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Double Threshold Workouts for Ultrarunning with Rune Talsnes #234
Coach Jason Koop discusses the merits of double threshold workouts with Rune Talsnes.
Comparison of acute physiological responses between one long and two short sessions of moderate-intensity training in endurance athletes.
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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 attempts to demystify something that has gotten a lot of attention and hype recently in endurance communities, and that is double threshold workouts the ability for you to take one workout that you would normally do in one session, break it up into two different sessions throughout the day, and the potential advantages that might have on any particular athlete. This style of training can be rolled up into a greater philosophy of lactate controlled training, which is sometimes referred to as the Norwegian method, and it has certainly garnered the imagination and attention of a lot of elite and recreational endurance athletes out there, and so I did want to demystify this just a little bit and talk to some people that are on the ground performing research on it.
Speaker 1:So on the podcast today we have Rune Talnes, all the way from Norway. He works in the Department of Neuromedicine and Movement Science in the Center for Elite Sports Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He wrote a great paper recently on this particular subject and attempted to define, or attempted to peel back the curtain on, how athletes actually react to these two different styles of training, one of them being you're doing one hard single session and the other one being you're going to break that session up into two individual section sessions. And what is going on underneath the hood, so to speak. We then take this podcast and we start to speculate a little bit about what types of athletes might benefit from this and what types of scenarios. What might we actually use this training intervention? As always, there's no hype or hyperbole. We're just presenting the data and his research as it is. All right, folks, with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way.
Speaker 1:Here is my conversation with Rune Taleness. All about double threshold workouts. All right, rune. First off, welcome to the podcast, coming all the way to us from somewhere in Europe Sweden, norway. Where are you coming to us from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm a Norwegian living in mid-Norway in a city called Trondheim, and I work at the university there, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Flomland, where I'm a researcher or a post-doctor. I do research mostly on endurance sports, endurance training and different topics related to that, and in addition I also do some consulting or testing of endurance athletes in the Norwegian Olympic Federation.
Speaker 1:So I have a question to start out that's kind of unrelated to the paper that we're going to talk about double threshold sessions, but since you're involved in it and just so the audience can kind of get to know you a little bit better, why is it that sports scientists and athletes from your region of the world are so endurance centric? Like we get a lot of like interval training theories and interval training research we have a disproportionate amount coming out of that area of the world is compared to like the U? S who has a much more populous athlete base to kind of work through. So I was wondering if you could just peel the curtain back for the listeners a little bit about why that's the case. Why is it just so ingrained in the culture out there and why do we see so many good athletes and so much good research around endurance training come out of that area?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's a good question. Um, interesting observation. Most likely also really true, I think. Probably it has different reasons. There are longstanding traditions in Scandinavian countries, like, for example, especially in Norway and Sweden, for doing research on human performance exercise physiology. The kind of pioneers in exercise physiology were from, were from sweden and then also in in both norway and sweden. There are also traditions for a collaboration between academia research on one side and then sports practice on the other side, and particularly that is the case in endurance sports, I would say. And there are for sure long tradition traditions as well for endurance sports in Norway and, as probably many are aware of, there are long traditions for cross-country skiing, which is one of the most demanding endurance sports, I would say, which is one of the most demanding endurance sports, I would say. So that is probably also a part of the reason for your observation about this interest of endurance training in Scandinavian countries, both in sports practice but also in research.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember early in my coaching career a lot of the block style training architecture started to gain just a lot of notoriety and traction within the endurance world, and it came from. Two facets is one the strength training world, which is neither here nor there, it's kind of not that relevant to what we're going to talk about. But the other piece of it came specifically from cross country skiers and the research and the practice emanating from from from that area of the world. So this basis of taking training theory that was either developed or pioneered or at least communicated in that area of the world to the rest of the world has got a long-standing history and it's always just really fascinating. To me that is the origin of a lot of what we that area of the world is an origin of a lot of what we think about endurance training today. So we're going to talk about the next iteration of that Time will tell will be the next iteration of that Something that has gotten a lot of attention over the past two to three years in a number of different formats, and that's double threshold training.
