Based on their recent research article, the Seilers discuss the proliferation of training zone systems and compare them to the highly touted Norwegian five-zone model.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris Case: Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Fast Talk, your source for the Science of Endurance performance. I’m your host, Chris Case. Here with Coach Trevor Connor. Training zones have become ubiquitous. It’s true, but there are so many different variations of zone systems now that they’ve added confusion to training.
Today we wanna talk about the role of zones, why they are meant to add clarity, the trends our guests are seeing and how they’re being employed, and offer advice on how to use them best. Dr. Steven Seiler and his daughter Serin, former professional runner and master’s student in exercise physiology at the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences have recently published an article in scientific reports entitled, contextualizing the Norwegian Standardized Intensity Zone Framework in an International Sample of Endurance Practitioners to look at the proliferation of zone systems they identified over 40.
We discuss what’s common in terms of number of zones and the basis of those zones and how coaches and athletes are using zones and why cycling is such an outlier. Next we look at the Norwegian approach and how it’s standardization and use throughout the country’s Olympic training centers may have led to the nation’s rise in medal winning performances like what we’re seeing at the Winter Olympics Now.
As with any podcast with Dr. Seiler, we wander a bit, but there are nuggets of gold throughout the entire episode, sometimes from Steven and oftentimes from Sirn. So prepare for a double dose of Seiler Science and let’s make you fast.
[00:01:44] Trevor Connor: Listeners, come ride with us now through March. Chris case and I are hosting Zift rides every Tuesday with special guests like Neil Henderson, Brent Buckwalter, Dr.
Steven Seiler, and more. Each workout will be an easy no drop ride, so you can chat your cycling training questions to our experts and get interesting answers all while getting a one hour workout. Register for Fast Talk Labs, zw rides on zw.com or see our guest list and register on Fast Talk labs.com/zw.
Well, Steven and Sirn. Welcome to the show.
[00:02:19] Siren Seiler: Thank you.
[00:02:19] Stephen Seiler: Thank you.
[00:02:20] Trevor Connor: I’m gonna say we just started, but we are already actually 20 minutes in and this is, how would you describe this, Chris? A
[00:02:29] Chris Case: show
[00:02:29] Trevor Connor: Dumpster,
[00:02:34] Chris Case: the first ever stylish show, but we won’t talk about that. That’s behind us. Now
[00:02:39] Stephen Seiler: the audience may want know it’s not because of what I’m saying, it’s technology, it’s technical issues, just technology. We think it may be due to the nato Greenland issue.
[00:02:50] Trevor Connor: Actually, I gotta give you good dad credit because you always have the perfect sound system set up and you gave it to your daughter and her sound is perfect.
[00:03:00] Stephen Seiler: Yeah.
[00:03:01] Trevor Connor: And we just spent 10 minutes with your setup and finally just went Screw it.
[00:03:06] Stephen Seiler: Yeah. See, that’s never gonna happen again. I am not gonna let, I’m gonna say on your own kid, on your own.
[00:03:14] Trevor Connor: So the two of you published a paper together and it’s one about zones, zone models and how people are using them. And I’m gonna say, as I was preparing for this, I went, well, this is really interesting.
I’m gonna bring in a bunch of other studies that look at zone models. ’cause I’m sure I have a bunch of them. And I was actually surprised I couldn’t find very many. So you’re really actually, even though we talk about zones all the time. In the scientific literature. You’re being a little bit novel here.
This is a little bit new.
[00:03:44] Siren Seiler: Yeah. I think that was kind of what inspired this paper or the study itself, because we know that there’s so much talk about zones and sewn systems, how to set the thresholds, et cetera. But there hasn’t been any papers before that has actually investigated how these zones are used in practice and how people actually implement the demarcations into their training systems or sewn systems.
So. We don’t know what people use. So that was what we wanted to kind of investigate. And also with respect to the Norwegian five zone system, which is kind of implemented across both sports and levels here in Norway or so we think. So we wanted to check if this is actually true and how we compared to other countries in the use of zones.
[00:04:39] Trevor Connor: So why don’t we start with a little bit of background. We have talked about zones before. We actually had a whole episode that was pretty popular called Our Zones Dead, where we talked about this. But let’s just quickly take a step back, tell us why we have zones, what’s the purpose of them, and give us just a little bit of the history of training zones.
[00:04:59] Stephen Seiler: Well, I mean, I can kinda start a little bit and then Cyn can feed in, but I think we have to really keep in mind that both of you come from the cycling world and perhaps some of the people that said zones are dead come from the cycling world. And cycling is special because you have such easy access and control of power of the externalities that are presented that are accomplished, meaning power, times, duration, and different manifestations of it.
That is unusual in endurance sport. In fact, it’s almost a singularity in a ecologically valid setting. Rowing, they have rowing machines with power, but when as soon as you get on the water, everything changes and it’s tougher cross country skiing, you have no way to measure power. You have it on an urometer, but as soon as you get out in the snow you don’t.
And so most sports, if they’re measuring something, they’re not measuring power. They’re instead having to try to generate zones from either heart rate or lactate or that combination perceived exertion. So they’re using internal and perceptual phy, some physiology and some perception to get at these intensity zones.
It’s cycling. That is the special case and it’s a nice special case. ’cause we can start with cycling ’cause it’s easy and then we move on to the harder stuff in terms of that triangulation intensity zone process.
[00:06:31] Trevor Connor: Yeah. It’s also interesting with cycling that you effectively have two zones. I mean, with all my athletes, I have to create a set of heart rate zones and I have to create a set of power zones.
Looking at the interaction and the difference between the two can be very interesting data.
[00:06:44] Stephen Seiler: Yeah. And it gets very individual and companies like training peaks, they try to be agnostic to this and just say, let the user decide. And then they have, I think C identified 40 different Culminations,
[00:06:58] Siren Seiler: more than 40
[00:06:59] Stephen Seiler: different ways to cut up the pie.
With training zones, but if you go into the research literature, including some of the really good studies by Alejandro Lucia years ago, way back when, he was able to get ahold of Tour de France level athletes and so forth, and it was a three zone model that was used, meaning that we were able to identify two break points based on either lactate, doing a lactate profile or a ventilation based profile with the metabolic cart.
Both of those methodologies have been used and they both give you two turn points, two departures from kind of linearity that you can identify, and then you use those and you end up with three zones, kind of zone, 1, 2, 3, or green, yellow, red, or easy. Medium hard. You can kind of put names to it as you wish, but that’s what most of the scientific literature is based on are three zones.
And then in recent years, Norway has really tried to be better on the sports science side. And in Norway they use five zones. So there are a lot of publications from Norway and maybe from others that have kind of followed this, that involve five zones. But what they’re doing is still, they’re overlaying that five zone model on top of the three so that the middle is still the same, the two break points are still the same.
And then you just take the easy zone or that zone one and split it in two, and you take that red zone and split it in two, and now you got five. So that’s the world. We work in Norway, but a lot of the research literature is either gonna be three or five now.
[00:08:45] Chris Case: Let’s hear from Neil Henderson and Tim Cusick.
Both highly experienced coaches on how the proliferation of zone systems has impacted the training process.
[00:08:55] Neal Henderson: I would say having worked at a company that had certain zones, assessed for heart rate and power and running pace, and none of them were the same and they didn’t overlap. And then I looked at the other major competitors in the marketplace and they had different zones for different things as well.
It was very much a problem across the industry of what is available and the consistency is not there in any way that I can discern.
[00:09:24] Tim Cusick: It’s a languaging problem, it really is. We can have a lot of physiological discussions about what exactly fits where, but across the universe, community of endurance athletes, it’s really difficult when people keep pumping in new ones.
