Debrief: Dr. Randy Wilber

Dr. Randy Wilber is a Senior Sport Physiologist at the US Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. He has worked with numerous Olympic medalists across multiple sports. I press him for insight on overtraining and blood analysis.

Debrief: Dr. Randy Wilber Chris DeSantis

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Hello and welcome to the swim brief. My name is Chris DeSantis, and today on the debrief, where I bring on coaches, experts, knowledgeable people, people who can help you to learn and become a better version of yourself as a coach, I am I'm super excited to bring this one on. Dr. Randall Wilbur is a senior sport physiologist at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. He's been working there for decades. He's been working with high-level athletes, U.S. Olympic medalists in swimming, track and field, triathlon. And he also started his career as a coach, so he's got a coaching background as well. Am I leaving anything out, Randy? I mean, how long should we make this intro on the front?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

That sounds good to me. I've been here for decades, so we don't want to go into detail on that. That's way too long.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Well, we do want to get a little bit of biography on you. Uh I had the chance to see you speak in Denmark. It's funny. I mean, we were laughing about it, I think, at the time. You know, you're you're an American, you fly halfway across the world to go to a coaching clinic, and the speaker is from the US OPC. I had to go all the way to Denmark to hear from you, but I was I was really interested in what you had to say, and we're going to be following up on some of the things that you talked about in that context. But before we get to that, I just want the audience to sort of understand a little bit who you are, where you're coming from, uh, both in the sense of what the arc of your career has been, and then sort of what kind of expertise you're bringing to the table when you're talking about some of what you're going to talk about later. So give us the give us the five-minute Randy Wilbur like career arc. Talk about how you got started, how you got involved in sports. I do in particular, I don't think we spent a lot of time when you were at this clinic talking about your own coaching career. And that's where you started, right? You were a coach first?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah, when I graduated from college, I immediately gravitated to Florida. I had an older sister there who was teaching school, and I just envisioned Florida as the place to be if you're starting a high school coaching career, which I was in the sport of the sports of cross country and track and field. So I'm not a swimming coach, rather I'm a cross-country and and track coach. I spent the first 10 years of my career in uh Central Florida, and then I moved to the university level for a couple of years. One thing after another, push came to shove, doing some independent reading in a relatively new field of uh applied sport physiology at that time. And I was in a position to make a bit of a career move. So I went back to school uh and got a master's and a PhD in uh integrative and applied physiology. From there, you know, I made my way out to where I'm speaking to you from, and that is uh beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado, the home of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee in the United States Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, part of which you see in the background, and again, that's uh where my home base is when I'm not uh moving around the country or traveling uh around the world for one purpose or another. So yeah, I've been here 33 plus years. Uh been very uh excited uh to be here every single one of those years. I've been a member of the official United States Olympic uh and Paralympic team delegation at uh 14 Olympic games, seven winter and seven summer. Very proud to say that. And I'm also very, very proud to say that along the way I've had the opportunity to to work as an applied physiologist with USA swimming. And wow, what what great athletes and great people I've had the opportunity to work with there. I guess just grabbing a couple off the top of my head with the Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecki and Ryan Murphy and uh Alice uh yeah, Alice Allison Schmidt. Um again, you know, not only just record-breaking athletes, I don't know how many medals if you had all those people together, you would have probably triple figures, I would think. Uh but they're just good down-to-earth, uh totally first class people, and that's what I'll remember. I'm already starting to remember that from uh some of them who are retired. And uh you know, again, it's been a wonderful opportunity to work within that sport and uh for the coaches and the athletes in USA uh swimming. That's about it. I'm uh still working full time. Uh I'm shifting uh to more of an uh old man's role that is uh a consultant, a mentor, a teacher. Uh I just started in a program at uh our local University of Colorado here in Colorado Springs, where we're starting a master's program that's designed to teach new young junior level up and coming physiologists who basically want to follow the same career path that I followed. So it's been a delight. I started doing that in January. Meet uh once a week with uh a group of graduate students, and we have a full curriculum designed to prepare them uh when they graduate from this master's program to step right into working with NGVs like USA swimming or working here at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Training Center. So uh I'm uh I'm not laying on the beach in Florida, still here in Colorado Springs, working hard, but working in a little bit different capacity than I've enjoyed over the last uh 33 years. And I'm really uh enjoying this role as now uh again, kind of a godfather, a mentor, a teacher, uh, an advisor for these uh young people uh who are just as passionate about pursuing a career uh as I was, you know, some 35 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

Yeah, one of the things that strikes me in your story and just looking over your bio, Randy, is you have to be one of these people that just has a genuine love of learning. I had an undergraduate, bachelor's in history, and I was even looking at your bio. You left out, you got a master's in history along the way. I mean, like you went to a lot, a lot of school, Randy. You uh you pursued your interests academically to the to the full extent, and that's quite a that's quite a departure. I mean, where was your mind at when you were getting a a master's in history? Were you gonna be like a high school history teacher and maybe coach a little bit of a cross-country track on the side? And and what really inspired you to shift over and devote your career to exercise science, sports science?

