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Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
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Micro-Periodization Strategies with Luca Filipas, PhD #230
Luca Filipas is a coach, researcher and exercise physiologist based out of Milan Italy. He is the coach of TotalEnergies Pro Cycling Team, Owner and Coach of Endurance Academy and Researcher at the University of Milan.
Paper discussed-Beyond the classical periodization: the new frontier of micro-periodization for endurance disciplines
Previous podcast with Luca
The use case for HRV in ultrarunning with Marco Altini
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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the coop cast. As always, I am your humble host, coach jason coop, and this episode of the podcast is with repeat offender luca felipas, who's coming to us all the way from Milan, italy. Luca is also a coach of the Total Energies pro cycling team. He is the owner and coach of Endurance Academy over there in Italy and he is a researcher at the University of Milan, and I wanted to bring Luca on the podcast today to discuss an editorial that he recently wrote in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness titled Beyond the Classical Periodization the New Frontier of Micro Periodization.
Speaker 1:For Endurance Disciplines, how one periodizes their training has been a subject of debate and consternation and a lot of dialogue in the coaching and the athletic community. Do we use some of these classical periodization models, such as linear periodization or block periodization, what works best depending upon the situation that is in front of you, and what works best for particular sports? Well, luca has described very eloquently in this really simple paper that I will link up in the show notes, a new feature that we are starting to see emerge within particularly the elite endurance athletes, where they are using a more individualized, periodized approach to determine when they're going hard, when they're going long and when they shouldn't be doing either of those and going easy. That is the subject of today's discussion. We bring in both of our personal coaching anecdotes to this as well to try to contextualize some of the topics that we discuss, all revolving around periodization. All right, folks, with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way.
Speaker 1:Here's my conversation with Luca Filippos, all about micro periodization. So, luca, welcome back. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule in the middle of the season, middle of the cycling season, middle of, I'm sure, athletes and teams and things like that running around to talk about this. It's also interesting timing because normally when we talk about periodization, the middle of the racing season is probably the worst time to talk about it, because all the training is kind of transpired. But nonetheless, we're going to talk about a really cool area here and, as you and I were talking offline, this is something that athletes and coaches are trending more and more towards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. It's a pleasure to come back here and, yeah, probably not the best moment, but yeah, for athletes or for coaches that are listening, I think it could be a perspective for the next season. I hope so.
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly, make you think about everything that you probably did wrong this season and how you're going to set up next season correctly. So with that as a little bit of a caveat, you know we're going to talk about. I can see this unfolding on two different fronts One where we're at, within this current, what you and I have been calling a trend of what you've described as micro periodization, and whether or not that definition or not holds. You can take credit for it, I guess, or take some credit for it. But then also the landscape of how we design training as a whole, given the fact that we have more into, a lesser extent, better I was being very careful there we have more into a lesser extent, better, insights into how the athletes can perform on a day and how well they're recovered and how ready they are and things like that.
Speaker 1:I think that this will take on both of those themes. But to kind of take a step back, a lot of athletes are used to hearing the word periodization. A lot of coaches are used to hearing the word periodization. Let's kind of describe, like what that means and how you view it through your lens, and then the different kind of like flavors of periodizations that have emerged over the years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, basically, periodization is a way where you can guide your training through a season. There are a couple of really well known type of periods. The most common type of periodization are linear periodization and block periodization. Linear periodization is basically a way of dividing the season in some periods, some cycles of training, where you have some weeks high loads and weeks of lower loads. The duration of each cycle depends on goals and so on. But basically doing a periodization implies that you go up with the intensity through the periodization and then to go a little bit down with the volume to the periodization just till you arrive to the goal of season.
Speaker 2:And block position is a little bit different because you divided the season as well in some cycles. But I call blocks because on that block you can put all the some specific workouts that you want to develop. On that specific block. I mean, there are some high-intensity blocks where you put all the high-intensity workouts, maybe within a week, and then the following week you don't do any high-intensity workouts, whereas in the linear periodization it's like more equally distributed through the cycle, the high intensity and the low intensity exercise. So basically this is the difference between linear and blocks. So in one case you have, yeah, tendency to increase. Linear periodization tend to increase intensity through the season, going down a little bit with volume, but the distribution of the high intensity and low intensity training are almost equally distributed through the entire cycles. On the contrary, with block periodization you have specific micro cycles that are one specific qualities that you want to develop, or like some specific intensity that you want targets for that block.
Speaker 1:Coaches and athletes and physiologists have kind of had this. It's not a pedantic debate, but it gets too nuanced in my estimation. You and I are kind of grinning right now because you know you probably know where I'm going to take this, about which one of these is better and you know which produces this more superior physiological adaptations, or which is better for certain types of races and things like that. And I think another way to kind of encapsulate the differences that you are trying to describe structurally, like how the volume and intensity flows between those two types of periodized models, is I'd like to kind of view it from a philosophical standpoint, in terms of what the practitioner or what the coach is trying to accomplish kind of at the level of physiology. And in a linear periodization model, your kind of working assumption is that things are building off of each other, that you do something first and that gives you a greater capacity to do the next step, and then they do the next step, and then that gives you a greater capacity to do the third step. And the way that naturally kind of emanates is, as you mentioned, the intensity generally goes up as the season goes along and the volume typically goes down. I'm going to use a word that a lot of really high quality coaches are going to cringe at, but I think a lot of people identify. It is that the quote unquote systems build on one another, that you're building this pyramid, so to speak, where you have to have a big aerobic base and then you build something on top of that base and then you build something on top of that and you contrast that with the philosophy behind a block style periodization and your working assumption. There is you need a certain amount of stress to produce an adaptation.
