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Coach Jason Koop covers training, nutrition and recent happenings in the ultramarathon world.
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Monitoring for Overtraining Syndrome with Sophie Herzog, PhD | KoopCast #242
Sophie Herzog is the Owner and Co-founder and primary performance analyst at the MRYA
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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 this episode of the podcast is about a phenomenon that tends to pop up in the headlines every few years, and that is overtraining syndrome, underperformance syndrome and the whole host of other descriptive words that we use to describe when athletes start underperforming for whatever reason or reasons. So on the podcast today, please welcome Sophie Herzog, who is the owner, co-founder and primary performance analyst at the Mira Center for Athlete Development. At the Mira Center for Athlete Development, at the Mira Center for Athlete Development, she is responsible for deploying a host of specialists to help monitor and counsel athletes that are at risk or in the throes of under performance syndrome.
Speaker 1:Also on the podcast today, we bring on CTS coach Ryan Anderson to provide his professional input on how he helps manage this process with his athletes. All right, folks, with that intro I am getting right out of the way. Here's my interview with Sophie Herzog all about underperformance syndrome and how we can help manage it as athletes and coaches. All right, sophie. Well, welcome to the podcast. I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about this recording earlier today and it brought me back to one of the very first recordings that I did with one of my colleagues and friends, corinne Malcolm, on overtraining syndrome, and at the time it was a and this is still the case.
Speaker 1:It was an extremely hot topic in the ultra marathon world and you know how the media cycle kind of plays out with these, with the various buzzwords overtraining syndrome, underperformance syndrome, whatever we want to call it, and we're going to get into some of the vocabulary got its foothold within the community and all of a sudden everybody has self-diagnosed or diagnosed others from afar with overtraining syndrome. We're going to talk a little bit about that. But I just thought it was interesting. This is like coming almost back full circle, you know, three years ago, when I very first started the podcast. We're now kind of talking about the same topic but I think we're going to put a different, a little bit of a different lens on it. But before we get into that, so the listeners can know you just a little bit better, why don't you give everybody just a background of who you are and how you got into sport?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting what you're saying in terms of the topics coming back. Oh, yeah, we'll touch on that later. I guess from myself. So my background is not an endurance sport, so I come from a football or soccer for the American listeners background. I played football and here in Switzerland for Basel football club with the guys from early age and super into it like, yeah, cooking in the academy and was the first girl there and I think quite ambitious, quite put a lot of pressure on myself and, yeah, developed an eating disorder when I was like 14 and, yeah, shot myself in the foot with that and sort of. That was the first rather large experience with underperformance, I would say. But and it carried on for a long time.
Speaker 2:I think I was probably at different forms of eating disorders and disordered eating for a period of about 10 years before I before, whilst I was actually then stopping to play football and starting with triathlon which, unfortunately, I must admit, also had to do with work, it was definitely my thoughts that this is a sport where you expend lots of energy, which, yeah, so it was not solely the decision oh yeah, this is fun, so let's try that.
Speaker 2:I was basically thinking this is something I can be good at and I can also expend lots of energy. So, yeah, with that I was also doing a master's and then a PhD at ETH Zurich in biophysics, also not directly related to to sports science, and, as you can imagine, like doing a PhD and trying to do or trying to train 20 plus hours a week is not directly or necessarily a recipe for disaster, but there's definitely some time and energy constraints involved. So you know that again ties back to other experiences or renewed experiences with on the performance, and that's, yeah, why this topic has such a big, had such a big impact in my life.
Speaker 1:I would say yeah, speaking of the PhD and athlete management, I've now have had three elite ultra runners who I've been coaching throughout their elite career and have gone through this being a PhD student while being an elite athlete to finishing their PhD and being a lead athlete, and I can tell you firsthand there's a market difference and there definitely tends to be an apex right around when that thesis is going to be defended, where the stressors is otherwise specified. The non-training stressors that we'll get into a little bit tend to have a very abrupt peak, and it's not one that happens on one single day. There's usually a timeframe that's associated with it, and I have both. I will say that both I've done it pretty well and I've also kind of screwed it up a little bit in terms of trying to load, manage everything that's going on with those two different roles that those athletes play. So what I'm trying to say is your plight is something that coaches feel as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's also like, even if you're on the other side, as an athlete or as a student I think it's not always easy to put or to analyze where you actually at. You know sometimes you cope better than you know. Naturally, like, if you look at everything objectively, you think like you should be really struggling but for some reason, like you're thriving, which you know. Maybe that's already a warning sign, Because then, yeah, you know like you might be striving still, but there is a big fall coming. Or you know you should be striving as you should be really flying, because basically you have less loads than before, like, for example, after you you finish your phd, but sometimes that you know that loss and pressure is a bit like after a big race. You know like you feel empty or like that something that has been a target for so long is not there anymore. It's also not super easy to handle. So it's a very complex thing, as is on the performance, as we'll probably speak about, or as is performance as well.
Speaker 1:Right, and we're going to spend the majority of the time talking about overtraining and underperformance syndrome, but there's one kind of like last piece of table set that I want to make sure gets communicated to the listeners, and that's the work that you've done with Mira. So can you explain to the audience first off what it is and then specifically how you function within that organization?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so thanks for letting me do that in the first place and actually maybe chronologically, it's easy to just explain a little bit. So I did finish my PhD, a little bit like so I did finish my PhD and then I ought to have a break and just focus a little bit on my sports. And then I actually got the opportunity to work with Olaf Alexander Buu and the Norwegian triathletes Christian Blomfeld and Gustav Ili and also Angie Niener. So I jumped straight into another high performance environment opportunity and, yeah, like it was maybe even more fast paced environment than I had before, like in my own sort of rhythm, and did that for a few months and then, only after I stopped working with them, I had this complete break, or shutdown, as I said before, and I experienced severe underperforming and unexplained as we'll talk about later. So I didn't know why am I not performing, because I thought it's a great opportunity. Now I just focus on sports for a bit before I orient myself and find something to work on. But the body didn't cooperate.