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Well, it's really a pretty unique story. My undergraduate degree was in uh history and political science. As I said, I headed to Florida. I had 10 years down there teaching high school, coaching cross-country and track, teaching uh basically, you know, uh a few different uh classes in history. But there there came a time when kind of after 10 years, and along the way, I I got a master's degree as well. But after 10 years, I had kind of a five-year, 10-year, 15-year plan. And after 10 years, you know, I kind of looked at where I wanted to go. And with bachelor's and master's in history, the logical thing and the thing that I was really focused on was law school. And I pursued that. I took the LSATs, got into a couple of good law schools, but along about the same time, I was also reading, again, self-educating in this relatively new area of exercise physiology or applied physiology. And one of the books I read was by a guy named uh David Costel, and the book was fascinating. And then I read his bio in the back of the book, and it said, you know, essentially, David Costel started his career as a high school swimming coach. And then he stopped doing that and pursued a master's and a PhD at Ohio State in exercise physiology. And I couldn't get that out of my head. And even though it was less logical, a less logical career route to pursue than law school, I talked to those key three or five people in my life and said, you know, here's what I'm thinking of doing. I've got two choices. Where do you honestly see me doing the most good and being the most fulfilled in my career? And all of them came back and said, No doubt, exercise physiology. You'd be a good lawyer, but you could really make a difference, and you would definitely be happier pursuing an advanced degree in exercise physiology. So that was the linchpin, the turning point. I still had that little book here in my office that again kind of changed my career path. And I have absolutely no regrets. I am definitely glad that I pursued excise physiology, got uh a master's and then a PhD. And as I said, from that point, my dream was to work out here, and that dream has come true, and it has been a wonderful experience. Which point now it's my responsibility to pass that knowledge and experience on to young American sports scientists, particularly those that want to pursue applied physiology at the elite level. And again, we don't have any place in our country except right here in Colorado Springs at the University of Colorado Springs, uh, Colorado at Colorado Springs, that no other university has a formal program to teach and to develop the next generation of young sports scientists who can step in and start working with USA swimming or USA track and field at a very, very, very high level. So again, I feel really honored to be able to do that. I'm having a lot of fun doing it. I got a great group of students. I know they're going to do well in their career. And I again feel like that is my responsibility at this very late point in my career and very late point in my life to be passing on and again to be coaching and mentoring the next generations uh that are coming along.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

It's so we didn't get a chance to talk about this in Denmark, but it's so nice to meet another David Costel fan out in the wild.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

I mean, I can remember David Costel.

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Yeah, you gotta know David Costell. I think if you're a swimming coach and you don't know him and you're listening to this podcast, dig in because I remember when I started my coaching career, and you know, I had a sense of I want to do things better, I want to be knowledgeable about what I'm doing. So I started digging in, you know, trying to find like who's been out there and who's actually done research in the world of swimming. And you can't avoid David Costell. I mean, like, he's just all over everything. Um, and I what I liked about what he did, and I think this brings back uh some of what you're referencing too with the program at University of Colorado is, and why that why I actually really gravitated to what you were saying in Denmark is sometimes I think with some of this with with sports science or with any kind of scientific endeavor, we risk kind of losing touch with reality, right? It's not grounded in, okay, well, at the end of the day, this is knowledge that coaches are gonna take out into the field and use with athletes. And I think Costel was somebody like he was a coach. He very much was trying to investigate things that were relevant to what a coach was actually gonna do or sort of advance the knowledge of what coaches were already doing. And I see that in what you do as well. You're not like a you're not in an ivory tower dealing with stuff that just has no kind of relevance to the day-to-day of coaches. And I think people will see when we start to talk about some of the topics down the line, this is what I gather is part of what is important for you, that it's one thing to have knowledge and to bring science to bear in order to try to gain some kind of performance advantage, but it's it's quite another thing to think about how that knowledge actually translates into the environments that coaches and athletes find themselves in.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Yeah, I agree. You know, to go back to that book I read by uh David Costel. And yeah, David Costel, David is retired now, but he is looked upon as an absolute icon in our field of applied exercise physiology or integrative physiology, whatever you want to call it. He was an absolute first-class, top-notch, laboratory-based scientist who had very, very applied questions. And when I was reading his book, I was coming at it from a very applied question I had as a young cross-country coach. And that question was when you're dealing with young men, ninth graders, tenth graders, seventh graders, particularly ninth and tenth graders, was it better physiologically? That is, did you get a better training effect by using 800 meters or a thousand meters in your key interval training, on your key interval training workouts? And I was committed to being databased in answering that question. And that was one of the books I picked up and read, a little book, you know, it was a booklet, basically. It wasn't really a book, but it was chucked full of interesting information that was really resonating with me at that time as a young cross-country and track coach. But that was my question. Yeah, I had that question, and I talked to other coaches about it, and I read other articles about it, but it was really David Costel who was able to help me answer that question. And uh that goes again back to uh, yeah, I think people in my field, they're either, yeah, uh in the laboratory doing great work, but never really crossing that bridge toward practical application. Whereas I kind of started, there are people like me who start with practical and applied questions, and then we go hunting for data to support answers to those questions. Yeah, we may get involved with research peripherally to help answer those questions, but we spend most of our day in an applied practical sense or in an applied practical realm versus being in the laboratory from sunup to sundown, you know, uh collecting data on humans or many times on animals, such as rats research. Uh so yeah, again, what I'm trying to do is teach my students now at the University of Colorado uh to be, you know, very, very applied first. And our first class, the uh the theme of the first class was how to speak effectively with elite-level athletes and coaches. You can be the most intelligent graduate student in the world, but if you can't speak their language as athletes and coaches, particularly at the elite level, then everything else that comes in this course in the weeks ahead is is uh is gonna kind of stop at the doorway. Fortunately, I have graduate students who like me, they have a coaching background. And I think that's absolutely critical in terms of pursuing a career where you're working in sports sciences uh with elite athletes and coaches. You have to have had that coaching experience, not necessarily at the elite level, but you have to understand that dynamic uh between uh an athlete and a coach that occurs on a day-to-day basis, year after year after year, in many c in many situations. So uh I I do. I'm I'm very proud of uh my coaching career at the high school and the university level. Uh that was my passion, that was my goal at that time. And then again, about 12 years in, I I reached a critical point where uh I was determined to try to have the best of both worlds. And uh fortunately, it it's it's worked out for me where uh I can't say that a day hasn't gone by in 33 plus years out here when I haven't employed uh some of those coaching skills uh that I developed, you know, early in my career in the first 10 or 12 years of my career. Uh so that gives me great uh gratification. And again, I tell my students, you have to have those skills. You have to have that coach athlete experience in order to be successful as a sport an applied sport physiologist working with Olympic level athletes.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Yeah. Let's get into one of those applied topics. Let's get right. We've I think we've done enough preamble. Let's let's talk about overtraining because this was something that you presented on when we were in Denmark, and I think it goes to one of these questions that so many coaches at some point or another end up asking themselves about, right? When we, especially in a sport like swimming or track and field, sports where conditioning really is king, I think, and people are so sophisticated in terms of I think the ways that they try to get athletes in shape to perform at their best. At the core, right, we're trying to create a training effect with whatever we're doing. And in order to create a training effect, you do have to stress the system to a certain extent, right? So that that stress response creates adaptation on the other end. However, it's not a simple more is better equation, right? We've all run into situations where you keep on trying to turn up that stress dial to create a greater straining training effect, and then all of a sudden, you know, you've got an athlete that is that is struggling, that is plateauing, that is maybe moving backwards despite the fact that they are more or less training harder than ever. Talk a little bit about where you come from when you think about overtraining, when you try to work with elite athletes. What are you looking for? What are sort of some of the common tells that you're trying to find in order to understand whether or not somebody is overtrained?