Speaker 1:I think the way that this is going to work is we'll spend a little bit of time kind of discussing what it is just to bring the audience up to speed, and then a whole lot of time talking about how you're trying how you and some of your colleagues are trying specifically to kind of get a fix on exactly how this type of training not only affects the athlete but also can potentially promote the adaptive process, which is ultimately what we're concerned about. But just to level, set the vocabulary and the strategy for the audience to start out with in your mind how would you describe this to an athlete? Athlete comes to you hey, I've heard about this double threshold training stuff. How would you actually describe that to them and what would be some of the key like theoretical advantages that you, that we, you would try to communicate to that athlete?
Speaker 2:yeah, no, I'm not sure where to start, but I guess I was. Double threshold training as a concept or or method is just performing two sessions of threshold training or moderate intensity training during one day. That is kind of the idea that is, as you said, kind of have received increased attention over the last years. I don't think I will engage in the debate where this originates from and who started in it doing it first. But that's fair enough. I don't think I will engage in the debate where this originates from and who started doing it first.
Speaker 1:That's fair enough. I don't want you to have to step into those waters as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's been around for quite a long time and I've heard that it's been used in kayaking and rowing for many years ago, also in running many years ago, also in running many years ago.
Speaker 2:And there's this well-known author in Norway that has written a lot of books on cross-country skiing and sports and he always says that nothing is new, everything has been tried before.
Speaker 2:But the context changes and I think that's the case here as well. It's been around for four decades but, as you pointed out, it's got increased attention over last year and I think that is particularly due to the use of middle and long distance runners, particularly some Norwegian, or some of the world or at least the world have some of the best runners in the world and the the brothers jacob ingebrigtsen has received some attention in with that regards, and then it's kind of been adopted to, to, to try us alone and other endurance sports and this concept, uh, probably then also that probably then also be referred to as the Norwegian method or the Norwegian model, which is this double threshold training specifically, but also threshold training with emphasis on intensity control, intensity steering, particularly by using low-lighted measurements to kind of steer the intensity of the threshold training. All this somehow relate them and by many now referred to as the Norwegian method of endurance training.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll give the Norwegians the credit for the origin story there, although it's not novel, but maybe we'll give them credit for at least naming it after themselves. Fundamentally, there are all different types of permutations of this type of workout that you studied experimentally, and I'd be remiss to not mention those, because when you're doing an experimental design you've got to narrow it down to something, usually a singular thing that you're actually testing, but at its core a double threshold workout is taking, a threshold workout that you could do maximally, something that represents almost the most volume of intensity that you could handle in a session. And the classic way to look at that you've pointed on your paper is six by 10 minutes hard and breaking that up into two different sessions, a morning session and a night session, by either doing the entirety of that six by 10 or some variation of that which you kind of see in practice. Sometimes it's four, you know, four intervals in the morning and two intervals at night, sometimes it's three and three, sometimes it's four and four, and there's all different kind of variations of that and I think we'll get down to which ones can be more advantageous than others in the in kind of the dialogue and kind of the dialogue, of this, but fundamentally that's what you're doing is you're taking something that you would do maximally, or something that represents the maximum or close to the maximum amount of volume of intensity that an athlete could withstand, and you're breaking it up into two different sessions that are separated by half a day or an afternoon or something like that.
