KoopCast
Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
KoopCast
Durability in Ultrarunning with Michele Zanini, PhD | KoopCast #239
Michele Zanini is a PhD candidate at Loughborough University as well as the head of Strength and Conditioning for the Italian Triathlon Federation. During this podcast we ddiscuss the concept of durability as it relates to ultramarathon performance.
Papers discussed-
Durability of Running Economy: Differences between Quantification Methods and Performance Status in Male Runners
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Trail and ultra runners. What is going on? Welcome to another episode of the CoopCast. As always, I am your host, coach Jason Coop, and on this episode of the podcast we explore further the concept of durability as it applies to ultra running. Durability is one of these emerging physiological concepts that describes how our maximum performances, like a time trial, or our maximum physiology, like VO2max, deteriorate after some sort of fatiguing event, let's say, a two-hour run or a 50 kilometer or 50 kilometers of running. Coaches and physiologists alike are appreciating more and more the importance of durability in ultra running, and it has the opportunity to be one of, if not the most important variables that could correlate with performance and, as it turns out, it's also something that we can specifically train for Now.
Speaker 1:With that as a backdrop, on the podcast today is Mikel Zanini, who is the head of strength and conditioning, as well as a physiologist for the Italian Triathlon Federation, as well as a PhD candidate at Loughborough University. He has flushed out or at least he's trying to flush out this concept of durability through his academic endeavors as well as his work with athletes. Also on the podcast today, we will hear from coaches Adam Ferdinandson, fred Sabatore-Pastor, as well as our strength and conditioning expert, sarah Scazzaro, on how we can use different training interventions, including potentially strength training, to enhance durability. Okay, with that out of the way, I am getting right out of the way. Here's my conversation with Mikel Zanini all about durability in ultra running. Appreciate you joining me today, but kind of before we get into things, the listeners will always already have heard an intro on you, but can you kind of go over just a little bit of your background and what your area of research focuses on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, thanks for the invite, really appreciated it and I'm a listener to the podcast as well, so excited to be involved.
Speaker 3:So my background from my research perspective and but perspective comes from running. I was a runner and then started doing a degree in comes from running. I was a runner and then started doing a degree in sports and exercise science and then eventually got more and more involved into the physiology side of it, trying to understand how training occurs and how can we enhance performance by training and monitoring it through physiological testing. I've been involved in practice with high performing athletes, mainly at the start of my journey as an intern in Kenya with Claudio Berardelli, and then went back a few years later and worked with Renato Canova on the strength and conditioning side of it. So his philosophy and approach on training and endurance reform has really shaped how I see the applied physiology research that I currently do. And then on the back in 2020, I can. We try to delay fatigue or enhance durability via training interventions, and we focused on strength training as a potential strategy for that.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've kind of just in the background research that I've done, that I've really come to appreciate about your work, is that it's directly applicable to what you can do from a training perspective, because you have both the performance side and then also the intervention side of things as well kind of married up together, so to speak, meaning if we know that these certain physiological parameters are important for performance, that's always one thing, but it's an entirely different thing to say how do we actually improve those things?
Speaker 1:And that's what you know. Coaches and physiologists and athletes all alike are trying to chase around right, trying to improve the variables that matter the most in the variables that may not matter as much, might be something that they focus on at some other point in the year, or maybe not even focus on at all. And I think there's just a lot of practical elements of a lot of the research that you're, that you've done, that we're going to start to that, we're going to start to weed through yeah, I think that is the main driver for me to do research, at least in the applied physiology side of it other other areas which I'm interested in.
Speaker 3:But if you speak about this, then the final goal is how can I find a way to get better? So that brings me back to a conversation I had with one of the athletes I was training with when I was doing my master thesis. So it was a thesis about the use of foot-pot power meter stride and basically the use of foot power meter stride and basically the reliability of that. And it was these elite 400 meter athletes that she did the olympic championship, olympic games, her world championship center and etc. And the question when I explained what we were doing was okay, so will that make me faster? So that is is one of the points in my research experience that made me focus more and more towards the applicability of what I do and making sure that what we research, we investigate, can have then a translation to the practice that has done with athletes from a physiological perspective and then, in fact, on training eventually, if we want to measure that yeah, because it always has to drive down to what can the athlete actually do to improve?
Speaker 1:and sometimes that gets lost in research and pedantic arguments and the nuance of things and you absolutely need a lot of that and you need a lot of that very. You need a lot of that specificity in order to really understand things. But at the end of the day, athletes just want to know what do I do? Do I strength train or do I not? Right? Sometimes it's very binary like that do I do intervals or do I not? Do I do high intensity intervals or do I not do high?
Speaker 1:intensity intervals. Sometimes it can be, you know, kind of boiled down to something that that really is that simple. So we're going to. We're going to first talk about a paper that you wrote about durability. I'll direct the listeners to two previous podcasts that I did on this very same topic with Nick Berger and Ed Marinder. There'll be some links to the show notes in there.
Speaker 1:But I've considered this. Out of all of of physiological phenomenon that we studied, I consider this one of the newer ones and one that we don't have the best, like working, definition of, if you were to describe it to people, and also the best definition of how to actually measure these types of things. And so, since you're at, you know, you're at the leading edge of this, being kind of like early to the game to it, just to refresh the listeners who might have not listened to those podcasts, or it's been a while since they have listened to those podcasts, just describe it in your own mind or in your own words, what durability is. And then, why is it actually important? Going back to that original theme that we were talking about, why is it actually important for endurance athletes to pay attention to? Yeah, sure, why is it actually important for endurance?
Speaker 3:athletes to pay attention to. Yeah, sure, I think from a meta-terminology perspective there's a lot of debate or two terms that are used at the moment related to physiological changes occurring during prolonged exercise. So that would be the way that we would describe durability, so a change in speed, power output or physiological determinants due to accumulated fatigue during a continuous part of exercise. Now, that is one of the definitions, and then, if you look at papers recently published by Andy Jones, for example, he defines the same as physiological resilience. So at the moment we have these two terms, that they may mean something slightly different, but it's not that clear. So I think at the moment they can be kind of used interchangeably. We will hopefully eventually come up to a more clear definition of that and we are actually currently working with Ed Mounder, andy Johnson and a few other people on to developing a terminology which can be used in the future for that. But yes, a simple way to describe it is any changes in performance outcomes or physiological outcomes that occur due to fatigue during plonal exercise.
