Dr. Jeroen Swart. Success means being able to have the time to breathe, to exercise, to pause, and Dr. Jeroen Swart is a professor of sport and exercise medicine. He is also an ex professional cyclist, and in 2018, he joined Tour de France team UAE as the head of performance. There are just some athletes that are just gifted and There's nothing that you or I could do to actually match their performance, even if we did the same training or more.

The simplest session that actually has been shown to have the greatest benefit is a minimum of five full on 30 second sprints. Multi sport athletes have an increased risk of dying. How do you train? What is the strategy? How does someone train for the Tour de France? So 10 minutes of exercise can be more beneficial than three hours of training.

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Dr. Jeroen Swart. Uh, first of all, thanks for coming on the show. Um, it's great to have you. Um, I wanted to start off with, uh, what you think are the main factors, uh, in performance, what are the things that dictate performance with athletes? Goodness. Let's dive straight in. Thanks for inviting me. You again, after all these years, what are the main factors?

You know, there aren't any main factors performance is such a, uh, multi dimensional thing that you can't really distill it down to some very, very key features, uh, you've got to break it down into all the different components and. If you're looking at, in my field, endurance performance, uh, in cycling, road, mountain bike there, I mean, key elements, obviously the physical capacity of the athlete, and that's, but multiple different aspects to it from genetic composite, uh, uh, you know, genetic elements, including athletes that have naturally high VO two max training induced adaptations, particularly metabolic capacity.

So their ability to oxidize fats as a preferential fuel source. Carbohydrates oxidatively, um, strength, functional strength. Uh, then you can delve into the psychological aspects. Resilience is very important. Uh, personality types are important, even though there's quite a diversity of personality types, how those personality types adapt to the, the competitive environment.

Nutrition is a huge, uh, factor in endurance performance. Uh, biomechanics aerodynamics are increasingly important. So there isn't one factor that I would say two or three factors. It is. a huge range of different variables. And, and that's really what makes it interesting from my perspective. You know, I'm a, I'm a generalist.

And for those people that aren't familiar with what generalists are, they're people who have no, uh, a little about a lot. In other words, I delve into different spheres and I have published science in various different domains from nutrition to biomechanics to. laboratory performance testing to training techniques to various different aspects, including the brain.

And having that broad based knowledge allows you to see how all these different aspects interact to create the whole, because specialists have a very narrow field of vision. And so they often miss what's outside of their field of vision. They also become overly focused about their particular expertise.

And aren't able to see what level of energy or, uh, in a team that's got a particular budget, how much budget is reasonable in terms of what their specific expertise delivers in terms of performance, generalists are able to see how all these different things fit together and then maximize your bang for your buck or your bang for your time by focusing on first of all, the low hanging fruit, and then.

The other fruits that where you can still see significant gains. So that's a long winded answer to your question, but it gives you some idea. And, uh, I mean, you, you mentioned with the genetic component there, so there are just some athletes that are just gifted and there's nothing that you or I could do to actually match their performance, even if we did the same training or more.

Look, sometimes, You know, for that very key individual, for instance, genetics plays a big role. Those kinds of individuals come around once in a generation. Certainly having that advantage is helpful, but you still have to fill in all the other blocks. So cycling in particular is a sport that rewards training.

It's a highly trainable performance. And so even individuals who are somewhat less genetically gifted are able to perform at a very high level, even at a world tour level and even winning races. But, uh, obviously if you've got the, the goods and you're born with them, that helps and that makes it easier to reach that level.

And who is Dr. Jeroen Swart? Sure. A father. I have two beautiful daughters. And so that comes first and foremost, and a partner and everything else comes second to that. And so the rest as it relates to this interview is, is I'm a mix of things. I'm a medical doctor, I'm a specialist sports physician. I am an exercise physiologist.

I am a high performance coach. Um, and, uh, I'm an entrepreneur. Um, and so I'm, I'm a mix of multiple different facets. And they're all complimentary in some way. And I think that's helped in terms of achieving the things that I've been able to do in my life. And, uh, I don't see any element of what I've done in the past as being redundant and, and, and regretting spending time on anything, everything I've done, whether it's racing professionally, whether it's creating businesses, whether it's studying medicine and, and now spending so much time on high performance.

They all provide different skills that, that complements the work that I do on most days. And, um, what, what led you into this, you know, journey of, of health and, uh, and cycling specifically. I mean, that's a big focus. Was that always something that you'd sort of envisioned or, or was that sort of something that naturally happened at the time?

So I was always in, I was always interested in sport and I was always interested in physiology and, you know, when I was young, we didn't have the internet, you know, we had, uh, we had encyclopedias and we had library books. So, you know, I grew up as a teen in the, in the late eighties. It was before the internet.

And, and basically I devoured books. You know, I, I used to love reading about everything from geography to, you know, science to biology, but I was interested in everything from planes to astronomy to whatever, and I basically had this interest in, in knowing about things and how things worked. He used to take things apart, electronics and put them back together, see how they worked and code it on my computer and, you know, things like that.

So I always had a, an interest in understanding things. And then I also had an interest in sport. I was involved in, you know, cycling at an early age. Um, my friends were all keen cyclists. And so we used to race each other and, and, and we watched the Tour de France. The first. To the France that I watched was the 1986 to the France where Greg LeMond, uh, was attempting to basically fight off his teammate Bernard Hinault, who was trying to win his sixth to the France.

And, uh, and so that was a fascinating, uh, battle and, and that ignited a passion for me in cycling. At the same time I was a runner, I used to run 1, 500 meters and then I realized I had a gift for, for athletic prowess because I went to my first race as a representative for our school and ended up lapping the entire field and only three and three quarter laps in a 1, 500 meter race, uh, lapping everybody was sort of a, uh, a light bulb that went off and said, okay, I can run.

And I was in a very competitive age group included Ezekiel Serping who became. Olympic silver medalist, um, Marius, uh, van Heerden, uh, on board, uh, Joshua Pedersen. They all went on to win, uh, world championships indoors, world indoor records. And we had a very competitive age, but I ended up messing up my knee.

I've got a congenital abnormality in my left knee and I ended up not being able to run. And so when I stopped running, cycling became much more, you know, the focus. And throughout my university, and then I went to go and study medicine because I was interested in everything about the human body and so I wanted to study medicine.

Um, I enjoy the doctor patient interaction and helping people. And so that was definitely something that appealed to me. So I studied medicine and while I was studying medicine, I gradually moved up the ranks and by the time I was in my final year of medicine, I was in the top two nationally. And so the year after that, I decided to take a break from medicine.

