Prepare to turbocharge your cycling performance and vitality as we team up with physiologist Ryan Kohler to unravel the secrets of VO2 max. Discover how pushing your limits can not only advance your endurance on the bike but also fortify your health for a long and vigorous life. Host Adam Pulford and Ryan Kohler also discuss how to design and execute VO2 max intervals in your training, and how Junior (U19) cyclists should approach high intensity interval training.
Key topics in this episode:
Links:
Ryan Kohler's Website
Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast Episode 70
Research: Survival of the fittest: VO2max, a key predictor of longevity?
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Guest: Ryan Kohler, M.S.
Ryan is a career endurance coach with over 20 years experience working with student-athletes and adults in the fields of health/fitness and sports performance. He specializes in science-based approaches to exercise, with a focus on finding the improvements that can make the biggest impact on your lifestyle.
Education:
Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 14 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
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Prepare to turbocharge your cycling performance and vitality as we team up with physiologist Ryan Kohler to unravel the secrets of VO2 max. Discover how pushing your limits can not only advance your endurance on the bike but also fortify your health for a long and vigorous life. Host Adam Pulford and Ryan Kohler also discuss how to design and execute VO2 max intervals in your training, and how Junior (U19) cyclists should approach high intensity interval training.
Key topics in this episode:
Links:
Ryan Kohler's Website
Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast Episode 70
Research: Survival of the fittest: VO2max, a key predictor of longevity?
ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST
Guest: Ryan Kohler, M.S.
Ryan is a career endurance coach with over 20 years experience working with student-athletes and adults in the fields of health/fitness and sports performance. He specializes in science-based approaches to exercise, with a focus on finding the improvements that can make the biggest impact on your lifestyle.
Education:
Host
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for more than 14 years and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform
GET FREE TRAINING CONTENT
Join our weekly newsletter
CONNECT WITH CTS
Website: trainright.com
Instagram: @cts_trainright
Twitter: @trainright
Facebook: @CTSAthlete
From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now onto our show. Welcome to a new year at the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.
Speaker 1:To kick off a new season, I thought it would be fun to talk about the fountain of youth, but that doesn't exist. So I figured we'd talk about something that does exist, which are key aspects of longevity, health and performance. We'll not only identify what these aspects are, but we'll talk about how to train for them and develop habits to cultivate a whole lifestyle around them. Now, to discuss this a little bit more, we have a very special guest today. He's the founder and head coach at Rocky Mountain Devo, the top physiologist at Fastalk Labs, as well as working alongside Dr Andy Pruitt at the Boulder Center of Sports Medicine. He spent two years as the manager of the BMC mountain bike Devo team and has worked with the USA Cycling Junior mountain bike program for the past eight years. With a degree in exercise science and a master in sport nutrition, we could literally ask this guy any question, as I regularly did when I worked with him at CTS, and he would always have the answer. So, ryan Kohler, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks, adam. Not sure I have all the answers now, but glad to be on here talking about this and, yeah, good to be on the podcast after our CTS days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's for sure. Well, you know, when clarification already, if he never, if he didn't have the answer, he could usually go research it and develop a good answer after that, so which I'm sure we're going to do today. But the first question I have for you, ryan, is you know, first of all, just thank you for joining us, because I know you got a couple of kids, demanding job, wife and all the things right. But I got to ask are we interrupting any tele-skiing or other Colorado adventures just to make you talk about nerdy endurance stuff today, or what?
Speaker 2:You know, not yet. Really, the resorts are getting there, but the only thing we're interrupting this week is the Festive 500. A lot of trainer miles on Zwift, that's about it. So this is a welcome break to all that.
Speaker 1:So you're knocking it out on the trainer? Huh.
Speaker 2:We're trying. It's the only option, because it's not happening outside. I can guarantee you that.
Speaker 1:That's true, we did. We had a whole newsletter article, we had a podcast about the Festive 500. We talked about indoor, outdoor and all this kind of stuff. So good luck to you. I am not doing it. Good idea, just a little. Yeah, all right, man. Well, we want to talk about these key aspects of longevity, health and performance. So, straight over to you what is the one biggest key thing that you're looking at, or what is maybe a couple, if you had to choose more than one? Well, it's one aspect that you're looking at. As a physiologist, as a coach, with all your time in a lab, what's the number one thing to look at that our listeners can identify with when we're talking about health, performance, longevity?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this one doesn't always go over great with the endurance athletes because we've had a bit of a change. These topics come up every five, 10 years or so and they sort of become hot topics again. But, like you said, there's multiple that are in there. So for me today it's VO2 max is really what I start to look at and that's something that fell off the radar for a while.