SPEAKER_01 19:53

Yeah, thanks, Chris. You know, that's a uh a very relevant topic for any level. You know, I think the higher you go on the ability scale, the more likely you're going to run into a true overtraining type of situation. And they're tough. They're like uh a puzzle with pieces all laid out. You got to put them together. There's no sort of quick fix, you know, take this and lay low for two days and they come back to 100%. Uh they're tough issues. A couple of things up front. Think uh, you know, when you're working with athletes and coaches and especially coaches, so again, if I'm acting as the team liaison on the physiology side, I'm always going to use the uh terminology of underperformance versus over-training. Again, I'm going back to my coaching background, and if you know, some somebody uh sort of on the science end came up to me and said, Well, coach, you're overtraining your athletes, I would take offense to that. I would, whether it's true or not, it's it's uh kind of a diss at you as a coach that you don't know what you're doing. So I think, you know, for any and all that find themselves in that situation, I think the more productive terminology is underperformance versus overtraining. Underperformance truly states the fact, and that goes to uh really the first and and major criterion for sort of evaluating and quote unquote diagnosing underperformance, and that is they're not meeting expectations, not only on competition day, but also on key workouts. And those can be evaluated very easily compared to that same workout earlier in the season, when again, you would be expecting their times during specific sets and during specific workouts. You would expect those times to be getting faster, better going forward. As the season progresses, you can also compare those times to, say, the previous year and to previous points in that year when the athlete was relatively successful, was not experiencing this underperformance syndrome that he or she is experiencing right now. So, yeah, you can evaluate blood markers. They're basically more reactive than proactive. They may find something and typically do that is wrong on the physiological or the medical side, say, for example, a deficiency in iron that is very, very common in these underperformance situations, particularly among our young women. You know, bottom line, and again, I say this as a former high school coach who says, this guy talking about I can't, I can't do blood testing, you know, I don't have the budget to do that. I would argue you probably do via, you know, high school parents probably have that covered on their medical uh program, but you know, we can talk about that in a few more minutes. But again, if you're seeing these consistent keystone type of workouts or index type of workouts that you do on a pretty regular basis, once a week, once every 10 days, once every two weeks, and you're starting to see flatlining and regression in those times, that's a pretty good indicator, independent of any other marker, that you're kind of going down the road of underperformance. And I can talk about of, you know, well, what can we do about it? As Chris, you you want to go or you want to bring that up. But again, my points would be referring to these situations as underperformance versus overtraining, and then, you know, having absolutely nothing else, no lab, no blood tests, nothing, you know, no other technology other than that stopwatch. The stopwatch is a pretty good, I would say, you know, uh uh A minus kind of indicator of uh underperformance uh by your athletes that will require some type of evaluation, some type of diagnosis, some type of intervention to get them going back in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00 24:29