Speaker 1:I'd be remiss to mention that. I think that threshold training and this might be a catalyst of it has kind of got a resurgence, so to speak, over the last few years. It seems that sometimes training theory goes in these waves based on popular opinion One thing becomes popular and then another thing gets demonized, and then another thing gets popular and then another thing gets demonized, and the latest iteration of this is VO2 max training is good and threshold training is bad, and I'm putting those in intentional air quotes because as practitioners we usually realize that there's a variety of different intensities. But I was wondering if you could kind of like expand on that a little bit and like why, specifically, what threshold training tries to elicit and what your opinion is on why we shouldn't think about some of these intensities as necessarily good or bad, that we have to kind of elicit a range of them over the course of an athlete's lifespan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a good and valid observation. Threshold training has probably also been around for a long time, long, long time. As you say things, common goals and goals, and for 10, 15, 20 years ago it was probably more polarized than during training of endurance athletes. It was kind of either you did low intensity training that was the focus, or you did more high intensity training or via the max training than this kind of emphasize on threshold training. We've got some density zone in between there where it came around and that has kind of received more attention in different communities and endurance sports and probably this is also reflected in the research literature that most of the literature, at least on kind of training intervention studies, has been emphasizing high intensity training. It's not that much on kind of moderate intensity training, threshold training, and particularly not that much on low intensity training which often represents 90% of the total training time in endurance sports.
Speaker 2:So there are different benefits of doing threshold training.
Speaker 2:Typically I would say it's mostly the argument will be that it acts on your fractional utilization of your V2max or your threshold intensity threshold, pace, anaerobic threshold or critical speed or critical power. But also at the same time it's hard to separate that kind of low intensity training and target dose adaptations, threshold training, target dose adaptations and high intensity training and those adaptations and high-intensity training, target, those adaptations they're kind of all overlapping and are contributing to developing high aerobic endurance capacity. So the question always is not if you're going to do one or the other, but it's about kind of finding the right balance between different endurance training intensities and find the right balance between training load and recovery and also kind of the periodization of this training. And typically you have more low intensity training, moderate intensity training or threshold training in your preparation period and then when the competition season are coming closer, then you kind of increase more emphasis on high intensity training and speed training. And also it depends on the sport that you're doing.
Speaker 2:What are the kind of the demands of the sport you're doing? What type of athletes are we talking about? Different approaches with regards to threshold versus high-density training. It's probably different training that you need if you're a junior athlete compared to kind of senior athlete. That's an elite level.
Speaker 1:So the context, context matters so try to set this up for the audience. If what I'll call regular threshold training targets a very specific aspect of an athlete's physiology, what's different or what is the advantage for taking that threshold training session and splitting it up into two different sessions, like just from a theoretical or philosophical training architecture standpoint. You've got this one session and you're saying we're going to, instead of doing this one session, we're going to do these two sessions. What are the advantages that we think might be going on by by using that type of training structure?
Speaker 2:yeah, I guess you can get different answers on this one, depending on who you ask, of course, but there are different aspects that have been addressed with regards to this double threshold concept, and I guess the aspect that has been mentioned the most is that if you kind of have a certain model of threshold training that you want to perform and you do that in two shorter sessions compared to one longer session, then you will kind of achieve a lower training stress and potentially lower recovery time per session, and then maybe over a longer time period, for example a week or a month, then you can obtain a higher total volume of threshold training by doing it this way. That is kind of one aspect of it, given that it's performed kind of at the same external intensity, even though it is performed kind of at the same external intensity. Another aspect that is often mentioned is that, particularly in running, if you split session up to two shorter sessions, then you kind of have a lower mechanical loading per session and a lower injury risk maybe, and also from kind of a more molecular or adaptive signaling context, if you have two sessions in one day, you kind of provide two signals for molecular or two molecular signals for adaptations during one training day compared to one session and one signal. So there's a few aspects that have been mentioned. And also, if you do two shorter sessions, as I said, they will probably cost less with regards to internal intensity, for example heart rate or blood lactate levels or RP, and then you can also probably compensate by having a higher external intensity, for example speed or power, by splitting it into two shorter sessions and now you allow for performing more threshold training closer to your actual competition speed. That could also be an aspect of this.