Speaker 1:And from a practical standpoint, what would that actually look like? How would an athlete see that if they're running a marathon or an ultra marathon? What would they actually notice in the data that they can just acquire through their GPS watch?
Speaker 3:For example, from running. It's quite easy to see a heart rate lift as you continue doing exercise. That is due to many factors, but let's leave the underpinning of it to the side for a moment. What you usually see is a steady speed and an increase of heart rate. So that means that your physiological demands are increasing at the same speed and therefore there is a decoupling between heart rate and speed. It can occur on the other way around, so you maintain the same heart rate and the speed decreases, but the effect is the same you have a decouple between physiology and performance or speed, which will eventually cause you to either slow down or cessate the exercise altogether.
Speaker 1:And one of the paper that we're about to discuss that you, that you're an author on it tried to get to the answer of does this actually matter? Which I always like to start, which I always honestly like to start with whenever we start to read research. We have a research newsletter, the group of which we're going to meet with just after this call, in fact and one of the things that we're constantly asking ourselves is does this actually matter? Like, do if we see an improvement in X? Is that meaningful in some way from a training or racing perspective? And many times that's not the case, or it's at least unknown. And so you're trying to get a heart, you're trying to get at the heart of this with some of your, some of the research that we're going to talk about in this next paper. Can you just describe generally what you were looking at, who the subjects are and things like that, and then we can start to get to what the actual findings were.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. So the paper you've been mentioning. We wanted to look into how economy run. Economy specifically changes due to continuous exercise.
Speaker 3:Now, to me specificity is very, very important.
Speaker 3:So we do have the element of intensity which needs to be appropriate. We wanted to specifically target the demands of a marathon, so the speed was targeted to be closely resembling that that would be normally for highly trained athletes in the heavy intensity domain. So between the first and second threshold we can get into some of the details if needed. I think if we say in zone two or zone three, depending on the three or five zone model, that makes it quite clear. And we wanted to have a duration which at least could have been meaningful to provide some information, could have been meaningful to provide some information. So 90 minutes was a okay compromise between okay, we have a duration which is relatively long and we don't risk to have 50% of our participants dropping out because the duration is too long. So if we were to do two hours and a half and that intensity would have been very hard for most athletes and probably the power of the study would be much lower and that would have consequences from a statistical perspective and result perspective.
Speaker 1:Really, yeah, and I appreciate the number of athletes that you actually put through this. So 50 or north of 50, 51 male runners, correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, 44. They finished in 44, not 51.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and some of them quite good. So 31 minute 10K was kind of the good group and then the less good group. I mean they're still very good runners. The 41 minute 10K would be the comparison group. So when you took the run first off, describe the testing protocol a little bit more. And then what did you actually find?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so what we did was initially having this 44.
Speaker 3:Well, the study was the design of the study and the protocol was the same for everyone.
Speaker 3:So we just got them to do the initial step test to measure threshold on its mux, and then on a separate day, we thought them coming at 8 am, so standardized time of the day, diet and exercise prior to the test, and then it runs for 90 minutes where we collected the running economy and other and other data every 15 minutes.
Speaker 3:They were running on a treadmill at a speed which was corresponding to the first threshold. It was roughly 80% beauty marks for the athletes. I don't remember on top of my head the speed, but it can be found on the paper and we measured the changes in energy costs and oxygen costs, which are two ways of measuring running economy, between time points, so 15, 30, 45, and so forth minutes until 19 minutes into the trial and then from there we divided the groups based on 10K performance, as officers were running below 33 minutes 10 kilometers and between 45 and 38 minutes 10 kilometers. So that left five minutes gap in between, which we deemed to be appropriate to have a clear divide between the groups and compare the changes in oxygen and energy costs between groups.
Speaker 1:So, before we go on, the fact that you're looking at both oxygen cost, energy cost and energy cost, I think is something worth discussing, especially because we are talking about something that's in a relatively high performance setting. Most of the listeners will kind of think potato between those two, kind of between those two variables, but can you describe a little bit more in detail as to why, or actually like how, they're different and what's the significance of those differences in this context?
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, it is very much a physiologist kind of speaker.
Speaker 3:So what we have in the description or the use of running economy is it can be expressed as oxygen or energy. So the difference is, with oxygen we have an integrated view of the changes in oxygen demands and substrate utilization which is given by RER, whereas with energy that change in RER is already included in the measure. So what we've seen, which one of my supervisors saw a few years ago with Andy Shaw, which is now the senior physiologist of British athletics, was that there was a difference in the accuracy of the measure of running economy between oxygen and energy cost seem to be a better way to express running economy, a more accurate, appropriate way to express the underlying metabolic demands of the body, because it's sensible to changes in speed, which is not the case for oxygen cost. So what we wanted to look into from a research perspective in our case was is it the same if we express durability as energy cost or oxygen cost? And if there's any difference, to what extent is this different relevant for applied setting?
Speaker 1:From a practical point of view once again, kind of drilling it back down to the listeners. Why would somebody see a drift in one and not the other? Or why would somebody see a larger drift in one versus the other?
Speaker 3:It would mainly be due to changes in substrate utilization. So if you have a change in area because you're depleting glycogen, you will have a higher reliance on fat, which requires more energy. So you'd see high drifting in oxygen cost compared to energy cost because there's this difference in accounting or not accounting for substrate utilization. Now what we found was that actually with these specific settings, differences were so minor that they are kind of irrelevant. There was a difference of 0.1% between the two, which I think it was kind of unexpected. Although the changes in substrate utilization in our study was very limited. We do have data for other studies that have been done in the past on the marathon and in that case they have a difference which reached about 2%. So from the start to the end of a marathon the participant athletes would change by maybe 15% for oxygen cost and 13% for energy cost. Just slightly larger difference. But I would say that overall there's a quite minor influence of the unit used to describe an economy between energy and oxygen cost to be worried about from a practical perspective.