Yeah, I would love to follow up as you suggested. I mean, how do you start to unwind some of that? Because I think one of the things, and you you presented on this in Denmark, you were sort of showing some case studies or some progressions of somebody into this underperformance zone. And it takes a while to get there, right? It's not like you just trained too hard on Thursday, and now it's very hard to on any singular day to cause so much stress to the system that you're not able to perform in subsequent workouts. So it's a it's a problem that builds chronically, right, over time. And so I'm gathering that it must be take some time to unwind. And I think there can be a lot of uneasiness in that, right? Where, for instance, an athlete may be looking at like, I gotta take a step back in training, and you you're trying to sell them maybe on it's one step back, two steps forward. But in the meantime, they're just focused so hard on like, well, I'm but I'm taking a step back. I don't want to take any steps back, right? I just want to move forward. And I think coaches can have that same anxiety, right? That where they they just start to worry, like, is it, is there gonna be this sort of delayed payoff, or should we just keep forging ahead? We just, you know, grit our teeth and grind and dig in a little bit harder, and you know, it'll all sort itself out. How do you how do you deal with some of that when you're working in an environment with coaches and and and what kind of steps do people take, I guess, to unwind from it at the outset?

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Yeah, it's uh it's a really, really difficult dynamic. And again, so you know, on my end as the physiologist, I gotta, again, be respectful of the coach's domain, and I've got to fall back on some of those years when I was a coach, and I've I've gotta have some people skills too. Again, this is uh probably bottom line, a physiological problem, but it takes some tact, it takes some professionalism to try to get particularly the coach kind of on the same page and to work out a program that's gonna uh bring this young athlete back going in the right direction. What I I recommend at this kind of point in my career, after having dealt with these underperformance situations for a long time, is more a people skill than anything else. Although, again, uh I'll talk about my sort of three-step recommendation to avoid underperformance in a second. But what I try to convince the coach of is you are at a crossroad where you can, yeah, grit your teeth and we just need to work harder, you're not working hard enough, it's all in your head. We can go down that road, which probably is going to result in ultimately uh a very ugly end to this athlete's season. Or you can go down the road of being a little bit more databased, being a little bit more flexible, generally backing off on the training load, which is an area where I can jump in technically and work with the coach, I think, on in a positive manner, and help that coach to make the necessary regression in the training load to bring about that athlete's recovery and get that athlete going back in the right direction. And what I do is basically outline the fact that if you go down the first road, yeah, you're probably gonna crash and burn. If you go down the road of recovery or modification to the training, then yeah, it you'll you'll lose some conditioning. You'll lose some conditioning by taking a route that focuses a lot more on recovery. You'll lose some conditioning, but it will take you a fraction, a fraction of the time. Once that athlete is healed and recovered, it will take you a fraction of the time to get that athlete back to where they need to be versus crashing and burning and the season is over. That may take you a whole nother season to get back to where that athlete needs to be. So when I lay it out in those terms and in those two choices, I've been fairly successful in convincing the coach that it's better to, you know, take that second route at the crossroads or at the fork in the road than that first one. Because again, nine times out of ten, it's it ends very ugly. The athlete crashes and burns at the end of the season. Sometimes it's the end of the career uh when you try to push through. And again, just grit your teeth, work harder, it's all in your head. But we got, you know, conference championships coming up. We don't we can't take time off as opposed to to going the other direction. And, you know, I've seen that, I've talked to a lot of coaches, a lot of uh athletes, I worked with them in that situation in uh several sports, not just swimming, but that is my uh sort of ultimate takeaway. Uh people, especially coaches, when they feel like they're facing that situation. Again, it's uh a fork in the road, and I would encourage them to go down, take some time off, take some rest, modify the training as opposed to trying to plow forward and hope for the best.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

Yeah, I mean, I think you're speaking to something I work with a lot of athletes one-on-one, trying to coach them up on the psychological side of things, but I I find myself discussing the same incidents because I think so often you can hear it in what you're saying that this underperformance can really go systemic on the psychological side, right? I think if you don't handle it correctly as a coach, if you don't handle it correctly as an athlete, you can start to believe just that that gosh, I just I'm just not working hard enough. I'm just not trying hard enough to get through this. Meanwhile, you're actually working against yourself in the way that you're doing it. So it becomes self-sustaining, and then the athletes start to believe that, like, oh gosh, you know what? I've reached the the limit of what I'm capable of. I I just can't do anymore. And that's where people, you're right, that's where many people stop because they think, well, there's there's nowhere else for me to go with it. I have a I have a very specific question that I want to ask you in regards to this because uh people people listen to this podcast will know that um and I've been writing and and putting stuff out there in the swimming world for a long time, um, all the way back to 2008. My my thoughts on training and the psychology of uh swimming, they have been evolving, and people can probably see that through the written record of of what I've put forth through all that time. Earlier in my career, I became heavily influenced by a lot of what I saw around higher intensity training, right? The benefits of race-based training and kind of the efficiency, right, to being able to train up race performance with a lower volume approach that that emphasized more sort of race-specific training. And then at the last part of my career where I was coaching, I would say I became way more heavily influenced by the high volume camp, which I think is really kind of the traditional swimming camp, right? That swimming has always been a sport where, for instance, in comparison to track and field, like we're just able to do quite a bit more volume relative to the distance of the race. Whereas if you were doing that in track and field, you would be injured and you would be underperforming vastly, right, if you trained that much in correlation to how long your races were. I'm coming to the specific question here, which is I it started to make me wonder because I'm I've I've been converted to more of this uh I I think I finally understand why these higher volume approaches work in swimming, and I want to run it by somebody who's maybe not maybe who is more knowledgeable than me to see. I'm checking my work right now with you, um, Dr. Dr. Wilbur. And that is, I wonder if from the outside looking in, I think one of the reasons I feared higher volume training way back when was I I thought that it was much easier to over-train somebody in that way. That you were essentially like it was like a throw a dozen eggs up against the wall, let's see which one didn't break kind of system, right? And I think that's a lot of people's perceptions of that kind of training. What I've come to understand, because I actually worked within a system where it was working, is it's actually quite possible to over-train somebody in a low volume system as well. And what I didn't what I what I didn't really perceive about those lower volume systems were that there's actually quite a bit of training at an intensity where it's quite hard to stress the system too much. And I think probably there's people that miss in between. So I guess this is my long, very, very long-winded way of asking. I know we're not we're switching away from the terminology of over-training, but it essentially I have to use it to ask this question. Is it possible for people to both be over-trained in the sense that they are stressing their system too hard with the intensity of what they're doing? And then also kind of undertrained in the sense that they haven't achieved this baseline level of fitness that you get with fairly low intensity work done over longer periods of time. Have you seen that?