And, and, and instead of doing my community service, I went and raced professionally, which I did for three years. And at that point I realized I was never going to be top 10 in the world. Mountain bike cross country was still not such a huge discipline, probably way smaller than it is today. And, uh, and so I decided to come back to, you know, to study more.

And so I did my community service and at the same time enrolled for a PhD. And so I did my PhD in exercise science, uh, with Tim Nugges as my supervisor. Tim thought very critically about things and, uh, and, and, and was. Someone who challenged, uh, the status quo to look at things, you know, from the, from a first principles perspective and really delve into them.

And so that ignited more passion to sort of inquire and to, to reach deeply into investigative stuff. And, and, and the research came out of that. So I've been publishing research in all different fields since then. He's also very diverse. And, and, and, and so I followed that same process. And at the same time, I started to get involved in, uh, coaching.

So I was at the sports science institute where I still am. I'm at, I head up sport and exercise medicine at the university of Cape town, and I'm still based there. So I've been there ever since 2003. And, um, and so I started to offer services because there weren't any, uh, so I, I, I provided coaching services and then biomechanics and then performance testing, which we, there wasn't a lot of science available at that point.

You know, the early two thousands, it was still a huge gap in our knowledge. So we, we basically learned from what was published and what we were actually doing in terms of our own research. Back then, Rob Lamberts, who's also quite a well known researcher in the field of cycling. And I did our PhDs together and we, we, uh, basically learned a lot from our own data and the coaching then grew out of that, um, and then along the way, in terms of my cycling career, uh, from a, from a cycling performance perspective.

There were some key sort of moments that, that defined that. And the first one was in 2006 when Jan Uris, who had won his first tour de France, and then after that had experienced lots of difficulties, he had had, uh, recurrent injuries. And, uh, he'd gained a lot of weight. He had struggled to lose the weight.

He couldn't understand why he struggled so much to, to lose the mass. And he came, he used to spend his time in South Africa in January, February, trying to get himself back into shape. Enjoyed the weather and the, and Cape Town's got some great writing as you know. And so he would base himself. Yeah. And in December or early January, 2006, sorry.

He came together with his, uh, physio, Birgit Kroemer, and, uh, his manager, Rudy Pervinaggio, and he came to just visit us at the Sports Science Institute. And Ross Tucker and I were quite involved with helping him. And, uh, he wanted to know why his knee was always sore. He had had two operations on his knee and he still had knee pain.

And we did a whole battery of investigations on him. We, we did, uh, DEXA scanning, MRI scanning, we did, uh, physiological testing, we did biomechanics assessments. And we. Eventually found out that, you know, the main component was that he was always riding in too low a cadence. And that when he did that, he was putting too much stress on his patella femoral joint.

And, uh, that was also leading to weight gain because he had actually gained a lot of muscle. The DEXA scan that we did. He was, I think, 86 kilograms, which is heavy for, for a cyclist. And when we did this Dexter scan, he was only 10 percent body fat and Dexter overreads body fat percentage. So he was not that he was just really muscular and he's, he would basically be grinding these heavy gears doing.

a massive amount of resistance work and then wondering why he ended up so heavy. So we switched him to a really high cadence and he did really, really well. But unfortunately, Operation Puerto happened and, uh, and, and a huge number of riders were implicated in, in a, in a doping scandal then, and he was one of them.

So we didn't work with him after that. Um, but it was an insight into the world tour and that level of, of, of, uh, you know, and, we realized actually. That we could offer a lot of expertise and that there wasn't that much quality science going on, because if a guy who had won the Tour de France, who was on that time on probably one of the biggest budget teams in the world, didn't have the resources to be able to figure out what his problem was, and we basically spent two weeks with him and figured it out and managed to sort out a problem that had plagued him for five years, you had to wonder what was going on behind the scenes in these big budget teams.

And so, so that was an insight later, uh, Barry Stunder, who was, um, you know, well known in, in modern biking and, uh, and one of our best riders until recently was still our best cross country rider ever. Uh, we ended up on the same team. I was racing, uh, after having raised professionally, I raised, uh, age group, but he was racing for GT internationally.

I was racing for GT locally. And. So we ended up in the same team and, and as a result of that, he asked me to coach him. And so then I took on his coaching. And, uh, by the time we got to 2012, we went to the Olympics together. Um, he was number two in the world at the end of the season. And then tragically, he died in January, 2013, when he got hit by a car.

But that was also a really important step in terms of being involved with high level athletes, and there've been a string of them since then. And then, uh, um, as a result of, of the activities I was doing, I was doing the super cycling show, which was that, uh, I had a talk segment would burn in and in, uh, um, uh, was it late 2012 when, uh, Chris Froome won the, it was the 2011.

I'm trying to, no, it would have been later. It would have been. 2012 won the, um, the welter. Um, he was then staying cause he grew up in, in, in Johannesburg. And he went to school in Johannesburg. He still had a house in Johannesburg. So in the off season, he would be there and he was on the super cycling show.

And the two of us happened to be, he was interviewed on the same night that I was doing my segment. And we sat backstage and we had a long chat just about various things and then we exchanged numbers and then at that point, uh, basically, I helped Chris a few times when he had issues with injuries and, uh, and other aspects that he wanted info on and eventually he invited me to do all the performance testing on him, which I did in 2015.

And, uh, we did that in London at GlaxoSmithKline Laboratories and we published that data and that was quite a high profile event. And so all these sort of sequence of events just slowly. Move you into a trajectory where eventually, uh, I was approached by UAE team Emirates to come on board. And I've been with them, uh, for close on seven years now.

And, um, and that is a, I mean, that story's quite easy to see when I started the team was 17th or 16th in the world rankings, um, that only won 14 races. And, uh, this year we've won 81 races and, uh, we've got double the points of the second best team and, uh, we won the Jira, the tour and the world championships.

So, um, so it's been a great journey and, uh, it's been a very clear trajectory and it's been great being part of that and contributing to. What is a big team of individuals, but, um, now leading that in terms of being performance, uh, head for the team. And, um, yeah, it's been, it's been great. So that's sort of the compressed story of how I got to where I am.

Um, but there have been certain key moments in that. You mentioned a lot of points in there that I wanted to ask you about various things about Dr. Noakes and diet and Chris Froome and things. Um, but let's start out with big question for the average person. Um, if, if they're watching, you know, you're watching the Twitter France, it's, it's sort of hard to even imagine.

Cycling for that amount of distance for three weeks. It's just insane. Um, how do you, how do you train? I mean, obviously that's a big question, but what is the strategy? How does someone train for the Tour de France? Yeah. I mean, what I alluded to in the beginning is that it's a very multifactorial process.

So, you know, there are steps along the way where we focus on particular aspects of physiology right now, for instance, being November and going into December, the writers are focusing on functional strength, you would have done that as part of your training, but basically working on talk and we were seeing more and more data.

