers. But it's a real thing, right? And and it's it's less so to do with muscle mass in particular, but more to do with adapt adaptation to training. And there are high adapters, medium adapters, and low adapters to training. Now, the likelihood is if you've got a background in some sort of sport, it's probably because you're a higher or a medium level adapter and you got quite good at that sport at a relatively early stage during your development. Now, if that for most people that will be playing a sport in school, or the first time they go to a gym and they see improvements and it's like, cool, I can bench 60 kilos now. When last week I could only bench 55, and next week I can bench 65. And I'm seeing this adaptation, those novice gains. Um, the the higher you are as an adapter, the more likely you are to be motivated by training, the more likely you are to continue to do that. And you'll you'll see an awful lot of people that will be psychologically motivated to train, but don't adapt. And you're gonna see how long they hang around for. It's uh it's a thankless task. Okay. So the likelihood is if you've got, going back to that point, is if you've got some sort of background in some sort of sport uh at any sort of decent level, you're probably at the very least a medium-level adapter, i.e., if you train, you'll get better. Yeah. And if you're a high adapter, which uh I am and you will be, you'll train and you'll get better than most people get better. So you'll out you'll out-improve people. Now that's massively motivational because you and me, you know, Tom, Dick, and Harry all go into the gym at the same time. We all start and we've all got a 50 kilo bench press. And then in six weeks' time, me and you have got a 60 kilo bench press and they've still got 50. Who's gonna keep coming? Yeah, yeah. Who's gonna stop going? Who's gonna think, cool, how do we get to 61? How do we get to 62? And then building on that going forward. Um, so it sort of self-selects. I think anybody that's got a background, the likelihood for the most part, is you know, you can have a load of people that are poor adapters that play just for the love of the game, or that you know, just were out outperformed because they were really intelligent players or you know, understood the sport better than other people. But um, certainly for something like uh for something like CrossFit, there's not gonna be many or any people in the top um sort of 10% that aren't at least medium-level adapters.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, makes sense, makes sense. And I guess going back to the base, you say, yeah, again, it can kind of be and running is an easy one, easy, easy example. Someone who's brand new into running, they go online, they look at fresh code training and look at track sessions, and someone sips them down and says, Listen now, sap that off. Just go and run four or five days and really build your base, and they go away, they do the kind of the easy work with zone two work. Say they do that for four to six months, they get fit. Once you've built in that triangle, you've built your your foundation, so to speak. Can you at that point, once you've kind of really built it up, maintain that through not doing as much of that zone two work? So, for example, you've done six months of nothing but easy work, and now you're looking to kind of take it to level up, you introduce a bit of threshold, you introduce a bit of V2, a bit of track work. Could you maintain that base whilst not doing it, as long as you're keeping up the training volume, or is it something that needs to be downwarded into still weekly to maintain? It kind of depends on what level you're at.

SPEAKER_02:

If if you're what we would call a recreational runner, a club level, uh, maybe a 90-minute high roxer, if we're looking at high rox or whatever that that might be, um, you could probably get away with not doing zone two work and just doing three sort of interval uh or threshold or um VO2 sessions a week um to maintain that. I would struggle to find many people that were in that quote unquote elite or or pushing for maybe sub hour um high rox times or whatever that aren't doing any sort of zone two work and maintaining that base. And there's there's two reasons for that. One is the the basic time on the tension, just the volume of training. It will you're in improving adaptation, you're improving mitochondrial efficiency, you're improving mitochondrial density, size of mitochondria, all of these things that we touched on in the last episode that are very important to aerobic performance and fitness. And two, it actually can help with recovery as well. And I think we touched on it briefly in the last episode as well. And it's probably a whole series of episodes in itself, and something that I'm a massive proponent of in terms of how I coach and how I program is that you can only train as much as you can recover from efficiently. Anyone can do more training, but then you're into that stage of overreaching. I don't use the term overtraining because I think there's very, very few people that are actually genuinely overtrained. But there's an awful lot of people that are overreaching. And under recovering. And under recovering, same, same, same thing, basically. And what that means is if you are overreaching and under-recovering, you won't improve. You are treading water because you're breaking down and then just about recovering back to the point where you are now, and then breaking down and just about recovering back.