It really just makes the whole concept fuzzy. And if we think about, one of the things that training with data does is it shouldn’t make things fuzzy. Like it should answer questions. It should help us make better decisions. But then when we layer in maybe over nuance to be polite, we actually take something that was simple and we make it much harder, and that’s problematic.
[00:10:03] Neal Henderson: You know, within zones, a lot of times I try to think about the three different. Axes in a way of what the actual output is. A response to that and what that feels like three different ways. It’s kind of triangulating any given intensity. So you can look at it’s X watts, my heart rate is wide beats per minute, and it’s C on the RPE scale, A to Z, I don’t know.
But you have that actual work done. How the body’s responding to that, and then that perceived effort. And by and large, most training things should be fairly well in line. And when something is out of line, that’s often a red flag that something is going on. Maybe you have a little virus and your heart rate’s elevated for the given effort and you’re about to get sick, or you have the opposite.
You’ve been training hard, maybe not fueling well, and your perceived effort’s very high, your heart rate’s low, and the power’s kind of high things are outta whack there. And so for me, it’s not actually just those discreet bending of zones and numbers for some of those. Classifying it there, but actually the variation across those three different axes.
[00:11:14] Siren Seiler: I think that the five zone scale in Norway, it’s more about just adding nuance to the prescription of training because zone one or the green easy, low intensity zone below LT one can be extremely large for an elite athlete especially. So say an elite runner can run. Below LT one at 3 45 min per kilometer pace and also a a five minute per kilometer pace.
And that’s like a huge range. So it will differ the mechanical loading, despite your heart rate being relatively low and also your lactate being low. So it’s, I think more about focusing on making the EC training days. Easy enough. Enough, and maybe this is more important in running, so you don’t really prescribe zone two training sessions or upper end low intensity runs because the speed ends of being pretty high for well-trained runners, and the same with the upper intensity zone.
You just make sure that. It’s not as hard as possible. You just really control it. So it’s better to split it up into zones four and five and stay on the safer side of that range.
[00:12:32] Stephen Seiler: I guess at some point, I’m gonna say this, I’m as well glad out there ’cause I’ve probably spent 25 years now trying to figure all this out.
’cause the first papers that we presented where we presented kind of this idea of a polarized distribution, 80 20 model, whatever you wanna say, it was based on what the athletes were doing, right? Not what my brain was coming up with. I was just describing what I saw. And then since then I’ve been trying to understand, well, but why?
Why do they do it? Why does it work out that way? Why is the 80 20 kinda distribution, you know, you see it in different sporting groups, different endurance sports independent of each other. For years I’ve been trying to work that out and one of the things that has really happened in the last, say 10, 15 years, is that whole molecular biology part of our knowledge.
You know, that we have people, we have laboratories that have gotten really good at measuring the actual signaling happening in the muscle fibers in the capillary network and so forth that are. Turning on and driving those adaptations that we all try to achieve more mitochondria, more capillaries around the muscle fibers and so forth, changes in enzymes in all of that.
So how’s it happening, and is it such that training in zone two or in zone one, in a three zone model induces very specific adaptations? And then the higher intensity zones, like the interval training zone four or five, that induces other adaptations? And the answer to that is no. The answer to that is a resounding no.
In fact, where the paper that just came out showed that the aspect of training that was best correlated with changes in the size of the heart and the pump function of the heart, it was duration. It was volume, not intensity, and this just came out so that the literature is becoming more and more clear.
And why is that? Why is it that it doesn’t work that way? And if it doesn’t, then what are zones for? Well, if we look at. The kind of the signaling. What we see is there’s a bunch of different ways to get to the same place that evolution Nature has equipped us with a kind of biology, a biological solution that is that the metabolism that happens during exercise induces some signals increase calcium concentration inside the cell, reactive oxygen and nitrogen species.
So free radicals are part of it. Mechanical loading. The energy charge, meaning the ratio of a TP to a MP when you’re really pushing hard, all of those induce some signals. But the thing that happens is all of them go into a kind of a central regulator. Or a few central regulators. We’ve talked about PGC one alpha, right?
Well, so this has been called a bow tie architecture, lots of inputs, a central set of regulators, and then lots of outputs. And that seems to be what’s going on inside these fibers. And so. There’s many ways to roam from a signaling standpoint that will then turn on this cascade of adaptations that are that whole endurance spectrum.
And if you understand that and it seems robust, what we’re seeing, then you have to ask, okay, what are zones for? What is the function? Of these training intensity zones, and my best understanding right now from all of this and all the good science that others are doing is that we basically use intensity zones to help manage stress.
The stress of training. ’cause we want to get a high signal to drive adaptation, but we have to do it at a manageable level of systemic level stress. And what is that? What’s systemic stress, Steven? Well, it’s. The autonomic nervous system turning on that big autonomic nervous system response. It’s mechanical loading.
That can be excessive. It is also inflammatory responses. So these are the system level cost of achieving those cellular level adaptations. And if that balance goes in the wrong direction, too much stress for the signal, then we are compromising our athletes. Then they start struggling. They have trouble recovering and so forth.
So that’s my take right now is basically good coaches use intensity zones kind of to regulate and manage their athletes’ recovery to keep them on the plus side.
[00:17:16] Trevor Connor: This is what I love about you. When we, right before we started, I said any questions about the outline? You went, Trevor, when have we ever stayed on the outline?
And sure enough, I asked you our intro question, you’ve already gotten to the halfway point of the outline, and now we’re on a different outline.
[00:17:33] Stephen Seiler: Well, I guess for me, this is really fundamental because it’s like these belief systems.
[00:17:39] Trevor Connor: Yes.
[00:17:40] Stephen Seiler: You know, it’s almost religiosity around training zones and so forth and.
I guess what I wanna say is, guys, it doesn’t work that way because if we understand our biology it can’t, we put too much faith in our silly zones. But it’s both not that complicated and it is much more interesting.
[00:18:01] Trevor Connor: But you’ve raised a really good question, and forgive me, I need just one minute to give context to ask you this question, but you know, sir, and in your paper you started with the history of training zones and you mentioned, and I’m surprised that you think about it, zones are still a relatively new thing.
The first person to take an attempt at creating training zones was Sally Edwards.
[00:18:21] Siren Seiler: Yeah. At least for heart rate. Yeah.
[00:18:23] Trevor Connor: When I bought my first heart rate monitor, I had came with this little book with Sally Edwards zones, and I took a look last night and it was, zone ones was 50 to 60% of max heart rate.
Zone two was 60 to, you know, there was no science behind that at all. And then you talked about Jack Daniels. I read his book and what he did is he. Runners. They do a lot of their training at their marathon pace and then some of their training at their mile pace, and then he tried to say, here’s how they train, so let’s put zones that kind of match up with those different paces.
But you really see coaches saying, I need this as a communication tool to tell athletes how to train. Steven, what you’re bringing up is now starting with the three zone model, which I’d like to say you introduced, scientists have gotten into this and said, let’s put science behind this. Let’s put physiology behind this.
Explain zones from a physiological standpoint. The issue with when coaches were doing as a communication tools as sirn, as you said in your paper, there’s over 40 different zones and it gets confusing. My question to you is how does it change zones when now researchers are saying, let’s step in, let’s fix this.
We’re going to give you the correct zones. Is it still a communication tool or does it serve a different purpose? And Stephen, I think that’s what you were getting at.
[00:19:43] Stephen Seiler: I just wanna make one little correction. I didn’t invent that three zone model if I was gonna give credit to it. What I learned it from was Alejandro Lucia, who he’s kind of moved over into more cancer research himself, but we were just corresponding and he helped me understand some things, and I stole the three zone model from him.