Speaker 3:Would it be a reasonable assumption to say, as the duration of the event goes up, the potential for those to kind of deviate from one another or separate from one another would go up. Is that a reasonable assumption that people are kind of teasing high performing? Maybe sub-2 hours 30, sub-2 hours 20 in a male athlete the respiratory exchange ratio would be around 1 for the whole duration of the race. But that doesn't really matter because there's no drop in RER and no change in the substrate utilization, whereas for trail runners or ultra-distance runners it will probably matter much more because of their high reliance on fat due to the lower intensity of the exercise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Okay, I think that's a good distinguishing point because we're always in ultra marathon world. This has been a theme that we come back to. Almost every podcast is. In many cases, we're taking research that was done in a marathon setting, just because it's more, it's just more prevalently studied, and we're trying to expand the interpretation of that into a longer event, and sometimes that expansion holds true and sometimes that expansion does not hold true, and that's part of you know, the person who's interpreting the study or the intervention or whatever to actually kind of figure out, uh, but that's neither here nor there. Okay, so what did you find out? You have good runners and you had kind of more. I keep describing them as less good runners. I can't remember exactly how the paper described them, but how did they actually differ in terms of the things that you were measuring?
Speaker 3:What we found was basically, as you would expect intuitively, that the high performing runners had a lower drift in economy, so they had a better running economy durability compared to the lower performing athletes. So we define them as high or low performing based on that 10k performance. I don't remember the exact numbers, could be something like 4.5 versus 2.2, 2.3% change from 15 minutes to 90 minutes. It's basically like a 50% difference in the upward drifting economy between the artists that perform around 31 minutes in 10K versus the artists that perform about 41 minutes in 10K.
Speaker 1:And so what comes first here in your estimation? Let's put kind of more of a practitioner's hat on right. Are the better runners more durable because they're better runners, or is the greater durability enable them somehow to become better runners? Or is that not even the right way to to think about it? Because that's the final part of the interpretation on these is. A lot of times you start to see these physiological phenomenon differ from one group to the next, and you always have to decide where the chicken and the egg come and where, in what order they actually could, and what act, what order they actually like, come in. So, in your mind's eye, since you've been studying this, what do you have to say to that? What is causing any of this phenomenon to actually be different between these two groups?
Speaker 3:yeah, it's a. It's a good question. I don't have a defined answer and I would say it's a bit of both, which is hiding away from me. It's tricky because what you would need to answer the question would be an intervention study in, in my opinion, or a very long longitudinal study looking at that. So if you do an intervention and you get athletes doing a specific type of exercise for an X amount of months, then you can see the effect of it. If we just take a section cross-section study and compare athletes from different backgrounds, performance level, whatever variable we want you can only say well, this is how the groups differ, but you cannot say why.
Speaker 3:If I think about some world-class athletes and their durability, some of the case studies that have been brought forward recently, there's one about two pro cyclists, the winner of the 2016 Giro d'Italia and the 2017 Giro Rosa, which they demonstrated how their durability this being a decrease in maximum mean power throughout a stage was far higher than any other measure taken before from other athletes, even from world tour cyclists. They didn't change their maximal mean power output up to about 80% into the stage. That's one. And then, very recently, Magnus Dietle, world-class Ironman triathlete, was measured and his physiological changes during a simulated Ironman were tracked every, I think, about 30 minutes. And here again, from an economy perspective, he only changed by 1.52% after the Ironman, whereas there were no differences in cycling efficiency.
Speaker 3:So that, to me, says well, if you are a world-class athlete, you need to have good durability. Now the question you made is do we need to train for that and that is what makes the performance better or is it something that the athlete already has and it can't really be developed? I would say you can train it, and I say that because if you take anybody that is just running five, 10K races, let's say you can measure their economy, you can measure their view to max and you can measure their threshold and you should be able to pretty well estimate their marathon performance. However, if you ask them to do a marathon, they're not going to be able to finish it because they never experienced that exposure to volume, running distance and et cetera. To me, that is one of the factors that fits into the puzzle and gets developed through long runs, through long exercise, through specific type of training sessions that we all know improve marathon performance, but up to now, physiologically, we couldn't really explain why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean, here's where I kind of come back to it.
Speaker 1:So, first off, to kind of expand on what I had originally asked you in terms of, just in terms of what you know, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Speaker 1:I'll go back to the previous podcasts that I did with Ed Marinder and Nick Berger, and they both believe, after after studying this phenomenon, that it is a little bit of both. First, it's a natural byproduct of training and probably the biggest hammer that you have in all of endurance physiology is just volume. So the runners and the athletes with just a higher amount of volume who have been training at high volumes for a longer period of time, decades, and not just years, they tend to demonstrate better durability as a byproduct of all of that, of the cumulative amount of all of that work over over many years so that's the first kind of component of it is that we see more experienced runners that have been training at high volumes for long periods of time have better durability and there's kind of no shortcut to that right, that's just, you know, you just have to be in the game for that long.
Speaker 1:And second thing, that they this is more of a postulation than what they actually see in case studies and things like that, because it's harder to actually tease out and this goes to your idea of an intervention study is that is there a way to deliberately focus on this physiological aspect? The analogy that I always get, that I always give, is we know how to push on the VO two max button pretty well by now. There have been any number, hundreds and hundreds of studies that have analyzed volume and interval programs and the duration of the interval and how long do you have to be under a certain type of load and what the combination of work to recovery can be and things like that. And there's a reason why everybody's like quote unquote VO2 max workouts are all roughly the same, because it's the combination of all of that research over many years that have kind of given us some best practices. And sure coaches get in these stupid debates about is a one minute interval better or two minute interval better or whatever kind of small like deviation, and there's some value to that, but by and large they're 90% the same. But then they come back to okay, are there actually interventions that we can do? And the resounding answer from them and I'd like to hear your comment on this as well is we kind of don't know.