Speaker 1:A lot of high-end athletes will gravitate more towards a block style periodization because they've just been training for so long and they're just so good and they need that amount of stimulus in order to improve. These things don't exist in isolation. You can have a Venn diagram, overlap of kind of both, but from a philosophical level, when I look at those two, that's what I have kind of come to reconcile in terms of the differences of them. Yes, I understand the structural part, but I kind of look at it more from a what are you assuming is going on at kind of the level of physiology, and then you can choose to deploy more of flavor A or less of flavor B or some kind of combination of it, or we're going to talk about flavor c in a little bit, but you can choose to do that just based on the situation and the athlete that's in front of you. If you know what's going on underneath the hood, so to speak yeah I totally agree with that, with your explanation, I think it's.
Speaker 2:it's basically what is the reality in terms of two different periodization. It's almost impossible to have one and not having the other at all. I assume, as you say, that many high-level athletes are doing right now some sort of blood periodization, but not extreme periodization, like probably all the entire work hours at that specific goal in like one metro cycle, but the sort of mix of the two different periodization. But yeah, from the, especially from the high level athletes, it's interesting too. Too, I know you have mentioned some other episodes.
Speaker 2:There are one interesting study on Marit Bjørgen on periodization, on Marit Björgen. That was on her most successful season of her career and this study may show that basically both kinds of positions were good for her. She needs when she moved to Blackbridge she won was one of the most successful season of her career and basically also they mentioned that also not only for physiological perspective they moved to blood transition but also for mental changes to their routine. So I think for high level athletes, something where you are at the top of the tier you need something different, sometimes not only physiologically but also mentally, to develop something more and change something in your routine, to be even higher on your performances.
Speaker 1:I referenced that study in a presentation I gave just a couple weeks ago. I'm pronounced to you, luca, and I've probably sent that study out. It's not a new one. It's been around for a while. Just recently, for whatever reason, I've sent that study out to about I don't know five or eight of our coaches. Just as a point of, just as a point of discussion. I will link it up in the show notes. It's a great study.
Speaker 1:Your point on novelty is really well taken, because at the kind of the most elite level they've been training for so long that sometimes if you just change the stimulus to anything, you'll see an adaptation because they've been training for so long.
Speaker 1:And the novelty is, it's not that it's a secret or anything like that, or it's not that you've unlocked some special sauce, it's just that the stimulus is novel and that leap in performance is normally attributed to the change.
Speaker 1:And there's, you know, I think that's a worthy assumption to take when, whenever, that's the take, whenever that's the case. That happened in the Tour de France this year and there was a lot of, there was a lot of dialogue. There was a lot of dialogue around that. But sometimes we have to take a step back and say there's a lot of dialogue around that, but sometimes we have to take a step back and say, well, is it both different and a better stimulus that's creating this adaptation, or is it different, or is it singularly different and or better, and that's a whole, you know debate to kind of like uh, to to kind of weed out. But nonetheless, I'm not sitting here and I think you and I'll take a really pragmatic approach to say any one of these approaches are definitely superiorly better for every single use case, but we need to look at them as tools in our toolkit that we can deploy depending upon the athlete that's in front of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's basically what we need to do as a coach. So we need to understand the athletes we have in front and, I think, also understand what the athletes have done in the past to understand what physiology needs to change for improving their adaptation. So we basically, as coaches, we look a lot at the data of the previous year to understand what are the yeah, the key stimulus and the key periodization to arrive and to elicit some, also some other marginal gain that probably some high-level outlets have, just for like a small part of their physiology. So, yeah, basically I think there are no right to respond if it's better one of the other, but yeah, it's better to the best physicians, the best for that outlets. So is there the one that developed the physiology of the happiness? So it's not a, it's not a. You cannot say I do block transition, I'm going, I'm doing rare, I'm doing linear periodization, doing rare. But it depends on what you are trying to do and what are your goals and, of course, mainly and mainly what I have done in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, okay, so we're going to stick on what you have done in the past before we go on to microprioritization. I told you we would go off the rails with this pretty quickly. This is a big point of emphasis that I always bring up with our coaches whenever they get new athletes, and especially when they get new athletes with a robust training history that is described and well encapsulated. And that is not always the case. Sometimes, even at the very elite level, you get athletes who it's hard to decipher what they have actually done in the past. It's hard to figure out what their previous training has actually looked like. But when you have that, it's such an incredibly powerful tool to look at that through the lens of what has worked and what has not worked, and you can really bifurcate it that simply and look at training in the past and say, okay, well, when this training was going on, you were performing really well. When this training was going on, you weren't performing well.
Speaker 1:And what is missing? Are there components of training that are missing? Is there a period of high intensity that is missing? Is there even a modality cross-training, modality, straight training or something like that that is either missing or, I would actually say being overemphasized. Sometimes, taking those really big picture themes from previous training and not doing anything different from an annual training volume perspective, just rearranging some of those pieces is an incredibly powerful thing and can actually make you look like as a coach. It can kind of make you look like a genius, because you're literally getting more out of the same out of the same amount of work by looking at it through this context of a really big picture four, five, three, three-year lens, four-year lens, five-year lens, six-year lens and trying to pick out the patterns, that kind of can that you can then leverage to gain things in the future yeah, I totally agree on that, especially because there's so many coaches that don't do that and they just start with training immediately after the coach arrived, the athletes arrived to, to their laboratory, their training and they just start coaching.
Speaker 2:The atlas as a new one, but probably this atlas has a long history and you can just, if you're just checking your, just checking his past training programs and training history just one year, two year and three years to go, and then you can understand immediately okay, I have to go in this direction, because they are developing their entire career doing polyvolume, no high intensity or the opposite, just high intensity, not just really low training volume and you can understand many things about it.