Just so we’re clear.
[00:20:04] Trevor Connor: Good. You give the credit, but still, I mean, sir, it looks like you have an answer for this, and maybe this is part of what your paper was getting at. How does it change zones? How does it change the purpose of zones when researchers get involved in creating them?
[00:20:16] Siren Seiler: Yeah, so when I started.
Doing my research for this paper, I wanted to kind of create an overview of everything that was out there, right? And I quickly realized that that was gonna be impossible because it was too much. And just as I said, on training peaks, you can choose between more than 40 different scales. Not just zones, but different ways of creating the scale.
So different metrics to use, for example, power, heart rate, or pace duration. And then in the scales, you can choose between say, three to 10 zones. So it’s like the combinations are endless out there. And most of those I don’t think are based on physiology. They’re kind of created. From Gus or influential coaches, athletes, but then the Norwegian five zone scale is based on the three zone model.
It kind of originated from or in the late. 1990s I think it was. They borrowed from German researchers, Luis Ma and his colleagues, and also their own testing of their athletes. And they were previous athletes, Matson Al. I referred them in the paper as one of the founders of the original Norwegian scale.
So they had like a physiological perspective when wanting to create zones and establish a common intensity language among elite athletes in Norway. That was kind of the fundamental purpose, not to make the correct zones or correct intensity scale. It was more just to create a communication tool and a standardization of language among the different athletes across sports.
And also to be able to communicate better among and between athletes, coaches and scientists at which is the regional Olympic Federation. And in later years it’s been. More and more used by researchers, and I think it solves perhaps many of the issues around the different needs of different sports.
Maybe because it is so general when it comes to heart rate and VO two and lactate values, and then you have a framework, but then you have to adapt it to the individual. So it’s not like set in stone. It’s supposed to be a framework. Because an elite athlete and a beginner athlete will have very different heart rate percentages at their lactate threshold, or say LT two or LT one.
So you have to individualize it, but it’s good to have a common framework to refer to. Maybe
[00:23:09] Stephen Seiler: they should summarize the law and I think. She mentioned some names that will mean nothing to the listeners, but what was interesting about them, like this individual Rolf Al, who is no longer with us, but he was a rower, an elite level rower at one point, and he was also one of the early students of in exercise physiology at the Norwegian Sport University.
So there were these early kinda bridge makers that understood the training process from the inside as athletes as high level athletes, but then trained in physiology. He was one of them. And he, I think, had a really important function in that, bringing those two worlds together. And he says, if we’re gonna be successful in Norway, little Norway, one of our competing.
Tools will be that we’re unified, that we understand each other, that we have the same language. And so like CN said, that those training intensity zones and all of that became this common language that helped clarify, that gave us the opportunity to spread the news and spread training, understanding across sports.
And I think it is just, we’re about to have another Winter Olympics, but the data is super clear that when this started happening, the Norwegian performance, just the number of medals, gold, silver, bronze, just went way up both summer and winter. So we think it made a difference.
[00:24:40] Trevor Connor: So, I mean, this is where you can reverse engineer it and say, what is the value of training zones?
By asking, it seems you, you standardized the training zone system in Norway and you saw improvement in performance. What did the standardization do? How did it help performance? Having that one common language?
[00:25:01] Stephen Seiler: Yeah. Syrian can follow this up, but what we’ve seen is it allowed for the different sports disciplines like rowing, cycling, cross country skiing, to talk to each other and learn from each other so that we became this knowledge sharing process.
Gave benefits that several heads are better than one, and that was what started happening is we started being able to compare notes and see where you can basically then say, we kinda came up with this. Alright, there’s some universal tendencies in terms of training intensity, distribution, and things.
That’s that give us a reasonable starting point. There are some sports specificities that we have to deal with. Running has got that big eccentric and mechanical load that. Pretty much none of the other endurance sports have. For example, there’s differences in the force curves and so forth that we have to think about a bit.
But then, and then there’s that individual level that may be driven by obviously genetics, fiber type, different aspects, technical mastery and so forth that you have to deal with at the individual level. So those three levels kind of emerged and it’s helped us develop a framework for incorporating all of that into the mentality of the coaches and how they understand the training process and how they communicate with their athletes and so forth.
Now, is it perfect? No, but it’s been positive.
[00:26:24] Siren Seiler: When it comes to, is it perfect? Like I don’t think zones can or have to be perfect. And what I think is so important with the Norwegian approach, or what actually maybe happened when they standardized this, it may have been that they were able to train smarter, just have a better understanding of what it means to train easy, when you’re supposed to train easy, and what it means to not train as hard as possible during your interval session.
So for example, mallet GaN the great Norwegian cross country skier, she’s a great example here because her training was at one point very polarized to the point that she did a lot of say, sewn five work or. Intensity above 90% of heart rate max. And that didn’t work like she regressed after a while of doing that because it was too stressful.
Back to what Steven was saying earlier with the systemic stress response was higher than the adaptive signaling or what she could tolerate at least, so they had to change some things and in the five sewn model, she ended up doing more intervals in zone four. Or up to 90% of heart rate max. So it’s like just those nuances that you maybe not get with the three zone scale and even more zones may make things too complicated again.
So it’s one of the things that works. You’re just able to add nuance to the low intensity and the high intensity domain and keep the threshold region as that range between your first increase in lactate or LT one and your second exponential increase. So where you can maintain, say, 60 minutes or half marathon as a runner.
[00:28:12] Chris Case: Here’s Dr. Stacey Brisson on how she likes to take advantage of the ability to communicate that zone systems offer, regardless of the system being used.
[00:28:22] Stacey Brickson: For me, the most important thing is that regardless of what zone model you use, your athlete understands it. And so I’m a little resistant. To, you know, seven zone models.
I honestly can’t keep track of them. I like Steven Seiler three zone model. I appreciate that’s not what they just adapted. But I think from communicating to an athlete, that’s a nice place to start. From there. I do like the five zone model, and I do like that the inflection points are rooted in physiology, both lactate and ventilatory.
My feeling is not so much that it should be standardized for the whole world, but standardized with your athlete and that it’s somehow meaningful so that the athlete understands the intent of whatever zone you’re prescribing.
[00:29:10] Trevor Connor: So this goes back to the idea that it’s primarily a communication tool.
[00:29:14] Stacey Brickson: Yeah, exactly.
And communication. How are you communicating that? You know, is it via power? Is it via heart rate? Is it via RPE? Is it via ventilatory and simpler? For me, it’s just the way my brain works is better. I think I can communicate pretty clearly just with breathing. It’s why I love breath as a tool. It doesn’t lie.
It’s not as influenced by other factors like heart rate, and it doesn’t require constant monitoring by looking at a screen. You know, you can just ask yourself, am I able to converse? Am I gasping? Am I somewhere in between? So yeah, communicating it to your athlete and using any one of those metrics, but breath is the simplest
[00:30:00] Chris Case: to me.
It sounds like in terms of the question of why did this lead to success in Norway, it had far less to do with the system that was chosen in some ways and more about the knowledge sharing between coaches and researchers within Olympia Toin, and then also the execution of that. So had they chosen a different system that had more or less than five or It was slightly different.
It wasn’t so much the system that was chosen, that was what was right about it. It was the execution of it and how it was distributed throughout the country, throughout the people that needed that knowledge and expertise to make. Good choices, is that what I’m hearing? To some degree,
[00:30:48] Stephen Seiler: yeah. So you have training zones.
