Scott, I'm gonna line with Don on this one, man.

I really can't overemphasize how important it is to learn our bodies.

We can fight against the aging process, but it's still gonna happen.

Welcome to another edition of Frail Rear Nation.

My name is Don Freeman. And I'm Scott War. Today's guest is Cliff Pittman. He's a coach, he's a writer and an endurance training specialist who has a rare talent. There's very few people that can take complex physiology ideas and turn those into things that athletes can actually use. He's also a contributor at Ultroning Magazine and an article we read in last month's magazine was called VO2 Max Training for Ultronunners and why it still matters. So today we're going to get into VO2 Max, what it really means for ultra runners. How little intensity is actually needed to protect it and how we can use it strategically in our training and our racing. Now interestingly enough, we booked this recording before this happened, but last week on Instagram there was a Norwegian triathlete named Christian and I have no idea how to say his last name. And I don't know if you know about this cliff. I didn't give you a heads up on this. Christian, Blumenfeldt, he posted on his Instagram after he finished a treadmill test. And the screen on his Instagram picture showed a VO2 max value of 101.1. And you're going to have to help me with this too. Milliliters per kilogram per minute. I think that's the way you measure VO2 max. So that is like a world record VO2 max. I mean, it's crazy, crazy high. Some people are saying, you know, is it real or whatever. Here's the opening question for you, Cliff. What is VO2 max? And why should we even care about it? Yeah. You should have just started with that, Scott. No, that was a beautiful, beautiful build. Let me comment on that first. That is like, I think that's the highest recorded VO2 max in history that I'm aware of. Right. Maybe this will frame the discussion a little bit. I'm skeptical as to whether that value is actually accurate when you look at some of the details of that test. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. There you go. Who cares? Because he's probably in the 90s based on like the performances that he's put out there. It's still a world-class VO2 max and he can Obviously win with whatever engine that he has So whether it's 101 or 91 does it really matter? He's got an engine that is world-class. So what is VO2 max? Essentially most simplest way I can put it is that is the highest rate of oxygen that your body can consume via the lungs and then deliver or transport via the heart and then utilize via the working muscles. So we've got the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system and the muscular system working at max capacity. So it's like the engine is essentially what that is. So it sounds like it's something that we should monitor, we should care about because as our fitness improves, hopefully that that VO2 max improves. One of the things that I've had issues with or questions about is I think the only way that you can test VO2 maxes in a lab. Now, we have wearables that say what your VO2 maxes, but I think that's just kind of an algorithmic, you know, something that tries to mimic what your VO2 maxes or estimate what your VO2 maxes is. So as a typical athlete, why should we care about that number versus all the other data we have on our wearable? And can we count on what our wearables tell us? Scott, this might surprise you. Based on I wrote this link, the article on why VO2 max training is important for all to runners, but I'll say that I don't think

that number matters to us at all.

It really does it.

And especially with the reading on the watch,

because the way that the watch does it

is mostly proprietary based on these different companies.