SPEAKER_01 34:33

Yeah, sure. That's I mean, that's a good example because first of all, and I know you're not sort of touting this, but it's important, particularly for maybe some of the young coaches listening, that it's never an either-or. It's nice to throw out the, you know, this system versus that system for good dialogue and discussion and debate among coaches. But you know, Chris, as well as I that the very, very best coaches, no matter what they call their training programs or how they characterize it, or how other people characterize it, they do a masterful job as blenders. They understand the full spectrum of training stimuli. And it's uh it's tough really to categorize those types of programs as sort of high volume or versus low volume, high intensity. Again, no matter what the what those types of coaching and training systems are called, you know, those coaches do a wonderful job of mixing and matching and tapping into and stimulating the different metabolic systems, the different energy systems, and they do it in a masterful way, done at the right time of the year and in the right amounts during the right time of the year. So I agree with you on the physiological side, the programs of the training systems that emphasize you know a relatively high volume or a relatively high percent of the training days and the training workouts are more volume-oriented, are laying again that that true physiological base, and that's a a very you know, long-standing physiological principle and concept, is again establishing a good physiological base. And again, your master coaches are are ones that matter what different types of programs they've tried, kind of like you, they've ultimately come back to a program that's based on fairly high volume. And again, that's for a reason physiologically, does all the good things physiologically that allow you to then blend all the other different types of training, different types of intensities, different types of uh recovery uh dynamics. By that I mean recovery within the workout dynamics. We'll come back to again having that good physiological base of the positive effects it has on enzymatic profiling, the positive effects it has on blood flow, the positive effects it has on capillarity, going right on down the list of physiological benefits that ultimately produce more ATP, whether you're doing something relatively under control in terms of the pace or the intensity, or you're flying pretty hard doing a very high-intensity, high velocity kind of set or workout or session for a particular day. So I think again, it seems to me that there is um a pretty solid line of coaches doing good training today based on, you know, good volume, but also blending in all the other types of intensities, you know, all the other types of workout mechanics. Here's a direct line back to Doc Councilman. Why'd they call him Doc? Because he was. He was a PhD in by the way, exercise physiology.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

Physiology, yes.

SPEAKER_01 38:36

You know, I think I told this story in Denmark where, you know, me, yeah, as a young coach in Central Florida, I would go to my annual track and field or cross-country coaches clinic, and they were great. And, you know, you'd share a a drink or a sip of coffee with some of the veteran coaches, really good coaches down there in Florida, and you know, just about every one of them said, Hey, you you want to learn a lot about how to construct interval training and training in general. There's a swimming coach named Counselman. He's written a couple of books, and he's a physiologist. You know, grab some of his books, you can convert things pretty quickly from swimming distances to track and field distances over 400 meters, but the basic concepts are exactly the same, and most of those coaches said, hey, you know, it was from a swimming coach where I learned a lot about how to construct interval training and how to guide it forward from week to week, month to month over a competitive season. So I think, you know, whether coaches know it or not in in USA swimming, that they they're still very heavily influenced by Doc Councilman, uh, whether they know it or not, uh, but probably coaches they learned under uh and coaches that those coaches learned under. As I said, I'm pretty sure you can draw a direct line back to Doc Councilman and you know the principles that he developed based on his uh physiological training.