There was a paper published last week, which showed how critical talk capacity is in terms of VO, two max level intervals and efforts. But we also see from our own data and we'll be doing some research, uh, during the course of this year, that'll be published on a, from another team that shows, uh, from our own data, that durability, which is the ability to maintain power later in a race, when you've got accumulated, uh, More long lasting fatigue effects that durability is very much affected by your maximal functional strength on the bike.

So as you get tired, if you've got the ability to produce talk, you have a greater reserve and can continue to produce power. So durability is a big part there. Is that predominantly being trained on the bike or is that in the gym? So three times a week, uh, in the gym doing very specific exercises. And one of the things that changed today's performance from last season to this season was that he spent a huge amount of time at home working with a physio one on one doing a lot of strength work.

It also involves strength work on the bike. So at this point in time, everyone's doing about two sessions a week where we're focusing very much on, on, uh, functional strength. And then it transitions into a lot of metabolic work. So my colleague in San Milan and his zone two concept, and that's a very important part, particularly for younger riders, but also for all the riders to maintain, to build mitochondrial capacity, which is a very important part of once again, durability, if you're able to use fuels in a very efficient way.

So whenever you're at a lower intensity using fats as a fuel substrate, and then using carbohydrates in a, in an efficient way, which is oxidatively. instead of producing pyruvate going to lactate, which, which is far more inefficient than, you know, burning the pyruvate into carbon dioxide water vapor and energy, which is what happens in the mitochondria.

Um, so that kind of training is also then important. Um, and then from there, progressively increasing intensities. moving on to work that involves lactate clearance from working muscle and reuptake in less active muscle to buffering capacity to all out, uh, maximal efforts, uh, which are important in terms of neuromuscular elements.

So there's a whole cascade and it's a, it's an overlapping sort of Rainbow of different stimuli that are important. I think if you look at the performance in the pellets on these days, one of the biggest factors that's resulted in the higher speeds in races and how aggressive races have become is nutrition.

So even 10 years ago, 2014, so, you know, that's, that's not, that feels like yesterday, you know, athletes were consuming 60 grams of carbs per hour. We now, you know, doing 110, 120 grams an hour as standard. And using the right fuel substrates, athletes are able to absorb that and with gut training, that's, that's also an important plot.

So, you know, there are lots of different elements to what results in the final performance at a race like the Tour de France. And some of them are also psychological, you know, uh, making sure that you manage stresses. Have that mental resilience, the right kind of approach to managing the stress of the, of the race and the stress of whether it be interviews and, uh, the media and so on.

So there are lots of different elements to that. And with the, you know, you touched on the diet there. Um, I mean, obviously there's been a lot of, uh, there've been a lot of changes and, and sort of controversies in the last, you know, Uh, 10, 15 years with various diets and the ketogenic diets and things like that coming out.

And now there's all sorts of things. There's plant based and carnivore and all sorts. Uh, I had heard that, um, I don't, I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that Chris Froome was actually on a ketogenic diet at one point. Um, and I was just wondering what your take was on ketogenic diet and its role in, you know, in performance.

And, and do you think that That's a enhancement or do you think that carbohydrates are a necessity? So Chris definitely never used a ketogenic diet and during his career and at any time, I can be pretty sure about that, what probably stimulated that thought was that a periodized nutrition was a big thing a few years ago and still is, and, but it's the recent research shows that it might not necessarily be the case.

a necessary way to train and periodize nutrition involves carbohydrate restriction for some sessions, including fasted sessions. And that can stimulate ketosis in some cases, and then using very high rates of carbohydrate consumption for other, uh, training sessions. So that's periodized nutrition. Um, when it comes to ketogenic diets, I mean, ketogenic diets are beneficial to type two diabetics.

If you have type 2 diabetes, you can, you can improve your glycemic control by following a ketogenic diet. Do they have a benefit for other individuals? They are good at inducing short term weight loss. So, you know, people who have obesity can lose weight with a ketogenic diet. But the people who manage to keep that weight off are the same people who manage to keep it off with a mixed diet, which is a diet that contains carbohydrates, fats, and protein.

And that seems to be more related to your ability to maintain a diet. So it's not about Um, the specific diet that you follow, it's more about, uh, the fact that, you know, people who lose weight and maintain that weight loss are people who have the ability to continue that diet. And whether you'd follow a low fat diet or a ketogenic diet, so a low carb diet or a mixed diet, but eat less, uh, everyone stands to benefit by eating less.

And that's a key phenomena across research. Dietary caloric restriction, whether you do that one way or another way, is the most effective way to have good health in terms of, um, it, uh, reducing your risk of cancer, reducing your risk of type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and dementia, um, longevity in terms of living longer, cardiovascular disease, the main killer globally.

So eating less is good. How you achieve that is up to you. But if you can achieve it, you're gonna be healthier because we all generally eat too much. The majority of the world's pocket. Yeah. Food. And so, yeah, so ketogenic diets don't necessarily have long lasting health benefits, uh, more so than any other diets.

In fact, the research shows that the healthiest diets are Mediterranean diets and a diet that is. Low in processed foods. So the raw, the ingredients are, the more time it takes you to prepare a meal, the better that meal is for you and the healthier that is for you. And that's. That that's across the board.

So, uh, really that's the take home message. I, you mentioned there about also about periodized training and fasting, and obviously I've done some of that myself and I found that that helped me a lot. Um, you know, doing, doing faster training and stuff, just in terms of my. My energy, I became a lot more efficient.

Um, and obviously not being, you know, not being hungry all the time. And initially it's really challenging. Um, if you've never done it before, you, you feel lethargic, you've got no energy, but, uh, you know, after a while when you adapt, it's, it's quite amazing. You know, I can easily go for a zone two ride for a couple of hours and, and.

It's totally fine. And you, you go with other people and they, they start stressing out when they heard you haven't had breakfast, you know, um, That's definitely benefits. And, uh, and we see that in terms of how, as you say, you, you're able to, uh, be more efficient in terms of your energy use and, uh, and last longer as a result.

And, uh, I mean, obviously you mentioned that eating less overall is good for health, but that's not the, I guess, the main goal for, for a Tour de France athlete, I mean, what is caloric consumption? What does, I mean, what does, uh, what do you have to eat to, to race, uh, you know, the Tour de France, cause I can only just imagine.

It must be astronomical. Yeah. So, I mean, the, the, the athletes are consuming about 7, 000 calories a day and, and that's, because of their, yeah. You know, when they, on those long stages, four and a half, 5, 000 calories is really what their, their energy consumption is during race. So they're, like I said, they're consuming 110, 120 grams of carbs per hour on the bike.