So I don't really know exactly how it reads it,

but it's using math and algorithms

and it's using heart rate data and paste data

and it's trying to predict based on your you know internal readings like heart rate and then also your outputs such as paces what it might be and so just to give you an example mine is about 20 below my watch says it's about 20 below what I've measured in the lab. Oh wow. It's a stark contrast and I know a lot of other athletes who experience the same. And that's because in the lab, you have the mask on and it's measuring gas exchanges, how much oxygen you can consume and then also ventilation, how much carbon dioxide you're breathing out. And then it actually gives you this direct measurement. And so when you say, should we care about this, we should care about our aerobic engine as a whole. But that is a wide spectrum in a big range. We've got, and VO2 max sits at the upper limit. It represents that absolute capacity is the ceiling on the house, it's the roof. And so we should care about the entire engine as a whole, and the ceiling is a part of that, and it's an integral part of it. Now, just because we should care about it, just because it's important doesn't mean that it's everything. I would even argue it's not as important as a lot of the other stuff that sits underneath that ceiling. If a person has a 91 VO2 max and another person has a 100, can we expect the person with with a 100 to win just about every single race, providing they're making good decisions. They don't go off the trail. They don't trip. They don't sabotage themselves. Is a VO2 Max a good predictor of a finish? That's a great question, Don. Yes and no. There are some studies out there that show that like VO2 Max is the main determinant for performance, even all the way up to, I think they did the study at, believe it was, CCC, so out of UTMB. So even a mountainous race, long race like that, that VO2 max was the main thing that determined performance. However, it's not safe to assume that somebody with a 100 is going to beat somebody with a 90 every single time. And as the variables are decreased, let's just say a 5K or let's go even further like an 800 meter track race where 50 to 60% of that is like aerobic metabolism. That or a 5K, VO2 max matters a whole lot more in a short duration race where maximum output matters so much and there's not as many other variables that play. Now, once we go up to 100K, 100 mile, ultra distances and we throw in night running and fueling and all of the chaos that we love to in a data ourselves with in the sport. All of those variables start becoming more and more important. And so I would say VO2 max, yes, it can determine like who can perform at the top end of this sport. Like it's really important to have like I would say a big enough engine to compete at the very front, but whether someone has a 190, I mean we've seen it, Killian's got a believe a recorded VO2 max of 90 plus and he hasn't won every race out there. And that's because there are other factors that do play into it, especially when the longer the distance goes, we start talking about fatigue, resistance, and durability, and fueling. That stuff starts to matter a whole lot more. So yes, you need a big enough engine to be in the game, but aside from that, you need to have a lot of other stuff to be really, really good. And fractional utilization is a big part of it it too like what percentage of your VO to max can you operate at? So at the beginning of the season we're we're not in our peak shape So let's talk about the beginning of a season of VO 2 max and then we're peaking towards a race Can we watch that VO 2 max increase? Can we use that as a measure to monitor progress? Or does it stay pretty much consistent with our DNA and who we are? Or can we manipulate it? Um, yes, we can manipulate it slightly, but it also just depends on the particular athlete. And I know that's the annoying answer that every coach gives. It always depends, right? And so that's one of the rules we have a CTS. Like if you say it depends, you have to say it depends on what. And so it depends on the athlete history and training history. And so if you've been training for 20 plus years, like you have all this training history, and you're 40 plus years old, like you're not going to move that number. It's not going to change. And the goal at that point becomes more about preservation of like fighting the aging process and holding on and maintaining as much as possible, that number, but or what it represents. But if the athlete doesn't have a lot of training history and they just started running, like within the last few months or a year, it's like, well, yeah, they can certainly manipulate and improve that. It's kind of like genetically predetermined, but now they have the opportunity to train into that and optimize it and build it up to its full realization. The fascinating thing there, though, is what the new athlete is kind of coming back to what I was talking about, the range of the aerobic engine. The way that I would train a new athlete to raise their VO2 max is not to give them a bunch of VO2 max work. I would actually just ease them into to easy running and build up their volume and optimize their volume because that actually improves VO2 max as well. And so if you think about there's this endurance string theory. I don't think I have a string at my desk, but let's use this. I don't know if this will come across on the video well. It certainly won't come across on audio, but you've got this string. And so over here on the right side is VO2 max. That's the ceiling. On the far end, over here call this endurance. It's like zone one, zone two, you know, easy, easy aerobic work. So if I were to like lift this string over here, then the whole string is lifted, right? And that's because physiology works on a spectrum, like dimmer switches and not necessarily on off. So when people think, oh, VO2 max training, I have to flip the VO2 max switch to really move the needle. In certain contexts, maybe. For a new athlete though, let's go ahead and go for this low-hanging fruit. Let's lift this up, and we're gonna improve their endurance, but their VO2 max is naturally going to be lifted as I continue to improve that. So once you improve one aspect of your physiology, you're essentially improving other aspects of your physiology simultaneously. And that's because everything works on a spectrum. So a new athlete, we want to build a volume first instead of throwing them right into like hard, high intensity work that comes with the higher cost in terms of recovery and also higher risk in terms of injury. So as Cliff was holding that string up for those that only have audio, he lifted up the left hand side of that string for endurance, the VO2 max side elevated along with it. So he's lifting one side all the effect the other. You know, I love that visual. And I also liked a phrase that you used, and I want to ask a question about it. I think you called it fractional utilization. I don't know if that's the correct phrase you used. But before you said that, I was thinking, okay, a VO2 max is the ceiling, and we're running endurance races. We're rarely bumping up an extra that ceiling. In fact, if we are, we're probably gonna burn out and not finish the race. We wanna keep that well below VO2 max. So should we ever, as we're training, push that VO2 max and try to hit that, that ceiling and do some interval training where we're passing out, or should we concentrate more on the fractional improvement or the fractional utilization of our oxygen use. Yeah, you're thinking about this correctly Scott. That's exactly right. And the answer is both. And so, you know, if, if an athlete, and we talked earlier about athletes, been running for 20 years, and let's just say for that training history, they've been doing nothing but very low intensity, like traditional ultra