Speaker 2:I think it's a big part in my training approach. So it takes a lot of time for me to analyze that and also I think for the athletes and for the coaches it can continuously come back and check because sometimes you didn't see something and you can see it after because of course you are human. So as a coach you cannot see everything, maybe analyzing it in details, or it takes a while to understand sometimes some training patterns in the past that could have led to some specific good adaptation or some specific bad adaptation and you can see maybe after two or three months. So I try to continue this analysis in the past, even if I have already started coaching with someone.
Speaker 1:To give the listeners a little bit of perspective on that, because you and I are practitioners and I think that a lot of times what we do gets cut and maybe necessarily so gets lost in the weeds. It takes me about six or eight hours to go through an athlete's previous training history when I first start working with them. Just as kind of a go forward, because when you're prescribing training you're looking at such a short time. When you're initially prescribing training you can kind of look at a short timeframe and just propagate that in the future to kind of bide your time. But when I'm doing a really robust review of training history with a new athlete that has, say, three or four years or even greater of training behind them, that's well encapsulated, it's well, it's well documented. The training notes that are articulated by the athlete and also if they were underneath a previous coach or whatever. That process takes me a long time. Six, eight, maybe even 10 hours if it's a whole, if it's a whole lot of data. But it is absolutely 100% worth it to do that and at the end of the day, at the end of all of that, that time suck. That I've been, you know that I've been drawn into.
Speaker 1:I kind of come away with the themes that you have just mentioned. When was athlete training really good? When were they training really bad? What has been overemphasized and what has been underemphasized, those that those kind of like polarized themes are the. Those are usually the highlights in the notes that I have. I'll create three or four pages of notes, but the things that kind of come to the top are the really like obvious ones and sometimes aiming training with those kind of big picture themes in mind. It's like the easiest thing that you can do year one to get improvement out of an athlete that has a really robust training history. So, needless to say, my point with all that is is, if you're looking for ways to improve and you have been training for a long period of time, look at the past. It's a really neat window into how you can improve, how you can improve going down the line Definitely.
Speaker 2:Definitely. I totally agree with that and I, as you said, I spent a lot of time on that, I know. So you can do it from different perspectives overall annual data. You can do monthly, weekly, daily, so that takes time. So, yeah, it's always underestimated by athletes and also I saw some coaches that don't do that. I think because they have their I don't know how to say it in English they have their magic, they have their magic touch for the athletes and they start training without knowing anything about the athletes. So I prefer to spend some time checking. I can start as well immediately with training with some base training.
Speaker 1:And then I will adjust my training as you say, going down in the pot and checking what was wrong, what was okay and I think that this is true in a lot of endurance sports coaches who have found success with one or two or three athletes. They will use that same or a similar blueprint with a larger cohort of athletes as they start to build their business out and kind of capture new athletes, and they immediately go to the thing that has worked with other people because they're familiar with it. They can usually articulate it very well, which actually is a really important point, because they've done it over and over. They're usually have some sort of clever way of describing why they are doing what they were what they are doing actually works and then, unbeknownst to the athlete, just start propagating that training onto that athlete without much of a robust history. That actually happens a lot here in the US and I mean I'm just as guilty of it as anybody else, especially early on in my coaching career. That's why I always take a step back and before I get too hot and heavy with the training prescription is, I just try to gather as much data as possible, if it's, if they're okay.
Speaker 1:So we're going to talk about micro periodization. Should I give you credit for this term, or did you come up with? Did somebody this? Does somebody else deserve a little bit of credit for this? Why don't you walk through the history of the, the paper that I'll link up in the show notes, and then what you're describing in it?
Speaker 2:I think the micro periodizationization has been used in different situations, I think not only in endurance sports. I'm describing it like a more short-term pilotization. So I don't know if I'm taking some credit about that, but yeah, for sure I think that it's a good way of thinking the transition process. So I don't think that this type of determination will remain under my name, but it's for sure. I think it's good for the coaches and for the practitioner to understand which level this determination is.
Speaker 1:And it's an interesting one of the things that there's a few things that kind of like caught my eye with it. The first one is we normally think about periodized approaches with a long term lens. So I have 12 or even maybe 36 months of training, with Olympics are happening right now as we're recording this. I have four years right, 48 months to get an athlete ready for the Olympic games. How am I going to organize the next four years and use a periodized approach to get that person ready for the summer Olympic games in 2028, right, the?
Speaker 1:When we think about periodization, it's usually that long of a timeframe this is the name implies micro kind of turns it on its head. Right, we're not thinking so much long term. You can always have that in the background, but we're really using things that are kind of right in front of us in order to organize the architecture within a day or a week or kind of a shorter term time frame. That's one of the things that was kind of fascinating for me to think about and I wanted to get your thoughts on what, like what is enabling that right now? Because we do have the capacity to look at things kind of almost in real time. I wake up every morning and I have kind of a standard workflow for my athletes to either change what I've prescribed which happens a lot or kind of stay the course. What has transpired in the past several years that makes this just even pragmatic to do in the first place?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think with the modern technology we are basically having more data and more possibility to extract the studies, the biological studies, the athletes, so we can understand in a way better than in the past at which point of this adaptation process the athlete sees If it's in a weak stress situation, if it's in a good situation for adaptation or if it's a really stressful situation and we cannot stress the others anymore because it is going in an overreaching situation or an over-training situation. And basically I think in the past the problem was that we started from the supercompensation process and supercomp pattern. That means that when you, when you like, stress an athlete with the trainee, you expect a response and then it's, it's normal and and then you adapt from the stress positive, positively after the recovery. And basically in the past this process that is like physiological process where you put a stimulus to an outlet and then for having some adaptation you need time to recover from that stimulus.
Speaker 2:Basically the problem was that we cannot track exactly the stress of the athlete during the light supercompensation process.