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Yeah, I've got counselman's book right behind me. So I'm smiling as you're uh reading it. And I I was thinking of him in the context of what we're doing today, too, because I think, you know, there may be, unfortunately, too many coaches that don't even know about Doc. But one thing that I think, you know, uh the people who do know of of him, they know that he was a scientist. They know that he was out there doing the work to push knowledge forward. And I think a really important aspect of him that I find under discussed even by people that were in the know was that he was also uh in some ways like a journalist, like an influencer before there were influencers. He was publishing, he was showing his work. He was not only, you know, putting stuff forward when it was a finished product, but if you read like old articles that he had written for Swimming World magazine, I think he was actually involved with the foundation of Swimming World magazine, George Haynes as well, another one of the top swim coaches at that time. These guys were not like, you know, working in it's not like Doc was in Indiana and you know he had all the secrets and he was like, I'm gonna guard, you know, I'm gonna guard the flame here, and nobody's gonna be able to find out what we're doing at Indiana. Um he was trying to get that knowledge out there and he was trying to open up a conversation with other coaches and get them going. And I sometimes I think that's something that's missing today, where the role of the coach and the maybe just the the pressures of being a coach has have has coaches working in a more narrow form and and maybe being a bit more guarded about what they're doing, even as we are in this era of like great transparency and social media and all this stuff. It seems like we're actually not getting as much as those leaders' side of were putting forward at that time. I want to switch base. You you referenced earlier something about blood chemistry, and this was another topic that um, of course, you're starting to teach this course, you're training this next generation of applied sports physiologists. And this is something that I have found really interesting, just like with my own health. I'm somebody that gets blood markers taken once every three or four months. I have things that I'm tracking, I have people that are helping me on the other end um and and pushing things a little bit farther beyond maybe what your doctor might do at an annual physical. And it strikes me that, you know, this blood draws are not new, right? Doctors have been performing blood chemistry for quite some time and analyzing that, right? But I guess could you provide some historical context? Over the course of your career, how has blood chemistry been used from a performance aspect and what has changed over time? How did we get to the present moment where uh where you're doing some of the work that that you're teaching about and putting out there into the US Olympic movement?

SPEAKER_01 43:22

Yeah, great question. I think um, you know, relative to my career and how things have changed, and I'm speaking about the elite level, and again, I'm speaking about the utilization of blood chemistry in terms of possibly some reasons why an athlete is underperforming. So early in my career, I mean, there was uh uh a lot of interest, a lot of research on trying to come up with the blood chemistry based marker for. Underperformance, or, you know, as the literature was calling it at that time, not having to deal with the sensitivity to coaches, a blood marker for overtraining. You know, things bounced around. You can go back, yeah, 25, 30 years and look at those papers. And, you know, it got to be pretty competitive in terms of which laboratory or which group of researchers were touting which marker that they claimed their data showed, wow, you know, when this marker reaches this particular level, it's overtraining.

SPEAKER_00 44:38

And, you know, Randy, can I ask you, were they were they looking for like a chronic fatigue marker? I mean, were is that what is that the path they were taking down? Or were they were they not even looking for something as a as a sort of analog of overtraining? Were they just sort of trying to find something that they could draw a direct line to overtraining?

SPEAKER_01 44:57

Yeah, they uh these were primarily uh European researchers. A lot of them were German. And um, you know, at the time, some of them were coming from the recently emerging former East Germany. So Leipzig, the Leipzig Academy there was, you know, really one of the leaders in in looking at elite athlete performance, number one. And number two, when elite athlete performance goes south, you know, what what what is the reason and what marker or markers can we use to try to identify it and then potentially prevent it from happening? So, you know, it was a very, very applied practical track of research. And again, you know, sort of four or five or six laboratories were all kind of putting forth their data in terms of one or two markers that they were concluding were the evident markers in a blood chemistry test of uh uh over underperformance and overtraining. Part of their distinction was, well, there's kind of good overtraining and bad overtraining. They called it functional overtraining and non-functional overtraining, where functional overtraining is, wow, we had two hard days of training, the markers are high, we need to kind of go into that amber light zone that I was talking about in in Denmark, where proceed but proceed with caution, whereas, you know, non-functional overtraining is what we would refer to as true overtraining. And wow, we got a serious problem on our hands now. But anyway, to get back to your question, you know, that was kind of the that was kind of the route many were going down. And I just personally was never convinced reading those papers that it was ever going to come down to like one marker that you could pull up, do on a daily basis, and keep that underperformance overtraining syndrome under control. But uh uh, you know, today we've evolved into, again, it's more like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces laid out. You can't just pick out one piece of that puzzle and say, aha, overtraining. No, you're looking for trends, you're looking for patterns. And most importantly, you know, I think, at least I know in terms of my approach over the last 10, 10 plus years, I'd say, it's been on prevention of overtraining. You know, why why even have a discussion about overtraining? And as a matter of fact, any blood tests you take when you reach a point of overtraining are simply reinforcing the fact they're not solving the problem. So why not, you know, take Benjamin Franklin, 1736, when he was talking to the citizens of Philadelphia, warning them about the dangers of fire within, you know, their wood-based city. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It sounds trite, but it's actually foundational when you're talking about underperformance and overtraining. So I've tried to spend my time, not going down the road of finding a marker for over-training, which simply just says, yep, you know, he's overtrained. It doesn't solve the problem. It didn't prevent the problem. So I think blood chemistry can be part of a what I call a three-step program that's based on Ben Franklin's ounce of prevention, pound of cure approach. But, you know, for example, serum ferritin, yeah. You should be, you know, certainly an elite athlete, you should be checking your iron profile on a regular basis to make sure you're not going down that road of iron deficiency, non-anemia, and certainly iron deficiency anemia. Season's over, pretty much at that point. So that's easy enough to do. It's not that expensive. If you're a professional athlete, if you're an elite athlete at truly a professional level, that should be something you have done on a regular basis during the season to check for, in that case, ferritin and other markers as well that you should make sure are within a reasonable range for an elite athlete so that you don't, again, truly go down the road of uh underperformance or overtraining. So I think uh it can be valuable in that regard. Relatively easy to do, it's relatively inexpensive to do, and anybody who I've ever worked with has ever gotten the most out of their talent at the elite level, and that typically means being on the podium and having a metal wrapped around their neck at some point in their career. All of those athletes have committed to collecting data on a regular basis via athletic chemistry.