We kind of try to develop a common language, but what else emerged kind of through self-organization. We saw that the athletes and coaches, what do they do? They experiment. So that’s a laboratory in itself across decades. And what emerged was, yeah, you can’t train hard every day and you need volume. And so you, this kind of 80 20 or this distribution that we kept seeing that doesn’t, didn’t come from scientists, that came from athletes and coaches that just experimented their way to kind of, you might call it a self-organizing property.
That, and then where does that come from? It seems to be just our genetics, just how our bodies work. And so that part of it. We described, but we didn’t invent. It wasn’t a science driven process. We’ve been trying to figure out what the athletes and coaches saw that wasn’t clear from all of our eight week studies of untrained people, which that’s a very different body of literature that says something very different.
It says, train at the threshold for eight weeks and you’ll get fit. Yeah, that works. Then when you keep going after you know more and more weeks and months, you find out, oh, but then you stagnate. Then you kind of flatten out. And so that’s what coaches and athletes figured out with the more elite performers that were thinking over years of development.
So that’s an issue is, but then you get a common training intensity framework. And then another thing that comes in after that is you say, yeah, but okay, if we’re going to measure lactate, if we’re gonna measure heart rate or measure these things, let’s try to get kind of dialed in how we measure so that we’re all use on the same page here, so that the folks in Bergen and the folks in Christens SA and the folks in Oslo.
We kind of agree on protocols, on the procedures for doing lactate tests and for doing VO two max tests and so forth, and we’ve done that too here in Norway. So now you’ve got these different laboratories at these regional Olympic training centers, we’re all using the same methodologies. Well, that’s good if you’re a cyclist that lives in Bergen, but sometimes is in Oslo, then if you get tested in either place, the numbers you get will be comparable.
So you’re trying to make things as cookie cutter as possible so that you get better comparability and portability, and our athletes are moving around a lot, so that’s good for them. They like that. So that’s a level of kinda standardization that has also happened. You got the standardized zones and then a standardized set of tools.
Which lactate analyzer do we use? Which VO O2 system do we use? Which treadmill type? We’re kind of standardized there as well.
[00:33:31] Chris Case: This is not very flashy stuff, but it ends up being very effective.
[00:33:36] Stephen Seiler: That’s right. It’s just basic stuff.
[00:33:38] Trevor Connor: What I find interesting about all this is when I ask the question about what happens when you standardize it, what happens when researchers get involved?
Does it fundamentally change a purpose? And we’re still coming back to the same thing, that ultimately this is a communication tool. It’s a way for people to communicate. But my question to you here now is, is the benefit by having this standard communication tool that it acts like a Rosetta Stone, so the Norwegian cycling coaches communicate with the Norwegian skiing coaches and share some of the secrets and knowledge that they’ve gained and they can understand one another.
So it allows them to give one another tactics and ideas and knowledge? Or is it a case of you’re avoiding. Miscommunication.
[00:34:23] Stephen Seiler: It’s probably a little bit of both, but avoiding miscommunication and avoiding egregious errors in training is probably the biggest benefit because if we can keep our athletes basically on the right track, I know we’ve had these discussions about functional and non-functional overreaching and.
Over-training syndrome and burnout and that, I would say, you gotta do things pretty darn wrong to get overtrained, but it still happens. But we feel like we’ve reduced that a lot. We’ve reduced the incidence of true over-training syndrome. And if you’ve had athletes as a support like I have where that actually happens, and you can watch an athlete either take a year or more to come back or never come back, they have such long term consequences of really driving their system too hard, too long, and becoming just compromised for a long time.
So that kind of serious egregious error in training is far less common now than it used to be. And I think good communication has helped there. And then on the other side, on the flip side, some optimization, stealing a few tricks from each other, that’s an extra bonus.
[00:35:38] Siren Seiler: Also, I think apart from just the communication, I think it’s very useful for the athlete.
I can talk for myself as an athlete. Like in endurance sports, you don’t have a lot of kind of levers. You have the duration, you have the frequency modality, and then intensity. And the intensity is probably the most difficult thing to control as an athlete. So just having. Framework that you use day in and day out, so you can compare your training now to your training a few years ago.
That’s, I think, very useful and also be able to see, has my heart rate at this pace become lower than it was a year ago? Is B lactate different at this pace? So having those zones, you can track progress better, and it just makes it more quantifiable. Instead of maybe only using descriptive terms like easy and or moderate hard.
I think that works very well too. But when you get into the elite sports region, it becomes maybe more about those details. But I think for most athletes, and especially when you begin training. Probably three zones or just the terminology itself is very useful. Just knowing what it should feel like to go easy and what it should feel like to run at your say threshold or hard, but not blowing up kind of hard.
[00:37:13] Chris Case: Let’s hear from physiology researcher, Jamie Whitfield on the benefits of standardizing zone systems.
[00:37:21] Jamie Whitfield: I think standardizing training zones can be really beneficial. It removes some of the confusion. Athletes often come in and they’re working off a three zone or a five zone, or a seven zone model, and so as a result when you are trying to explain different.
Aspects of training responses and, and physiology and training prescription, it can become very confusing. Particularly there’s such an emphasis now on on zone two for better or for worse. And zone two of his three zone model is very different than zone two of a seven zone model. So I think having that standardized so that everybody’s familiar with it is really beneficial.
I mean, it’s very similar to to lactate in that regard that the number of ways that you can measure thresholds with lactate, whether it’s four millimole, two and a half, millimole, obl, mod dmax, there’s a litany of different terms. And I think what that’s done is it’s just made life confusing for people.
If you’re spending all day, every day reading the literature, then it might not be so difficult. But for somebody who’s just getting into the sport or trying to upskill themselves and learn, it can be really confusing. And I think therefore really daunting and. So having something that is, is prescribed and is consistent, I think really provides a lot of clarity.
And I think that just helps with practitioners and coaches, particularly as you move up into elite realms where, you know, as opposed to just looking at a single coach or a single athlete, you’re looking at integrated support teams. And so if everybody’s speaking the same language, I think that just is really beneficial.
[00:39:02] Suzy Sanchez: Hi listeners, this is Susie Sanchez from USA Cycling For Over a Decade Fast Talk podcast has brought the most interesting experts from the world of endurance sports into a conversation about your training. If you like what you hear on Fast Talk, what about becoming a certified coach? USA Cycling offers courses for new coaches produced with expert help from Fast Talk labs.
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[00:39:27] Stephen Seiler: Before we keep talking about how brilliant we are with all our zones and monitoring and everything. So I just have to say number one, yeah, if you’re working with recreational junior athletes and so forth, three zones is plenty. Keep it simple.
And then the other is I’m currently working with a PhD student from Ethiopia. He’s at the University of Sababa. And he contacted me and I was skeptical. I thought, oh, how’s this gonna work? But he’s done just a remarkable job. He has collected data on elite Ethiopian runners. But let tell you. They don’t even use heart rate.
I mean, we were able to put a Kros watch on them and for 14 weeks, and these are athletes that are like the ones that get invited to the Berlin Marathon. And so they’re high level athletes, women and men, actually eight women and six men, but they don’t use heart rate. They don’t use anything except the coach telling them pace, giving them pace prescriptions.
They don’t even use volume in the ways we do. So we’ve tried to understand the training process from their perspective and our whole language is just like. We don’t do any of that. We just run really fast.
[00:40:45] Trevor Connor: So I love the story of elite Ethiopian groups where, like you said, I mean these are best runners in the world.
They run as a group and they only have one heart rate monitor. So they give it to one runner and it’s their job to set the pace, and the rest of them are just trusting that this person’s going the right pace.
[00:41:01] Stephen Seiler: Yeah. They just take turns going to the front. It doesn’t have to be complicated. I do think in Norway we have a system that works for us and our mentality and we’ve embraced some technologies, but.