SPEAKER_00:

I've been through that process.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And and that that is a massive psychological barrier for a lot of um highly motivated people to get through. It's actually what you need to do is less or not as hard.

SPEAKER_00:

And that's a question for me to you again is under recovering, overtraining. I think we all view overtraining as, and again, this is something I listened to recently where I just nailed it on the head, and it's a bit I've had in my mind for ages, is is there such a thing as overtraining volume? Or is there such a thing as overtraining intensity? And the answer to what I listened to, and what I've always also believed in is you you're training 50 hours a week if you overtrain volume, but you can overtrain intensity. So when you say doing less is sometimes doing more, I've always thought that is okay, have a rest day. Whereas actually, what we're talking about is drop your full cent high rock session or your VO2 max running session and maybe pop in an hour easy bike.

SPEAKER_02:

Or what we would we talked about in the last episode about Elliot Kipchovy. Yeah. And he does a lot of bike work, but it's because he can't do any more running.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Because he's already running probably 200k a week.

SPEAKER_00:

And so are there there are there times where maybe it is a case of listen, mate, I'm fucked. I need a rest. Is that okay, have a few easy days, or is that have a few days? But is there ever a period where complete rest out trumps, keep an easy work, active recovery?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think that there's there's two sort of schools of thought on that. Um really truly easy aerobic work can be restorative as long as psychologically you're not broken. That's the big thing, I think. And I think a lot of people would psychologically recover a lot more from a day off than they would from an hour on a bike. And that's maybe that's what I have.

SPEAKER_00:

I the best thing I've ever had is buying a bike for the house as much as my girlfriend hates it, is psychologically, I can't not do anything. I'm just not that way. But having a day out of the gym psychologically changes my mind. So before I had the bike at home, I was in that gym seven days a week. But sometimes I always go into that gym to sit on a bike for probably 25 minutes at 75 watts and then leave the gym. But because in my head I'd been to the gym, I'd done a hard session. So I'd come into Monday feeling not recovered at all. What I'm now doing is having a lie in, I sometimes do an hour and a half, pretty hard on the bike, still zone one, zone two, and then have the rest of it at home. And I feel great on Monday because psychologically I've had an easy Sunday at home. And it's so yeah, that's that's a massive problem.

SPEAKER_02:

Scientifically speaking, you know, you go back to the volume side of things. Um, the amount of volume that you can tolerate is basically capped by the amount of calories you consume. Yeah. But you can as long as you consume enough calories, you can probably train 18 hours a day. Um, and by train, I mean be active, be on your feet, going for a walk, whatever.

SPEAKER_00:

Once this podcast goes viral, consume by YouTube channel. That's something I would love to do. Is just uh a day, a week of just I've seen people do like 10,000 calorie days versus 10,000, burn 10,000 calories and eat 10,000 calories. I would love personally for someone I'll do the eating, you can do the burning. I love training and I love eating. And I would just love to have a how how hard can we go? How much can we do before the body says no? Um so yeah, soon to come. Watch this space, watch this space.

SPEAKER_02:

Um yeah, and I think when going back to your your initial uh question, or one of your initial questions when we just went off on this sort of tangent, when you said um if you're overtraining, is that is that volume or intensity? The the real answer is yes. Um it's it's amount of volume at intensity that is the the problem. And the the issue that you've got is intensity is relative. Um, and again, that can come back to psychologically. You know, how hard are you able to get yourself going? How hard are you able to push um consistently before you don't want to start pushing that hard? Um most people will push beyond that, and uh you know, won't the people that are probably listening to this are highly motivated trainers. So it's rare that they don't want to train. It'll be often a case of them um pushing and doing too much intensity and not wanting to train easily and do that light work. And I think that that again that comes down to to two separate factors is one is confidence in your own ability um and honesty with yourself, in that this is I know the best thing for me to do, and I'm confident that if I do the best thing that I'm supposed to do, I will get better, rather than what's he doing? What's he doing? Somebody else is training harder than me. I need to train harder. And that ego saying, Come on, you can go harder, you can go harder, where even though you know it's not the right thing to do. And that's that that's a gosh, that resonates a lot. Yeah, that that is the the paradox um or the um the juxtaposition of of being an athlete, right? Is that we all want to be the best and we all want to train as hard as we can to be the best. And sometimes training hard is not actually training hard, it's doing the hard thing and not training, and the hard thing is to not train.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And on that note, then so the easy work. We I in my head I view like there's two lots of easy work. There's your there's your zone two base building easy work, which in my head I think everyone said that's not easy in my head. Easy is an easy run for an hour in zone two isn't easy. So there's that side of it where you're building a fitness level, and then there's the other easy, which is kind of your recovery, where that is easy, you could sit on the bike for two hours. If, for example, I had a session tonight, for example, it's whatever time it's seven o'clock, I just haven't got it in me to do this hard session. Would there be benefit of someone doing a recovery session, an hour and a half on the bike? Are they gonna get any maybe not physical adaptations but fitness adaptations by doing that? Or would the sole benefit of that be recovery, flushing your legs out, active recovery?

SPEAKER_02:

Um, yeah, that would be the benefit, and that in itself is the benefit, is the benefit. So I think like if you if you if you were a professional athlete that you know didn't have to, you know, put food on the table and worry about paying the bills and doing all this other stuff, that money wasn't an issue, time wasn't an issue, all you had was a bedroom, a gym, and a kitchen. Um you probably couldn't do too much recovery work. It'd be a very, very, very hard thing to do. Now, the problem that most people find um or don't find because they don't understand is that they what they consider recovery work is still too hard. Yeah. Um, recovery, like genuine recovery work, might be literally going for a long walk and jumping in a sauna um and maintaining a uh a relatively high heart rate. There's a hack in there for people that will probably go into in some future rabbit hole that you know, if you do your cardio work um or zone two or aerobic work and literally get off the bike row runner, whatever, and straight into a sauna, you're basically continuing that aerobic work. Yeah, I've heard that. And really, really cool uh science of studies around that. It's interesting stuff. Um now going back to that in terms of my initial point that I made about the the intensity and the volume, we're we're ring-fencing ourselves here a little bit because we're talking about running in a relatively aerobic um style of training. If we were to look at that as gym work, then volume can become an issue. Yeah. You can do too much volume in the gym. Go back to my bench press example for whatever. If you look at the total uh poundage of a session, i.e. weight times reps times sets, that that'll give you a set amount of work that you've done in that movement. So say I've done 100 kilos for 10 tanks, yeah, that'll be 10,000 kilos I've lifted in that session.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