Speaker 2:But, as I said, with regards to endurance training intensity and endurance training intensity distribution, the question is not if you should do double threshold training or not. Probably the answer is kind of finding the right balance between doing one longer session per day and then sometimes you can do two shorter sessions in one day and use this concept as a tool that you have in your toolbox. And what you can lose in a way of doing it as two shorter sessions compared to one longer session is that if you have a longer session, you typically achieve duration-dependent increase or drift in internal intensity measures, heart rate drift, increase in lactate or RP, and the physiological stimuli and cost of the session is higher, and then you might also achieve kind of one larger or higher signal for adaptations, particularly through glycogen depletion. So there are probably pros and cons of doing double threshold training compared to fewer and longer sessions, and this concept can, as I said, be a tool that you can use together with performing some longer sessions, I would say.
Speaker 1:Rune. That was really well articulated, I think, for all the coaches out there. If you just rewind three or four minutes and bullet point each one of those almost like a pros and cons list that you went through, I think that's a really good exercise to go through when designing training architecture, because everything that you do will have a slightly different, or could potentially have a slightly different effect on the adaptive process that you're ultimately trying to elicit. And how you tune those individual workouts and the whole milieu of workouts that you prescribe for an athlete has to be discreet and very specific towards what the athlete actually needs. And here you have something that looks on paper where it might actually where it looks on paper at least, where it could be the same.
Speaker 1:You have six 10-minute intervals and in one scenario they're all done at once. In another scenario they're split up in two sessions. That's the only variation of it. But if you do start to do that, you start to see subtle differences in the way that the athlete actually physiologically reacts to that. And that's exactly what you decided to test, and I'll leave it to you to kind of describe the specific paper that we're going to talk about in just a little bit. I'll leave a link to it in the show notes, but the title is Comparison of Acute Physiological Responses Between One Long and Two Short Sessions of Moderate Intensity Training and of acute physiological responses between one long and two short sessions of moderate intensity and moderate intensity training and endurance athletes. I'll use that as a little bit of setup and throw it over to you. Describe like the experimental condition that you're creating. Then what were the key takeaways from it?
Speaker 2:yeah, we can try that. As I said, this concept of double threshold training has probably been around for several decades but it's not received any attention in the research literature. So this was kind of the first study on this topic and this concept and it's not kind of a training intervention study that really does say anything about the actual training effects of doing double threshold training versus not doing it. But the purpose was to kind of have a starting point, try to understand this concept better. So we kind of did a more observational study where we measured the acute physiological responses of doing double threshold training compared to the same time and intensity matched session as one long session. So that was kind of the purpose of the study and we recruited 14 national level cross-country skiers in norway to do this and they, in a counterbalanced order, they performed they all performed one day of two interval sessions and those were kind of three times 10 minutes per session, and then the other day was one single session with six times 10 minutes intervals and this was running in the laboratory.
Speaker 2:During the sessions we measured kind of different physiological measures, so heart rate, blood lactate levels, rating of perceived exhaustion, oxygen, optic ventilation, and then also after the sessions were performed, we had the participants in the lab for one more hour and measured kind of their heart rate recovery during that hour post-exercise. We also had some questionnaires put directly after the sessions were performed on how they perceived the exhaustion and the training quality of the sessions. We also had this questionnaire on perceived training stress and recovery that they filled out the morning after the training day. Basically what we did relatively simple study design and measurements, just to kind of acute responses. But this hopefully serves as a starting point in this topic and might generate some kind of hypothesis for further work and maybe some future training intervention studies. It's also the case in the research literature on endurance training that a lot have been emphasized towards the interaction between training volume and intensity. There's not that much research and scientific understanding of the interaction between training volume and frequency. It's mostly emphasized intensity. So that was basically what we did in the study.
Speaker 1:It's almost like you get what you expected, right, so you have one session. That was that. That when you study the subjects during the session and after the session, six by ten is is I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of bastardize the results here that one session is harder, right, or physiological, physiologically more stressful than splitting the two sessions up, which is the audience is going to think about this and be like, well, yeah, of course it's not. Like if I go and I do the hardest workout I could possibly do, or a really hard workout, of course that's going to be more stressful or physiologically stressful than if I split it up. And I always feel that studies like this that are looking at the response from the athlete and not necessarily the training effect or what you call the training effect Well, I'll call the adaptive response the same thing it ends up being a little bit of a Rorkshaw test, right?