Speaker 2:So there, that's where, like, this topic of an experience that I've had several times in my life materialized like very obviously, and that's where I started having conversation with David Stombach, which I think you also had on the podcast before and, and he was at the time a professor at the NTNU in Trondheim but did a sabbatical in Switzerland, which is where I live, as he has a Swiss wife, and we had several conversations about this topic, and he was at the time leading several research projects where Irina Talsnes was involved, doing a really interesting case study about a world-class cross-country skier, which is one of the scientific frameworks that we are using now with MIRA, and MIRA was sort of yeah, that was the original thought that we had.
Speaker 2:We want to make the sports world a better place in terms of we want to help athletes that don't have the support network, such as a B-Trick turn set or the athletes that are at the very top, but not just in their underperforming state, but also in terms of how can you actually prevent it. What kind of education goes into preventing situations like that, not just for the athlete itself, but also maybe for coaches or development programs such as sports high schools or universities, but even for parents. So just basically providing a support environment and a sort of a holistic athlete management system that helps athletes in their development program. What athletes would be eligible?
Speaker 1:for this? Can any athlete out there, recreational athlete, elite athlete from the US, in their development program? What athletes would be eligible for this? Can any athlete out there, recreational athlete, elite athlete from the US, from any other country? Can they reach out to you for these resources?
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, and actually I think and maybe we'll come to that later but I think not even only athletes are eligible for it. I think if you, if you look into the corporate world, into the any kind of high performance environment, the issues or the constraints that we're having and the problems that we're dealing with are very much the same. You know it's very much always a question of load management and kind of that, two opposite forces. You know the load and the recovery and in the end you want to adapt and optimize for performance instead of breaking down, and I think that's difficult to to get right so we're going to talk about overtraining and or underperformance in the whole alphabet soup of acronyms that we've now conjured up to describe all these different phenomenons.
Speaker 1:This is going to be a timely podcast release because it's going to come out in late April, early May. A lot of athletes are staring their main events in the face. It's they're coming up in the next eight to 12 weeks and they're going to want to ramp their training up. And kind of alongside that, whenever you ramp your training up, there has to be some sort of load management component in the background, because you can't just add stress if you don't take it away from somewhere else. And many of the athletes out there that are listening to this are going to have a personal reference point with either doing too much training or doing too much too quickly or not recovering from the training that they applied that they thought that they could actually handle.
Speaker 1:So I use that to. I use that to kind of like level set everybody that you're going to go through this, because ultra marathon is a challenging sport just like any other endurance sport. We kind of want to maximize the stress that we put on our body, but we still need to do it in a really safe way. So, before we start, there's this whole range of things that have been described over the years in terms of how to. How do we actually want to describe either doing too much or not allowing the proper time and or effectiveness for the recovery process to actually take place? I'm going to let you describe the different like flavors of this and what most people would just call overtraining or overtraining syndrome. So you're the expert here. Describe the different flavors of this, and why do we need different flavors of it, or does it actually matter how we describe them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like you say it's very confusing and I think you know science is kind of. It's like you say it's very confusing and I think you know science is kind of known for having multiple terms to describe the same thing or sort of the same thing. And I think the term underperformance or unexplained underperformance syndrome is basically it's not a new term, it's not like a new kid on the block, I think it's more just a bit of an umbrella term, whereas other terms are maybe used to describe prolonged underperformance, depending on either the severity, the duration or the cause of the issues. You know, like over training sort of implies very much that the causative factor is the training itself, whereas I think in the in it's very rare that training alone is the causative factor, and I think that's a little bit why I, me personally, prefer the term on the performance syndrome and the addition of the word syndrome, I think, kind of explains that there or it kind of is emphasizes this multifactorial, these multifactorial causes possibly.
Speaker 2:But yeah, in a nutshell, I think what these terms all have in common is that they occur and that that's what makes it so complicated and difficult to really put a finger on. It is that they occur on a continuum right. If you, for example, you do a race, then you feel extremely fatigued at the end. Hopefully, so that is acute fatigue and that's not necessarily a bad thing. However, if you then carry this fatigue into something chronic, then the further you move across to the right on that fatigue spectrum towards functional overreaching, which is something that you can still recover relatively quickly from, with potential beneficial adaptations, you know, for example, in a hard training block. But then the sort of the how do you say like the transition from this functional overreaching to non-functional overreaching, where you possibly don't have beneficial adaptation anymore, to then something called overtraining at least in research definitions it's. You know it's a continuum, but these transitions are very vaguely defined or not defined at all, and we also don't really have a proper way of diagnosing someone.
Speaker 1:To say like you're now non-sanctually overreached or you're now over trained is very hard to do and I think a lot of the plight with the vocabulary has to do with that last point. We're trying to use the vocabulary either over training and I'm using I'm emphasizing the word over, intentionally, the training being too much, versus under recovery, the recovery not being enough. We're trying to use those pieces of vocabulary to help give us guidelines for how to fix the ailment, because if the training is truly over and then you remove the training, you should actually get better. And raising my hand here, the first experience I had in this arena managing this with athletes the dominant vocabulary that we used was overtraining syndrome. This is back in the early 2000s is starting to, you know, kind of a kind of a merger, where you started to describe it and in my you know kind of naive, maybe non you know non analytical brain, I'm what I would think is. Well, if I had an athlete that was truly overtraining and I started managing that athlete, let's just train less, right, the training is over and you train less than.