If I then turn around and go, oh yeah, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do 50 kilos, but I'm gonna do a hundred sets of ten. Actually, what I'm doing is fifty thousand kilos instead of ten thousand kilos, and that is exponentially more volume and my arms will probably fall off even though it's easier. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so there if you look at things, I think um people look at running, they look at aerobic work almost separately to training. But if you look at things like Prelipin's table, where um set amount of reps and set amount of um sets at certain percentages of one rep max, there's not a ton of difference between that and sets and reps and uh of time at aerobic word and at at percentage of either perceived exertion or via two max, depending on which way you look at it or what what your that specific movement is. Um so for for instance, five fives at 65% is that sort of sweet spot um on uh a lift, a squat, a deadlift, a bench or whatever. Four fours at 75%, three threes at 85%. That's that's sort of in and around that. Well, actually, that could easily look like three lots of three minutes at 85% of VO2, um, or 85% of threshold. Um and you you wouldn't then want to do 10 sets of that. Um, there's a reason why you're doing a certain amount of threshold, but time a threshold while you're doing a certain amount of time at VO2. Um, because doing more and more and more, you know, the whole adage thing I talked about in one of the other episodes was more is not better, better is better. And you can only do what you can recover from. Now, it's slightly different in the aerobic side of things that we're talking about there, because you can go much, much easier than what you can with a bench press. Because there's a movement pattern, there's a you know, force times mass time is acceleration. So the distance I'm traveling from here to here is a set distance. And even just doing that a million times with nothing, just my arms, is gonna have a fatiguing factor. Um, that would be the equivalent of going for a long run. Yeah, as soon as you put a barbell on there, well, that's 20 kilos more than that. You put another, you know, 40, 60, 80, 100 kilos, whatever it is on there. Um, that's then increasing the intensity. Um, but the distance is staying the same. Well, the same thing if you going for a run, every time your foot gets the floor, there's an eccentric load to that. That's you doing this with nothing, but it's still doing something, even though it might not feel like doing something. Your your Achilles, your calf, your quads, your glutes, glute mead, for stopping you rolling from side to side, you know, even your eptospiny, keeping you upright when you're running, all of those are taking a little bit of eccentric load every time your foot gets to the floor. Um doing it on a bike less so, which is why we tend to do more recovery work on a bike than we would on the road rather. Um, but there's still muscular exertion going on there that needs recovery from. Um so I think the the really long-winded way of going about that is that you just need to be sensible in that you can do too much. Um you definitely can do too much and have done too much in in the past. Um, and I think it's something where you you need to you need to focus on what you can recover from because you can always do more. If you've done too much, it's too late. You can't do less.

SPEAKER_00:

You've already done it. Yeah, that's very true. Um it's it's tough, isn't it? It's especially online these days, you look at you look in the highlight reels as well, huh? You look at the highlight reels, you look in the 18, 20, 25 hours a week, and you look at yourself and you've done like 13, 14, you think, I'm not giving enough here, I've got more on the time. Okay, you'd have. I always find as well, it's you know when you've done a little bit, or you need to take a step back. But I find once I get into the session, no matter how bad I feel, I feel great after it. So you regret a session you've done. So it's very difficult to not do that session, even if I know I shouldn't, because I know for a fact that in an hour and a half I'm gonna feel better again. And then I keep going and I keep going and I keep going, and you never take that like a step back to take two steps forward.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think that, you know, again, rounding back to the whole original side of this is you know, having a background in anything, you'd have learned a lot of these lessons. So you're further along the journey, journey, but further along the journey in terms of training age than somebody that's a complete novice, right? So I know what overtraining or overreaching feels like. I know what soreness, real fucking soreness is. Yeah. Uh I know when I do something in the gym cross, I better stop there because tomorrow, otherwise I'm gonna be in a shit state. And if all of this is brand new to you, you've got all those mistakes to make.

SPEAKER_00:

That's such a great point. And I've seen it so much the last year, especially since running is just jumped up. You get one of two newbies. You either get the newbie who just has zero work ethic, doesn't know what hard work feels like, and they wonder why they're not getting better, they just don't train hard there. Or you get the number two guy who, or girl, doesn't know what over-training feels like, doesn't know what overreaching stiff muscles thinks that's just normal, and then destroys the tactic, and they send it seven days a week, 365 days a year. They fail every single race they do because they built zero base, but they just think that's the way you really get, and you're right, it's that trading age when you learn that if you're a bodybuilder in the past and you've done a six-day push for leg split, and by day six, your legs are battered, you need that rest day, or you're a runner and you've done a hundred kids, you know what doing too much and too little feels like. So, yeah, I think that's a massive, a really good point there.