Speaker 1:But it makes sense that if you concentrated some portion of harder work or the workload in a fatigued state, regardless of how you created that fatigue, whether it's a 90-minute run, which would be the example of the research that you just went through, or a three-hour run or a set of intervals or whatever if you kind of created some fatiguing state and then did something deliberate in a fatigued state, that might enhance this component of durability, just like we can enhance VO2 max development with specific protocols and intervals and interventions and things like that, with specific protocols and intervals and interventions and things like that. Okay, let's take a quick break in the action and hear from coaches Adam Ferdinandson and Fred Sabatore-Pastore on how we might be able to program for durability in ultramarathon training. Okay, coach Adam, so what do you think about this overall concept of durability. What do you think about this overall concept of durability and maybe give us a practical example of how you would accentuate it with an athlete that you're coaching?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So durability is something that I think about every day when I'm programming schedules for athletes and when we think about what we're going to do over the next months or years, and even though it's a newer buzzword in this space, it's something that we've all had a more intuitive sense about for a long time. You want to run a hundred miles. It helps to slow down less some sort of a concept like that. So to program it honestly with most of my athletes I probably don't do anything where, like a workout where this is the durability workout or something like that, there's a time and a place for that. I think it's somewhat advanced, I would call it so. It's not something I deploy often. One of our number one tools that we're always going to have is training volume. It's one of the reasons maybe we do training camps or leverage other ways to make things a little bit more dense, stack closely together or harder, but number one tool is volume. So you will spoil some of the later tidbits.
Speaker 1:I'm always reminded, from a programming perspective, probably one of the oldest workouts that a lot of marathon runners will recognize, and that's the progression run. So a run that gets faster over time to the point where you're doing the most intense part of the run, at the point of most fatigue and there may be some component of that accentuates durability. And I think what a lot of runners need to kind of like reconcile in their head is are you building your overall capacity or are you building something like very specific? So if you're building overall capacity, you would typically want to do the hardest parts of a run when you're the freshest possible, because that's going to give you the best outcome for that. But if you wanted to build more quote unquote durability, in a way you could shift some of that hard work towards the end of the run.
Speaker 1:And I do this with a number of my elite athletes where we'll program tempo and steady state mainly those two workouts, so threshold or slightly easier than threshold closer towards the end of the run as opposed to the beginning, knowing that we either have to reduce the volume of intensity because they're pre-fatigued, or just set the expectations differently in terms of how fast they can run or the intensity that they can maintain for those specific runs. I wouldn't say that it's a workout that I deploy a lot Like. Maybe it's 10% of the actual like in. It's maybe like 10% of the total amount of time that we're spending at any one particular intensity we'll do in a fatigued state. So I hope that like sets the context for how like quote unquote important it is because, adam, as you mentioned, there are other ways that you can actually accentuate it, kind of going along in parallel.
Speaker 1:This is a relatively newer concept. To actually like, test for and we test for it for two reasons is one to see if we can actually improve it with certain interventions and the second thing is to actually seem if it's actually, or to actually make sense of. Is it actually meaningful? We think it's meaningful for performance, actually make sense of is it actually meaningful? We think it's meaningful for performance. But a lot of times we have to test people's different durabilities and see if they're better or worse athletes.
Speaker 5:And, fred, I was hoping that you could, you know, kind of shed some light on that concept, since you've got a lot of experience in this area yeah, and then for this testing side of durability, a lot of the research has been done with sports in which it is very important to perform at a very high intensity towards the end, like road cycling. Road cycling is probably the one in which it has been done the most and you want to do the final climb going very fast, compared to trail and ultra running, in which you may be pushing at the end but the intensity at the end is usually actually can be slower than at the beginning because of the accumulated heavy right. So then in those types of sports, the typical test is to do go as hard as you can for like 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes at the end of the workout. That is something that we can still deploy in 12 running, but doing that hard test at the end. So, for example, wherever you do like, if you have a heel client that you use for testing, doing it at the end of the workout as hard as you can.
Speaker 5:That could be one thing. However, one thing that I tend to use a lot is more like when going by rp. So like an athlete is supposed to be keeping the same rp, they run a loop and the first climb they repeat at the end so they may go out for three hours. They like warm up, do the first climb, then they go, they run and then at the end they repeat that same climb. They've always still been doing it with the same RP, all that. And then we check like what is the change in the different variables that we can see First of all time of the climb, right, like did they run more on the first time and then walk more the second time, and then like was the car rate different? We can check like first of all time, which would be performance, and then what are the things that are influencing?
Speaker 1:that time. Yeah, and a lot of people who are familiar with, like the grand tour stage race cycling, they can see the way that this actually plays out in a race where the entire peloton can make it up the first climb. Maybe 80 percent of the peloton can make it up the second climb. 60 percent of the peloton makes up third climb, and then you're left with the leaders at the ultimate or the penultimate climb and that's usually where the kind of the more decisive moves are made, especially at the really tough mountain stages.
Speaker 1:And in the research world, what they've tried to do is kind of recreate that in a more realistic scenario by doing either a fixed amount of work let's say it's a thousand kilojoules of work or something like that or a fixed amount of time at a certain intensity, and then do some sort of performance test afterwards. So you're testing the performance test in this fatigue state after a certain amount of work or a certain amount or a certain task, as opposed to that, that same type of performance, uh in an unfatigued state, and seeing what the actual difference is. Performance uh in an unfatigued state, and seeing what the actual difference is, and I kind of want to get your take on, like both of those elements, both this volume element and also the specific intervention that may or may not get teased out in the next several years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I agree, and, as we were mentioning before, I think intuitively, every coach that does training for marathon or longer running events knows that you know that you need your long runs to improve your marathon. Now I think what we're trying to do is try to understand why, what occurs in the body and how your physiology changes during exercise, and then the the next step from here onwards is can we try to improve that? To me, specificity is very important and I come from the methodology of Canova, which is very much onto specificity. You have to do your long runs and you have to do it long enough and fast enough. So that is the key, in my opinion, to have a very good performance in the marathon, even at the very first attempt. And then, if you blend it back to the durability I think that is one of the key aspects. There will be probably protocols or ideas on specific training that can be done to optimize durability enhancements, but at the moment I would say that including your long runs often enough will make a difference.