Speaker 1:While there's a magic fix to it Turns out it's a little bit more complicated than that, and trying to figure out what is over and what is under and how to actually make the course correction isn't as black and white, but you see athletes and you consult with athletes that are actually dealing with this. Despite all the poor vocabulary and these vague transition points as you describe them, is there a common theme that runs between the athletes that you're working with, meaning they're all coming in and these are the things that they? These are the things that they are describing, and here's how we can get a better fix on how to move forward. Can you just generally describe that, that process, as you're managing athletes that are kind of coming in the door seeking your counsel?
Speaker 2:that's a very good summary that you made there and I think, yeah, there is a common denominator and that's like athletes are not performing. So that's again like why, I think, on the performance is maybe better suitable or at least they're not consistently performing. I think what is quite common is that you have quite a stark variability in performance. So one day you might feel great and then the other day you feel pretty rubbish again, and that's kind of like a little bit of an up and down constantly. Stagnation is another one which is also not strictly on the performance, but like you're just you're feeling like you're putting a lot of effort in and don't see the rewards. And I think these three things so on the performance, performance variability and performance stagnation what they usually cause in athletes is that athletes do not reduce the load.
Speaker 2:When they see this or experience this, they have a tendency to push harder. They oftentimes also have a tendency to maybe be a bit more extreme in terms of you know whether that's intensity, volume or actually you, or actually manipulating their diets, for instance, like thinking, okay, maybe I need to lose a few pounds here, and I think that's oftentimes what pushes them actually in the opposite direction of that overtraining or fatigue continuum and with that. So now we're talking about physical symptoms and with that. So now we're talking about physical symptoms. Obviously there's also oftentimes and I guess we'll talk about that later but if you are actually monitoring subjective factors such as motivation to train or mood swings or mood in general or other like completely non-training related factors, such as stuff like sleep quality or libido, things like that then, which you could say is psychological or health related, then you see changes there as well.
Speaker 2:But these are more variable. I would say like the. If we're speaking about athletes, then the performance related, like on the performance, stagnation and variability are the most common ones, and these often also go in line with, you know, changes, for instance in in subjective exertion. So how hard is a certain effort? If the rate of perceived exertion all of a sudden feels a lot higher, then that that's kind of a warning sign as well okay.
Speaker 1:So if the common denominator is performance decline and or performance variability those two components one of the things athletes are going to struggle with is those are lagging indicators. You don't know if you're over, over-trained or under-recovered or whatever vocabulary we ultimately ascribe to this. You don't know that until after the fact, right After you've already made the mistake or you're starting to make the mistake. Right, you've kind of teetered over the edge, or you're teetering across the blurred line, right, instead of hard edges I think that's a better analogy Athletes will want to know, like what can they do to stay out of it? Stay out of that blurred line in the first place? Right? Are there early warning signs to you might be getting closer to this blurry edge that they can then kind of step back from or at least take assessments from? And I'll preview the answer, or I'll kind of like preview a little bit of the dialogue is there's all sorts of monitoring that we can put on our athletes.
Speaker 1:I have a Garmin Fenix 7, which isn't even the latest Garmin on my watch right now. Every morning it gives me a card and it tells me how awesome or not awesome I'm going to be every single day. And there's an infinite number of variations of that, whether they're rooted in a wristwatch or a ring, or subjective monitoring or performance monitoring or all of the above. How can athletes take an assessment of that? Athletes and coaches taking an assessment of that? To stay further away from this blurry line that ultimately the athletes kind of end up in your care after they've stepped over it, what can they do in advance to prevent it from happening in the first place? Okay, I wanted to sit down with Coach Ryan Anderson to see how we monitor athletes for early signs of underperformance.
Speaker 3:So I think this all comes down to honest and consistent communication, and that's texting with the athlete, regular phone calls and good, consistent feedback via training peaks and the post activity comments. And for some athletes they are succinct it's two to three sentences, and over time I learned how to take so much information out of those two to three sentences. Others it's two to three sentences and over time I learned how to take so much information out of those two to three sentences. Others it's two to three paragraphs and naturally you get a lot of information out of that. Either way.
Speaker 3:I don't care, as long as it's consistent, because if there's not consistency in that communication then I'm constantly having to guess or follow up and like okay, can you tell me a little more about this? Because for some athletes they may get in a habit of only reading feedback when things are going well or vice versa, when things are going bad. And of course in both of those examples it's only half the puzzle and when you have the full picture then you learn their mood. You can discern through their feedback either way and how things have been flow. You can discern through their feedback either way and how things have been flow. But really consistent, honest communication is the foundation with this, and data comes into play as well, whether that's tracking their performance on interval workouts, endurance runs, looking at their heart rate data and using HRV for training as well.
Speaker 2:HRV for training as well. Yeah, that's again a very interesting one, and I think that's something that I learned, or where I learned a lot from the Norwegian culture and I think or maybe you could say, the Scandinavian culture, because I think what is slightly different there, especially when I compare it to my past as a football player, where I was used to just come to practice and the coach would say this is what we do today, and you just go there and execute and there is zero ownership or responsibility of or, yeah, like the whole program that I'm good, like what I'm actually doing, whether I should actually push through today or not. And obviously I was not involved in the training planning or in the training process with my football coach, because the training was not individualized for me. But then, even as an endurance athlete, I came to triathlon and I thought I would just need to find the perfect plan and then execute that plan and everything was going to be fine. And I think what the best athletes have in common is that they're very intelligent in terms of when do I have to push through and when do I have to adapt and maybe do less today in terms of doing more, like in the long term. So having that long-term thinking over short term, or that long-term gains over short-term gains and obviously there's a lot that goes into that. You know, there's a lot of learning about yourself and also I had to learn that you cannot develop that in just one year or in in half a year. It takes a while to really get in tune with your body and be honest with yourself, and I think that's obviously where a coach can be extremely helpful, like a coach that checks in regularly, even obviously beneficially, sees you and can actually see whether you know, if you say yeah, I'm fine, whether that coincides with your body language, with your facial expression.