I do want to be clear that it’s not the only way to get to excellence in endurance sport, but it’s the process we’ve developed in Norway.
[00:41:24] Trevor Connor: So having this Norwegian standard, obviously the results are there, the improvements in your athletes you’ve seen in both summer and winter sports at the Olympics.
But there is something that I want to ask about. That to me seems a danger. And Cyn, you had this in the study, that there’s a lot more variability in the lower zones. So zone one, two, and three, and you point out particularly in cycling, and I did a little exercise here, which I’m certain you did with multiple different zone systems when you were writing this study.
But I took kind of an average athlete, so they have a max heart rate of 186, a threshold, heart rate of 172, and a resting heart rate of 45. Then I looked at what is their zone two in a couple different systems. And here’s the biggest extreme difference you’ll see is USA cycling. Their zone two was 114 beats per minute to 126.
In the Norwegian system, their zone two is 140 to 158. They don’t even overlap.
[00:42:25] Siren Seiler: Yeah.
[00:42:26] Trevor Connor: And I will tell you, I would not give a, tell a cyclist go out and do a five, six hour ride in the Norwegian zone two. It would kill ’em. That’s a race.
[00:42:35] Siren Seiler: Yeah.
[00:42:36] Stephen Seiler: Yeah. But unfortunately that’s just wrong. I mean, it’s not, it’s an improper understanding of zone two.
And it’s unfortunate. Zone two is a fabrication of a very artificial situation, which is cycling. And outside of the cycling world, it’s probably doing more harm than it’s doing good. Because what is happening is when people. Adopt this idea of zone two, what they end up doing because you called threshold.
What actually is that LT two, they’re trading way too hard. They end up blowing by that first lactate turn point in their ecstasy about trying to train right up against the threshold. Well, they blow by it and so they end up training way too hard on their easy days. So zone two has ended up being a problem.
It comes from cycling where you can noodle, I mean you taught me that word, Trevor, that you’re noodling and you’re almost falling over on the bike ’cause your intensity’s so low. So yeah, given that then I would say sure, that’s, it’s nice to have a way of saying, Hey guys, let’s be purposeful. Let’s keep the intensity.
Yeah, it’s talking pace but not, it’s not noodling. And so. I get it a zone one, zone two distinction. But when you take the average runner or cross country skier, the age grouper, and you try to tell this to them, they already struggle with their green zone being very pretty small. In other words, not very broad.
It doesn’t take very much of a little climb before they pop over and they’re way above, right? And so their green zone or their low intensity zone is not broad. I can feel that on my body now that I’m doing some, running again is like good grief, I feel when I’m on the bike, when I’m on swift and that I feel like the master of my domain and I’m in good control of my intensity.
And then I go out running and I just. Feel like this sucks. ’cause I don’t have a very broad green zone and it’s not fun. I don’t have much room to play, much room to absorb small intensity variations. And so I think that’s one of the unfortunate takeaways from the zone two phenomena is that we don’t understand where it came from and the unique situation, the unique problem in cycling, maybe it was designed to solve, that’s not really a problem in most of the other sports.
In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.
[00:45:07] Trevor Connor: Well, you even said this in the paper, that what would be considered a zone two heart rate range for a cyclist would probably be zone one for a runner. So my question is then do you need a different set of zones for cycling compared to other sports?
[00:45:24] Siren Seiler: When we looked at the results, it was clear that cyclists generally set their zones lower, and this is based on heart rate, so percentage of heart rate max.
It would maybe be a different picture if we used another metric, but heart rate is generally used in some degree by every sport. In contrast to power, which is not very available in many sports. So, so we see that they cyclists set their zones lower, especially in zones one, two, and three. So yeah, zone two heart rate for a cyclist will, according to our results in this study, correspond to sewn one heart rate for a runner just as a result of where they set their sewn limits.
So I think for cyclists, they set their at like 65% compared to a runner or the runners at like 70%. And then also then regional Olympic federation’s, intensity scale. The zone two there starts at 72% and ends at 82%. So. You can just imagine for most people that is pushing our ahead of their LT one and will quickly put them in a threshold or moderate region.
So I think it is really just a miscommunication when it comes to terminology and the concept of zone two has maybe become a different word for low intensity training and now it’s become like a renewal or on social media and different places that it’s useful to train easy. So it’s kind of just polarized or the lot of low intensity training is actually very useful to improve in your sport, which we’ve known for decades.
Right? But now people are kind of catching onto that and so, and two has become the starter of that hype maybe.
[00:47:33] Stephen Seiler: But the other thing is. Let’s face it. What’s a long row? What’s a long cross country ski session and a low intensity session? What would be a typical duration for rowing? I can tell you it’d be something like a long row, 90 minutes.
That would be a long row. Cross-country skiing. Same deal. A long, continuous, 90 minute session on skis. That’s gonna be a long session. That’s gonna be, and they call it long shoring. Long driving, low intensity, long and so, and what’s a long cycling session for a pretty high level cyclist? Well, whoa. Now that’s a different ball game.
That’s quickly. Three four. More hours. So 55% of heart rate max times four hours, that may end up being a pretty darn good signal for adaptation. So maybe they’re onto something, they understand that and so they back down the heart rate the low end of what’s the bottom end of zone one for a cyclist. And they say, well, it kind of depends.
’cause if you go four hours, the 55% may be plenty, or 60% may be plenty. If you’re only going two, then maybe 70 percent’s the right kinda combo. And so I think that’s what we have to understand is that duration. Lever is so much more variable for cycling than it is for most of the other sports.
[00:48:57] Trevor Connor: So is this why you started your paper?
And I’m literally quoting here in the practical prescription of training, intensity can only be interpreted in the context of duration. So that’s right out of the intro of your paper. Is that what you’re getting at?
[00:49:11] Stephen Seiler: Yeah, that’s right. Outta Steven Seiler dumb head. Yep. Yep. That’s that line that comes from me is that you can’t understand intensity in isolation.
Intensity is always connected to a tolerable duration. I mean, let’s take the number of 1,250 watts. I’m a 60-year-old man and I can still produce that, but only for like two seconds. So everything has a duration.
[00:49:39] Chris Case: Trevor’s very jealous. He’s never hit 1250.
[00:49:41] Trevor Connor: No, I
actually
[00:49:42] Stephen Seiler: haven’t.
I gotta tell you a story. You know the Matt Patterson, I met his coach and I was asking him, I said, coach, is it true that in the 23 World Championships, which were in Scotland, and on that just brutal course, is it true that he hit over a thousand watts, 260 times during the four hours on the loop? And he says, yep.
And so he says, I got the file. So anyway, so that tells you something about you can do high powers, but the number of seconds you can be there. That’s small. So intensity always has to be connected to a duration. That would be a take home message. Don’t look at intensity in isolation.
[00:50:28] Siren Seiler: I think the reason why that was in the intro is that I started wanting to define the different levers in endurance training are kind of have specific terms and definitions, but it’s easy to define duration, modality, frequency.
But then when I came to intensity, I kind of found it a little bit more difficult because you don’t have a very specific definition of intensity. So I think that was what kind of gave rise to that sentence that, yeah, well we can actually just interpret it in the context of duration because it depends.
It really does. So, and that is why maybe intensity zones are useful because they describe ranges and they describe how. Long, you should exercise at a certain intensity and what is possible at a certain intensity, how long you can be there,
[00:51:24] Stephen Seiler: what’s reasonable. And we gotta remember our elite performers, they break all the rules.
We know that we can have people like. I don’t know, he just retired. But Tim Cleric’s sitting at the front of a Peloton pushing 350 watts for two and a half hours and doing that multiple days in a row. So this idea of how long can you be at your threshold, that’s a, it’s variable. But for us, normal humans, an hour is a reasonable kind of value or duration to use as a starting point.