Speaker 3:That is one of the other studies we did. It's not published yet, but what we did was exactly the same as the protocol we described, and we had two groups one that had the inclusion of long runs in the training program defined as, I think, runs longer than 90 minutes at least three times a month, and then the other group didn't have any long runs defined as no. I think they had to run less than 70 minutes continuously in the previous six months. What we found here again was the group that did long runs only increased their energy cost, oxygen cost, so the running economy durability, by 3% in the 90 minutes and the other group increased by 6%. So again, this is not an intervention study. It may be due to a lot of factors, but that is one other step pointing towards. We need volume, we need continuous running to develop durability, and that is clearly linked to the best practice of development of long distance runners to the best practice of development of long distance runners.
Speaker 1:There's this contingent of athletes and coaches that want to use a lower volume approach when training for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 1:They either want to focus more on intensity, they want to, they are injury adverse, right, or they might be more susceptible to injury and volume being one of the kind of like catalysts for injuries potentially amongst certain athletes and things like that.
Speaker 1:And there's a whole like like host of motivations and I've always thought that there's power in doing that because you know, we should all be advocates of a variety of intensities for any endurance athletes. But one of the things that you're missing with those low volume approaches is this very specific I'm going a certain duration and I'm developing parts of my physiology that I can't otherwise develop unless the duration is of a certain distance. The question is, what does that need to be? And is there a dose dependent response for increasing that duration past two hours, three hours, four hours or five hours, or does it not matter after a certain point? Or does it not matter after a certain point? And this is a debate that we've gotten into in the ultra marathon world and I don't think that there's a lot of things that we can point to, to give us best practices or things like that, other than a lot of these case studies that we see with people for that have been training for many years with a very high volume.
Speaker 3:They just tend to exude this quality more so than other athletes yeah, I mean I can't comment much on this, but if you look at the training practice of the best elite runners or elite endurance athletes in general, they all have very high training volumes.
Speaker 3:Now, from a running perspective, the main limitation is probably the occurrence of injuries due to the continuous load on joint bones and the eccentric damage that you get from running, particularly in trail running. If you speak about downhill running and how that affects those parameters, did you look at other sports? Triathlon is an example which is very clear. You have elite triathletes that they sometimes train more than 35, more than even 40 hours per week. There's been a case study on the training habits or training background of Christian Blumenfeld just published a couple of months ago, and the highest weekly mileage he had or highest weekly duration he had across the three disciplines was over 40 hours. And it's the same for many of the elite athletes. I worked with the Italian Travel Federation. We top up 32, 33, 34 hours per week regularly with the best performing athletes.
Speaker 1:And I do think that perspective that we particularly see in triathlon, because they have three sports and they're not, as they seem to be at least less injury susceptible because of that sport distribution and you can do a lot of volume from a cycling perspective and kind of get away with it a little bit more. But I do think that looking at those volumes in that context, drilling it back to what I, the athletes that I work with for a living, which are ultra marathon athletes, I do think that there's a valuable lesson in there in terms of how much volume can potentially be tolerated by an athlete, and in most cases it's greater than what a lot of people think. A lot of people look at 10, 12, you know, 14 hours per week, especially for an elite athlete, and they look at it as a lot. And then when we look at these other sports triathlon in particular, and then also cycling to a large extent as well, we see athletes in this 25 to 30 or even, as you mentioned, 40 hour category that are remarkably successful. And then you also kind of see the corollary of what's the floor that you need to have to be able to train at in order to be remotely competitive, meaning what is the hourly commitment that is absolutely required in order to compete at the highest level. We also see very high amounts of that as well, not only just looking at the peak volume, but looking at like kind of the minimum viable amount of time that's necessary to be competitive.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's explore this topic a little bit further with CTS coach Fred Sabatore-Pastor. So, fred, I want to talk a little bit about how volume becomes extremely important when we talk about how we can accentuate an athlete's durability. In the earlier interjection with Coach Adam, he mentioned that this is one of the things that we can actually press on the most from a training perspective to enhance durability, as opposed to coming up with some sort of fancy convoluted progression run or something like that. And this is something that the research has actually teased out a little bit, and I was wondering if you could comment on that a little bit further in terms of what role volume actually plays in an athlete being more or less durable.
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think it is one of those things in which the research has been pointing to that direction, most of this of this research again being done with cyclists or in cycling. But then when they have seen what are the training variables that correspond to better durability with these athletes usually like under 23 and professional cyclists what they see is that training volume it is the main thing, the thing that is going to improve durability the most, or like the thing that correlates best with durability. It's a correlation, but from this correlation and our experience as coaches, we are seeing that inference as well that athletes that are running the higher but a weekly volume and also the higher accumulated volume over like the previous period not just like week by week, but like accumulated, not just like for the peak weeks, right, but like for an accumulated number of weeks the athletes are accumulating the biggest volume are the ones that can sustain intensity better towards the end of races, and that seems to be also the case with, like, marathon runners.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you mentioned the overall umbrella because a lot of times we tend to put the focus on what is the longest long run or the longest training blocks or what are the biggest two or three runs that an athlete would have. But what typically produces the best adaptations is the amount of volume that you can do over long periods of time and there's really great and I'm going to link some of these up in the show notes now that I'm thinking about it amount of volume that you can do over long periods of time and there's all there's really great and I got to link some of these up in the show notes now that I'm thinking about it. There's some really great case studies on endurance athletes where they have a very rich history of training. This is at the elite and the Olympic level and what they've seen is with those particular athletes, when they just increase their low intensity volume towards the ends, toward the end of their career, they can actually see that career either either elongated and or they actually perform better. They're not doing anything else.