Speaker 2:You know small indicators that could potentially tell something about the state of the athlete. And then, like you said, of course there's nowadays we can track all sorts of different things. I mean, monitoring is becoming everything, but I think it's very much about finding that balance between those things that are packed, you know and even there you have to be careful, you know, is an overnight heart rate or an overnight hrv? Is that actually telling the full story? What is the difference between, maybe, overnight measures and a morning measure? I think marco altini does a good job in terms of educating when to do, when to use what and what are the nuances that are provided by those metrics. And I think the athlete has to have an interest and an education, so to speak, in terms of learning how to interpret those signals. And sometimes you have to overturn signals, that's for sure. You know in a race you're not going to stop just because it feels hard, but you have to learn when you know, for example, example, a pain is not good anymore.
Speaker 2:So this, these monitoring things, I think they include a variety of different factors and that's also something that we at muller we have a sort of a holistic assessment that we do, which is actually available for free on our website. So this includes just it's a questionnaire about a variety of different things. So we have five categories. It's questions about training, health, recovery, environment and nutrition, and that's something that you can repeat on a regular basis, let's say every. It depends a bit on your state, like if you're in an underperforming state and you do it more frequently, let's say every three to four weeks, but even if you are in a good state, then we generally recommend that you do a submaximal test, whether that's on a, like a standard loop, or on a treadmill with an incline, or a stationary bike or whatever. It just has to be relatively standardized. You do that every four to six weeks, and then you could also fill that questionnaire, and that usually provides you with quite quite a good insurance system.
Speaker 1:So to speak, so I'm hearing kind of two two. Two themes emerged to this question of how do we help keep athletes outside of this blurry range of stepping into over training or under performance. The first component that you mentioned is actually quite interesting. It's this aspect of individualization go, it goes back to coaching 101. And I can speak from my personal experience. I've probably consulted with maybe up to 30 athletes that are in some form of overtraining and underperformance, whether I got them there or another coach got them there, or however they got there. They come from many kind of different angles, but one of the common undercurrents amongst all those athletes that I can rack my memory right now and remember right off of the bat is that they had a training program that was not tailored to them specifically.
Speaker 1:It was either a static training program, it was either a program that was copy pasted from another athlete, it was a program that hadn't been individualized to the feedback that they were actually giving the coach. There's a whole different ways that you can unindividualize or not individualize a training program. It's not necessarily volume, right, which is kind of the fallacy that we run into a lot. You just train a lot and then you're automatically going to be overtrained. The theme, one of the themes that are one of the more common undercurrents that I think that you're trying to allude to here, is just to have a program that's individualized to you, individualized to your strengths and weaknesses, how much volume you've done in the past, how successful that volume has been, the frequency of the training that you're doing, the frequency of the intensity that you're doing. Are you doing two workouts per week, three workouts per week? All of those you know that may loo of workout care characteristics that has been successful in the past can be a really great blueprint, blueprint for future. And then the second thing that you're mentioning is this monitoring component, and I'm going to leave a link in the show notes to I've had Marco since you mentioned him by name, I've had him on my podcast twice to discuss this, very, this very aspect. And you're absolutely correct. He does a brilliant job of explaining all the different nuances and applicability of not only a heart rate variability, which is kind of his bread and butter, but a lot of the other monitors and wearables out there, but some component of monitoring that, when I internalize it it helps reinforce the individualization piece.
Speaker 1:None of those things are perfect and they can't stand alone.
Speaker 1:We're not going to get perfect red, yellow, green stoplight systems, like we all kind of want to tell us if athletes are ready to train or not ready to train, or whether they should go hard or go easy.
Speaker 1:But we can do things that can help us, that can help the subjective side of things, either confirm or deny or give us a better direction on where to actually take an athlete. Those are the two things that I'm kind of like hearing from you that if athletes are ramping up their training, be mindful of what's worked for you and how much you've done in the past. Not that you shouldn't exceed it, but just be mindful of it, like kind of like look at your previous training and has it been successful or not. And the second thing is just have some sort of feedback loop whether that's a wearable that you use or a constellation of wearables, or subjective feedback or, hopefully, all of the above have something in place that serves as a little bit of a check and balance to make sure that the pathway that you're actually taking is going to be one that is continually sustainable for you yeah, I can agree more.
Speaker 2:I think the word sustainability is also one that actually we emphasize a lot. I think again, that long-term thinking, in terms of what you can actually just like, it always depends, like if you have six weeks and you know after six weeks you're never gonna, you're never gonna put a foot in a running shoe anymore, then maybe it's a different story, even though probably you still don't want to risk all your bone, your bones and your joints and all that. But it's a different story. But if you want to optimize for a very long time frame, I think sustainability has to be an aspect to consider and I think it should also be a talking point in whoever you're working with. If you work with a coach, then sustainability, especially within your context of living, like whether you're working or whether you're studying or whether you're a professional athlete is definitely something that has to be considered into creating a plan, and we are very much of the opinion that the athlete has a prominent role in that planning. You know, maybe not in the specific session prescription, but definitely in the, you know, the adaptation of the plan or the adjustment of the plan, because he can be the best coach in the world, but not even his or her training plan will be perfect, because he has to adapt it based on what's happening around.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that's where I think communication is really key and that doesn't come natural to every athlete. And I think that's maybe also from a coaching perspective, where sometimes you have to figure out a little bit. You know, how can you bring your athlete to communicate with you, or maybe it's just not. You know, chemistry is not there, and then maybe it's also better if the athlete works with someone else, or maybe works in a group where the coach sees the athlete every day. I think, for me at least, communication is definitely something that is crucial for everything know himself or herself better in terms of communication, or communicating to the coach, or to the partner or to the whoever whoever is involved in in this athlete environment.