Speaker 2:From what I've seen in the labs and we see over the years we've had a big push in zone two and mitochondrial health and LT1, lactate threshold, one with more accessible lactate testing. So we've seen a lot of that stuff come about for endurance athletes and that really sort of took the spotlight for a number of years and VO2 max got pushed on the back burner a little bit. But the concept has been around for decades and it's really when we talk about longevity and health and performance, you can sort of put different percentages on how important that is across those different areas, but in terms of longevity and health it's a huge predictor. The higher your VO2 max, the better your quality of life and that's something that I always try to bring into the coaching with someone, whether it's someone highly trained or relatively new, in different age groups too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's exactly it. And when I was looking at topics and questions from our audience members, this is something that I wanted to just come out the first week of the season and come out swinging with, because it's like, hey, if you want the secret, there it is, and it's been here for a while. We'll talk about that here a little bit more in a second. But for those of us who maybe don't know what VO2 max is, or kind of scratch your head and be like what do we actually mean by that, can you tell us just kind of a working definition of what VO2 max is and how it applies to health, and we'll get to performance as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we've got a couple of things. We have the V and then the O2 and then the max piece. So it's this amount of oxygen that we can essentially bring into the body and that comes into the lungs and that gets exchanged in the lungs and then transported out to the muscles and then finally taken up, exchanged in the muscles, and then the max portion is basically saying well, how quickly can we do that at our maximum capacity? So there's a lot of things that play in there, where it brings in your respiratory system and then even what's happening at the cellular level out at the muscle level. So it's a fairly complex process, for how simple the definition really is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's it. And I think the reason why it's correlative to health as well as performance, because from the performance side of things, I think our audience is like, well, yeah, if I get more oxygen in, boom, I'm going to go faster, but also like if I can get more oxygen into the system, or if the VO2 max is higher, it usually means that my equipment, my mitochondrial density, my red blood cells, all the equipment that goes on into carrying oxygen into my body, is like fully optimized as well, which means my vital organs, my cells, they have plenty of oxygen to thrive, not only just survive correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly yeah. And that that VO2 max, we also can hear it referred to as like your engine, your aerobic engine, from you know, at times, and that's that's a great description, because that that word aerobic is really the key component. You know, when we do exercise there's a certain, you know, at 100 watts versus two, versus 300 watts and so on, there's a certain oxygen demand for someone, you know, and that's when we, when we go through those intensities, that demand needs to be met and if we can meet that aerobically, using that strong aerobic system, that's a good thing for endurance athletes. And then, yeah, where we start to see that limitation come in, we know, well, hey, things are changing there and our sustainability now is dropping off dramatically. But, yeah, that's why, like you said, it's, it's those aerobic processes require oxygen. The more we can bring in and deliver, yeah, the better it is for that whole body system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in one last thing, and Ryan said it, but what we're talking about here is quality life. It's not extending the years of life. So if you have a 90 VO2, it doesn't mean that you're going to you know, live to be a 102. That's a whole other conversation. But generally speaking, quality of life will also go with it, so long as we have good habits, and we'll talk about that too. So let's just go again kind of like straight to that target center of the bullseye that we're aiming for here. If VO2 max is so awesome, how do we improve it? What can we tell our audience and on how to get the biggest VO2 max possible?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we know the VO2 max is fairly trainable, so it's one of those components that should be included in your training right. And when we think about endurance athletes and the training breakdown, we know there is this big focus on aerobic development zone to work and that's that's been a big push over the years. But the other side of the coin is that upper end, so that's that zone two stuff is the easier area of the zone. You know, depending what model you're using zone three or zone five and you know polarized or a five plus zone model that's where you start working into that VO2 max intensity and that's something that should be incorporated into the training. You know it's.
Speaker 2:It's one of those things where, to a certain point, a little bit more can be better, but you can sort of quickly hit, you can quickly overdo it on that as well. So you know, for some folks, one or two quality sessions a week like that are totally reasonable in terms of time. The time per session is fairly low by comparison. So some folks may get, you know, adaptive responses with, you know, five, six minutes per session. We see some research in certain populations where just a few minutes of high intensity is great and they may be coming from a very low level of fitness and that's all they need. You know, working up to maybe 12 or 15 minutes for a lot of folks is a reasonable amount of time. So it's it's fairly short. It allows you the chance to have that high quality and it plays nicely with the other training that you would do as an endurance athlete.