running training, right? We're running with the group, we're having beard afterwards, we're having a good time like this is the lifestyle. And not a whole lot high intensity training as a part of that. And so most likely if we were to put them in our lab, what we would see is that their lactate threshold, and so let's just say that synonymous with fractional utilization, is at a very high percentage of their VO2 max. And so if they want to improve that upper sustainable limit, such as lactate, threshold, or critical speed, then they're going to have to bump up that ceiling. There's no more room for growth at that point. There's a lot of stuff underneath the ceiling. And if we want more room for growth, we're going to have to raise the ceiling up a little bit to have more space to grow. Now, some people, let's say, you know, this is of getting into athlete phenotypes, but like myself, where I have a strength and power background. It was a 400 meter runner competed at a high level when I was very young, 400 meters. So a lot of fast twitch muscle fibers. I can put on muscle easily, spent a lot of time doing a lot of strength work when I was like the military. And so that's my background. So I do a lot less VO2 max work than an athlete who has a different phenotype and different training history. So the goal is to increase fractional utilization and that's what's the most important thing I would say for performance is what percentage of that can we operate at and so That is where the majority of our training should should reside and At some point throughout the season It is good to to focus on increasing or raising that ceiling a little bit For for a variety of reasons and one of them is to have more space for growth. Cliff, I really like that string that you held up because the body responds well to change. Some variety. It needs a little bit of variety. And when you surprise it, all of a sudden it has to adapt a bit. And whether you push that string up from the right hand side or the left hand side, probably the best bet is to mix it up a little bit so that string isn't just lifted up on one side and dragging the other side. So you're kind of lifting both through some mutaneously through your training regime if I'm catching that right. Yeah, that's absolutely right, Don. That's correct. We really need to address the entire aerobic system. I think that's a really good way to look at it as athletes is to be well-rounded. And so we have to look at our year in sailing. It was the most important thing. Well, most important thing is going to be operating at a very low percentage of our VO2 max for a very long time. And that's the kind of stuff that should make up the majority of our training. And it should also be what we do in the final few two to three months leading into a big ultra event. But there's a lot of time in the season outside of that that we could be focused on becoming a more well-rounded athlete. And that's where we can focus on building up the other side of our our aerobic engine. You know, before I abandon the the stat on my wearable that says VO2 max, you've already mentioned that it's probably not accurate versus the lab results. Is that score relative and as we improve our fitness and and we're looking at our wearable VO2 max and I'm using air quotes here, does that gauge our fitness? Or should we just abandon that and go after, you know, some things like Don told me, you can test your fitness, find a loop or a segment that you run regularly and time yourself. And if you're getting faster, your fitness is improving, right? So there's a lot of thoughts and questions there. Go ahead and answer whatever you want to. Lots of questions, Scott. Yeah, I think it can serve that purpose, although I think the latter example that you gave is better serves that purpose. Because at the end of the day, it's a matter of performance and a certain outcome rather than indirect math. However, the indirect math should all be equal in terms of how it continues to calculate this estimated score. So it can be one piece of the puzzle. And as a coach, we like to look at all the pieces and tell a story. Whenever we're determining athlete progression, we never look at what is their watch's VO2 maxa. It's just not something that's high up on the priority list of like is the athlete progressing or not. However, I think that as an individual athlete, if that's one thing that you know that you can look at reliably over time, then sure. Use that and then certainly like, if it's going up, you're probably doing something right. You mentioned early in the podcast that, you know, VO2 max is the ceiling and then there's these other measurements below that are probably more telling what are those. What should we be looking for if we like our wearable? What are some of the key metrics that you would suggest to track rather than VO2 max. Yeah. So the first part of the question is what is underneath that ceiling? Well, there's a lot of physiological parameters that at the end of the day, you have to test in the lab, essentially, in this ventilation. You can have your first ventilatory threshold and your second ventilatory threshold. Those are not completely synonymous with lactate, but they also coincide pretty closely with the first and second lactate turn point in a lab. So those are things underneath the ceiling that can be measured as benchmarks. So how does that work in the field for an athlete? One thing that an athlete can do is to understand their approximate pace at lactate threshold. It's a lot of different tests out there in order to do that. I think the most straightforward one would be a 30 minute field test where you go out and you just do like essentially a 30 minute time trial, you're going to get roughly somewhat close to what that approximate pace at lactate threshold is. And so that's a benchmark. Now, you can really insert any benchmark like that, though. It doesn't have to be that test. It doesn't have to be approximate pace at lactate threshold. There's There's, you know, segments on Strava, I think is a great one that you guys mentioned already. I think it's a really good way and I certainly leverage that with athletes. Like, hey, look, you ran, and I don't necessarily look at Strava when I'm analyzing training, but I will have athletes look for that type of data over time of how are they progressing, you know, on their regular routes over time. I think another one that is often overlooked is kind of on the other end of the spectrum. It's not maximum output. It's not even performance oriented on that side. But it's actually on recovery efforts. And so recovery efforts are necessarily like are like kind of the same year-to-year-to-year throughout training, typically what that might look like for most athletes is like 30 to 60 minutes, zone one, and it's like all day forever pace, right? And over time, if an athlete is progressing, we should start to see that that heart rate at a given pace or a given effort is starting to come down. Those are signs of adaptations that the heart is becoming more efficient, that's a more stroke volume, and pumping out more blood per beat. And so that's one way to kind of look at like, hey, my easy runs are staying relatively close to the same pace, but now my heart rate has come down over the years. And that's a very long-term way to look at things. And then ultimately at the end of the day, like I don't think we should overlook subjective feedback. And that's, you know, as a coach, I love nerding out on data. And I look at a lot of robust information on training peaks. That's where I like to look at all the training data. But at the end of the day, like, sometimes you just got to ask, like, how did it feel? How does that route or that distance feel compared to previous efforts, whether it's a race or a training run? And, you know, if you're finishing stronger and you're feeling more confident,