Speaker 1:Okay, I wanted to check in with coach Ryan again to discuss further this balance between objective feedback and subjective feedback and how we can use the interplay between both of those to help monitor athletes. Ryan, what do you have to say about this topic?
Speaker 3:So I hit on earlier about the importance of a consistent, honest communication. That's the foundation of all of this. But we also have data training peaks, interval workouts, hours, their normalized grade pace trending throughout a block. And HRV is another one specifically using the HRV for training, because it's been talked about on this podcast quite a bit that it's the most valid measure as opposed to the Garmin reading overnight or the Coros or whatever. But there's always caveats with data and I'll give two examples here.
Speaker 3:So last year I wanted to leverage HRV data more. I got the HRV for training coach account. I was encouraging my athletes to get the app do the measurements in the morning, making sure they had the correct information on how to do those measurements correctly. And specifically I wanted to use it with my high volume athletes because naturally they can be closer to the edge of being cooked a little too much. It's important to monitor when they need the recovery and I wanted it for the historical data so I could look back and find the patterns of hey, they responded really well to this load of training. This was a period of too many interval workouts that the numbers weren't looking great with their HRV. So athlete, a high volume athlete loves to exercise, enthusiastic about all things, he's checking his HRV. Everything's like green Green score is good and consistent for a while. And four, six weeks later, after we start this, I come to learn he's been rechecking his HRV until he gets the green score, so he gets the score every morning.
Speaker 1:It's gamifying the monitoring process.
Speaker 3:Exactly, exactly. I have to hit the green so I can do those 20-hour weeks. Coaches put on the training plan Because if I get a yellow he's going to text me, he's going to take something away, and we can't have that. So naturally that throws all that out of the window. And then another athlete they were getting anxious upon their measurements in the morning because, same thing, they didn't want to get a yellow or a red. That would then kind of trigger the stoplight system that we had of.
Speaker 3:If you get a yellow, text me and let's just see how everything's going, okay, you're doing a bunch of interval workouts not surprising. You had to stay up late last night with the kids not surprising. Okay, we're getting two yellows. Let's investigate further and likely alter training. If we get a red, full stop. Likely there are some recovery days in there. Whatever, this athlete also loves exercising, has big goals. They don't want to see their training changed. And they were getting very anxious upon the measurements in the morning. Of course that's going to throw off the readings. And so, with these two examples it just reminded me of what is the core of my coaching philosophy that communication is so, so important. I wasn't throwing that out with these athletes. I was just thinking it would be another fail safe.
Speaker 1:And back to that point earlier of hey, this is more historical data to see how they're best responding and not responding to training, but with these two athletes it was also a good reminder of don't just like implement these things as specifically, like measuring the data and forget the communication piece, or like having oversight if, like, you're getting good, reliable data or not yeah, our coaches will say our coach, our coaching group at cts will say that we're not only coaching athletes with the physical prescription that we're actually giving them go out and go run two hours on wednesday and do a five hour long run on saturday or whatever that physical prescription is but we're also coaching them on how to be coached, and especially for newer athletes, who this is and this is the case with a lot of athletes that we see come in the doors is their first foray into coaching. They kind of don't know what they don't know right. They don't know how valuable the feedback is. They don't know how valuable the data is. They don't know how valuable just saying, man, I was really clumsy in the first two kilometers of the run, or something like that. They don't know how valuable everything felt Great, those three words, right, everything felt great, or today was a good day, those simple pieces of feedback. They don't realize, like, how valuable that is when it's stacked up over periods of time and that feedback becomes kind of kind of becomes consistent.
Speaker 1:But all of this I still come back to and view it through the lens of a. It is a way to individualize the training for a specific purpose. We have these general concepts of we can only increase volume to so much and by such a degree or whatever. However, whatever philosophy you actually want to use, the overriding theme across all of that is looking at a individual, sophie Coop, whoever you know, whoever we're actually working with what do they actually need? How do they need to be, how do they need to communicate on a two-way street, what volume we're applying, where intensity we're applying, and things like that, and that's not easy. I want to, kind of, I want to get back to sub. I want to get back to the sustainability piece and flip that on its head a little bit, since this podcast is timely.
Speaker 1:We're getting into the meat and potatoes of the training season. One of the things that athletes are going to want to do is undertake a training camp, which is inherently an unsustainable component of training. They're going to go out, they're going to do some sort of race recon. Some elite athletes will go do an altitude camp or a team camp or something like that and intensify their training in some way. They either intensify it by doing more volume over a concentrated period of time. They either intensify it by doing a higher frequency of workouts, harder workouts.