The zone one threshold range is maybe around an hour, and then we get into that interval range, that high intensity range, and now we start counting minutes. And so we can kind of think of these timescales that the, these zones help us kind of move into my. Daughter, when I was coaching her as a runner, I felt like I had a handle on it.
We’d done a lot of research using four times four, four times eight, four times 16 minutes. We kind of saw that when we gave our athletes these prescriptions, that the prescription was like algebra. The knowns were what’s the modality, what’s the work duration, what’s the intensity? And we define the intensity as maximum session effort, and it would put them in different zones, zone kind of 3, 4, 5.
But with my daughter, it didn’t quite work because if I told Sierra, I want you to do this four times, eight minute, that should put you in that zone four, right where I wanted her. She would just compete it. She would race it. Everybody does, you know, you remember that, sir? And so she would race. Yeah. And she would dig too deep and it would, she would push into zone five during these interval sessions.
And then she didn’t recover very well. And so she got into a kind of an imbalance and that. So I had to say to her, okay, change the rules. You don’t get to do maximum session effort. You get to go to 90%, that’s your governor, that’s your limit. And everything got better because we kind of constrained it and got her back into that four zone four she collect, she accumulates minutes.
It could be three times eight, four times eight. Even at five times eight was I think upper end that you did a few times, accumulating more minutes, but able to recover, able to come back the next day, do a normal, long, low intensity session, not be cooked. So that’s this playing chess, trying to think long game and.
Understand that sometimes it’s better to back off the accelerator a little bit, go a little bit lower intensity over a little bit longer durations and live to fight another day because you can come back and so overall you get more volume, you’re able to handle more training because you stay healthy, you stay on the plus side.
So these, it sounds super simple, but it’s,
[00:54:17] Siren Seiler: it was huge. It was like, it was what made kind of the, I think, shift for me as an, as a runner, like it, it made me go from high 36 to 34 in the 10 k and I shaved. For my first half marathon to my best, it was eight minutes. Like, and that was in a little bit more than half a year.
And it was just about tuning in the intensity in a smarter way. And by doing that and having that nuance in the higher zones, I was able to better understand what threshold was for me and also how I could accumulate more minutes at like, I wouldn’t say sweet spot, but it was a a sweet spot because I could stay there for a long time and get in 40 to 60 minutes at that intensity, which was around my half marathon pace in a session without blowing up and recovering from day to day.
So it just created the training flow, I think.
[00:55:17] Stephen Seiler: I think you used the term comfortably uncomfortable.
[00:55:20] Siren Seiler: Yeah.
[00:55:21] Stephen Seiler: As kind of a mental, where you needed to be in that mental space.
[00:55:24] Trevor Connor: Well, it’s the golden rule of athletes. If you tell ’em to do a workout in the heart rate range, one 40 to 1 54, all they hear is 1 54.
[00:55:32] Siren Seiler: Yeah,
[00:55:33] Stephen Seiler: that’s right.
[00:55:35] Siren Seiler: At one’s 54.
[00:55:37] Stephen Seiler: That’s why it’s so important if you’re gonna be in error. Make sure the error is a little bit on the low side, meaning when I’m setting that first threshold, I’m gonna be a little bit conservative instead of being aggressive because I know my athletes are gonna tend to push that.
They’re gonna tend to push it too hard, so I’m gonna back it down. I’m gonna anticipate the error they’ll make and be a tiny bit conservative with that LT one line, if that makes sense. So I kind of try to account for their most likely behaviors, which will be to push a bit too hard.
[00:56:12] Chris Case: What you two are describing here in this little case study of coach daughter makes me think of.
The zone system, whatever one you choose is a, is merely a starting place. And then it really comes down to paying attention to the data, the sensations, and if you are working with a coach, that relationship, because the zone system can become irrelevant if you stick to it without looking at what it does to the athlete.
The numbers are. Purely guidelines, and if they don’t work, they don’t work. And then the system is irrelevant. So we preach about this on this show a lot is it all depends, depends on the athlete, it depends on the relationship, it depends on the sport you’re talking about. There’s so many things and what it comes down to is paying attention and not just accepting something dogmatically because it’s written on a piece of paper or the Norwegian system seems like the right one for you.
There’s always so much nuance, so much individuality.
[00:57:10] Trevor Connor: I was about to go the exact same place, which is what I’m hearing from you is context matters. It doesn’t matter how scientific a zone system you create, if you just hand it to somebody and go, here you go, zone 1, 2, 3, 4, and five have fun. They’re probably not gonna be successful.
So the question I have for you is. When Norway standardized this, is that what they did? They just handed it to everybody and said, figure it out? Or did they provide the context? Did they teach what each of those zones means and how to use them?
[00:57:39] Stephen Seiler: There’s been some wonderful work done. Espin Tennis and Thomas Houg and some colleagues of mine in Norway that have created some papers where they look at the relationship between the scientific evidence and best practice coaching and trying to see the common ground.
And they’ve done interviews of elite coaches in Norway, 12 coaches that between them had athletes who had won over 300 international medals. So these were, if you equate success with how have your athletes performed on the toughest stages in the world, these were really good coaches, really successful.
And what they all talk about is the relationship. They talk about the trust that has to evolve so that you can make those. Small changes in corrections and so forth. And yes, you have a scale and a platform. You have a basic framework, but then it’s about seeing each other coach who sees almost just by the movement of the athlete, that they’re tired.
And back to my case with my daughter, if my daughter said to me, Papa, maybe. Possibly I need a rest day. Yeah. She would say, I don’t know, uh, maybe I said, dear daughter, I know you and if you’re even asking me the question, then the answer is yes. And she just wanted confirmation. She needed that confirmation.
’cause it was scary to take a rest day. So again, I’m old and gray, but we, at least her and I communicated on the same level on our understanding of training. And we had a trust relationship. And that’s what we see with all of these coaches is they, it is a communication process. It’s therapy. Sometimes it’s what’s kicking ’em in the butt a little bit.
Sometimes it’s so many different ways of getting to the goal. But you have to see your athlete. You have to understand their needs, understand their caveats, and how their brains work and so forth. So. Tomorrow or next week, I’m meeting up with one of my other coaching friends, Espin, who’s been on your show.
He works with SMA and Aspen’s background is like. Therapy and he’s the guy they love to send to altitude training because he calms the athletes down. ’cause if the athletes are at altitude, they’re often getting ready for some big race. So they’re nervous. And so they like him there because he’s like, his background is working with stress so, so coaches are often hobby psychologists as much as physiologists.
And maybe if I have to choose between the two, I would want that coach that’s naturally good at communicating, naturally good at seeing and interpreting body language. It’s not so hard to teach ’em the physiology. It’s not rocket science. I wish I could say it was since I’m a physiology guy, but I think it’s a lot harder to find the really good communicators.
[01:00:35] Trevor Connor: But going back to what Chris was saying, it sounds like potentially a another value of the zone system. That might help explain some of the Norwegian successes. It’s also an education tool. It gives a framework for educating coaches and explaining best methods of training, of coaching.
[01:00:55] Stephen Seiler: Well, you said something pretty smart there, Trevor.
[01:00:57] Trevor Connor: It happens every once in a while
[01:00:58] Stephen Seiler: when you say, I wanted to point it out, just son, give a dog a bone. So that’s my bone today. So yeah, I totally agree with you. It’s definitely a educational tool.
[01:01:10] Siren Seiler: For coaches who don’t have a physiology background, it because the scale is based on physiology, it makes it a tool to better understand why the athletes train the way they do or why they should distribute their training intensity and not try to go.