Speaker 2:So you cannot exactly say, okay, the athlete is ready to do a high-intensity workout, the athlete is really stressed, so the athletes are in recovery because we didn't have some really high, specific, really specific tools for tracking, like these stressors.
Speaker 2:So basically the point was that we in the past we did like two, three weeks of like normal training, high loads, and then we basically need one week of tapering because we to make sure that the athletes recover from this stress, because we in the past we were not sure about this.
Speaker 2:This, uh, is biological status every day and so to make sure not to go in an overreaching overtraining situation, we kept some tapering weeks to make sure that everything goes well, the athletes recover and we can go ahead with another step in the pyramid, as you say. But now we are in a different period of technology so we can track some important metrics from the athletes and, of course, we are not in the body, so we don't understand exactly where the athletes are because we are not there and see the mitochondria, muscle or level, what's happening right now. But we can understand what from different metrics, what the situation globally of the athletes at that moment. So basically, this kind of approach allows you to understand when the athlete is more ready in terms of biological stimulus, to be ready for adaptation, ready for good adaptation and not ready for bad adaptation.
Speaker 1:Luca, what you're describing is something. I've actually tried to articulate this in presentations that I've given on training structure. As coaches, we're always trying to make educated guesses around a few fundamental pieces. How much acute load can the athlete handle? So that would be like in a training session, one single training session. Can they handle a five hour run or ride? Can they handle one hour worth of intervals, whatever you're trying to put in front of the athlete, how much load they can handle? That's an educated guess. Use a lot of different components to determine to or to, to to make that educated guess. But let's be frank, you just mentioned we can't look inside of the body. We're making an educated guess on how capable or how much capacity all of those different things have in order to handle the workload that we prescribe them as coaches. The second thing we're making an educated guess on is how frequently and how long to apply that load for before taking a recovery period.
Speaker 1:And most coaches and athletes default to this very prototypical pattern that has decades worth of legacy behind it, where they go three weeks hard in one week easy, roughly three weeks hard in one week, one week easy. And the interesting thing about that is if you ask yourself well, why is it three weeks right? Why is it not six weeks or two weeks or one week, or 17 days and four days off? You know, 17 days hard and four days off, like, why is it three weeks in one week? A lot of that legacy actually has to do with doping and it it it started, it started to get propagated kind of in the old Soviet and East German training styles for all sports, not just endurance sports, and particularly around the women's menstrual cycle, because they would show the most adaptation to a lot of that era's doping protocols. And it just happened to be, they would dope them up with male hormones revolving around their menstrual cycles, which is roughly three weeks on and one week off. And so we have this entire legacy of periodization based on not entirely based off of, but with a large influence off of this kind of like false premise that you can actually kind of do that with an athlete. And so whenever I see these new models and describe well, it doesn't have to be three weeks hard in one week, easy, right, which falls. It also happens to fall into a prototypical month, but it doesn't have to be that, because your physiology isn't kind of neatly organized around this one thing it's been manipulated to have this legacy that we now like look on with the hindsight of a few decades and we need to think about it a little bit differently. So your point of is now we'd have some tools and we're not going to. We're not going to adjudicate all of the tools.
Speaker 1:I've done that in previous podcasts with Marco and um, our girl teeny, who I'm sure you're familiar with, and other people in terms of what can we, what data is worth extracting and what type of situation.
Speaker 1:And mainly we're talking about the wearables. So the things that we can get from our watch or power meter, things that we can take upon waking whether it's heart rate variability or whoop strap or a ring, and things like that, harnessing that data and using that to influence this cycle of I'm going to go hard, and how long am I going to go hard for, and then I'm going to go easy, and how long am I going to go hard for, and then I'm going to go easy and how long am I going going easy for? That's fundamentally what you're talking about when you're kind of describing this micro periodization model is you're using things that we can then deploy to determine this hard easy cycle that doesn't have to necessarily default to three weeks hard, one week easy yeah, basically we can have some really high level metrics, both in training, coming from training, and both when we are in the college in the morning after the training or before the training.
Speaker 2:So basically in training I think some things that are really worth looking at is HR response to some maximal exercise, so this one is a good metric to track your stress. Sometimes I usually do that like some maximal step in the warmup routine of my athletes to understand if they are ready or they are high on or they are. Or they are high on or they are, yeah, like over stress, or they are fine for the session, and sometimes I prescribe some different workout based on what happens on that. That's a maximal test. So sometimes I saw that the heart rate is in the range that I want. So, yeah, from that outlet it's me. Every metric that I'm playing is highly individual, so I cannot say that range is good for you and for everyone, but I usually try to have some ranges for each outlet.
Speaker 2:I estimate that the recovery is good based on the power-arthritis relationship and if the athletes fit in that range, range I, yeah, the others continue with the training, with the high intensity training. Otherwise they they just need to do a low intensity training and then they postpone the high intensity session to the next next day. So during the training I usually use that for the athletes to track that by yourselves. I also check after there to track that by yourself. I also check after the as well. The heart rate power response. Of course you have to do some adaptation based on the weather because, yeah, high weather, hot weather, cold weather, yeah, change your heart rate. So you have to do some adaptation on that to compare the data properly.
Speaker 2:And after the training you have many recovery metrics that you can use. One of the most important in the data that I use it's, of course, hrv Markwell, as Tókio wrote probably about that. So I'm using that. I'm using also all these three parameters that I think they are also extremely good and we are also developing some with the team. We are also developing some new simple blood tests for extracting some inflammation from the blood in the morning. So just one blood sample and you understand like CPK response. So it's like really really light, similar to lactate, but yeah, you can like one, one blood, the noise that they have to say drop one blood drop one blood drop and and you can understand your immediately, your CPK response.