Speaker 1:There's a number of different ways that you can slice and dice it. The whole point of it is these training camps kind of offer like an isolated environment, so to speak. Remove them from their day-to-day environment and they can increase what they would normally be able to do, and the hope is the hope is that will reap a superior adaptation as compared to the sustainable training that they do. You know that they do week to week and I'm wondering what your perspective on that particular component is, because many times, once again, if we talk about an overreaching or overtraining or underperforming athlete, you're seeing that you're part of that mixture of training that they're doing is how are these training camps constructed? So do you have any guideposts or guidelines for athletes that are undertaking these potential training camp opportunities in terms of what's tight, how should they actually go about designing them? What things should they take into consideration when doing so?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think it's a. It's an interesting and a complex question because I think it depends very much on the athletes. It depends whether you're an elite athlete, you know where maybe a training camp isn't that much of a jump in terms of volume, compared to when an age group or an amateur athlete goes for a weekend away even, or a week away, where the jump in training might be significantly more. And also the training environment, you know. For an amateur, maybe they don't have to work, maybe they don't have their family around, whereas for an elite athlete, maybe you know, their training environment is sort of optimized to a degree where even when they stay at home it's relatively the same, whereas they can focus on their training entirely. So I think that obviously the context is important. And then I think training camps like or, yeah, like with training in general, I think I think steven styler said that research we put it recently that training is a an optimization challenge and not a maximization challenge. I think that goes for training camps as well. So it's not about trying to cram in as much training as possible in those whatever days you have available, but actually trying to optimize something in terms of an ultra context. Maybe you want to simulate your race over a three-day period or for an Ironman athlete, maybe you want to do the Ironman distance over a two-day or a three-day period, which is very specific. So you're trying to optimize something, but you're not necessarily trying to maximize for something, and I think that obviously speaks to specificity. It doesn't necessarily speaks to speak to how we're going to adapt to that then as well, which is the other important piece for you know, optimizing versus maximizing, because the end goal obviously is adaptation, and I think that's where sort of the holy grail. We still don't have it. You know we don't have the training metric that we have to follow in terms of having a guarantee that we're going to perfectly adapt to the training that we're doing, and therefore it's also very difficult to sometimes fear the load or manage the load effectively for optimizing whatever goal we're setting.
Speaker 2:So I think, from a practical perspective, what I think is always a good advice is that you shouldn't be needing another holiday after you're finishing your training camp. But it's fine if you're tired, you know, it's fine to need a, a few days easy. I think getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing. It's even better if you can combine a training camp with actually having fun and having a good time around people. But yeah, there's this, there's a few, and I'm sure I'm not the first one that says that you know, certain things in training camps are obviously not beneficial, which is, you know, trying to lose weight at the same time, or trying to, you know, go hard every single day, or combine it with excessive alcohol consumption in the evening or going partying every single day. I don't think that's that's a thing within your community. So I don't think I have to necessarily emphasize that here.
Speaker 1:So the way that I frame it up and athletes always want to do this because they want to, in their mind, to use your vocabulary they want to maximize something and what they're trying to maximize is their time out on feet but the way that I'm internalizing it is just the way that I think that you want other athletes and other coaches to internalize it, as we're trying to optimize and we might be trying to optimize for the audit, the end adaptation that we're trying to, that we're trying to achieve I. The framework that I like to use when setting these this up is, if you're going to increase your work output by X, let's just say that's two hours a day, right, and that would be a double for a lot of athletes. Most athletes aren't training two hours, or most normal athletes aren't training two hours a day. Well, let's say we wanted to decrease it by two hours a day. You also need two hours a day to not train, an additional two hours a day to not train. So not only are you allocating an extra two hours a day for the actual training component you're at, you're allocating an additional time of one X on top of that to just not do anything. So be prepared to double whatever the increase in training actually is throughout the day in order to get the benefits from it, because you also have to rest more, and that's where this all kind of like comes down to it. I can always ask an athlete to, instead of waking up at five in the morning, wake up at three in the morning to get an extra two hours, but that's not going to benefit them nearly as much as having the extra two hours of time availability to go and train and then have another two hours of availability on top of that to not do anything and just rest and absorb and absorb the training.
Speaker 1:So I think like the first thing when we start to design these training camps for athletes is start to think about the whole picture of time and where all of that time is getting allocated. Am I traveling? Am I having to do a transport from A to B in order to do like a point to point or recon or something like that? The training activity is going to take X, and then I'm also allocating some amount of time for nothing like block it off in your calendar few work things as possible, if any of those decompress as much as possible. I do think that, like when we talk about, in terms of reducing the risk for a training camp, to be part of the over or under negative part of the equation, baking in the recovery side of it, is an intentional part of it, is a big part of it all because a lot of times we can find the time availability, but what we fail to do is to find the time availability on the recovery side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that's also something that maybe people do not always appreciate that actually elite athletes spend a lot of time more, a lot of their time that they have available more on the recovery. You know they take naps every single day, which I think is a huge performance enhancer. And also, you know, oftentimes their logistics are optimized. You know oftentimes they live in a place where they don't have to travel that many minutes or hours to a pool, for instance, or to a place where they can actually do their hill reps or their long runs on the trails and all that kind of stuff. But for some, obviously and that's also like if you take triathletes that's why they go to resorts where they have the pool and the gym and the track in one place, and that can sometimes be extremely beneficial simply because you spend or you save that time going from one infrastructure to the other or from one place to the other.
Speaker 2:Another factor I think that I haven't mentioned before is obviously nutrition. I think if you do increase the training load, it's always a very good idea to be on top of nutrition, rather taking too much than too little. It's a great time and place as well to experiment with your rice nutrition, where hopefully you'll fuel enough as well, and also like don't spare the protein with. Don't spare with the protein, because I think, in terms of adaptation, that's where you know. Example, having a protein shake before going to bed can sometimes be extremely beneficial, simply because our output is so much higher as we need it for recovery.
Speaker 1:Okay, I wanted to check in with Coach Ryan one final time to talk about how we build in extra recovery for high volume athletes or for athletes who are increasing their whole training load.
Speaker 3:Earlier in this podcast, or perhaps after this little snippet, you or the guest mentions this concept of if I'm going to add two hours of training above their mean, I've got to. I would like them to have two hours of nothing. Air quotes on the other side of that and that's just a logical way of looking at it, of if I increase load to absorb that load, get the most benefit from it, I've got to have a balance of recovery on the other side. So how do we get to this? To find that right load goes back to that principle of communication and feedback. Look through their historical data in terms of when they hit this level of volume. They kind of crashed and burned when we were doing three interval workouts in the course of 10 days. It was too much. We're trying to use the data that way and then couple that with their subjective feedback as well. And how I approach this with athletes if let's call it moderate stress, in which they're not necessarily time-consuming their work stress, their life stress is not excessive Typically a four-day recovery block will do the trick.