Speaker 1:So what you're saying is, if you're crunched on time throughout the week, we shouldn't just do five days of VO2 work nonstop. Yeah, five days, vo2 intervals all the time yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, seven days, seven it's not better. No, it more is better.
Speaker 1:If you can, am and PM sessions every day, yeah, yeah, yeah, all joking aside, yes, there is a mixture here, right In the aerobic development side of things, like Ryan said, vastly important. But a few qualifiers here. I did do an episode all about this, actually in its episode number 70. And for our, some of our audience members that have written in and said I listen on Spotify, the episode numbers aren't on there. They are on there now and they will be moving forward. We're working on the historical aspects of it too, but the date on that one is October 7th 2021. So if that helps in going back and learning all there is to know about training VO2 max, please go and listen to that one. That's a very in-depth episode about how to do this. Ryan, when you were saying about doing about seven minutes of VO2 work and working up toward like a 15 minute, can you explain what that means? Like how would you break that up with intervals?
Speaker 2:So one of my favorite workouts, my go-to workout, is four by four, so four intervals of four minutes each and that's just one of those classic ones that gets you 16 minutes of work time roughly and that's always been a go-to for me. I might switch up for some athletes and we go to that three minute range, but somewhere in that, you know, three to roughly six-ish minute range is more what I look for. With those, you know, longer intervals and then on the other side, if you go shorter, you can look at those very short on-off style intervals 40-20s where you go hard for 40 seconds, rest for 20, 30-30, 30-15. You can sort of, you can mix those up different ways. But yeah, that's what we're really looking at is accumulating time in that zone, quality time where you know you're not only and this may be getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but you know we train with different devices but power and heart rate are two of the big ones, but it's when I look at the training I'm looking to see.
Speaker 2:One, you know, is our heart rate achieving a certain amount of time in there, so we know we're spending enough time. That is efficiently high percentage of VO2 max. But then also, if we're working with power, then are we able to actually sustain that output. And you know, can we do. We see that across, say, all four intervals where we're, you know, at an appropriate power, exercising intensely enough as well. If we see the first interval go off, great, but then we end up dropping down to threshold, that's not a quality interval, even though our heart rate will still continue to rise. So we have to look at both of those to really focus on that quality component.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you mentioned that. A quick question on that is if you do see power dipping down into threshold or below, what do you tell your athlete? To keep going, or do we shorten the intervals or what do you do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, if we see that then I would start off just checking to see how they felt that day. We we need to assess that readiness and say, well, did you come into this well rested, was it just a bad day? Or, potentially, are those targets set a little bit too high? Or was your pacing strategy off Did you? You know, we, when we look talk about VO2 interval let's say a 4x4 we can start off really hard and then do a peak and fade approach where you eventually kind of find that sustainable power still well above threshold, but you compare that to more of a targeted approach where you go up and you get like the nice tabletop. We can just look at those different approaches and see, you know, was it? Was it more of a tactical error or were you not prepared? Or do we just have to reduce your targets and change that up so you get better quality?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and that's so the reason I asked that question is for a lot of our audience members. You got to know that VO2 work is not perfect. It's gonna be messy and you should go out and you should fail. Actually, sometimes the goal is to fail through that so that if you're working with your coach or if you're coaching yourself, you can look at that data and then kind of Adjust accordingly, because sometimes it is shorter intervals, sometimes it's not spiking right and doing more anaerobic contribution to the effort, making it more block style so you get through it.
Speaker 1:Or you know kind of what why Ryan was saying before where Say you start by with 4x4, because that's what you heard me and Ryan talk about. Well, it, maybe you only get through to the intervals. Okay, because that's all you can handle right now. Completely appropriate, like start where you're at and then build up from there, and that's that's some just like solid go-to Advice on VO2 work, because it is super, super hard, it's very emotional and it's very messy.