Speaker 1:From an interval perspective, it's the same, it's the exact same person, but just by increasing that low intensity volume they tend to have performance benefits really across the board, and so it's something that we have to focus on a lot from a coaching perspective, because there becomes this double edged sword with it, where we know it's a potent stimulus for improvement, but we also know that it can be too much for a lot of athletes. You can't do an unlimited amount of it because of the injury susceptibility. But make no mistake, it's kind of like the best hammer that you have in your toolbox. If you have like all these things that you can do, you can always count on doing a little bit more volume to reap improvements across the board and, more specifically, with their ability. I was wondering if you can kind of like comment on that component of as well, just to kind of like add the perspective. We're not just looking at the super highest people. They do have very high volumes.
Speaker 3:I think if you're limited in time, you can try to find strategies to optimize your training. I think training load is a good metric from a weekly perspective to look at. So if you don't have the time in the week, then you can try to download the sessions harder. Although we know very well that the distribution between low, medium and high intensity let's call it that way it has to be primarily low intensity, a little bit of medium intensity, a little bit of high intensity, which can be equally distributed or not. And speaking about 70, 80, 78, 90 percent of low intensity, I wouldn't be able to tell you what is the minimum volume that you need to to perform well in a race.
Speaker 3:If I give you a simple example of an athlete that I've been working with for a long time, it's a eight grouper, master, 45 years old athlete and he just did his first marathon last week. He ran three, two hours 32 and his training volume was about 100 kilometers per week. I think it is hard to run two hours 30 if you don't train at least 100 kilometers a week, although it very much depends on your engine. If you are super talented let's say you are, I don't know like a kipchoge type of athlete and you've never trained. You will probably still perform very well in the marathon just because of your biology. But across the board, if you say 100 kilometers a week, I think you can break the two hours 30. Maybe you can break the two hours 25. Then you probably need more volume.
Speaker 1:I mean once again. I think people will resonate with that. You know you're talking 60, I'll convert to miles right 62, 65 miles.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, that's okay, it's totally okay. But I think people will kind of resonate with that like minimum viable product. You know the everyday runners out there that have job, kids, they play a lot of different roles in life and things like that. They can't train 20 hours a week, just from a time availability standpoint. They can't train 200 kilometers a week, 160 miles a week, just from a time, you know, just from a time availability, time availability standpoint. But they, but they.
Speaker 1:But for the elite athletes out there and I go through this whenever I take on a new, when I take on a new athlete, I kind of drill down to how much time availability do you have, like do you have a minimum amount in order to kind of kind of succeed, especially if you're kind of right on the cusp? Because there is there, there is a certain amount that required is not quite the right word, but there is a certain amount that is absolutely beneficial to have. A minimum amount that is absolutely more beneficial to have, that is not trivial, that you have to be able to dedicate to in one way or another, whether it's time dedication or effort dedication or all of the above. I kind of want to pivot a little bit to some research that you did that was presented at the ECSS conference, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is unpublished, or at least it's yet to be published. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yes, it's under review, so hopefully it will be out soon.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect. So we're like peeling back the curtain a little bit on this and you can divulge as much or as little as you want to. I know that there might be some restriction on this, but it has to do with strength training and endurance performance, which is another topic that we kind of keep coming back to and also kind of dovetails into this element of durability, maybe directly, maybe tangentially. So can you go over some of that research, since it's, you know, part of your thesis, is something that you're obviously intimately involved in, and then we can try to come up with some take-homes with both that and then on the durability piece as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean, if we speak about strength training, you know broad perspective related to endurance, sports and running. Initially, we know, at least from a scientific perspective, that strength training tends to improve endurance performance and is mainly due to an improved economy. So, again, energy cost, oxygen cost or cycling efficiency, if you speak about cycling, together with alterations that they seem to potentially make you more durable as well. So you have an enhanced muscle tendon stiffness, which could be useful in a front exercise type of type of exercise, and then we have an increased muscle strength, meaning that for the same load, same velocity, same speed, we would usually have a lesser, or we would expect to have a lesser, activation of muscle fibers because you have a higher force produced by each muscle fascicle and therefore that should reduce the load on the number of fibers that you're using for the same speed. If you get these from a fresh perspective to a fatigue perspective, what you'd hope to see is that there's a delay in lesser efficient type two fibers and that should carry on advantages from a fatigue performance perspective.
Speaker 3:So that was the initial idea and reason why we wanted to look into the effect of strength training onto durability in running. So what we did was again a 90-minute trial, slightly more intense than what we did with the first study. So a bit more into the heavy intensity domain, I think 10% above the about 10% delta between lactate threshold one and two and we measured it before and after 10 weeks of strength training done twice a week where we did heavy strength and biometrics and then we measured it. We measured the changes in economy throughout again every 15 minutes and the change in following it. So high intensity performance following 90 minutes of running done before and after the training intervention.
Speaker 1:Can you describe the strength training that they were actually going through?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we had two plyometrics exercises. We do have, I think, the kind of sample table that is available online. I put it on my Twitter when we presented the study and, if you have it, feel free to share it on your platforms as well. It's no secret, and we did it purposely to make it readily available for runners that would just want to implement it. So the reasoning was we want to use it in an ecologically valid way, that everybody can use it in our gym or at home if they have some bubbles and weights. We had two plyometric exercises, one horizontal and one vertical, to improve muscle tendon stiffness, and then we had three maximum strength exercises a single leg press, a squat, which was a half squat in most of the of the protocol, and then an isometric seated calf race, and that was done mainly to improve the force generated, the capacity to generate force in an isometric perspective due to the behavior of the calf muscle to be acting mainly isometrically when you run it.
Speaker 1:So you used the term ecologically viable. I'm going to colloquialize that. To me it was simple, meaning athletes who had a reasonable strength training setup, or even no strength training setup, could do something like this. And I guess another way to put it is I could put this in front of one of my strength training professionals and they would go oh yeah, this is really simple programming. It's going to be remarkably effective, but we can make it more effective by just adding this, that and the other. You were taking a really, I guess, very simplistic approach with what you were actually prescribing for athletes, and I'll wire up that table in the show notes for anybody that actually wanted to look at the protocol that you were taking athletes through.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was the idea Keep it simple. And I wouldn't necessarily implement it like that myself, because I want to have it more individualized. But we wanted to keep the exercises as simple as possible and not change them throughout the 10 weeks intervention, because otherwise we would have spent one, two, three weeks without at least learning the movement, instead of spending the time getting stronger. So we had a 10-week duration constraint, which is not the problem usually with an athlete that wants to implement it regularly from today, consistently, throughout the next season, for example.