Speaker 2:And then you go, of course, with the high level acid because it's still a little bitter, a little bit, it's not so. So it's not possible to buy this, this tool at the moment for the general population, but I think there will be in the future many of them. To understand also the inflammation response in your body in the morning, your body in the morning and also, if you have the possibility, another way to understand better your stress studies is to track, of course, your nutrition, of course, in the previous day to understand if the athlete has recovered well from a glycogen point of view. Of course, this one can be done only using diaries. You cannot measure glycogen in the money. So basically I don't use any of them more than the others.
Speaker 2:I try to put everything together and understand what's the biological subject of the artist, because I think Marco has already talked about that with you more in the case about the HRV. But if I saw low HRV on that day, it's not a clear sign that you are in an overtraining situation, overreaching situation, just a normal biology. So sometimes you don't have to look at one tool, you have to understand maybe, the overall status of the other, looking at this time point Sleep I was asleep, I was. The nutrition is everything okay? I check also with the inflammation, with the CPK response, with the blood analyzer and I check also resting heart rate. In the morning I go for some maximal exercise at the beginning of high intensity workout and check if the response is okay or not and then I adopt my training based on that and I think it's a good point to start my competition and I think I think it's it's a good point to start my competition to think of training in a different way than monday high intensity and friday high intensity and that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I so. So you I'm glad you encapsulated it at the end really quickly, as you're using biological status to determine when the big stressors are, when the hard are not necessarily their day, that they fall during the week, or even the frequency that you have per week. I mean going back to just randomness why is it two hard workouts in a seven-day period? What's magic about that ratio? There really is nothing magic about that ratio. If you're trying to push and pull physiology, you might as well use the athlete's initial starting physiology as the basis point to determine how hard or what the session should actually look like. So I've heard a number of different practitioners, such as yourself, describe their monitoring systems, and I have a monitoring system with my athlete that I shared with you in internal continuing ed. If you get a chance to take a look at it, I'm sure none of it will be surprising to you. But whenever I hear a version of that whether it's coming from you or whether I'm articulating my own or I talked to another coach about, kind of about theirs I always think that we were trying to hedge our bets. We're trying to collect all of this information, right, and it's almost like a.
Speaker 1:I'm going to use a financial analogy here. It's almost like a financial advisor telling you to diversify your assets. You shouldn't have everything in real estate. You shouldn't solely base things off of heart rate. You shouldn't have everything in the stock market. You shouldn't base everything off of blood lactate. You shouldn't base everything off of sleep. You shouldn't have everything in physical assets like gold. You should have a little bit of everything and then you can choose how, depending upon who the athlete is, you can kind of choose where to push and where to pull, what things to put more, what things to put more weight on.
Speaker 1:I'm always come away with that, with a similar type of analogy, when I think about these monitoring systems. We're gathering a lot of things to get multiple direction arrows. We apply a different weight to each one of those directional arrows. At the end of the day, they're very rarely all pointing in the same direction with the same strength, and this is where the art of it really comes through is trying to figure out which ones of those directional arrows are we going to listen to, where some hard and where some harder, like stopping points, like. I absolutely see this and so I know every time I see this, or 90 of the time I see this, I'm going to take 180 degree approach. The day goes from hard to easy, something like that.
Speaker 1:But I guess my point with that is is there's always going to be new things that are emerging and it's kind of up to us to like make sense of it all, even though they're not going to all tell you the exact same story. There's going to be something that goes along and you've seen this in your monitoring systems. There's going to be something that doesn't jive with the rest of the, with the rest of the, with the rest of the patterning that's actually going on. So for the athletes and coaches that are out there that are like they want the answer, right, they like tell me the protocol.
Speaker 1:That's always big in the podcast world right now. Right, give me the protocol. We're not going to have one for you because I've developed one that I think works okay for the athletes that I work with, but I don't use it universally across all of my athletes. I have like different kind of flavors of it, so to speak, with each athlete, based on a number of different factors the way the athlete collects the data, how comfortable I am with it, my history with the athlete how they have reacted underneath different kind of like a physiological profile in the past. Going back to our the past will tell you a lot about what you could do in the future dialogue at the earlier part of this podcast, so I'm not going to have a magic answer.
Speaker 2:I basically say to everyone that is asking for a magic protocol, I always say, if we have a magic protocol, probably artificial intelligence will replace us in a minute.
Speaker 2:Sure, they can analyze everything and they can do a program better than us.
Speaker 2:But it's really good for coaches, the good of the coach, the ability of the coaches to analyze everything, understand which one of these parameters is good for that outlets and which makes sense more for another one, and understand why you have.
Speaker 2:Maybe you have some alarms or like worry advice for the let. Maybe you choose by your own to go ahead with the high intensity. Even you need to have warning because maybe you want to check if they might respond better to like more long stimulus and then they adopt in a better way with a higher load. So you don't see the warning of your tools, your parameters, and then you go ahead with the one, maybe more session high intensity to check what happens. And I think it's also the ability of the coach to understand everything and to manipulate the program in a proper way. And that's why I think that there will be always, also in the future, a human coach that can play a big role and cannot be, we cannot be replaced by just general trends of the data and automatic settings of their of the trading program well, let me get.