Speaker 1:In terms of if you're coming to the test or if you're coming and reading the paper through a certain lens, you're going to interpret it that way.
Speaker 1:And if you come to the paper from a different viewpoint, you're going to interpret it that way.
Speaker 1:And if you come to the paper from a different viewpoint, you're going to interpret it that way as well.
Speaker 1:So if you're looking at this paper saying, okay, I want to create the most stress as possible, and then that higher level of stress is going to facilitate a greater adaptation, you're going to say, ah, of course, six by 10 is better. We're going to break it up into really blunt categories here, even though we already went through that. It's a tool, but six by 10 is better because you're going to get a more robust adaptation, because the higher level of stress If you look at it from well, the lower stress is better at the same exact workload. You're going to say, oh well, breaking the session up is better because you're going to get a, say, a similar level of adaptation for less physiological cost. Is that a fair, like workshop analysis of it? Like when you put this paper out in the world and I'm sure that you saw some of the feedback and the commentary and the dialogue that revolved around it is that a fair encapsulation of how you could potentially view the same paper through two different lenses?
Speaker 2:yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:I think that's a fair and and good summary of the of the results in in the study.
Speaker 2:It was definitely not surprising if you kind of have if you do one longer session that have the same kind of volume and intensity, that have a higher physiological cost acutely and potentially a higher recovery demand, splitting it up into two time and intensity matched shorter sessions.
Speaker 2:So it can kind of be interpreted different ways depending on the lenses that you put on. You say, if you want kind of the highest possible training stress or training stimuli, then you should probably go for doing one longer session. If you want a lower historical cost and training stimuli acutely, then you should probably split it up to two shorter sessions. And both of those kind of scenarios have pros and cons, I would say, and it depends what your goal is and what you want to get out of it. It's probably a combination of both that you should kind of prescribe to your athletes or implement in your training programs. And yeah, it all depends. I would say If you want to accumulate more time over a certain time period, it might be good to have lower costs for a session to kind of try to achieve a more consistent training process, sustainable training process with a lower risk in a way.
Speaker 1:But if you kind of want a higher training stimuli, potentially also more adaptations out of a few sessions, then you should probably go for one longer session where you actually have these kind of physiological drifts during the session yeah, it becomes one of those things that, from a coaching and an athlete perspective, that many athletes are going to go down to the pragmatic implementation of either one of those styles and not to say that you have to do all of one or all of the other or whatever, but because some of the differences might be so incredibly nuanced. It kind of comes down to can you do two sessions in a day, which many athletes either don't want to do, or especially the regular athletes that have like full-time jobs and things like that? They just can't? Few sessions in a day, which many athletes either don't want to do, or especially the regular athletes that have like full-time jobs and things like that, they just can't. They can't like practically, can't practically pull off. So I don't know if you had any further thoughts on that or if you can come up with an example of an athlete in a particular event and you could span the entire endurance sphere right.
Speaker 1:An athlete in a particular event or that needs to elicit a really particular adaptation would be a more favorable candidate towards one style of doing this or the other. Because what I want to try to communicate is athletes are always trying to achieve something. They know what they want to get better. I'm going to take it out of physiology. They want to get better at climbing right, so they do specific things that make them better at climbing. They know they want to get better at speed, so they do specific things that get better at speed. Is there an athlete prototype or an event prototype that, in your mind, would favor one style of doing this type of work versus another?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's also a good question.
Speaker 2:I would say, as you said, it probably depends a bit on the athlete, what kind of profile that we have, and then it also depends on the sport in a way, what kind of demands that the sport includes.
Speaker 2:For example, in in road cycling, where you have long and long competition time, it's maybe not that relevant, but in in running it might be.