Speaker 3:One rest day, three recovery runs, 45, 60 minutes. That's pretty straightforward. Everybody gets that. I don't care if we're doing 15 hours a week, eight hours a week, that's standard. Nine times out of 10 works really well.
Speaker 3:If I'm going to categorize a high-stressed athlete, they're time crunched. It's the scenario of like I've got to plan my schedule down to the minute to fit in my run and then go pick up the kids from practice and everything With those. They're already so close to the edge. I just give them a full week recovery block. I throw in two rest days in there, three recovery runs that 45, 60 minute duration and a couple of endurance runs because they're already so close to the edge of being overstressed.
Speaker 3:Again, going back to that principle of we're going to have nothing on the other side of that. But yeah, those are two basic ways I approach the recovery and the whole theme of this episode consistent, honest communication. Whether you're self-coached or you are coached, I think that's an important thing to hit on. The self-coach athlete can still do this, whether it's leaving comments that are private to themselves and Strava, you can do that. If you have a training peaks account, you can leave your feedback in there and, again, if it's consistent, you can go out and tease when you're thriving and when oopsies, I crashed and burn, I need to like, felt like I needed two weeks off.
Speaker 1:A hundred percent. So I want to leave the listeners with a little bit of a summary of some of the monitoring that you were talking about earlier. I'm going to link up in the show notes a blog that, that that you recently wrote with some of the previous podcast guests that now I'm looking at the author list here, so the previous podcast guests that I've had on here and it's and the title of it is an athlete's career insurance. I love that title, by the way. Implementary implementing of monitoring tools to prevent underperformance in sport and insurance is the best way to put it, because you can't completely prevent it, but you want to put systems in place to mitigate the risk as much as possible. And that's what and that's what an insurance policy you know is ultimately like set up to do is to try to mitigate, is to try to like mitigate things that are that could actually kind of go awry.
Speaker 1:You have this five pronged approach of monitoring tools and in order in an order of the chart that's in the, that's in the blog. It's training diary psychological or sorry physiological tests, resting it's in the blog. It's training diary psychological or sorry. Physiological tests, resting. Heart rate and heart rate variability. Psychological questionnaire and medical health controls. We're not going to be able to go through every single one of those components. That would take, you know, five, five podcasts. But I'm wondering if you can kind of leave the listeners with a workflow, so to speak, of how to actually use that in practice from a day-to-day perspective, week-to-week perspective, and when they would see things that would cause them to titrate their workouts up, and then the opposite, when they should, when they start seeing things that should, that could cause their workouts to titrate down, and the things that they should be taking into consideration as they're actually using some of these monitoring tools yeah, I, I think, maybe as a first comment, it depends obviously a bit how much time you want to invest in all that.
Speaker 2:It might be that if you're not a professional athlete, you're only tracking your heart rate, for example, and then you have one barometer that you're going to track and that's fine as well. Then you have to be really mindful, for example, to your heart rate and your rpe, and sometimes actually can be beneficial to focus on less parameters more, but in the end it's you know we are big proponents of just having a selected or a handful of parameters that you track on a regular basis, and whether that happens in an Excel sheet or in training peaks or in a journal, it doesn't really matter. Obviously it depends a bit whether you self-coach or you work with a coach, because if you work with a coach, then I think a digital training diary is obviously a good way to as a conversation starter, right, especially if you add comments. We would always recommend to add comments. Like you said before, even something very short can be a good feedback for the coach. Just everything is fine. So you know like you, you know there's no problem, I think, for elite athletes or also if an athlete is struggling.
Speaker 2:I think very frequent check-ins are extremely valuable, you know, just not just for a recovery, from a recovery perspective, but just simply if you're not well. I think it makes you feel good if I ask how you are every single day, or maybe not. How are you? Just like in a standardized way, but like, how are you today, you know, is it a little bit better than yesterday? I think it makes a difference. And so these are things deviating slightly from, let's say, those five components. But I think the training diary is really maybe the most important tool that you have, and then it depends very much on how much time do you want to allocate to it. How many variables are you actually tracking? I think it is a very good idea to include subjective factors such as motivation, moods, maybe things that you're not directly relating to training but can often tell a lot about where you're at. You know, I think maybe your partner or your spouse is also a good reference point for that. Just, you know someone that holds up the mirror. If you're not reflective enough to judge whether you're in a good mood or how has have I been more irritable? How have I been sleeping? All these kind of things, libido and, like I said before, I think these are things that actually tell us a lot, even though there's sometimes not maybe not so comfortable to to really dig in.
Speaker 2:Resting hard, rent and hrv I think are great tools just to track, let's say passively, and also for a coach maybe, like if you see changes there, it's always a good thing to have it. You know, if you see some something is completely out the norm for a longer time periods, I think one-off readings are not normally a reason for concern, but if it's something that is changing for a longer time period, it's something that could indicate certain things. But context is always king, right, I think. For example, now we have allergy season, so this could have an impact on HIV for sure. If you're a woman, I mean in l luteal phase, usually your resting heart rate is just higher, your hrv is lower, your sleep score is lower.