Speaker 2:It'll never be perfect Exactly, I don't even say, just to follow up on that I had a nice little breakthrough from an athlete this morning who he was doing 4x4s and historically he did them on the trainer on erg mode, where it was this really nice little, you know, perfectly drawn out interval session. He did them outdoors and it was on, you know, roughly a four-minute climb and His, his feedback at the end, you know, we saw it and we. There was a lot more variability, of course, as expected, but his feedback was, you know, wow, that was really hard number one and the takeaway that he that he came away with today was what I really learned wasn't about making the power or anything like that, because he hit his targets, which was fine. The big takeaway was I learned how to relax and and settle into that pain cave.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, and if you can do that, that's gonna bring the quality, because I feel, like you said, they're messy and it's easy to think too when you're doing those workouts. It's easy to get yourself in that totally gripped mode where you're like stressed and just just bearing yourself and and you know you finish and that's why you're hung over the bars cross-eyed and you know, and that's another piece of feedback is always given athlete. Just like try to keep one in the chamber if you can. Like, don't finish like that, because then you're gonna Prolong your recovery.
Speaker 1:And then if that means we only do one a week, well, let's fix it so you can do two of those a week for sure and I think to like we talked about the aerobic aspect of these things and you know, before we do VO to work, oftentimes it's it's it's building the athlete up Aerobically to the point where they can now benefit and handle Adequate amount of VO to work that is high quality, based on power and heart rate data. So, with that being said, ryan, like what would you recommend in a way of I don't know, maybe overall percentage of of Time spent aerobically versus anaerobic layer? What? What's one thing that our audience should Pay attention to before they go into a round of VO to work? Like, where would you want your athletes to be before we Hit VO to at this time of year or at any time in the year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. I think I'd like to see I mean, I don't want to see them fresh, that's probably the first thing. So, knowing where they're coming from, I like to have them coming from a good base so they might be doing zone two, maybe some tempo done or done the right way in the right intensity. But I want to make sure that they sort of have that that itch of like hey, I'm ready for this, like, let's do intensity and just that readiness, sort of assessing their mood, can give us a great handle on it.
Speaker 2:I think the tricky part is if you have someone coming in who's Trying to hold a fairly high volume of Threshold work perhaps, or they're on the trainer a lot this year and maybe racing a bunch on Zwift, you know we would need to look at those things like, hey, what's, what's your training load looking like now? That CTL, that ATL, would it? What are those looking like coming into this and how does that compare to Previous seasons? So if they have historical data, you know, are you coming in at a place where, hey, you've reached a peak CTL for three years? Is that a great place to do it? I don't know, maybe, but it's, it's something where we just need to sort of take, take that information and build out their story to say, yes, this is a good time and are you really just fresh to start handling this stuff? You know, yeah, there's other willingness to also, you know, shift away from other training to support the high intensity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the perfect answer, in my opinion. Well, a few weeks ago we did a podcast about readiness, about how to bring yourself into a block fresh. So roll back maybe three or four weeks, audience members, if you miss that one, but that's it and I think To answer that question that I just asked I mean that's a complicated Question because it depends on so many variables, but I think you hit the nail on the head where, if, if, like our audience members, they've been training for a while. So general fitness probably good, but the key thing before you enter in a view to block of training like this is get fresh For sure, full stop.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're new to endurance training, it may be six months or something that maybe give yourself a little bit more time of aerobic development. We're talking zone one, zone two, zone three, zone for all the zones, right, progress in a way follow a training program. That's good, and then we hit rounds of VO2, but then we also cycle back around. As Ryan said before, once you enter in this VO2 Block of training, you're probably what going hard, two days a week, with the rest not hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I find when, when I'm in that block and it's true, you know Proper VO2 training, you know getting ready for an event, versus maybe this time of year where I'm using it more as Maintenance and keep it fun, then it's yeah, two days a week solid if it's this time of year, and they probably won.
Speaker 1:Let's explore that for a second to keep it fun. And this time of year meaning we're talking about January when we're recording this Talk about some of the goals there with your athlete, like what's an end goal that you're looking for as a coach? Not only fun, but from maybe the like, the data standpoint and what is that one day of VO2 doing for an athlete? That's right, the trainer, and not right in the tone of all you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean for one, it's giving them a balance and we're looking at just how can we best spend the time. Essentially, for my athletes it's always going back and saying, all right, like what's that vision for this year. And then, as we bring that down to essentially quarters, then we say, yeah, how does it? Does it? Well, one, does it fit in right, Does it fit in to do some type of high intensity training? And usually that's a yes, but it's a balance thing, right? If you're on the trainer, nobody wants to be on the trainer for that long. So there's that balance component.