Speaker 2:At least in middle and long distance running it might be more relevant because you want to accumulate more time at threshold or do more threshold training, and this might be a method to obtain that. And also by reducing mechanical loading per session, cross-country skiing, biathlon you have the possibility to change between different exercise modes, so you can also then do different exercise modes. So have, for example, cross-country skiing, something that are more lower body in the morning, running, for example, uphill running or something. Then it can be more double pole in the evening that are more low in the upper body, obviously, and then you can buy that also toll rates, a higher volume of threshold training. And another kind of potential benefits or advantage of doing it is if you try to center your interval sessions or your threshold training in one day or maybe over two subsequent days, then you potentially have better time in between there to do more low intensity training or other type of training that you need to prioritize. So that's probably also one aspect of this double threshold concept that is relevant to medicine you.
Speaker 1:So your time at threshold concept actually struck a chord with me because this is something that we see at the more at the elite end of the spectrum and to a certain extent kind of like the mid-pack for 100k and maybe 80k types of races. I just was telling you offline. I just got back from UTMB or the whole UTMB races and CCC is actually a great example of this. It's a 100K race and for the professional athletes typically they can do the climbs right around their threshold and they get a little bit of recovery on the descents. It's not like a cycling race where it's more zero watts and the stress is just the stress of the high speed descent and things like that. But my point with that is the way that the race unfolds 10 people make it over the first climb, 8 people make it over the second climb, 6 people make it over the third climb, 3 people make it over the fourth climb and then the winner in the podium is kind of determined by the last climb and the descent. And if each one of those climbs is done at threshold, they're anywhere between 20 and 45 minutes or something like that a very typical threshold type of uh time to or very typical time where you can elicit a threshold type of intensity. It's not that they can run any one of those climbs faster, it's just they can do more of it. So instead of being able to aggregate 90 minutes, let's say, at threshold intensity, they can aggregate up to two hours at that threshold type of intensity or whatever the domain that we're looking at it is.
Speaker 1:I view this application through that lens. So in one single session I might only be able to get 60 or 75 minutes out of an athlete at threshold. If I can somehow rearrange the architecture so that over the course of a day, a week or a month they're more exposed to time at that intensity and then therefore in a race they can operate at that intensity for a longer period of time. That's a performance advantage. It's not necessarily although this would also happen it's not necessarily improving that threshold capacity from whatever minutes per mile or minutes per kilometer to a better minutes per kilometer. It's being able to do it for a longer period of time or do it repeatedly over the course of a race. That, I think, is the material advantage. That's what that's kind of. The first lens that I look at this through is through just how would that actually play out on a race course, and in my estimation that's one of the more likely candidates that will eventually kind of get flushed out when we start to look at this more and more yeah, no, I agree.
Speaker 2:I think that's a good example of a way to kind of use this double threshold training as a method to target specific demands in after running, because intuitively, you would probably think that this is not that relevant for ultra-learning because it's long-duration events and this is splitting it into shorter sessions. You probably will have better, greater benefits of doing longer sessions in ultra-learning, but to provide a new stimuli for your training and also accumulating more time at a higher speed or at the threshold, this might then be a method that is interesting to to use as a part of your training program. It's not the most important part of your training program, I think, but it might be a tool in your toolbox that you can use. I'm not that familiar with ultra running, but if I understood it correctly, it also in the beginning of the competitions. Then the speed is often quite high. So you need some kind of capacity of handling with higher speed and maybe the higher low lactate values, and now doing this double threshing training might be a method to practice that more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting because in sports like cycling we know very well what the demands of the events are, because we have onboard power meters. That really revolutionized the way that we thought about cycling training because we could very realistically look at what the external load of a stage in the Tour de France was. A road race any sort of cycling application became a really good window into that. We don't really have a very good equivalent of that in trail and ultra running. We can guess by looking at heart rate and normalized graded pace and even perceived exertion and things like that, and start to try to alchemize. Okay, how hard are they running during any one particular race? And this is just when I say an athlete can do this in this situation. Right? I just mentioned the CCC example. That's just based off of my observation of looking at training files and watching how the races unfold and trying to dig into whatever data I can what's actually out on the course, and I think that's a realistic level of accuracy to try to get to.