And then obviously you, you've got that massive caloric intake, which is mainly through carbohydrates and because they are so highly trained, uh, they can consume all those carbohydrates safely and, and, and have a very high. Health status and even processed carbohydrates because they are exercising for so many hours at high intensities We're very different for your average individual who isn't getting enough exercise if they started consuming the same diet It would be terrible for them and they would be incredibly unhealthy.

So context is important and your diet also has to be tailored to your specific circumstances and your lifestyle, and particularly how much exercise you do. And which is the one thing, exercise is the key to health in, in almost every respect. So combination of not eating too much and getting lots of exercise, that's 95 percent of your health benefit lies there.

And I mean, so obviously on the bike, they can consuming incredible amounts of carbohydrates. I mean, are there any other things that are, that that's limited for the athletes in terms of when they off the bike, you know, are they, what's their sort of. Meat consumption, like the protein, you know, that sort of thing.

Yeah. So, I mean, during races, uh, they, they will have a restricted amount of saturated fats and fats in general, just because they delay gastric emptying. And so, um, you know, it's quality protein, but mostly carbohydrates. and then a limited amount of fat. Um, so that would be sort of the race diet during a Tour de France.

Um, it's obviously different when you, when you're not racing at that level, or if you're not a racer, I mean, then your diet is going to be, and then, then particularly polyunsaturated fats are very important for health. And so, uh, the average individual should be getting more Uh, fish oils, uh, oils from avocado, olives, uh, those types of, of oils, which are enormously beneficial and the Mediterranean diet that once again, it's a good example of that.

And then the other big thing that's important that we realize these days in terms of wellness and, and, and also performance and general health is sleep. Uh, sleep is such a underrated modality in terms of. And particularly with the lifestyles that we lead these days, you know, um, drinking too much coffee later in the day, doing work, sitting on screens, those all interrupt the quality and the duration of our sleep.

And that has an enormous impact in performance in terms of recovery rates, but in the everyday person that has a huge impact in terms of our health. And it affects all aspects of our health, including our body composition, uh, our mental health, our resilience. Stress levels and so on. So sleep is a is a huge area that's currently being researched more and more and and and where we start to gain more insight in terms of how to optimize that and how beneficial that is in terms of all the different aspects from performance to to wellness.

How much sleep is, is optimal for a, for a tour rider? Your sleep is very individualized, but typically an athlete at that level would require at least seven and a half to eight hours of sleep a night. That would be, you know, acceptable levels. And also the quality of that sleep needs to be, uh, needs to be high.

Um, and so it's not just the total sleep duration. It's the, it's how they, how well they sleep as well. That's something that I think I was definitely, uh, Guilty of, um, you know, when I was earlier in my career, um, and I think that's why I had, you know, uh, I had some health issues because, uh, yeah, I was just burning the candle at both ends.

And, you know, when you, I don't know, when you're young, you think you can just go, go, go. And, you know, it's tendency to overtrain and just more, more is better. And, uh, as I've gotten older, I've realized like, it's the way you feel and perform and you're, you know, Your mental state, everything you sleep, I feel like is, uh, the ultimate performance enhancing drug, actually.

Uh, it is, it is, it's important, but, uh, yeah, I think we're getting more and more insight into that now and, and, and methods to try and improve that. So we'll, we will all benefit. Uh, you alluded earlier, you touched on it earlier with, uh, with the training side and via to max and things, and I've seen how.

Important that is for not only performance, but also for longevity. And, you know, later in life, having a high VO two max and, and muscle mass and things, that's huge health benefits. Um, but I could only imagine, I mean, when you look at the, someone who's doing the tour de France. Or not just a tour rider, but also other extreme endurance events, Ironman try, you know, triathlon, that sort of thing.

Is it actually healthy for you to be pushing your body that much? Because I'd, I'd heard also with some athletes, there's, you know, calcification of the arteries and things of the heart. I mean, yeah. What have you seen, you know, in that space? So if you look at cardiovascular disease and you look at all cause mortality.

So deaths from everything from cancer, from cardiovascular disease and other ailments. The relationship with exercise is quite clear. There's a, if you start with the couch potato here and you look at both either cardiovascular disease mortality or will cause mortality. If you exercise five times a week, For 45 minutes and moderate, uh, the intensive exercise, you'll drop off in overall mortality rate is about anywhere from 40 to 60%, depending on which disease you're looking at or if you're looking at overall rates.

So just doing exercise is the single most effective thing you can do to, to live longer and to prevent death from varying different diseases that curve. And this was first picked up in the Copenhagen heart study. When they looked at marathon runners. It comes down, down, down, down, down. And at the very end, it's got a little tick up.

And so if you look at individuals who train seven days a week in particular, and do high exercise loads, and they are particularly people like triathletes, who do the highest exercise volumes, sometimes swimmers as well, and maybe Really? More, more than cyclists. Yeah, and, and cyclists as well, but, but, but particularly multi sport athletes.

Yeah. They have an increased risk of dying, both cardiovascularly and all cause mortality, but particularly cardiovascularly. And yeah, we don't fully understand that. So athletes who do a lot more exercise do have a lot more calcification of the coronary arteries. But they have less heart attacks. So normally the amount of calcium you've got in your coronary arteries is directly linearly related to how much of a risk you have of having a heart attack.

It's called a CAC score. If you do a CT scan and we use that to stratify people's risk. But athletes are unique in that they tend to have this calcium, which is quite diffusely sort of scattered. But those plaques that they have are sort of atherosclerotic plots, which cause a heart attack of very stable.

And so for some reason they develop this calcium, but they don't have heart attacks. Some of those people that very far end develop scarring in their ventricles, and that can then lead to fatal arrhythmias in a small number of people. We know there is a particular disposition there. So if we look at those athletes, some of them have, if they do like a VO2 max test in the lab or a stress ECG, They are the individuals who are able to push their blood pressure to a much higher value and have That capacity to go a little bit deeper.

And it seems possibly that, that they do that too often in training. In other words, that they, the people that don't train steady, they, they like to always be pushing and going deep and doing high intensity. And that either puts them at risk because of the fact that it affects the immune system and impacts on your cell mediated immunity, maybe putting them at risk of higher rates of infection with certain organisms, or Epstein Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, uh, and others that may then be a trigger for developing scar as a result of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, which is associated with some viral infections.

Or the actual stress of the exercise is creating some scarring in the ventricle through just the stresses on it. We don't really know, but that little increase at the end is definitely a risk with doing too much exercise. But even those people with that small uptake at the end are 35 to 40 percent lower risk than the couch potato.