SPEAKER_00 50:02

Yeah, I mean, I think I uh and you've sort of referenced this, this begs one of the questions, and I I it's this two-part question. One is that is this only for elite athletes? And then the second one is, and I think we had some conversation about this in Denmark, you know, if you go to you know, if you go to your physician and you uh they send you to a lab core in the United States and you get some blood drawn and they send it off, you know, lab core will send it back to you. And for everything that they test, you know, they'll have some kind of laboratory established reference range. And as I've had these reference ranges explained to me, these are, you know, based on your average population in the in the United States. And they're more or less, you know, I think based around safeguarding against dangerous sort of health consequences of being outside of these. They're not really performance-based markers. So I guess the second part of the question is is there any kind of nuance in terms of interpretation with elite at level athletes where you go, well, this is probably in range for like a normal human, but this person is trying to, you know, win an Olympic triathlon. And in that context, we should be concerned about this marker.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Yeah, I think I got uh both parts. Uh so uh number one, again, I I if if I went back to high school coaching, I would for sure do some basic blood chemistry testing on the athletes I'm coaching. That would be an iron profile, a CBC. That's probably about it. But I know parents could cover that with their medical insurance. Even if they couldn't, it's not that expensive. And I'd find a way, you know, to cover those charges through, you know, my booster club or, you know, whatever. I'd get that done. And I'd be particularly focused on the young women because I can't tell you, Chris, how many emails, how many phone calls. I mean, I still get, you know, from parents, high school parents, who just, you know, their girl their young daughter is is struggling. She's running cross-country, you know, her season's going south. Uh of course, the first thing I I ask them to do is, you know, get her, get her a blood test, and here, here are the specific blood tests that I recommend. And sure enough, nine times out of ten, they come back and the young lady is is iron deficient, either non-anemic or anemic. And it's no wonder her her uh workouts and her races uh she's struggling. So why not, you know, have that done preseason, you know, baseline on a regular basis to track any types of alarming decrements for particularly, you know, those those young high school athletes, particularly on the female side. That's uh a major problem there. The second part of that question, yeah, it's there is that linchpin of somebody who can look at those blood tests and say, you know, okay, this is high and this is high and this is high, but he or she is running cross-country, they're training at a fairly high level for their age. Do not do not lose sleep over this high and this high and this high. This high over here, yeah, we need to lose some sleep over that because even though, you know, they're performing at a pretty high level for their high school or for their college, this is an abnormal value that needs to be addressed. So unfortunately, those people who can look at blood chemistry values for an athlete at any level and be able to kind of read between the lines and say, you know, this high is okay, this high is not. Those people aren't, you know, growing on trees. That involves, you know, experience. It involves looking at a lot of blood chemistry tests and being able to distinguish between, yeah, a good high and a not so good high, and a good low and a not so good low.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

What would you look for in terms of qualifications? Uh, that's that's what that makes me think. I agree with you that you don't just want anybody looking at this. And I even had a podcast on here before. There's a woman uh works in the sport of swimming who says she'll look at DNA tests and she can tell you what to eat based off of that. And we've we work through challenging, you know, sort of the scientific validity of that. When somebody if somebody were to take your advice, right, and they have a high school age athlete, maybe they're a parent of a high school age athlete, and they they want an expert on the other end to help them interpret what they're doing. What specifically would you advise them to look for in terms of qualifications of the person on the other end?

SPEAKER_01 54:58

Yeah, I think it would your first place to start would be a sports medicine-based uh physician. You know, number one, you're getting the sort of ethical gold standard that you have a certified medical professional looking at them. But again, my experience with physicians who are not also in touch, I mean, closely in touch.

SPEAKER_00 55:22

Yeah, they're not going to be performance-oriented, right? They might not be Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 55:26