Speaker 1:I'll give the listeners so that. So, so that it's actually practical. I'll give the listeners an actual practical example of how this decision making process like comes through in my monitoring system and and I've spoken about this in a number of different formats, so none of it's, you know, super secret or proprietary, but I use Marco's HRV for training pro as not the exclusive part of my monitoring system, but it's kind of become the cornerstone. And so for the listeners out there, the way it works is you wake up, you get in a seated position, you take your heart rate, you take your morning heart rate variability using the phone on the back of your or using the camera on the back of your smartphone. You then fill out a subjective questionnaire how well did you sleep, are you sore, things like that and it uses this little slider system to kind of go through that and then it turns through all that data and it gives you basically a stoplight system style of advice Green proceed as planned. Yellow would mean to take it easy to limit your intensity, and red would be to take a rest day or to take an easy day, and I would say in about 70 to 80% of the total amount of days that I'm analyzing, I'm taking that advice wholeheartedly, meaning most of it's green because I'm doing a good job load managing on the front end. But in the times where it's yellow or red, sometimes I'm taking that advice and oftentimes I'm not. And I don't have a magic formula to say well, underneath these conditions I'm absolutely taking the advice and under these conditions I'm not, because I have to go through the whole thing. What happened the previous day? Were they traveling? Is it a really important session? Is there no intensity on the session and it's just really hard or it's just a long? It's hard because of the duration of the workout and I want them to continue as planned. Or maybe we have more space between when they're working out now and the race and I want to save that workout for a day where they're kind of like more primed for it.
Speaker 1:But I guess my point with all that is is, even within that monitoring, and even though I do have an answer on what to do, an algorithmic type of answer on what to do, I'm still taking in the context and I can't and I haven't been able to at least come up with an algorithm, and I have tried to do this.
Speaker 1:Come up with an algorithm that will tell me okay, I'm going to take the advice in this situation and not I'm always adding some sort of human element to it, based on the context of the entirety of the situation. So my kind of like counsel to athletes and coaches out there is to start with something that you're going to continually do and then do it consistently and then see what actually happens and use those previous learnings to like to go forward. Because, to going circling back to our original point, sometimes an imperfect monitoring system done consistently when you can learn from it, is more powerful than the perfect monitoring system that you can put in place that might be impractical to actually deploy and the key with it is just determined, is just looking at it from a past perspective and figuring out when it's given you good information and when it hasn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's usually the best approach, I think, is this one. So, yeah, I have a similar approach like you. So probably we are. We are going in a sort of parallel way to this one. Yeah, this one kind of metrics, but they are, we just need to say, shall be as well.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, the approach of training is, it's really similar, even with the high level of this, with the professional cyclists, we are using a similar approach, of course, with maybe like more tools and more control life, because, yeah, also another point that it's often happens with the amateur it's like that, it's like control life less than professional athletes. So they have some, maybe some multifactorial stressors. That happens. And so sometimes you, yeah, maybe you can check the alcohol effects on hrv and maybe it's not a big problem for the next session for me, but it's affecting HRV. So you see a red point, but it's maybe not a big red point because you can go ahead. It's just for your responders to alcohol it matters that they are really good responders to all stimuli and so, yeah, they just go, they just go ahead, and then after one day they go back to normality.
Speaker 2:So I think, yes, the approach is the best and I think, with this micro-organizational approach, I think we can sometimes keep some I don't know, say some not useful long tapering process. That happens in the past, I think, because we can almost every time track your biological studies and so, even if it's not 100% clear, it's like 90%, and so we can maybe sometimes keep some like long tapering process because they are not useful, simply not useful in the traditional 3 plus 1, 2 plus 1 block yeah, let's try to put some of this monitoring stuff into categories, into buckets, because I've been taking notes here and I think that they're falling into relatively neat categories that we can discuss and try to describe so that everybody can learn something from this.
Speaker 1:So the first category of monitoring would be just the subjective category. How are you feeling? How did you feel yesterday? How do you feel when you wake up? That's easy. You can put that in a notebook, you can have a format for it, you can have a Google spreadsheet. The HRV for Training Pro that I use has some subjective element of it, but it doesn't require any device other than a pen and some paper. Right, you can use that to try to monitor things and I think if you just did, that's a really good starting point. How did you feel during your training? How do you feel today? You consistently monitor that.
Speaker 1:Use one to ten scale or you can use some sort of likert one to five scale or something like that and I think that would give you a good direction arrow, fundamental. I think these points fundamental. The the second one and this is the one that you described right from the onset is you're doing something active and you're dose testing the active component with a harder type of interval and you're looking at the physiological response to that Heart rate response. We can measure other things going on physiologically, but fundamentally you're using the very beginning of the workout to determine what is actually going on and interestingly enough so I have a Garmin Phoenix seven on my wrist right now. If I went and I started to run when started my run this morning, after about five or seven minutes it will give me some readiness score.
Speaker 1:It's from negative 10 to positive 10, I think, is the scale. I can't I don't even profess to know what the scale is, nor what goes into it, but my point with that is is some of the device manufacturers are trying to do something similar where they're using the beginning portion of a workout and they're capturing something. In this, in my wristwatch's case, they'd be capturing speed and heart rate and the way that it changes over the first several minutes, and it's using that as an input, right? So you're using the very beginning part of it, you're taking that to an amplified level and you're doing some hard thing during the quote unquote warmup, during the early stages of the workout, to determine how the athlete's physiology is responding. Am I describing that correctly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not like maximal, but it's like some maximal stat, incremental, so like it's below the LT2. So it's like between LT1 and LT2. And then I tracked the HR at different maximal power intensities and I yeah, I understand it's the athletes is a really low response in terms of heart rate, it's normal response in terms of heart rate. It's over response to heart rate for that power. And then I, especially with the high level outlet, I have some bands, like when you have like the one that you have for HRV, and if you are on the bands you can proceed with the workout. If you are way far from the bands, you can go ahead with easy training and skip and move the hard session to the next day yeah.