Moderately hard every day, or just easy or just hard, or puts it into context of adaptation and stress response and how the body adapts so that they understand why it is useful to prescribe low intensity training sessions or have adequate days of easy training between high intensity intervals or tempos or whatever.
So yeah, I think it is useful that the scale or the framework is anchored in the physiology.
[01:02:03] Trevor Connor: With that in mind is an education tool. And thinking of all of our listeners who are probably interested in being educated on this, first, they’ll say, you don’t need to give the percentages. Anybody can look this up.
It’s online. It’s also in your paper. But explain to us the Norwegian five zone system and why they have the particular five zones that they do. And by the way, that was my second question in the original outline. So
[01:02:27] Siren Seiler: yeah,
[01:02:28] Trevor Connor: we’re there.
[01:02:29] Siren Seiler: I looked at the outline. We jumped up and down. But yeah, so the first figure in our paper is this five zone scale, or the overlapping three and five zone scale.
So it’s based on the first and second lactate or ventilatory turn point or threshold. And you have percentages on the X axis. But these percentages are based on. Elite athletes, so they won’t be representative for beginner athletes. They will strongly overestimate their threshold range if they follow those percentages directly.
But it is like a guiding framework and as we set in the intro or earlier, it keeps so two in the three zone scale the same when it comes to both lactate heart rate, but then it splits zone one into zone one and two and zone three into zones four and five. So you have this added nuance in those two regions and on.
Olympia Tobin’s homepage or the Intensity Scales homepage, you can add power to these zones. Your personal power ranges, your personal ventilatory ranges, and also, of course adapt the percentage of heart rate max ranges. And again, the lactate values will also differ at these two thresholds between athletes.
So it is not very smart to just say two and four minimal for every athlete. And that is, that was very clear in my study now on single versus double threshold training, that athletes differ extremely in GI lactate response and some have their LT two at. Two millimoles. Some have, there’s at five and the curves look a little bit differently for each athlete as well.
So I think it’s important to understand that it is a framework that maybe works on a general spectrum, but it’s important to individualize based on ideally testing in the lab or self experimentation.
[01:04:41] Stephen Seiler: Or in the field. Or in the field. Or
[01:04:42] Siren Seiler: in the field, yeah. With paces or heart rate or competition, uh, time, et cetera.
[01:04:49] Trevor Connor: So looking at that lower range, so in on the three zone model, looking at the zone one, which is the relatively easy and where you should be spending most of your time, we’ve already said this, popularization of zone two is, uh, really unique to cycling. So for Norway, which is creating the system for all endurance sports to use.
Why separate zone one into zone one and two, what? What’s the differentiator? Why would you use their zone one? Why would you use their zone two?
[01:05:20] Stephen Seiler: I’ll give you an example there. We had a Olympic gold medalist in Kayak, Flatwater Kayak, Eric Vero Larson, and now he works for Olympia Toppen himself. But he told me, he says, when I was training, he says, if I did zone one, really low intensity, then my force signature in the paddling was not correct.
So to get the proper force signature, I had to go up to zone two. I had to go a little higher, a little closer to LT one to be able to create a force signature that was. Relevant for racing. So that’s one of these tricky things with water sports, rowings, kayak and so forth, is you use frequency, the cadence as a control mechanism, but you want the force signature to be reproducible and relevant for racing.
And so. These are some of these issues at the individual sport level, understanding the nature of how we’re generating speed, how are we combining cadence, frequency of movement and the force curve or the power signature within each stroke or within each stride or whatever. So these are the subtleties, the nuance that comes in.
And good coaches understand, and as an athlete, he figured this out and adjusted within that range. And again, often these high performance endurance athletes, they’ve gotta that broad green zone or low intensity zone. So there’s room for them to kind of play a bit in trying to find how to exploit it, how to use it properly.
[01:07:02] Siren Seiler: Yeah. And also to add to that in the opposite direction, in running, like I talked to the coach of Kalina Gral, uh, a very good Norwegian. Long distance runner. He’s also said that around the concept of zone two. Yeah, like for running it, it kind of is the opposite. Like you don’t want your runners to run in zone two.
You want them to run easy on their easy days because of the mechanical load, right? So it’s not a matter of kind of gagging along. That may be a Norwegian term, but you have to have a certain stride frequency and like, right? You wanna maintain your form when you run, but you really want to go easy. And I don’t think there is a too easy in running.
I’ve never experienced going too easy on an easy run, but definitely going a little bit too fast because I was trying to run an easy run with the boys and then ending up spending a lot of time in zone two, which. For me in a five stone scale, just even going above 75% of heart rate max and staying there for a long time, you end up at a higher pace than you should have gotten.
So maybe it’s more of a pace thing in running and the opposite in rowing or kayaking where you maybe have to stay at the upper end of. Low intensity domain to have, uh, proper technique. So I think it’s in that region, it is very sport specific. And for cycling too, then you maybe have to ensure that you’re not just noodling along
[01:08:44] Stephen Seiler: speed skating.
They’ll say you basically can’t even be down in the racing position. I used to work with speed skaters and they said, what are you talking about going down in the racing position and being there for 20 minutes? That’s impossible. So I would appeal to their pride and say, well, every other sports discipline can do it.
So I guess you speed skaters are sies. I so, man, these different sports, they have their peculiarities. And so with the speed skaters, they can’t handle a lot of that. Volume of being down in that deep crouch, deep position, and so they, they might do three days in a row on the ice and then they unload with volume in cycling.
They do a lot of low intensity cycling, so, so that’s how they help solve that and get the distribution of intensity appropriately, is to combine two modalities.
[01:09:38] Trevor Connor: The one thing I’m not hearing the two of you say, which I think is what has driven this whole zone two concept to become so popular, is this belief that on the five zone model, zone one is just for recovery.
You don’t really get an adaptive signal there. If you want adaptation, you have to do zone two. I’m not hearing you say that.
[01:09:56] Stephen Seiler: You not hearing me say that because I don’t use the term recovery workouts. That’s just silly. In my world, there is no physiological evidence to support that. If you’re fatigued, that the best thing for you to do is a recovery ride instead of just.
Recovering meaning take a rest day. There’s no data to support that. The one is better than just resting. Okay. That’s a phenomena.
[01:10:27] Trevor Connor: Of course, you should do a recovery ride and you should do at least 30 minutes of it in zone three, just to wake your legs up ’cause then you’ll be fresh. Yeah,
[01:10:35] Stephen Seiler: yeah, yeah. Active
[01:10:36] Chris Case: recovery.
Yes, active
[01:10:38] Stephen Seiler: recovery and what the, where this comes from. And my good friend, Espin Ahold, would say the same thing. He says, look. No, I can have my athlete do an interval session after a rest day, but they’ve got to go through the gears in the warmup. They’ve gotta turn everything back on. And often that’s the failed mechanism is they don’t do a proper warmup and then they still feel stale when they try to start the interval session.
So good coaching back to good coaching and understanding physiology, understanding energy systems and so forth. But rest is so underappreciated.
[01:11:18] Trevor Connor: Yep.
[01:11:19] Stephen Seiler: I go back to Neil’s Vole, the guy that did the five two, you know, where he took two rest days every week and set two world records and so forth. So yeah, rest can work for you.
So I would say you got three choices every day when you’re trying to decide the levers you’re using, assuming modalities already chosen and so forth. What do you got? Well, you got intensify. Intensify, not a word, but I love it. And rest day. Those really are the three You got
[01:11:50] Chris Case: rectify.
[01:11:51] Trevor Connor: There you go.
[01:11:52] Stephen Seiler: Rectify.