So in general, as a general sort of idea, exercise is the more you get, the better off you are. It's really rare to have a side effect of being at greater risk on exercise. So the more the better. You didn't mention the triathletes there, and I'm sure you know Richard Murray, um, and he's a friend of mine and, um, you know, obviously he developed AFib, um, and, uh, That was a sort of, for me, a big eye opener because I hadn't really heard of it before, before that.

And, uh, it was crazy to me, you know, that someone in his condition, you know, could, could develop, uh, you know, heart arrhythmia. Yep. So, so athletes do have a greater percentage of scarring in the atria as well. Um, and that seems to be purely a stress related factor because of the high loads. So it's less dangerous, atrial fibrillation and atrial arrhythmias are not as dangerous.

They don't lead to death, but, uh, but they nevertheless are problematic in terms of the way that they affect the function of the heart. But that's also a factor. So that scarring happens in the atria as well. And I mean, for, for the average person, you know, listening to this, uh, that might not be an Olympic athlete or something like that.

I mean, I think it's quite hard sometimes, you know, the, you. People read a lot there on the internet. They see, ah, you know, Training is better Doing more training is better. But then you see too much training could actually be a down a downfall So, I mean what sort of practical advice would you give to the average person that is trying to Not just be healthy, but also improve their you know, general performance in whether they're a runner or a cyclist for example Yeah So you're talking there about overreaching and, and the balance between training load and recovery that results in optimal adaptation.

So every time you train, there's a drop off in performance because of damage to muscles, fatigue in the brain and various stuff. And then you, you, you should, if you do things properly, recover enough and your body compensates by bringing you to a higher level. And if you do that in a stepwise fashion, You get better and better and better many professional athletes.

And I've done the same myself in my career, make the mistake of doing too much training or too little recovery. And then instead of making that step up, they either make smaller steps and they don't reach their potential or they don't make steps at all. And one of the biggest things that I introduced to the team when I joined UAT Emirates in late 2018 was increasing the load monitoring and backing people off because back then cyclists were doing far too much and by doing less performance increased.

So that's a critical aspect and that involves you can look at various different things but we've just finished a study which we'll be publishing in the next months which showed that the single biggest factor that determines. how well you feel and relates to your performance and other variables. Is how tired do you feel, because you have the supercomputer in your head.

That's better than any AI currently available. Makes all of the different for now that takes all the different signals and processes them and tells you I'm tired. And so if you feel tired, you probably need a rest day or recovery and you shouldn't push you more. And so that is probably the most important thing to listen to is your head.

I am 100 percent guilty. Of that. Uh, I know that, you know, obviously I trained with one of your colleagues, uh, with John and, um, I know for a period of time, sorry, I also coached you for a period of time, many years ago, many years ago. But, uh, I, I was definitely guilty of that because I was one of those people.

I just want to go more, more, more, and not having enough rest. And I don't know when someone, even if someone tells you, no, it's a, you must go for a zone to ride for a lot of people. Um, and I know for people around me as well, my family, my dad, when he goes running, whatever, and you said, no, keep your heart rate, one 25, one 30, you know, low heart rate, It feels like you're not doing a lot.

Um, so you think, you think what I'm wasting my time, you know, and, and also for, for the majority of people, they don't have a lot of time to exercise. So when they exercise, they want to push themselves, but not, not going to the red zone, but also not doing zone two. So they stay in this sort of middle. Zone three sort of almost garbage zone where you you're pushing yourself too hard to recover, but you're not really making any gains.

Um, and then you don't progress and you just stay there for, for years and years. And I feel like I was a hundred percent in that camp and not to anyone's fault, but my own. Um, And only as I've gotten older, I feel I've done less and I feel stronger, which is, which is quite, uh, it is, it is, we. We were left off yesterday with people.

Um, I asked for some advice for people, what's sort of something that they could do that's important, you know, for their, for their training. And you said they should listen to their head, um, and not, you know, so they don't get into over training and things like that. Yeah, so I mean, we, we spoke about, um, the fact that, you know, the, the, the single most important variable that determine whether or not an athlete is fatigued is how they feel in terms of.

Whether they're feeling fatigued, but you can also add different devices and, and, and different measurements to that, to get basically a spectrum of info. There isn't a gold standard. So in, in terms of what we call athlete load monitoring, which is where you assess whether the load is optimal, excessive, or too low, athlete load monitoring doesn't have a gold standard.

So we have to rely on a bunch of different values from different Systems of working and, and we, we look at all of them and then come to a conclusion based on the majority of what the data set. And so some of the things that are emerging these days are like heart rate variability is one. Particularly, this is the difference between, for instance, if you wear a ring, like our team uses ultra human rings, and there's also other versions, whoop aura.

Those measure heart rate variability at night, which is. a good indicator of general health in terms of trends over time. Then we also see that if you measure heart rate variability first thing in the morning for a period of say two minutes, which is a little bit harder to do because you've got to do that manually.

You've got to get a wake up, attach either heart rate belt or for instance, HIV for training, which is one of the apps you can actually put your finger on the camera, a cell phone, and it can actually pick up the blood flow through the. That's incredible. Your photoplethysmography, it's the same thing that measures a set meter like in the hospital when you're measuring oxygen sets, it works the same way.

And a modern smartphone camera can do that as well. So that's a good way to see whether or not you're ready to train. And then, um, You know, various applications like training peaks have internal load monitoring and I mean, external load monitoring where you have just through the files that you upload using either heart rate or power or perception of effort, that's an internal metric.

But say, uh, power is an external metric. In other words, how much work have you done and how intense was that work? And that uses a combination of time and, and, uh, uh, an exponentially weighted intensity curve, and it generates a training stress score and your training stress score. Is either computed over the long term, which we'll chronic training load or over the short term, which is roughly seven days, which is acute training load.

And the balance between those tells you whether or not you're doing too much for your level of fitness, in which case you're in a negative training stress balance. And an excessively negative training stress balance is a sign that you need to rest as well. It's an external load metric. Now, if you combine that with an internal load metric, like how do you feel and what's your heart rate variability, then you've already got three different measures and you can start to get an idea.

And there are many more. And basically we use a conglomerate of measures to see whether or not someone should be taking it. easy as opposed to or training harder with the heart rate variability. That's something that I've looked at quite a bit as well. Uh, I also use a, an aura ring. Um, what are the sort of best ways that's, that has been shown to actually improve that?

Well, heart rate variability improves with overall wellness. So when you are in a better state of health, um, the body's less stressed and a lower physiological stress. reduces your sympathetic drive, your fight and flight response, and it increases your parasympathetic drive, your rest and digest response.

And that increased parasympathetic drive increases the variability of your heartbeats. And the same happens when you're fitter. So a combination of good health and good fitness give you a high heart rate variability. But they are provisors. So, so whenever you look at heart rate variability, you need to be someone who's actually educated in assessing that because excessively high training loads can also lower heart rate variability when you start to become fatigued.