Speaker 1:So my point with that is is it's active, right, you're doing something within the warm-up, you're looking at the physiology that's going on during the warm-up and you're using that as a directional arrow. That's another bucket, and these buckets are in no particular order. They're just as I was thinking about them. The next one is if we would think about our chronologically it's kind of in between the first two that I just mentioned and that's taking some physiology at rest. So most people will do this either via a nighttime heart rate they're waking heart rate is the thing that most people are familiar with. When I was a young athlete, I could wake up and I had a wristwatch by my bed and I would just physically take my pulse for six or 10 seconds or whatever it was. And now we have all these sophisticated things to where we'll do it overnight. We can get nighttime averages, we can get the lowest during the night, we can get heart rate variability during the night as a nighttime average or in the morning. But it's something at rest. I guess is my point with this final bucket You're looking at physiology at rest before you actually go and work out. The cornerstone of the monitoring that I use uses that as a big component of it. And then the fourth category, which might be the most exotic one, is we're using some sort of blood profiling to determine the periodization concept, micropurization or kind of whatever we want to call it, whether that's what you had described, where you're taking a very small sample of blood and looking at inflammation markers, or you're just using lactate, which is I know a lot of other coaches use. They will use lactate even during, kind of the first submaximal parts of a workout, as you were describing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you, so that's part of your system as well. But then also, if you want to take a bigger lens approach, there are there, there are periodized schemes that I have seen out there that do, that are influenced by blood profiling, that you're getting either bi-weekly or monthly or whatever the frequency actually is, to where you can determine, or you can use to help determine how much and or what type of training you actually want to deploy on the athlete. So those are the four buckets that I've come up with the subjective bucket, the resting bucket, which is heart rate variability and things like that, while you're actually just sitting down. The active bucket, so you're doing something and then you're measuring physiology based on an active state. And then the bylaw, the using blood biomarkers. Yeah, it's getting complicated.
Speaker 2:It's getting complicated but, yeah it makes clear to the, to someone that is using the podcast, that it's really complicated for the coach to understand the real biological statistics of the atlas. We need four buckets to understand it. We don't understand everything, so it's really complicated, it's really difficult to understand, but at the end I think it's a more modern and accurate approach to track biological adaptation to exercise than doing just check anything in the, just checking the exercise, physiological studies and not checking anything else, and then taper for a week and then everything is okay, and then taper for a week and then everything is okay and all things for adaptation. I think it's better to try something to understand what's happening in the body additional level, as you say. And of course you are still making some errors it's normal and mistakes. But I think you cannot strain light in 1960. You have to train light in 2024. So you need to train with the modern tools.
Speaker 1:You have to use modern tools. You have to use modern tools, yeah.
Speaker 2:I came up with a few, but just to say another thing you have to understand what these tools mean, because otherwise, if you don't understand what the meaning of that one, it's better not to use. Otherwise, yeah, it's just looking at the data and without understanding anything. So that's why, of course, I think it's crucial to let you understand better what's happening in your body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's where an educated eye comes in. Yeah, and that's where an educated eye comes in. And I mentioned algorithm at least currently, that will tell you that accurately. There are a lot of ones that try. I mentioned the Garmin readiness indicator that I see every single day when I start a run. I don't think that is even close to the best way, to the best one out there.
Speaker 1:As we were discussing this, though, I got to go back, because there are going to be some coaches that are going to get mad at me if I don't mention this. There's a fifth category that both of you and I probably use, but sometimes we can neglect it, and that's the actual training data. And sure, that's a lagging indicator because they've already done the workout and then you're analyzing the file or the workout to determine what's going on in the future. But that is certainly something that you can look at in terms of your entire monitoring system and just comparing effort to effort and what is that and what is actually going on. We'd be remiss if we didn't mention that, because they've actually got to go and do workouts at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's probably the more common and easier to understand. Yeah, so we mentioned about that. But yeah, it's probably the more common and easier to understand. Yeah, so we mentioned about that. But yeah, it's, of course, the swift one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you were right. So we tend not to go ahead without mentioning the most important one.
Speaker 1:But even I know coaches now and this is I think that this is more prevalent in my world and ultra running than it is in your world and cycling, because cycling has a couple of decades where the sophistication that uh, trail and ultra running is kind of catching up to now, because the data is so good with onboard power meters, it's been the predominant catalyst uh, predominant catalyst for that. I do know a lot of ultra running coaches that don't care to look in athletes, that don't care to look at their training data. They go, do the workout. They might skip to the subjective part how did that feel? And not couple it with something analytical in terms of how did the workout actually go?
Speaker 1:Much like we do on the cycling side, maybe to a fault, or maybe we analyze it and get too precise with it. To a fault with different power ranges and power duration, curves and you know and things like that that you're quite, that you're quite familiar with. I do know a lot of coaches and athletes that just skip that step on the trail running side and they look at something as coarse as their Strava segments to tell them if they had done a you know good workout or not. But actually, looking at the files if you can kind of see through the data and you know what you're looking at can be a really important component of how to periodize things for the future, because it gives you a very good gauge of how the athlete actually performed and how much fatigue that they may actually have on their system, based on not only that workout but also the entirety of the workouts previous to that yeah, that's certainly.
Speaker 2:I think it's probably for because it's, like, I think, a more easy to analyze it in cycling, because you have some bands and so, yeah, I don't know why they don't do it, but probably because it's more difficult. You have more different things to see in running and with the trade, but then in cycling because we yeah, of course, you don't have, like our meters, so, yeah, it's a little bit more tricky to understand and to compare the data, but I think you can find something interesting from that Also. Yeah, just, quite that's quite simple. It's a after. It responds to the duration. It's really easy to track and to plot and to analyze and understand what's happening in this final part of the session. And yeah, I don't know why they don't do that, but yes, I did plays a big role in the monitoring process of the art. It's, if you don't do that, it's, I think, a missing part of the entire puzzle.