Speaker 2:And then it's also like you said earlier. It's something where if you do some VO2 max workouts now and fail at them, there's no consequence. So this is a great time of year to learn that and just and you can even take a more conservative approach to say, hey, let's build you into these. So you learn as you go and if you fail, you fail, we try it again next week. You know, and the other aspect of it in terms of the physiology or performance outcomes would be to just keep a little bit of that load in there, because otherwise they wouldn't get it, and that you know, the higher the intensity, the quicker you lose those training effects. So it's something where, if we can keep keep one foot in the door by doing it once a week, then yeah, I think it's a good, it's a helpful piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's it and that is also something that I use with my low volume athletes is keeping some high intensity in there, because it's going to maintain VO2 max, it's going to maintain anaerobic energy systems so that when you do come back to you know high volume or group rides or something like that, it's there versus, in my opinion, if all you do is zone two for 10 to 12 weeks, you're you're going to lose adaptation on your VO2 max in anaerobic capacity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and particularly for the master's athlete too, where you know, we know they're losing some of those high force muscle fibers and if we can keep them in touch with that, that's a great way to keep them feeling fresh.
Speaker 1:So let's let's talk about some of these other aspects that go into building and maintaining VO2 max, Ryan. So how does, how does genetics play a role? Because I think historically VO2 max may have gotten a bad rap of genetically set I can't do much with it, but all of a sudden you also said it's very trainable. So let's talk about some of those dilemmas in the world of physiology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's one of those things that we see in science where we had, I mean, there's, there's support to say, hey, yeah, there's a huge genetic component. And basically, you know, we always heard, hey, you picked your parents or you didn't pick the right parents, and you know, so we've, we've had that and I think that's part of science is, yeah, we'll see those messages come out. But it's also we see the results outside, and this is sometimes where the research may lag behind a little bit, because there's always new methods of training and ways to apply training, stress and plenty of great coaches that are exploring this and they may find, hey, you know, I got a 12% increase and that flies in the face of this research article. Okay, that's great.
Speaker 2:When my athletes, you know, ask about and this is one of the things when I'm testing someone, they're always, you know, they get their VOT max and they say, well, how much can I improve? I'm like, I don't know, let's try it. You know, we don't know, you know, and that's one thing, and I'll tell them that same story of, hey, yeah, there's a strong genetic component. But let's figure out what works for you, what do you respond well to, and then let's find out. Maybe it's only 5%, maybe it's more, yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't have the numbers here in front of me, but you spent a lot more time in human performance labs than I do these days. But I mean, we're talking about a trainability effect of five to upwards of 20%, or is that a?
Speaker 2:That's really. Yeah. Now, that's totally reasonable, yeah, okay. Yeah, I think you tend to see those higher percentages typically in the less fit individuals more like the clinical studies. But, yeah, yeah, totally reasonable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think for audience members listening here, you know, if you've been one that's like, oh my, my VO two max it's. You know, my, my parents are bad, or where my parents are good, I don't need to train it because I'm solid Like it's. That's not the case they do. In my opinion, you should train VO two max for performance, as well as these longevity aspects that we're talking about here, because it's going to move the needle in the way of going fast, which is super fun, and also just becoming more fit and more oxygenated human being, which is vital for, yeah, health and wellness, exactly. So what other things go into it? I don't know, from a nutrition side of things, do you eat a bowl of kale and does your VO two max increase? Or? And then let's talk about sleep.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kale and seaweed, that's Okay just kidding, don't don't eat bowls of kale. That's not okay. So what role does nutrition play, ryan, if any at all? I have no idea You're the nutritionist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the nutrition. You know the whole nutrition field is. It's interesting how it's always evolving and then changing and I feel like it's a. It's just an evil pinball game half the time where we're just bouncing back and forth on a board. But yeah, in general, the way I look at nutrition, I mean there are, we know, there are specific things that can support particular areas of your performance.
Speaker 2:For VO two max, you know we're talking about that aerobic system, we're talking about basically a near maximal involvement of muscles. So we need we need a lot of this support. We need there's a high O two drive, so we need to support all of those things. I haven't seen a lot in terms of like, I don't know of any magic supplement that's going to dramatically shoot your VO two max up. But I look at nutrition in the sense of saying, okay, you know, we want to have a good micronutrient balance that will generally support that level of activity. And if we're getting in adequate energy right, if our, if our energy availability is high enough to support changes and adaptations, we've got that P style. If we have a good macronutrient distribution of carbohydrate, fat and protein, then we're going to be able to, you know, replace the carbohydrate that we burn during high intensity and any muscle damage that comes in. We can use protein to help support that amino acid pool.