you know, that's obviously a mechanism or a feedback mechanism of like things are going in the right direction. And I think that that's a big part of the athlete. Progression or the process training process is being in tune with how things feel over time. And Cliff, just a real quick clarification. You mentioned training peaks and there may be some listeners that don't know what training peaks is. Can you give us a nutshell of what training peaks is and how they might use that? Yeah, training peaks is a platform where coaches can prescribe and manage training. And so the athlete will upload their training just like they do to Strava and uploads all of the metrics and there's just a lot of really good ways to categorize efforts and progression and stress essentially is what measuring. Is how stressful is a given activity or even a given interval, and then being able to plot that on charts for year over year over year, or look at it on a more micro scale. So it's just a way that an athlete who's data oriented or a coach can look at an athlete's training and get meaningful information as to how training is going and how the body is responding over time. And you have to pair that with the athlete's feedback, which is 50% of the story as well. Now, Cliff, this, this, you're going to have to help me with this question that I'm asking. It's like, you know, the delivery truck shows up, bricks, paint, mortar, I don't even know what you're gonna build out of this. All the words are there. And it really kind of fits into the category of what we do often, we get better at. What we practice, we get better at. That if we're just, all we do is slog when we run whatever pace, your slog pace, and that's all you practice,

then you become very good slogger, and it's pretty hard to become faster than a slogger because that's all you do. And so you get that out there and you do some fart lakes and do some turnover and you get better. And you get faster, in fact, the same effort that you were doing your other slog is now a little bit faster slog. So I kind of want to replace this Slog Metaphor with VO2 Max.