Speaker 1:So I started out predominantly coaching cyclists and when I transitioned to coaching more trail runners, what I tried to do is to take how I would analyze a file from a cyclist and use that same strategy to potentially analyze the same things on a trail runner. I'm choosing that language and that vocabulary very deliberately because we don't have as good of an intensity surrogate as we do on the cycling side with cycling power meters, which is a very good not a perfect, but a very good intensity surrogate. We certainly don't have that on the trail running side and the closest analog that we have to that would be the training peaks vocabulary, for that, which is the tool that we use, is normalized graded pace. The Strava analog to that is a great adjusted pace and they both fundamentally do most of the same, most of the same things. But it gets obscured primarily because of the surface or the technicity of the trail. But if the trail conditions are all relatively or roughly the same, you can use it as a pretty good intensity surrogate and compare interval to interval and compare from first half of the run to the back half of the run.
Speaker 1:There's a number of different ways that you can do it, but just starting off with that fundamentally and try to see through. That is a is. It's an important problem to look at, but it's a difficult one to solve simply because the terrain is obscuring a lot of what you're looking at, and so you might only get 70% usable data or 60% usable data, and that's fine, that's better than 0%, but you got to know what you're kind of getting into, but, but. But I think that, back to the original point there, using normalized graded pace is the analog for the on the cycling side of things, and looking at that as part of your monitoring system is absolutely in figuring, and using that to kind of periodize what's going on in the future is an absolutely critical part of everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm using also that on my analysis with the wheelchair runners. So, yeah, I think it's the most, most shots, yeah, the more important parameters that you can track more, most of the easiest one that you can track. And also, I think, honestly, when you, when you, yeah, maybe sometimes you have not like the possibility to analyze only percent of your data in the trail or which are running, because, yeah, as you said, for the terrain on the surface, but, yeah, the rest of the data are good. So, yeah, maybe you definitely need to analyze some section that you know are good for data analysis. Maybe, when it's too difficult because for the GPS it's not taking the right segment and the right track, yeah, you have just to skip and clean that part and then maybe consider another part for your analysis. But, yeah, when you see the data, it's the data are good or not. It's.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you see I saw something also in dry running or in also in cycling. Sometimes GPS is not working well, yeah, and so you check something and you see scores. In cycling, the orange is not there because you have the power, so you can analyze power and, yeah, and internal response at the same time, but in running, if you don't have the right running speed because it's overestimated or underestimated by the GPS problem. You can overestimate it or underestimate the fatigue of your tablet. So, yes, important also in this situation to check if the data are good extremely important. And yeah, sometimes you're just checking track on on the on the side and checking where the athletes are. You can understand if the normalized data can be good or not. For that analysis sort of start somewhere.
Speaker 1:That's what I encourage athletes to do is to take one of these.
Speaker 1:Start that that do it consistently and even if it's just as simple as I'm going to give myself or give my coach, subjective feedback on how I feel every single day, don't discount how powerful that actually is as long as you're doing it every single day, and then you can go back and pick up on the patterns.
Speaker 1:Going back to what we originally talked about when were you good, when were you bad, what training worked, what training didn't and what was the subjective feedback revolving around those times. That, in and of itself, we'd like to talk about monitoring blood biomarkers and things like that, which is definitely an advanced tool and can be very powerful, but sometimes, if you just start simple, you can make a big dent in what you're actually doing day to day. I'm going to let you go, luca. I know you got a busy season coming up or it's in the middle of a busy season, so I won't take up any more of your time. If anybody is around Milan, which I know where your offices are where can they come find you and find more about you, even in an online capacity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you come to Milan, you can visit me in my Endurance Lab. It's called Endurance Academy. It's again near Milan, near the Malpensa airport, and you can come and visit me and visit my laboratory, visit my training outlets, also my Endurance Athlete. And yeah, online you can find me wherever so Instagram, I have a page also. We have also a page for Endurance Academy on both and also on Twitter, via email, wherever. I'm always available and if you have some questions, don't hesitate questions, I can respond to everyone. It's always a pleasure to share some knowledge to everyone.
Speaker 1:You're busy man. I appreciate you. I'm going to come and check out your lab next time I'm in the area. I might be able to make it over there when I'm there for UTMB. We can connect about that online.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I'm always appreciative of what you do. You're a good follow on all the socials and I'm going to leave a link in the show notes to the editorial that you wrote that kind of catalyzed this conversation. I encourage people to check that out as well. So thanks for coming on the podcast man. I really appreciate it. Luke Keenum, PhD.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you and thanks for your answer all right folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it. There you go. Much thanks to luca for coming on the podcast today and describing more in detail and enlightening us more on what he means by micro periodization and the impact that it might actually have with athletes. As we mentioned during the podcast, this is something that I have started doing a lot more with my athletes, where we are looking at things on a one day, two day, three day, four day rolling basis and, although there might be some general strategy that we are applying to the entire phase, using what is going on in real time to determine are we going hard, are we going easy, are you going for a really long run, and what does that data actually mean at the end of the day for improved performance? I'm going to keep exploring this area further because it does seem like the very tip of the spear is starting to deploy these types of monitoring systems and these types of micro periodization models more and more. But I will fully admit that it takes a keen eye and I'll also fully admit that sometimes we're just taking educated guesses as coaches. We're looking at the data in front of us and we're trying to make best decisions based off of that.
Speaker 1:So if you wanted one really big take home point, that is, capture the subjective feedback around your training. There really is no better window into how you're performing and how you are doing than the good, simple, old-fashioned how did you feel today? If you capture that over the course of an entire year and then go back after your season is over, look at the times where you felt you were training really well and the times that you felt that you weren't training so well, I bet that you can start to derive some patterns from that. So if you're not doing that, start doing that today. It's something that can pay dividends and pay a lot of dividends in the future. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