Speaker 2:And then the micronutrient standpoint. We look at that and yet there's tons and tons of things that you can go into there and all the way down to the cellular components to say, okay, where does magnesium fit into it? And in particular, supplements. But yeah, we can look at all of those and find areas where they might fit, but in general it's.
Speaker 2:I think it really comes back to say you know, it's that general healthy approach of a varied diet with a good mixture of nutrients, particularly from those colorful foods, and if we can do that consistently, that's going to give us a great starting point, I think for most people. The second we start going down especially for for time crunched cyclists, right the second we start going down the individual supplementation route of, oh, get you know, magnesium for this and iron for that and B12 for this. It's too much to manage, you know. So, and and I think the biggest thing is in nutrition is our habits and how they fit into our lifestyle. So if we can maximize those, get those right 80% of the time, yeah, we'll support ourselves to, to create an environment where we can do quality VO2 max work, which means then we can work at a high enough percentage of it and give us the recovery so that we can add and do that consistently over time.
Speaker 1:That's it. There's no magic pill. There is no magic food here. This is the boring answer. What actually matters, and it is the yeah, eating colorful stuff, boohoo, right, but if we make you know habits of doing that and we eat enough total calories and we eat enough total carbohydrate, like Ryan's talking about, we're gonna be able to have more training days, train better, recover faster and get the benefit of training, which is adaptation. But we don't do that without sleep. So, ryan, I'll just plug my favorite activity here in the world how much sleep should we be getting if we want to maintain and build our view to max?
Speaker 2:Oh man. Yeah, this is a tough one. I get a lot of pushback when I tell people nine hours, but they are like you're, you're getting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that's what I mean, that's what I go for. It's. It's something that I try to always promote. If you can get nine hours I found personally and with athletes that can do they just feel great, the recovery is good, they're monitoring things like resting, heart rate and hrv, and those things stay in good places then you know, and I know, it's just not realistic for everyone. Some people are like, well, you know, I can't do any more than five, six as a gift, you know, and if that's the case, then yeah, that's what we have to work with. But that's that's a point where we might go back and say, hey, let's look at nutrition in your lifestyle habits to see if we can at least better support those six hours. You know, if, if eight or nine is an absolute definitely not happening, you know. But yeah, like, eight to nine is a place where I'm pretty staunchly in there.
Speaker 1:And for listeners who have kids and they're like hell. No, I ain't getting nine like Ryan. How many kids you have?
Speaker 2:I've got two boys and they do their best to ensure I don't get it, but it's like training. It's like training. It's yeah and that's where the responsibility comes back on me to say, if I want to train, well, I'm gonna have the organization here to make that happen, or at least as close as possible to it, and it's not always ideal, but you know you're pushing toward it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I can't remember who said it, but there's a quote out there that says treat, treat sleep like an activity and you'll have better success.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think eight to nine hours adequate. Yeah, exactly yeah, and it's like you said. It's setting yourself up for success with it, just like anything else. You have to create those habits to know that, hey, when I get on the bike to do a training session, I had a snack or I, you know, or I'm rested or whatever it is, it's the same thing for sleep. You create that environment, create the habits that gives you the best chance at success in that event.
Speaker 1:Yeah, For some of my athletes who have or ring, we have it set up so that it cues them an hour before or 90 minutes before to start to get ready for sleep. And when I talk with my athletes about that, it is it the habit is putting. You know, turning off Netflix, yeah, it's going up to bed starting. You know, do your bedroom routine, brush teeth, you know, get ready and then start reading low light and set the stage for sleep. And that's how you develop those good habits for sleep, as opposed to just finishing the movie because you started it or Let your kids stay up super late or whatever else. But yeah, I mean, treat it like an activity and they will have success.
Speaker 1:So, speaking of kids, ryan and we're kind of getting late in the day here, but you and I both work with juniors. I know you're super passionate about it, but what can we say to our juniors or parents who are listening to have junior athletes in the way of developing and maintaining V2 Max, if they're not even thinking about, you know, being a master's athlete or maintaining lean body mass when they're 70 plus years old? They're just thinking about going fast and ripping it up right now. But what would you say to our juniors, or the parents who have juniors that are racing bikes, in the way of developing and maintaining V2.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think for the juniors themselves, like we know they can, they're really good at going fast and if we throw them out, you know, out at that V2 Max intensity, they'll do it All day long until their bodies completely give out.