Speaker 2:It's just something that you have to know and you can add context and then it's usually less of a concern. Again, like I said, if you're a coach, then having an eye on that and rather ask once more than once less is usually beneficial. But also from an athlete perspective, giving more information is usually better than giving less information. Yeah. And then psychological questionnaires is something that if you really feel susceptible to like a lot of changes or in your mood state, then that's something that you can add. It's not something that is necessary, from my perspective, to do, like for anyone, for everyone. Yeah. And medical checks I think that's just something that is sensible to do once a year or depending on, like, when you go to, before you go to altitude. I think it's definitely sensible to check your iron status, for example. Just make sure that you're healthy on a regular basis is usually a smart idea.
Speaker 1:Out of all of these, though, is it fair to say that the training log, or the training diary, is the hero component of it, because you started out with that and then kind of breeze through the rest of them, but either because it's a more consistent measure, or whether it kind of like it can like alchemize both the performance side of it as well as the subjective component of it. Do you feel that, if athletes are to focus on anything, is that where you would steer people towards?
Speaker 2:yeah, without a doubt yeah, and that's what I haven't mentioned, sorry, like I haven't mentioned the testing, like I have mentioned it before.
Speaker 2:I think it's something that we usually do on a regular basis, like every four to six weeks, and I think most athletes have some sort of standardized session in their program where, like you can see a little bit like how you're developing. And again, that's not like a, it's not a competition, you know, it's not I'm gonna have to win this session. It's not a pass fail, it's more of like a little bit where you're at. And if you do that over a long period of time especially like taking cross-country skiers again as an example like they have different periods in the year. Like you know, summer is usually preparation phase, so you do a test when you start your training. So you know, maybe you have 10 years of data where every single year you test in the beginning of june and you can also see the long-term development. And then also, maybe you're panicking because you feel so unfit, but actually, if you can compare it to 10 years of data, you can add a bit of context.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You can see like, look, actually I was even more unfit three years ago, but then I had a great season. So I think it just gives you a little bit more confidence in what you're actually doing and obviously it's also very helpful for planning the training process and managing the training process as a coach.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you hit the nail on the head on why the training diary or the workout log can really be the hero is because you have more data points.
Speaker 1:You have data points every single day and then, if you want to take just the critical workouts, you've got two to three data points a week.
Speaker 1:And if you're consistently evaluating those, week after week, month after month, year after year not to say you don't like physiological the physiological testing loses, it's, starts to lose its cost benefit analysis the more you analyze the training, because the training just kind of gives you the best snapshot of where you're at, because it's so consistent. The physiological test, although you know it gets more accurate standardized test, whatever it is, it's still a snapshot of one single moment in time during that one particular day. And so for the athletes out there, if you wanted to boil down this whole you know podcast into something like really simple keep track of your training and evaluate your training on a day to day basis. You don't have to get as sophisticated as looking at all the artificial intelligence that comes out of the data or anything like that Just what did you do, how much of it and how did you feel? It really doesn't get any more complicated than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:Well, sophie, this has been great. Will you, before we go, will you let the athletes know a little bit more about like, where they can find more about you, more about mirror, more about the work that you guys are doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, about you, more about mirror, more about the work that you guys are doing. Yeah, so our, I think you will add the website. So I think usually it's best to just visit the website. We have, I think, quite some interesting articles there. They're all for your educational purposes, so they're for free.
Speaker 2:We are also on social media platform Instagram, linkedin and X and yeah, so you can fill the if you're dealing with or if you don't know what are your of risk of underperformance. So it's a risk assessment, it's not a diagnosis. We have an assessment of your risk of underperformance on our website which you can also fill in for free, and if you fill that, then it is up to you whether you want the consultation with us. We also work with organizations and teams. So if you're part of an organization or part of a team or a federation which is interested to prevent underperformance, or even if you're part of a team or a federation which is interested to prevent underperformance, or even if you're part of a corporate organization and you think actually you know things like we haven't talked about allostatic loads, but if you're affected by burnout or underperforming employees, you know just like work-life balance is geared towards the overload side, then I think that's also something where we can help with implementing systems that can recognize or prevent ideally prevent that in the first place.
Speaker 1:That's excellent. I will have links to all that in the show notes. So thank you for your time and, more importantly, thank you for the work that you do with athletes.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, Jason.
Speaker 1:All right, folks, there you have it. There you go. Much thanks to Sophie and coach Ryan for coming on the podcast today and helping us try to understand this sometimes mysterious aspect of underperformance syndrome, overtraining syndrome, overtraining, whatever you want to call it. It's been known by those names, as well as many more, over the course of my coaching career, and it's something that we are always constantly keeping tabs on as coaches and as athletes, and, as we discussed during the podcast, there are a number of both communication as well as technological tools that we have used to try to get a fix on this problem, and what I have found throughout the course of my coaching career is there is no one silver bullet. You have to really alchemize all of those to make correct decisions on how much training load is enough, where you might be actually stepping over the line, and then course corrective measures to use when you think you have actually stepped over that line. All right, folks, as always, this podcast is brought to you without any advertisers or sponsors in any way, shape or form. There's no discount codes or anything like that you'll ever hear on.
Speaker 1:This podcast is something that I'm very proud of and something that I have been insistent on ever since the inception of this podcast. So if you want to help support this podcast, all you have to do is go to my website, jasoncoopcom, and subscribe to Research Essentials for Ultra Running. We take scientific topics like the one that we talked about today and we break them down into much greater detail. We've had a lot of coaches and high-level athletes be subscribers of that content and they all absolutely love it. I get a lot out of producing that content each and every single month with my contributors and co-authors, professor Nick Tiller, phd and Stephanie Howe, phd, where we break down the latest science and research as it relates to ultra running. All this starts at the measly price of $9.99 a month. It's pretty darn good investment for high quality content. You'll go check that out. The links to that are in the show notes. And that is it for today, folks. We're going to come back next week with another killer episode, but until then, I will see you all out on the trails.