Um, and so you need to understand the balance between the short term and longterm changes. Um, certain other things like, for instance, if an athlete's getting ready for a competition, if they're overreached, they will not have a very active sympathetic nervous system. The fight and flight response becomes blunted.

In other words, they, they empty the adrenal gland and the hypothalamus, the brain become fatigued. And so you don't produce as much cortisol and necronyphrine. And they will keep a high heart rate variability leading up to the race, whereas a well recovered athlete will actually drop their heart rate variability because of the upcoming stress and thinking about the rates.

And that's a normal thing. And so, you know, an LA person or someone who doesn't understand what they're looking at will look at their heart rate variability and if it drops leading up to the race, they're going to worry that they're getting sick. And then they're going to think that they're not, they're going to underperform.

So that harms their psyche. Um, so it's really important to understand these things and to be able to tell the athlete, this is normal. It's normal to have a lower heart rate variability in the lead up to a race. Okay. Cause I actually had that, that same thing. And I found that with also besides training and all that, just your.

Your mental state, if you happier, I find if I'm happier, my heart rate variability is higher exactly because you're less stressed. Yeah. So it's, it is a key marker of stress. It's a marker of, uh, excess of alcohol consumption drops your heart rate variability, lack of sleep will drop your heart rate variability, excess of training load will do that.

Um, so you've got to, you've got to look at it within the context of the whole psychosocial lifestyle situation to be able to interpret it correctly. And, you know, you mentioned you look at a bunch of factors when it comes down to, you know, being ready to perform. So obviously not everyone is going to have access or going to be willing to, to look at all these factors on a day to day basis.

What would you say if someone just, In layman's terms, what's the simplest thing that they can look at, you know, in the morning before they decide how hard they want to push that day? Goodness. Like I said, how you feel, if you feel like you're not ready for a training session, you probably aren't. Okay.

Good to know. Uh, rely on tech, rely on your brain, because your brain is a very advanced piece of technology. And with the team, um, Are they, how much sort of, is there any emphasis on education for them in terms of why they are doing certain things or why they are training certain ways? Cause I felt for me as well.

I've, I found it much more helpful later in my career, even though I'm not now, uh, I've sort of slowed down on the competing side, just in general, I understand my body way better now because I understand why I'm doing what, um, and why you should rest and why you should have an easy session or do intervals.

Um, yeah. Is there any sort of emphasis given to the team on that to actually explain why they're doing certain things? I think as a general principle, any really good coach should make themselves redundant. In a space of three to five years with an athlete, because you should be educating the athlete.

The athlete does need to understand what's happening to themselves. And, and that's part of coaching. So educating the individual to understand the process and to understand the response to the process. So, but that's on a, on a coach by coach basis, some athletes like to just follow the plan and say, tell me what to do and, and, you know, and not to have to think excessively about it.

Um, and some athletes love to have lots of information. And so there's a complete spectrum there in terms of what the athlete wants, but I think it's the, the general onus is on the, on the coach to make themselves redundant by educating the athletes. So. I generally like to give out information and like it when the athlete questions and understands what's happening.

And, um, what's, I mean, when you, you've obviously dealt with a lot of, uh, everyday athletes as well, uh, you know, what have you noticed is sort of the, I don't know if there's one thing that sticks out, that's a big difference between your, you know, average Joe and an Olympic level athlete. I think, um, to be honest, there's a, they have a similar spectrum, you know, the, the personality types that are involved in everyday athletes versus.

Olympic level athletes are very similar. The key difference is really the fact that a professional athlete has much more time and are very, you know, have a, have a very narrow focus in terms of what they need to do. Whereas your, your everyday athlete has work commitments, family commitments, They're trying to participate, train.

Um, and so they distracted a lot, um, and, and managing those distractions are much harder for your working everyday athlete, as opposed to professional. Professional paradoxically, it can be easier because you. You're not worried about other factors other than just focusing on your training. That in itself can also be a problem because it becomes overly consuming to many athletes.

So some athletes, because they don't have any other distractions, become overly focused on the next result, on the process going perfectly and become very anxious if it, if it doesn't go perfectly. And so once again, it depends on the personality type, but each, uh, that excessive focus and on the opposite side of that coin, the excess of distraction are both negatives.

And finding the, finding the right balance is, is key. Um, it can be easier for an athlete because of the lack of distractions, but it can also become a problem. And in my career, and for instance, I realized that. I was a better athlete when I had it, when I started doing my PhD, not because the PhD taught me anything, but because I was just distracted from that focus of having everything invested in performing and, and that stress of, of, of saying, okay, I've put in all this time and put in all this effort now I have to get a result.

And if the result didn't come, that can be quite overwhelming. And so having something else in your life or multiple different things in your life can actually help reduce the impact of the stress of, of training competition. It's interesting, um, that you mentioned that because, uh, I, I experienced the same myself, um, before I had my injuries, I honestly, I enjoyed the sport and felt like I wasn't as good as I was after the injuries and as difficult as that was to deal with.

Um, you know, just realizing having that time to reflect and giving perspective and getting other things in place in your life. And in my life that I realizing that I enjoy other things, um, made such a huge difference in taking the pressure off of the actual sport. Cause I felt like before my whole life was just competing, racing and nothing else mattered.

And so you, you put all your eggs in one basket and then when you don't get the result, your whole world falls apart because you just think, What am I now without the sport, you know, and, um, as difficult as that is, I think it's, it can be hugely beneficial for, for athletes to, to find that other thing, whether that's, you know, family or another job or a hobby or anything that's going to give them a drive outside of the sport, because then it's sort of, at least if you, If things don't come together in the event, you think, okay, well, you know, it's I'm disappointed, but I have this, you know, I'm not, I have something else in my life.

It changes the perspective. Um, just flipping a little bit, uh, to the more physical side, you know, with the, with injuries, I mean, obviously injury is a big part of the game, um, in any sport, but obviously in cycling as well. Um, so besides when someone has an accident, what would you say, what injuries do you see?

Sort of the most, uh, in something like a tour and, uh, you know, what sort of strategies do you guys use to try to prevent that? Well, I mean, the, the most common injuries are actually abrasions. So in, in cycling, particularly road cycling, not much you can do to prevent them. They, they happen because crashes are fairly frequent and, uh, and skin loss is the single biggest injury.

And those, those have to be managed in stage races. So if an athlete, for instance, in the 2019 Vuelta. We had a team time trial at the start. And, and, uh, I think it was because some guy decided he was going to clean his car up the hill from the team time trial course. And sprayed the whole road full of water.