Speaker 1:Yeah, perfectly reasonable timeframe to deliver that strength training program. So what did you find at the end of the day?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so what we found was we deliver that strength training program. So what did you find at the end of the day? Yeah, so what we found was we had the strength training group and we had the control group. So the difference was the strength training group implemented strength on top of running. The control group just kept running the same as before. They were matched for performance over 10K. Again, I think.
Speaker 3:Performance-wise, the average was about 39 minutes between groups. So decent runners, not elite or sub-elite, but still nice performance level, which is not that easy to find in the literature. And what we found was the strength training improved running economy durability, both within the group so the group that did strength training had a better durability before, after compared to before and also between groups. So we measured the change between and after the groups and only the group that did the strength training improved substantially, whereas the other didn't. Likewise, for time to exhaustion, that was a performance trial. At the end the athletes that did strength training improved by 35%, whereas the athletes that didn't do the strength training worsened by 8%.
Speaker 1:And people are going to think about that and you were probably just getting into this, so I'm sorry if I'm stomping on it a little bit People are going to think about this 35% improvement and go oh my God, that's kind of unbelievable. But I think it might be important to describe how a time to exhaustion test kind of exaggerates those improvements and why you actually use that in research.
Speaker 3:Yes, that was going to be my next point. It is very different than using a time to exhaustion from a time trial. Time to exhaustion is how long can you sustain the effort for the intensity for, whereas time trial is how quickly can you cover a given distance or how much speed can you put in a given time. So they are very different variables. If you have an increase in time to exertion by, let's say, 35%, as we did, that could probably translate into improved time trial performance. So let's say a one kilometer performance of 5% to 10%, 5% to 7%. So it is very much in line with previous research done in other sports. They found similar results in elite cyclists after 11 weeks of strength training and improved by about 7% peak power output or main power output over five minutes trial. So pretty much in line with what they found in elite cyclists.
Speaker 1:And this is in line with a lot of the other strength training research that is actually out there strength training research that is actually out there.
Speaker 1:One of the things that always comes up that I want to kind of get your perspective on is whenever you do a strength training intervention study, where strength training is laid on top of either what the athletes are already doing or a standardized training protocol that both groups are doing, what a lot of people will say and I kind of I look at some of the, some of the strength training research with this eye as well is just listen.
Speaker 1:Group two, the strength training group, is just doing more total physical work and usually when we come down to training, just as sort of volume conversation kind of alluded to earlier usually just more work results in more adaptation, even if it's not specific or well-programmed or whatever. That's kind of like the big hammer is just the volume of work and I was wondering if we can just get like your perspective on that, meaning if we just layer this on, is it the layer of extra work that is potentially producing some of the adaptation, or if we could somehow and there's been some research on this where you try to equate for the effort, or for the kilojoules, or for the workload or whatever. How does it actually? Is it a more effective or more efficient form of activity to actually improve an athlete?
Speaker 3:yes, it's a very valid point and very practical. Everybody that walks in practical settings would have that perspective and I totally agree. Actually, we are working on a manuscript that tries to bring forward the limitation of a lot of research, adding interventions and then not matching or not acknowledging the fact that training load is not matched between the training group and the control group. I think there is an important component there from a training volume perspective which it is hard to address Because if you were to increase equally the running volume from the control group, you may well incur highly increased risk of injuries occurring in, highly increased risk of injuries because of the sudden increase of one hour 30 of running per week in assets that are running maybe five hours per week. So it's probably like 25 percent more volume all of a sudden. So from a from a practical perspective it is quite tricky managing that.
Speaker 3:There are a couple of studies that match the training volume between control and training and it still found an improved performance and economy in the training group. But there is a confounder there. Due to the volume that differs between the groups, the adaptations will be different. So I would still expect some positive effects from the strength training because you're working on capacities that are not developed in running. As we said, increase the force from a single fiber perspective, increase the stiffness, all these factors that are relevant from a metabolic perspective, which they don't usually get developed if you just do two extra easy runs during the week.
Speaker 3:From the other, on the other hand, if you have these two other short runs each week, you may get better, in your likely treasure, for example. So they target different systems and I think striking the balance is important. So when I work with athletes, if they have more than three times per week, then they will have a strength session. If they only can train three times, then it's just running and then the second session can be added. If they have maybe six, seven sessions per week, it'll be maybe five and two. So that is a very practical perspective on the topic which may be helpful for the listeners.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's take another quick break in the action and bring in CTS coach Sarah Scazzaro specifically to talk about how we can incorporate strength training. Okay, so I wanted to expand on this concept of how strength training can actually affect durability, because I know a lot of athletes have questions about it and we've talked in that. We've talked previously in this podcast about how volume can affect durability, how specific workouts like progression runs can affect durability, and so I wanted to get your perspective on this, sarah, from how do you actually program things like this from a strength training perspective and how do you just view this overall in terms of how it can be integrated into an athlete's program?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So when it comes to strength training and durability, first and foremost, we're not going to be doing anything in the gym to specifically try to like overcome something that you could be, you should be doing in your actual run training, meaning we're not going to do a bunch of step-ups to try to get you as a better mountain climber. But what I focus on with my athletes is not only the volume of their strength training, the specificity of the exercises, but I also like to lean on things like plyometrics and isometrics for muscle and tendon stiffness, which I think can be really valuable. With the durability of ultra runners, especially in longer distances, it packs a lot of punch, especially isometrics, for a lot less risk and a lot less volume necessary. So there's a great exchange of durability there.
Speaker 1:And just to like make sure that everybody understands what you're talking about, what, like what would the exercises and the it's going to use set rep combination but the time under tension actually look like in those with that programming?
Speaker 4:so, like a plyometrics, you can do something as simple as I know as, like low scale is like pogo hops, pogos, and then you can go all the way up to like depth box jumps and things like that.