Speaker 2:So I think they already have that gift to be able to do that. So I think for them, like learning how to enjoy it is a big thing and learning how to sort of tame it in a way where, like so they can see the value of it, because their tendency is they'll just do that as often as they can until they crack and then they'll go do it again after they rest up. But learning how to sort of tame it and and then that also helps put them into that position of understanding the value of it, as, as they go through that long term development process, to say, oh okay, I know how to train this, I understand the benefits of it, I understand that I can do too much and you know, if they're in that mindset, sort of that more professional mindset as they're developing, then they see that as a very important thing I can bring with me over the years, 1020, 3040 plus years later. They can bring with them and I think, like we said earlier, it's a fun way to train and that brings a lot of enjoyment. So it's it's one of those things for the juniors. I would encourage them to explore it and, you know, just try to realize the benefits of it now so they have it and then they have that mindset of like, vo2 max isn't just for performance, vo2 max is also something I bring in later in life to stay healthy. And yeah, you know, and on the parent side, I think I see this more and more.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you might as well, but you know, I see, with particularly juniors that are doing a mixture of sports, I hear from parents that you know they they're doing so much high intensity, like the in the pool swim team, for example. They're like, oh, the coach has been doing intervals five days a week and I'm just like, oh god, why? And the parents know, they know that something isn't right with that, you know, because their kids come home so tired. So I think for the parents just learning this stuff and like, yeah, listening to podcasts like this about it and learning to say, oh, that's not right.
Speaker 2:And I now have a little bit more information where I can, hey, go talk to the coach and say, hey, you know, let me learn why you're doing this and let me explain to you how it's impacting, you know, our kids recovery and I think it just gives them that ability to have that conversation because in the end it's it's the coaches, the kids, parents, we all. It's it's all about that junior, you know, or that group of juniors. So any information we can get to help with that, to prevent them from burning out, is crucial because they don't necessarily know how to prevent it themselves. You know they listen to coach and they do what coach says and they go from there. So I think for parents they play a huge role.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very vital role in fact, for better or worse. I generally think better. But I do have the parents of my juniors really highly involved in and I encourage asking questions about why we're doing what we're doing. I share, you know. I link their training peaks accounts to the parents as well as the athlete, as well as maybe a team director, something like that, so everybody is communicating and on the same page. And then also, you know you lean into the boring stuff again. It's like educate them on why zone two or zone three or zone four, whatever is boring to you, but like the whole you know, buffet of training intensities, why that's so important and why hitting the gas every single day is not the greatest decision, right, even though they want to do it. Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, I have to ask if this is such a well established concept of V02 Max directly correlating to performance, longevity and health, and we've known for some time. Why do we humans keep searching for the Holy Grail when we seem to already have it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question. I'm going to try not to get on a soapbox, but it's for me, it's. I think as a whole we are. We don't want to accept the answer that it's actually quite simple and it just takes hard work and dedication and commitment and I think when we put those things out in front of someone, they want to go the other way because they want to find an easy way out. And it's like you could do it the right way, which is the boring way, or you can look for the way that's easier, where you're going to put chocolate on the broccoli to get it in your mouth, and I think, yeah, that's just our nature. So, as coaches, yeah, it's always going back to like this should be kind of boring because it's just you put your head down and if you want to do this, put your head down and you go and you commit to it, and I think people don't want to hear that.
Speaker 1:I agree with you, full stop. I agree with you. So I'd say there's no better way to summarize the conversation that we had today other than your response, ryan. So we'll leave it there. But if our audience members loved what we talked about today and they want to connect more with you, where can they find you?
Speaker 2:Probably on my website is the easiest at justrockymountaindivocom.
Speaker 1:Cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We'll link to that in our show notes. I know that you make appearances and you're also working on the background over at Fast Talk Labs. Is there any episodes there to showcase, or should we just tell people to go check out Fast Labs?
Speaker 2:There's a number at Fast Talk Labs. I can't think of any specific ones off the top of my head.
Speaker 1:They go super in depth on quite a few things, whereas we try to keep it a little bit more fast-paced over here, but they do work well for the topics where you want to deep dive into, and Ryan's there on a regular basis. So, ryan Kohler, thank you so much for joining us today and talking about VO2 Max and longevity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you Loved it. It's a great topic.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainritecom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.