And it ran down onto the team Tom, of course, just before our guys came around and our entire team walked out. So you're talking eight riders. I think only one rider didn't hit the deck. So where Adrian Ruccino was then, uh, at the, I joined the Vuelta later, but he, he basically had to go back to the bus and patch up seven guys.

And, uh, it was like a war zone, you know? And so, and then they have to manage that for the entire three weeks. So, or until those skin wounds heal. So the, the skin wounds are a big challenge, you know, and then obviously after that is everything else, uh, including fractures, uh, and they vary from fractured wrists, finger injuries, uh, to like you experienced dramatic hip injuries, spinal injuries.

Um, Jay Vine, for instance, last year, or this year, sorry, this season, um, had quite a, a, a significant. Not that's an understatement. He had a very significant injury or series of injuries in the in the crash into Tulia Basque Country, which also affected many other top riders on his injuries were to spine and that, you know, those take a long time to heal.

So the big ones are hip and spine injuries. They and femur fractures also a huge one. Chris Froome is an example. You know, he's never recovered from his femur fracture. Egan Bernal, uh, similar. Um, he still hasn't reached the level that he was before. Um, so femur fractures and hip fractures are, can be quite devastating.

Um, and spine fractures as well. And they can take a very long time for, for riders to come back to the level that they were sometimes never. In fact, if you look at the stats, it's generally only about 50 percent of athletes or less that reach their former level. If they have a significant spine. Or femur fracture, for instance.

Wow. Yeah. And, and obviously there's been a lot of advancements in, um, you know, medicine in the last couple of decades. And I, myself, obviously with a hip replacement, now I'm back doing mountain biking, downhill things. I mean, would you think that someone, for example, with a hip replacement, if they had the injury that I had, do you think they could, Still compete in the tour and be competitive.

Yeah. So I mean, two people had hip resurfacings and returned to the world tour, um, or, or similar level. One of them is Floyd Landis, who we don't need to speak about more, but John D. Augustine, who previously raced for, uh, was it, was it empty in Quebec then, or no, it was before that. Um, but he, he had a neck of femur fracture.

Yeah. Mm hmm. Like, and then ended up with a hip resurfacing while he was a team spy. I was actually involved in that and actually was there during his surgery and helped him through that process. And then subsequently helped his recovery and John D then returned to the pro peloton as well. So it can certainly happen.

And the other sports as well, you know, golf and many other sports where, uh, I mean, I think Andy Murray had a hip resurfacing, if I recall correctly, and I think he returned to play, I think, at the highest level. Hypersurfacing has gone out of fashion because of the large surface areas in contact generate a lot of ions, which can have an adverse effect and cause Pseudo tumor formation and other complications.

Um, so they, they've gone out of fashion, but, but in the past they were a sort of interim for younger people to have. And so, yes, they can return to the highest level. And what impact do you hope to have in your career? Oh goodness. You know, um, you know, when you're younger, you kind of, by no means old, but, but you know, 10, 15 years ago, you know, you, you want to, you know, You know, you maybe have aspirations of reaching a particular level.

Um, you know, when I was in my teens, obviously the goal was to win the Tour de France as a rider, you know, every young rider has that as a, as an ultimate sort of dream. Uh, and I couldn't do it as an athlete, but now I've been involved with, uh, at UAE Team Emirates three Tour de France victories and, and before with Chris Froome and, and during his career.

So. Uh, less involved directly, but, uh, on the for a free. And so, you know, actually, and this goes back to 2021 when, uh, in 2020, when, when Tadeo won his first two Tour de France, it was almost. To some extent, a crisis of, uh, you know, direction because effectively, you know, what, where, where do you go from that?

Um, that's, that's reaching the highest levels in the sport. So as a, as a career, I think, you know, now with this year with UAE team members, we've won the Giro, the Tour, the world, I mean, the, um, the world champs, we've been number one team in the world, two years in a row, uh, almost broke the record for all time victories.

So. We're pretty close to the highest level we can get. And, um, so my focus has changed not from aspiring to achieve, but aspiring to focus, to become the best practitioner of the, the process of coaching, and that's actually far more fulfilling because it doesn't depend on results to the results come, but it doesn't depend on the results for validation.

The, the joy and the validation comes from, from, from knowing that you're doing things the best that you can. And I think that's really where I see my validation and satisfaction coming from. I shouldn't say validation. It's not, it's not something that needs a validation. It's more satisfaction. comes from not only my own direct involvement with athletes, but also coordinating the process across our team to try to optimize that and to try and achieve an optimization that that then on its own will get results irrespective.

But, you know, they can always be Factors that you can't control that, that influence it, but controlling all the controllables is really the process that's, uh, that, that I'm, I'm interested in, and that gives satisfaction in the, in terms of my career. Very cool. Um, I, uh, you know, the goal of this podcast is to, to help people and to spread awareness, educate people to.

Try to perform better, but also be healthier in general. Um, and you know, speaking to experts like yourself, uh, is hopefully a way to do that. And for the majority of people listening, I'm not going to be professional athletes. Um, they just want to know how to, you know, how to maybe make a small gain for the next time they go out for a ride on the weekend or something like that.

Um, and obviously there's, there's so many benefits to it. Different areas of of training whether it's in the gym or you're doing zone two or you're doing intervals Um, I think it can be quite confusing for people to know What's you know, what's better? What's more important what you should focus on? I mean if there was a sort of very straightforward Protocol, um, sort of generalized protocol for people in terms of like a weekly program that they could do, you know, whether it's in the gym or doing sprints once a week.

I mean, is there something like a, a basic protocol that you could give people for general, general health, but also to make, to maybe make that small improvement, um, in their sport, whether they're a runner or cyclist. That's such a general question, but If we look at, if we look at health, first of all, um, one of the biggest areas that you can maintain and optimize your health as you get older is to spend time lifting weights and doing things that are difficult.

So resistance kind of training and most individuals over the age of 40 don't do nearly enough resistance work. So that's a, an absolute must from a health perspective. And in fact, if you look at your risk of dying, once you get over 70, it's directly correlated with your ability to do functions like getting out of a chair without using your hands and, and simple tasks like that.

And those decline, if you don't do hard tasks, so doing difficult tasks is, is, uh, is important from a strength perspective. From a training perspective, uh, obviously aerobic capacity is also very, very closely associated with cardiovascular mortality and morbidity. So you want to be fitter and VO2 max is a measurement of that fitness and so VO2 max correlates with your overall risk of having heart disease and dying.