SPEAKER_02:

And I think what you do there is you build confidence, honesty, and competence in your ability. Um, and that's not necessarily your ability in training, it's your ability to recover. So you you I've built confidence in this. I know I can recover from this because I've done this before and I've recovered from it. Or I I know I've recovered from this because last week we did six lots of four minutes at you know 300 watts, or six times four minutes at uh, I don't know, whatever pace 13k on a on the on the treadmill. So I'm and I'm this week I'm gonna do six by five. So I know I can recover from six by four. Yeah. So I'm gonna I'm gonna have a go at six by five and see how that feels tomorrow. But I know I'm not what I'm not doing is six by fifteen.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm not going, oh well, I you know I did this, let's just go three times as much. I'm gonna do some, and that's that's the whole process of coaching, programming, whatever you want to call it, and following a program is that you you follow a linear progression, or lots of people don't because they overvary things and they try and be really clever, or they try and prove their worth as a coach, or they try and um you know pull the wool over your eyes and make that try and think that make them more make out they're more clever than they are to their clients, or more it's more personalized than it needs to be, or whatever. But you know, we talked about threshold training in in the last episode. Something like doing four by four minutes, say we're on a bike at 300 watts with a four-minute rest in between, and then going four by five minutes or five by four minutes the next week at 300 watts, or doing four by four at three or five watts. So you're I'm increasing the wattage or increasing the time, or I'm decreasing the rest. Yeah, that's the big one. There's three different ways of doing that to all achieve the same results, right? So what I'm doing is is limiting either limiting the amount of recovery, increasing the amount of power, increasing the amount of time, the same power. Um, and we might do that for three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, or even six weeks, and then deload, readdress, and change. And then we'll go back and we'll do something else where we might do, okay, we're gonna do two lots of 12 minutes, then we're gonna do two lots of 12 and a half, and we're changing things up slightly then for for variety, but also to get a stimulus. It doesn't need to be to reinvent the wheel. Um, and I think you if you've been through any of that process as an athlete or as a gym goer or whatever, then you what you're doing then is building confidence in your ability to recover and your confidence in your program, right? I know this works because last week I found that really hard. And this week it's quote unquote harder because it's an extra amount of time or it's an extra amount of power or it's less stress than the same, and it feels the same or better. Yeah. Oh my god, I'm super mad. I'm gonna keep doing this, and in three months' time, I'm gonna win the worlds. It doesn't work that, right? But but what you're doing is you're building confidence in your To recover. And if it doesn't, that might be say, I'll give you four by four at 300 watts with a four-minute rest, and you can't achieve that. Cool. We're going to go four by four at 280. Start again. Yeah. And you'd be like, okay, I can do 280. I can do 285. And then you eventually get to 300. You're like, wicked. Four weeks ago I couldn't do that. I could do that now. I'm getting 50.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. That's the nice. And I think that's been doing too much. The more I think about it, the goes, but doing you're never progressing. That's the biggest thing I found is the more the the more you do, the the more you should stay the same. And you kind of like, oh well, it's like insanity is doing the same thing again and again and again and not get any better anymore. I think that's what so many people myself would need to go wrong, is that you just add in more and more and more and more, but you're not actually getting better. But actually by taking that, not doing that second session allows you to make next week's first session better. You're much better than that extra two hours for that second session, which you don't really need to do.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think one of the things I speak to a lot of my athletes about, um, especially those that have got quote unquote real jobs that aren't, you know, gym owners or personal trainingers or coaches that that don't spend the vast majority of their time around a gym. Um and that's not taking anybody anything away from those guys either, because they're, you know, can be high stress or uh high workload jobs as well. But is if you um imagine you're playing a video game on Street Fighter or whatever, and you've got like a health bar, yeah, right, you've got a hundred hit points. Yeah, if you get hit a hundred times, you die. Okay. Your body and your central nervous system and your does not cannot tell the difference between stress from the gym, stress from the dog shitting on the carpet, stress from having a ride with the missus, stress increasing because you've had a poor recovery, bad night's sleep or beers the night before or whatever. Um, so all of those things are getting taking points away from you before you've even trained. Okay. You've only got then maybe 60 points to play with in the gym. Um you've only got 60 points to play with in the gym, right? So you better not go to 61, 62 because you're gonna then start overreaching. You're better off going to 58, leaving two health points and live to fight another day, because then you know you can wake up tomorrow at 100.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. I love that. No, it's it's really interesting, and it's just like you say, that the better the athlete, the more driven you are, the worse it is for you sometimes. Because yeah, I I can't resignate with that even more. And it's it's the outside of the gym stuff that really gets you. And I think that's where people both so wrong is that these guys that we're looking at on the scrum, it's their life, it's their life. Like I say, it's not the working in the gym isn't hard, it's incredible, but you're in the gym, even just the stress of driving to the gym for a new job, that's five points. You get cut up, yeah. It's phone calling work takes longer than you want it to, or your boss is it in bed or you get to the gym at half six. Well, by the time I finish my session, it's eight o'clock, I go. It's cold, it's raining. They're gonna make dinner, yeah. And they're gonna prep if there's so many, like I said, yeah. Could I trade 30 hours a week if I live this easy? And I'd probably find that a lot easier than the 14 hours say I'm doing now with a full-time job. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, it's a massive point, but yeah, I think like the the other thing as well is to to to sort of bookend to that point. Uh it's a I did the uh when you used to be called the CrossFit football course, it's now the power athlete uh power athlete course. Um ex-NFL player called John Walborn, really, really quite bloke, um, ran his own like training course. And uh one of the um the the analogies that he used, which I really liked, is that sometimes like thinking about training as though you've got a massive pile of dirt over here and you've got to move that massive pile of dirt to over there, and some days you've got a shovel, and some days you've got a spoon, but you've just moved the dirt. And on the days that you've got a spoon, so you've had a shit day in work, you didn't sleep very well, you know, Mrs. is in a bad mood with you for whatever, or your in-laws are over and you can't be arsed, or whatever it might be, that day you've got a spoon. So we're just gonna move a small amount of dirt and just be realistic that that's that day we're only gonna get a couple of a couple of spoonfuls of dirt done, but we're still moving some dirt. Um, and then that then allows me then the next day to get a big fuck off shovel or a digger. Yeah. Because I've used a spoon. I haven't tried to pick up the shovel when it's not there. I love that.