By the Wave Cliff, slog is Don's nickname for me. You finally figured out, keep going Don. Would you like me to start over on this Cliff or are you still with me? I think I'm still with you. So now we're going to substitute slog for for VO2 Max from Speedworks for some VO2 Max. Me as an endurance runner, just happy out there to get the mileage in. Why do I want to practice some of these VO2 Max to improve my endurance running? Yeah, so I think it comes back to just training the system as a whole. We don't necessarily have to always be progress oriented, especially this might be a use case where that's a good example of we're not always just going to get indefinitely faster. That's okay. Sometimes training is very process oriented and sometimes we need to address certain aspects of our physiology that we haven't touched in a while. And so incorporating VO2 max can have those benefits and we can do it by being focused on effort. Okay, this feels like a 10 out of 10 effort. So I know I'm doing it right. Like I cannot physically go any harder than this. And do it to the point where you're not killing yourself because you're only as good as what you can recover from. So you know, it's really that mindset of like, I'm going to plug in and go through the reps because this is a part of my aerobic engine that's that's important. I don't train it very often, so I'm going to be very intentional about doing it. I don't necessarily have to measure it. I don't have to say like, oh, I'm getting faster at these every single year because at my age, I'm not. Trying to hold on to what I've been able to do over the last five years. That's a big win It's a big win that I can still run those those paces at those efforts, you know year and a year out over the last few years

I'm not sure if that answers your question or not. It does because it is led to my next question

You're welcome. So I'm sold VO2 max. I'm gonna raise my string whether someone left a right hand side

I'm gonna push that ceiling up whether I'm going to leverage endurance or the more intense training. As a runner, what should I go do? Should I do it once a week and what should I do? Give me some direction because I'm right in line with you. How do I train? Yeah, you bet. So obviously this is context dependent, the individual. But let's just kind of just do a canned approach here. A good way for an athlete to incorporate this is to look at it in very short blocks. And so maybe we're going to address this for, let's say we're six months out from our big race. Got into Western states. All right, so it's January, we, six months out. And so we're going to address this aspect of our physiology. And so minimum effective dose is maybe a good approach for some people. We're not trying to really go all in and move the needle drastically in this regard. Really what we can do is incorporate, let's just say like a four by three minutes as a good safe work. Four intervals of three minutes, a maximum effort, and then we're going to have three minutes recovery in between. And so three minutes on, three minutes off. And we can do that twice a week. And what we have to do is make sure that we have adequate recovery on both ends like we need to make sure that we're not too fried or fatigued going into that workout and then we need to make sure on the back end especially if we're aging athletes. We need to make sure on the back end we have adequate recovery from that so that we can absorb it because it does come like we just need to be honest They comes with more risk than just going out and running easy and so we can do that one or two times a week and then we can repeat those We don't have to get get cute with workouts. They don't need to look overly complicated Just four by three is or five by three's I think an important thing to mention here though is that The overload and recovery principle is a universal training principle. It's applied to every single sport. And so in this context, we will want to make sure that when the athlete is the most fresh is when they do their hardest workout. And that is a little bit different than what a lot of coaches might implement or what athletes intuitively do. And so intuitively, an athlete might think, well, I'm just going to, I'm going to do four by threes this week. And next week, I'm going to do five by threes. And then I'm going to do six by threes that third week because theoretically, I'm stronger. It's not a good way to look at it. And that's because the timeline of adaptations aren't that quick. It can take sometimes three, four, five weeks for all those adaptations to actually realize in the new fitness. And so the worst case scenario here is an athlete doing their very hardest workout in week three or four when they're the most tired. That's not the best time to do the hardest workout. So when the athletes fresh, they're coming in, rested, do the hardest workout, and then you can either maintain that for the next few weeks, or you can start to step down. So maybe if you start at 5 by 3, and then you start building good fatigue over those first couple of weeks that last week, a third week, you're coming down to a 4 by 3, and then you're shifting into a D-load or recovery phase. Give yourself 5, six, maybe even seven days for some athletes to really absorb all of that high intensity work, all of that work. And so that might be what a meso cycle is, what we'd call that, a three or four week time frame, where we're very specifically focused on improving that one aspect of our physiology and improving the O2 max. That doesn't mean that's the only thing we do, right? We're only doing one or two workouts a week, so we're still doing other stuff outside of that. And that's all easy running. Cliff, you may think that I run my life by my wearable. And I may do that. But we're talking about recovery and I know having been coached before and knowing the benefit of a coach is not everybody has a coach or is in a place where they can have a coach. Is there a way to understand whether we are recovered from a high intensity work or doing the four by threes and how long it's going to take for us to quote unquote recover? And again, wearables, some of them say, hey, after this workout, you can look down and will say you need 72 hours before your next workout.

Are those accurate?

Can we use those as a rule of thumb? Do we need to really tune in? Don's favorite thing is listen to your body. I'm on the other extreme where I listen to my wearable. So how do we know whether we recovered?

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