And so you do want to do lots of aerobic exercise as well. If you're time crunched, then we know that. High intensity interval training gives you a greater bang for your buck if you're time limited than if you have plenty of time. We know in professional athletes, it's a different story. They actually get A very high training stimulus from doing the volume and doing low intensity volume, a little bit more intensity and sort of zone to work, which we've touched on with my colleague, Inigo Sanderland's contribution, and then some high intensity training.

So it really depends on whether you're a professional athlete or an amateur and how much time you've got. But the time crunched athlete interval training together with strength training are your two biggest areas that you're going to make gains. And so that would be the focus. And as you get older as well, um, doing hard intensities, cardiovascularly, whether it be running or cycling, unless you're obviously, you know, if you've got a cardiovascular problem that it contraindicates that or you're at risk of having a heart attack.

Then it might not be such a good idea, but if you're otherwise healthy, high intensity interval training and weightlifting are going to give you the biggest bang. And I mean, for those people that don't know what high intensity, what, how high is, you know, how high is high to make a gain in VO2 max? The simplest session that actually has been shown to have the greatest benefit is a minimum of five full on 30 second sprints.

So basically if you, whether you're a runner or a cyclist. Run it, be careful because you might tear a hamstring, but cycling a 30 second maximal sprint. And when I say maximal sprint, you don't pace yourself. You do as hard an effort as you can up a sort of a five to 10 percent gradient, and then rest for five minutes.

You can stand still for most of that time. A study from McMaster's university from the nineties showed that they took two groups of students. One group came into the lab twice each week and just did, if I remember correctly, I think it was 10, 30 second sprints. The other group trained, I think three times a week.

And they did at least an hour of moderately high intensity training and the group that came in and, and, and in between the sprints, the sprint group just sat on a chair. So they did a total of 10 times 30. I think it's, so what is that? Five minutes of exercise twice a week. So 10 minutes of exercise twice a week.

Was greater at enhancing the mitochondrial capacity because they measured mitochondrial enzymes and greater at enhancing the, I think it was a VO2 max and a 40 kilometer time trial than doing at least three hours of moderate intensity training. So 10 minutes of exercise can be more beneficial than three hours of training.

if you do something like 30 second sprints. So the intensity varies from an all out effort like that to lower, you know, four, four sets of four minute intervals at 90 percent of your maximal heart rate up to eight of those is another example, very effective session. Um, but they're intense doing, doing eight, four minute intervals with a, say, a four minute rest, uh, is, is by the time you get to the fifth or sixth interval, you are going to want to stop very bad.

I did a set of that last night. There you go. Uh, yeah, I was actually interested to see the, if there was a, you know, if it was more effective to do the. All out 30 second sprints or to do the longer, you know, 90 percent of your max intervals. Yeah, both are effective and and if you've done too many of one then doing the other will give you an additional stimulus So mix it up.

And in fact, for people that struggle to do say four, four minute intervals, the latest research shows that doing declining duration intervals allows you to continue to do more of the efforts above your two max intensity. So if you, if you can't mentally and physically get yourself to complete at least four, four minute intervals, then do say two, four minute intervals, then do two, two minute intervals, and then do two 32nd sprints.

And that'll give you the same stimulus as if you continue to do the formative intervals, but it'll feel much easier to you mentally and physically. And is there, is it more beneficial to be in that zone overall longer? Um, is it going to have, is it going to improve your VO2 max faster? In terms of being above a particular intensity?

No, it, it, so they work, they are different, different, uh, systems are activated at different intensities. So to give you an example, if you go and train for five hours at a low intensity, what happens is every single time the muscle contracts, it contracts because calcium is released from, there's a bag of calcium effectively inside the cell called the sarcoplasmic reticulum.

Okay. Thank you. And when a cell depolarizes, a muscle cell depolarizes, it causes the sarcoplasmic reticulum to release all that calcium into the cytosol. And what that does is it binds to a little molecule called troponin C, and that then changes the shape of that, and it gets pulled out of the way of actin and myosin, and you get a contraction.

And when the sarcoplasmic reticulum reabsorbs the calcium. that troponin C goes back into an elongated shape and slips in between the actin and myosin, and that's when you relax. So just as an aside, when you run out of ATP and you die, and then an hour later you get rigor mortis. Rigor mortis is when there's not enough energy to absorb that calcium, and the calcium Causes actin and myosin to bind.

And that's why you become rigid, but that's deviating down another path. But after five hours of that process happening over and over again, there are elements of fatigue that happened in the sarcoplasmic reticulum, and that doesn't absorb all the calcium and that increased calcium concentration in the cell acts as an activator, what we call a transcription factor and activates.

The genes that are responsible for mitochondrial biogenesis, in other words, making more mitochondria now on the other side of the spectrum, if you do those 30 second sprints that I was talking about when you do those 30 second sprints, you deplete ATP and you get left with adenosine diphosphate and a phosphate molecule and via a alternative pathway, you can take two ADPs, which now have two phosphate molecules each, and you can join them, You can make an ATP, so now it's got three, and then one's left.

And that accumulation of inorganic phosphate, that single phosphate, is also a very potent transcription factor for mitochondrial biogenesis. So, increased mitochondrial capacity, we spoke about it earlier, is, is a factor that increases your fat oxidation, your carbohydrate oxidation, so it increases your durability.

By those two different mechanisms, which are diametrically opposite poles of training, one doing low intensity for 5 hours, the other one doing 5 30 second sprints for 10 minutes. They both do the same thing, in that they both stimulate the formation of more mitochondria, but they do them in completely different ways, by two completely different transcription factor pathways.

And so that's the reason why you actually need to train the full spectrum. There is no one training. If, if, if professional athletes do too much high intensity training, they regress. If they do too much low intensity training without enough interval training, they regress. If they do enough interval training and low intensity training, but they don't do strength work, they regress.

You've got to do a complete spectrum of training to get all of the adaptations. And for instance, in Tadej Pogacar's case, that's what he was missing. He was missing some key elements that he incorporated during the season and in the lead up or the end of last season and the lead up to this season. And that's why we've seen such a different Tadej this year.

He has been able to make gains in areas that were neglected before, uh, while he was topping out in other areas. And by redirecting the training into different modalities, he's made those huge gains. And so any athlete should not be overly focused on a particular kind of training method. You need a broad spectrum of different training to get the optimal result.

Hope people are listening. Um, uh, so the last question, which I ask every guest is, um, what does success mean to you? Success to me means happy children. And, um, and, and. Success away from that means being able to have the time to breathe, to exercise, to pause and to enjoy life. And so I think that's a better measure of success than any other motivator, whether it be money, uh, winning, uh, or otherwise.

Dr. Swartz, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for, for coming on and doing this. It's been really, really interesting. Thanks Stefan, thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it and uh, look forward to seeing you again sometime soon. If you guys enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe and to see more episodes click the link right up here.

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