SPEAKER_00:

That's an analogy I open my head a lot. I think what what what would be better, let's say today? Say I had an hour or a half an hour session, which I've skipped because I didn't finish it off this morning, but I'm absolutely batted now. My brain says go home and get it done tonight. That means it's gonna be eight o'clock. I've been gonna have dinner, I'm gonna be extra tired, I'm not gonna. That's then really gonna realistically gonna take away a lot of the intensity. Is the camera gone? My camera's still going, we'll switch very soon. That's gonna take away a certain element of my intensity for tomorrow's session. So, in essence, do I quit while I'm ahead, sack off tonight's session, get a good night's sleep, get all my food in, and then train at an extra 20%. I'm actually better off by missing that. But it's as everyone listening to this is gonna be insane. But when we're a certain way inclined and driven, it's very hard to do the right thing. Yeah, we think the right thing is to do more.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and I think we spent the vast majority of this episode talking about that and not actually what if what your base background like what your training background is.

SPEAKER_00:

I think we didn't, I think we quickly realized that we're not very good at short, sharp episodes, which is fine. So we're terrible at sticking for the point. So I think at that point we're uh cut it short. But I think we we did cover the base bit quite a lot to start off with, which it's good. So we've uh ticked that off. And I think we'll the camera's ended, so we'll uh yeah, end this episode now, I think.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we'll leave it there, guys. So thank you very once again, and thanks very much for listening. Thanks for um you know like, subscribe, yeah. Do that thing, do do the subscribe button, share, and share. Yeah, uh and um speak to you next week. See you soon. Cheers.