Speaker 1:There might be some window that we ultimately like open up, you know, several years from now. That adds more precision to that. But I do think that at the elite level and mountainous 80K and 100K. Those athletes are spending a lot of time very close to their threshold on these 20 to 40 minute climbs and that becomes an important component of it. Your point that it's maybe not the most important component of it is really well taken, because that's not the entirety of the race. They still have to descend, they still have to eat, there's still other things that go into it.
Speaker 1:It's a really complicated sport that can't just be defined by the intensity on the, by the intensity on the climbs. But at least for that, like I said, when I look at this type of training intervention, the what I'm always trying to slice out whenever I see any of these studies that come out is okay. Now that we know what's going on, how does it ultimately apply? And then how could I potentially incorporate this into an athlete's training program? And when I go through that logical exercise, that's the application that I see sort of emerge yeah, definitely I agree on that.
Speaker 2:I think it's important to emphasize, not only in ultra-rhyming but all endurance sports that kind of. Although we have done this study on double threshold training, it's a concept that's kind of received a lot of attention over the last years. It's not any magic with it. It's kind of in many cases it is given too much attention and value. It's in a way sort of a hype and it's nothing magic with that. You can't find any magic training method.
Speaker 2:It's kind of the important thing is to have a good balance between training and recovery over time and have a training process that's are consistent and that you can do over a long time and then typically you receive better adaptations and improvements in performance. So I think also part of this double threshold training might be that if you're going to do two indoor sessions, threshold sessions one day, maybe you're a little bit more focused you know I want to do it even better better at intensity steering, and you're basically your training quality, execution, quality of the training will be better because you're so focused on doing this right, doing it more in a more systematic manner with better intensity control and so on. That might also be a part of the effect. You should not underestimate the kind of effect of believing in it either. If this is a concept that some of the best endurance athletes in the world are doing and you start doing it and believing in it, that also kind of have an effect on its own.
Speaker 1:I would say both of those are really well taken. I like it. I like the fact that the person producing the research is trying to tone down the hype on it like realizing that it's gotten a little bit out of control.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that about you. So you did this initial study right, which looks at the acute response right Between these two styles. Where do you want to take it from here? Because I know that you're intellectually curious. You kind of want to see if there is any magic behind it. Right, to use your earlier vocabulary, what do you eventually want to do to try to understand what might be going on further? Take us in your five years down the line, three years down the line. What do you want to better understand about this concept?
Speaker 2:what do you want to better understand about this concept? Yeah, I think, as I said, this is a starting point to better understand the kind of pros and cons of splitting endurance training up to frequent sessions and, as I said, also in general in the research literature on endurance training. It's not that much that I've been kind of trying to understand this interaction between training volume and frequency. So I think to continue to try to understand that, not only in threshold training, moderate intensity training, but also low intensity training that is, 90% of the training time in endurance athletes or 80% of the sessions, and we don't actually know that much about low intensity training, or 80% of the sessions, and we don't actually know that much about low-intensity training. What is the optimal intensity, the optimal duration, frequency and so on?