Speaker 4:I think that people starting with something very simple like an assisted plyo or pogo jumps, two sets of 20 seconds with 20 second rest, could be very effective. When you're talking about isometrics, I like to do things called overcoming isometrics, which are the push or pull. So you're actually doing like a mid thigh rack pull, something like that. So you're actually resisting the weight. You're not just holding a wall squat, which is fine, but when you're doing something like an overcoming isometric, you're not going to be holding for very long we're talking one to 10 seconds at times and you're going to be doing maybe five to six max of those, with rest in between. So it doesn't take a lot and you're not doing a lot of joint movement. Hence it's an isometric. In that case, there's not no joint movement really, but you're really going to be putting a good stress on the tendons and the muscles, with low risk in terms of skill and or overuse.
Speaker 1:So I want to bring coach Adam in once again from, like, the programming side of things because, Adam, you kind of work in the capacity where you're working with athletes that are integrating strength training into their programming as well, as you're trying to help orchestrate the strength training at the same time. It's a little bit of a weird position for an endurance coach to be in and I was wondering to get a little bit more insight into just more off your workflow when you're trying to organize the run training, the strength training, what the strength training load is going to be like. How does that just generally pan out for you when you're doing this with athletes?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, the first thing that I do with my athletes is that I really want to set the priority level and make that pretty clear and that kind of dictates how we're going to bring strength training into the program.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people will finish a race, my legs blew up at the end, my quads were dead and therefore they are not strong enough and I need to increase the strength, and while Mikkel's research is compelling that strength training is a way to address that, as we've kind of alluded to before, there's other bigger priorities. So I want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to get those bigger priorities and then we can layer in the strength training and to dive into that a little bit. The first goal is always to make sure that the strength work doesn't interfere with the run work, or at least very minimally so, and then you can get the benefits, hopefully, from both programs and you're getting your durability from a lot of great run volume and training. You're also getting a little bit from the great strength work you're doing as well, and they can live in harmony I kind of want to get the.
Speaker 1:I want to get the live in harmony piece and give sarah the final word on this, because we talk about this a lot in terms of how to integrate strength training and run training at the same time so that one doesn't compromise the other. Can you really quickly synopsize that for us, sarah? Is there a potential compromise and how do you actually view trying to navigate it?
Speaker 4:Absolutely.
Speaker 4:If the strength training is impairing an athlete's ability to do the primary focus, which is the run training meaning they're constantly fatigued, having dead legs, don't have the time for it then it's not going to work.
Speaker 4:So that means we need to look at how often are we doing it. We may need to shorten the duration and we may need to take away a day. So, for instance, a lot of folks come to me and they're like I want to do three days a week of strength. I want to do four to five days a week of strength Great in the early season. But as we progress and as volume increases, we're probably going to have to start taking some of that strength off the table so that you're not constantly in a fatigue state. And that might mean reducing from four days a week to two days a week, or from three days a week to two, possibly even to one as we get closer to an event. Um, we can still focus on the main lifts, we can still focus on some great volume there, but just feathering in like how much strength training is or is not either enhancing or taking away from the run programming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then the other practical perspective, especially for a lot of the regular athletes out there. They're normally adding strength training on top of what they are doing, without regard to load management. For right or for wrong, that's a topic for another day. Whether you take off some run load, management if you're going to add strength training and things like that.
Speaker 1:But from a practical perspective, when most normal athletes want to deploy a strength training program, they don't change their running programming. They run five days per week and they're going to train two times per week in the evening or the opposite time of day that they normally run. They're like literally doing it in the way that you've set up. The research design is is you have the group that's normally training and then the group that has the parallel training with the addition, or the whole addition, of adding a strength training component to it. That's not everybody, but that's a lot of people, just in practice. So it becomes something that that is to use an earlier word that we went through. It becomes ecologically valid because it's what's actually happening out in the field yeah, I didn't think about it so far I don't.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't have that broad experience. You probably have much larger experience because of the volume of offices you work with, even from an elite perspective. That is usually what happens. If you can squeeze in a couple of strength sessions, you just do that. You're not going to take away running or swimming or cycling volume for it. You may maybe consider to reduce maybe the run from one hour to 45 minutes and then have the strength session afterwards, but you don't just remove that run altogether. That's my experience.
Speaker 1:For the coaches out there and the strength training professionals out there that are cringing a little bit. Just to reemphasize, we're not advocating for actually doing that, because certainly if you're training at a very high volume or close to your maximum volume, adding in any sort of additional stress, needs to come with some sort of load management strategy. It doesn't matter whether it's strength training stress or even stress for heat training interventions that we do quite often, or even altitude. You need to have some sort of counterbalancing in the total amount of workload that you're doing. We're not advocating for just layering it on, we're just saying that it happens to be. That ends up practically what ends up happening with a lot of athletes.
Speaker 3:Very good point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I appreciate your perspective here. We're going to let you go. This has been really fascinating. I'm going to queue up all of the things that we discussed, including the Twitter threads that you put together. You're a good Twitter follower, or good Twitter follow, with a lot of this stuff. I'll link those up in the show notes so the listeners can go dig into those if they do choose so. But where can people find more about you and learn a little bit more about the work that you're doing?
Speaker 3:yeah, as you mentioned, I think the twitter would be the place. My art should still be mick zanini, m-i-c-z-a-n-i-n-i, and they double. And then any research that I publish will be on ResearchGate as well under my name. So Michele Zanini I don't think there's that many, so it should be easy to find. Not particularly active on social media, but, as you said, I tend to post anything that I find interesting on X slash Twitter every now and then.
Speaker 1:Michele, thank you for the research this year and thank you for coming on the podcast. It's been really insightful for me.
Speaker 3:Thank you Really appreciate it and thanks for the possible questions. Really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 1:Great folks. There you have it. Much thanks to Mikel Zanini, as well as CTS coaches Aden Ferdinandson, Fred Sabatore-Pastor and Sarah Scazzaro, for coming on the podcast today, helping us unwind this concept of durability just a little bit further. I do think that in the future, this is going to be something that we continue to lean on in order to evaluate potential athletic performance, as well as something that we can train for in ultra running.
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