They'll look at an elevated creatinase level and you know, say, you need to lose sleep over this. This is not good. Whereas the sports medicine physician who is in touch with, let's say, this young lady, 10th grader, who's running cross-country on a in a pretty good program, high-powered program, train him pretty hard. She is going to explain what that means to the young lady, but she's also going to say, don't lose sleep over it. This is a natural result, a normal result for you as a pretty hard-training 10th grader female cross-country runner. And right on down the line, you know, I can think of probably six other ones off the top of my head that if they were abnormally high or abnormally low, and again, I'm talking to a 10th grade female cross-country runner at, you know, a team that's ranked third in the state, that, you know, I would definitely explain why the value is abnormally high or abnormally low from a sort of medical slash physiological perspective, but then make sure that the athlete and the athlete's parents are not overly concerned about that abnormally high or abnormally low value, that it is essentially training induced or training related and will be acute typically based on the training load. And that again is a really, really good reason to do at least one blood test, maybe two, during the off-season when that young tenth grade female cross-country athlete is not training so that get a really, really good feel of what is normal for her during the off-season and also sort of somewhat normal during the regular season. I think you also remember, Chris, that probably during that same presentation in Denmark, I emphasized the concept of developing athlete-specific ranges for each athlete for each blood chemistry metric. It's tedious. It takes a little bit more work, but that to me is the key. I've used that my whole career. It just intuitively made sense to me that if I'm going to be working with elite athletes, I better be darn sure I know what their quote unquote normal values are, you know, over an entire season with all the ups and downs of training and from year to year to year. And, you know, I continue to use it and it's been invaluable to me. I again pass that on and teach that now to my students and say, you know, this is the way that you will be able to tell whether an abnormally high or an abnormally low value is okay because it's training induced, or it's not okay. We haven't seen this before, where it's way, way too high based on several of your previous tests, and we need to look at this more closely. So again, I gave some examples of how that's worked, the athlete-specific range, but again, uh, I made the point that I weigh the athlete-specific range much higher in terms of my evaluation process than I would the reference range that comes back on the test from LabCore or Quest Diagnostics. That's really, I don't totally ignore it, of course, but it becomes less and less and less important in the evaluation for that individual athlete, especially as you go forward and go from one test to six to next year twelve. And the more tests you have, that athlete-specific range just regresses to the mean and becomes the true set of reference points that you use to determine abnormality versus normality.

SPEAKER_00 59:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:34

I think I answered both those points, Chris.

SPEAKER_00 59:39

No, you did. You did. And I think there's an instructive point here, too, on uh when I was listening to you talk about the researchers looking for the, you know, let's call it the magical marker, the magical over-training marker. I think too sometimes it's important to understand that these are just snapshots, right? You know, if if somebody took a picture of me listening to you on this podcast, Randy, I think they would assume that I'm the happiest person in the world, that I've got a big smile on my face all the time, right? If that's all the data you had to base your opinion of my mood on. But, you know, if you took only a photo of me right after I woke up this morning, you might go, oh, Chris is exhausted and uh he needs some rest. You know what I mean? There's there's all these snapshots and you get data and you get information, and it's your job on the other end to be able to filter through and figure out what's noise and what is actually trying to tell you something, and you can't do that until you start to put this bigger picture together. Randy, you've been amazing. You've you've been uh flexible on time, you've been willing to go long. I think people who have listened to this, I know have learned a lot. As we wrap this up, is there any direction you want to send people if they they are interested in what you're talking about, where should they go? Where should they uh where shit are you? Well, um This is like where people, you know, I know I know you're you're older. This is usually where people like share their social media handles and stuff. I know you're not like, you know, in an Instagram account or anything, but uh No.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:18

Uh I mean you've uh you've seen my I think my presentation there in Denmark on overtraining. I'm unfortunately that's uh that's under the auspices of my work here at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, so I'm not able to just uh throw that up. I'm not a social media guy, but I guess I could offer if people have specific questions. You have my email address. I would be uh open to that. That's many times what it boils down to anyway, is people have a very specific burning question or two, particularly coaches. I'm always gonna be open to uh having dialogue with coaches because again, they're very practical. It's probably a a question they they need to get answered for one of their athletes to help them move forward in their training and their uh progression. So um yeah, I I don't have any types of instant, immediate things to to throw out there.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:16

I think that's amazing, Randy. Stay that way. Don't change.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:20

Well, I don't know. It's worked pretty good so far, but I don't think there's anything that can replace that personal, you know, one-on-one, be it a phone call, an email, uh a text, uh even just that one-on-one. That's the way I was taught. And I still think that's always going to be a pretty effective way to communicate, especially with athletes and coaches. I think that's the way to go. So Chris, if that's okay with you, I guess we could make uh that available to the coaches that Yeah, if if people Google it, I mean that's how I found your email address.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

If people just Google it, you you'll you'll come up pretty quickly with uh randy.wilbur at usopc.org.

unknown 1:03:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:03

And I think one of the things you mentioned in Denmark as well is that if people were coming out to do something at the training center, that was another opportunity to reach out to you if they were going to be in Colorado Springs doing something. I think, you know, as you say, the face-to-face stuff, you can't beat it. That's why I love this podcast as well, because I get to have these one-on-one conversations with people like, you know, you were presenting in Denmark, I had questions for you at everything you did, but I obviously didn't get all my questions answered. So now I can trap you on this podcast and you know hit you with all my specific inquiries, and I hopefully, you know, people also learn from that. If people want to get in contact with me, Crdesantis at gmail.com. That's my personal email address. You can go to my website, chrisdcoach.com. You can fill out a contact form there as well. And you can reach out to me on Instagram, Chris D underscore coach, there, and uh there'll be clips of this. Maybe I'll maybe I'll tag the US OPC and see if um, you know, somebody over there is willing to collaborate. USA swimming collaborated with me when I put up some USA swimming people earlier this year, so we'll try and figure that out. Thank you once again to Randy for joining. Thank you to everybody for listening, and I'll be back with you again in a week.