Speaker 2:So continue down that road, both with regards to low-intensity training and also threshold training. I think is really interesting and something that you want to continue with. And maybe when we have understood even more about this these acute responses of manipulating with training volume and frequency, then we have a hypothesis that we can actually test using a more experimental design or training intervention study. We actually apply different training models, measure the effect of doing it over a number of weeks with the training intervention study to predict the loss. So that will in a way be the next step, I think, to see if there's actually some potential differences in the training spectrum and performance outcomes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because when you look at how you would do this, practically, dividing one session into two equal parts is not the only way that you could do it. So to my earlier example if you know that you can do 6x10 in one session, and that's about all you can do, If you know that you can do six by 10 in one session, and that's about all you can do, you can squeeze out four by 10 in two sessions, which gives you 80 minutes on the day versus 60 minutes on the day. That's an apples and oranges comparison. But if you're going to use what I would call a time under workload strategy, right Time under a specific workload is going to be the biggest hammer on the adaptive process. If that is your viewpoint, how you kind of view a big component of training, then this again becomes more than a reasonable intervention to kind of throw at an athlete, given that they can actually do two by 40 and doesn't cause downstream problems and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So your point is real, is well taken on that, that we kind of don't know what these you know effect or we have a few guideposts. I wouldn't say we don't know, but we have a few guideposts in terms of what are effective doses, what are good maximum doses, what are effective minimum doses and things like that, and using these types of studies to to really elucidate that, I think is actually quite helpful. Just your point of what's the minimum, what's the minimum level of intensity that you need during an easy workout that's a really common question athletes have. Is it a heart rate of x? Is it a pace of y like? Does it matter if I go two hours at a heart rate of 140 versus 120? I'm just throwing those numbers out just to give a relative example. Does that actually matter? The fact that we have a little clarity on that, I think it speaks to a lot of what we actually can find out that's not true.
Speaker 2:My way is like in in the research literature on endurance training, typically we use three intensity zones, that's low, moderate and high intensity, and the low intensity zone is from 55% of heart rate max to 82% heart rate max. So where's your low intensity training? Yeah, it's a really big range. So we actually don't know that much. We don't know that much. So it's definitely more nuanced. Although other intensity solo scales exist and are being used, that is what's most commonly used in the research now. So there are work that could be done in this field to try to understand this better.
Speaker 1:I'll tell you from ultramarathon perspective. The answer is yes. Just more of all of it is better. Higher heart rate, bigger training volumes, whatever you want just more and more is better. And I use that part in jest, but part in serious that you can't always apply the more hammer to elicit further adaptation. Sometimes you have to use a little bit more precise tool to do it, and this would be a good, very practical use case of that, where you're using more precise tool. I appreciate you coming on the podcast today. This is super fun. I can't wait to hear what else comes out of your lab before I let you go. How can people find you? And a little bit more about your research and the work that you guys are doing over there.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. It was interesting with a detailed discussion on double threshold training. Hopefully the listener will get something useful out of it. I'm not the most active researcher, I think, on social media, at least compared to many, but you can find me on my ex. Some of my research will be kind of published there, and then ResearchGate, I think is the best way of finding and getting access to my research and, yeah, I would start there if someone are wondering what else that I have been doing over the last years.
Speaker 1:And I'll leave links to all of that, as well as the paper, which is open access. I found it freely so other people can have free access to download it, so I'll leave links to all that in the show notes. Appreciate you coming on today and we'll have to bring you back once you have step two, which is inevitably going to be how do athletes actually get better in one style versus the other?
Speaker 2:definitely, I will do that, thank you, thank you all right folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it. There you go. Much thanks to rune for coming on the podcast today. I always appreciate the insight from people who are actually doing some of this research on the ground and presenting a very practical approach for how we might actually implement these workouts. As I mentioned during the podcast, his paper that we were discussing is open access. A link to that will be in the show notes. Y'all feel free to go and check it out and download it. It's a pretty good read, but it's one that leaves you wondering what is actually going to happen to the adaptive process at the end of the day, now that we know what is actually happening to the athletes themselves in terms of fatigue and or recovery.
Speaker 1:If you like this podcast, there's no Patreon. I ain't got nothing to sell you. There are no affiliate links or anything like that. The only thing you can do is share this with your friends. I always appreciate it when I go out into the community, just like I did over at UTMB a couple of weeks ago, and people come up to me from kind of all corners of the world and tell me how much they appreciate the content within this podcast. So if you like it, you think that either one of your training partners, a fellow coaching colleague or just somebody that you happen to compete with or against would find this content valuable, please just share it with them and spread the love. That means a whole heck of a lot to me. All right, folks, that is it for today and, as always, we will see you out on the trails.