Oh, this is awesome. See, I’m gonna steal that. I intensify, rectify. This is, there you
[01:11:58] Chris Case: go. Rest
[01:11:59] Stephen Seiler: rectify. Anyway, but that’s kind of what it boils down to, the levers that we use in the manipulation of things.
[01:12:07] Trevor Connor: We did an episode a long time ago, Chris and I, that we titled There are only three rides. Types of rides.
Yeah. And it’s the same idea.
[01:12:13] Stephen Seiler: Yeah.
[01:12:14] Trevor Connor: So
[01:12:15] Stephen Seiler: the biology is amazingly complex and fascinating, but the exploiting that biology with training is pretty darn simple. Don’t make this so hard. We’ve talked about this in the epic workout kind of concept of trying to find that perfect interval session doesn’t exist and it doesn’t need to.
[01:12:35] Trevor Connor: So last question for you, a similar question, but let’s take that zone three on the three zone models. So for coaches and athletes listening to this, that’s that anything above what you would think of as basically anaerobic threshold, why take that zone three and divide it into zone four and zone five?
What’s the differentiator there? I
[01:12:56] Siren Seiler: think again, it comes down to intensity control. Whenever we see red, it suggests that it’s supposed to be a very hard session or a VO two Mac session, as many people call it. But in the day-to-day training, it is really more of a controlled threshold or long interval effort that will enable you to sustain that training structure over weeks and months and just gradually progress.
So in the Norwegian system, we don’t really. Use zone five workouts very often. Rarely, like as a coach, I almost never prescribe zone five sessions unless it is the final three or four weeks before a race. Just because it is very easy to go too hard during an interval session because you wanna compete a little bit with yourself.
Your ego is there if you feel tired, you wanna hit the pace you did last week, or a higher pace or a higher wattage on the bike, right? So I think it’s a way of just really making sure that the high intensity effort is around that LT two or anaerobic threshold or maximal lactate, steady state, whatever term you use, and then you extens that duration in that zone instead of going at 92 plus percentage of heart rate max or VO O2 max, and.
Ending up with a session, you can only do. 10, 15 minutes of duration of, so I think it’s about intensity control and, and adding nuance to the terminology.
[01:14:39] Stephen Seiler: One of the things we see is technical breakdown. ’cause if you look at what are the typical lactate concentrations for these in a five zone models, zone 3, 4, 5, zone three, upper end, maximum lactate, steady state, we’re talking something like four or five millimolar, zone four.
We’re talking six to eight, nine millimolar, but we’re still in the single digits. And for most of our athletes, especially age groupers that aren’t just pure slow twitchers, they’re gonna be in the double digits for lactate. They have enough, the pH is really going down and they technically start falling apart.
[01:15:18] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[01:15:19] Stephen Seiler: They don’t have good technique. They start, if it’s on the bike, they’re wagging around. You can see their body language. If it’s rowing speed skating, cross country scheme, then they just become inefficient. They’re struggling. Well that’s not contributing to speed and we don’t want ’em there in a race either.
They need to be able to maintain technical proficiency or else they’re gonna just get dropped. So we want to really spend time at a kind of the upper end of where they can maintain good technique. And that’s that zone four, when they cross the Rubicon into zone five. It becomes just a mess. They have all these expressions in Norway now.
He is beginning to just kind of fall apart. You see the body language of the athlete that they are fighting too much, and when you’re fighting with the technique, you’re going slower, not faster.
[01:16:12] Trevor Connor: I think it’s important to point out to our listeners, this is heart rate zones on a bike hitting zone five by power.
Sure it hurts, but it’s relatively easy to do. You have to be killing yourself to get your heart rate up into that range. Like I did a set of 30 thirties a couple days ago, which is a hard workout, and I think my heart rate might have hit zone five for two seconds.
[01:16:35] Stephen Seiler: Yeah, it’s hard to get into zone five with a 30 30 session because heart rate is kind of tethered to oxygen demand and you’re regulating oxygen demand with those rest periods.
So those micro intervals, 40, 20, 30 fifteens and so forth. They’re kind of hard to get above 90%.
[01:16:54] Trevor Connor: I see athletes that make that mistake that they watch their heart rate and go, oh, my heart rate’s not getting that high. I’m not going hard enough. And it’s like, no, you actually, you are just tough to get the heart rate up there.
[01:17:04] Siren Seiler: Yeah. On the bike it’s different. I think in that’s the negative thing with heart rate. It’s. In running. I think it’s a very useful tool because it really does correspond often to your pace and effort. It’s the stress response internally, but on the bite it is different because there’s a delay there and it depends on the terrain as well, if you’re not indoors.
So yeah, heart rate is maybe not a very good tool by itself in cycling.
[01:17:34] Stephen Seiler: I wanna throw just one more thing in there is when you, if you do those 30 thirties or 40 twenties, 30 fifteens, the run of start intervals as we go and you just look at heart rate, you get fooled into believing I should be able to go another block ’cause heart rate will stabilize.
But then when we’ve measured breathing. When we’ve measured just how rapidly the athlete’s breathing, that’s just going up, up, up, up, up. And we’re seeing that, oh wow, that’s a truth teller. This athlete is working really hard. They’re breathing 70 breaths per minute. They are cranking it. So heart rate is not necessarily telling the truth on how fatigued you are, how hard you’re digging in those kinds of micro intervals where you’re doing lots of ups and downs.
That’s an interesting area where heart rate is misleading, but that’s another issue. But it just, it speaks to this issue of the nuance, the realities of the physiology, and trying to learn that on the fly through experience and learn how to exploit it properly so that you do live to fight another day, zone four instead of zone five or whatever it might be.
Or
[01:18:41] Siren Seiler: zone three on a five zone scale. Actually,
[01:18:44] Stephen Seiler: yeah, threshold training is hard. And just to be clear, what’s being called double thresholds? Is like double thresholds based on lactate, but not based on speed, not based on pace, because they’re running fast, but they’re running fast for a short amount of time, then taking some rest.
And so lactate kind of again, gets into this quasi steady state. I think for SSON they’ll, it’ll be like three millimolar, but they’re running at, I don’t know, 21 kilometers an hour or something. They’re running pretty darn fast because they can, and it’s 400, it’s, what is it? Like one of the workouts is 20 times 400 meters.
[01:19:23] Siren Seiler: Yeah. But then you also have longer intervals, and I think it’s probably a lot due to the mechanical loading running, but it’s very typical to have a longer intervals in the morning, like six minute intervals or something. And then the, you really actually stay in zone three on the five zone scales. So it is actually.
True threshold in terms of both lactate and heart rate and also pace for those longer interval. But then, and
[01:19:52] Stephen Seiler: the morning workout.
[01:19:52] Siren Seiler: And the morning workout, and then they combine it with a 400 session, 20 by 15, 20 by 400 meters in the evening where the speed is higher, but they lactate is within that threshold range.
So the double threshold phenomenon is what I’m looking at in my master’s thesis now. And yeah, it is. We’re kind of moving a little bit away from the typical polarized way of thinking there, because it actually ends up being. Threshold in terms of the physiologically defined threshold region. So we defined it based on their lactate profile and put them at the right below LT two for the longer intervals and right above for the shorter interval.
So the pace was different, but the internal response remained pretty similar between the two session protocols and also their RPE, which is very interesting in running when we talk about the term threshold training.
[01:20:59] Trevor Connor: Do you know how we finish up and Cyn your first time? We have our one minute take homes, the big message.
And Cyn, I’ll ask you, do you want to go first or do you want to go last?
[01:21:09] Siren Seiler: I think I have to go last.
[01:21:11] Stephen Seiler: Oh, brave.
[01:21:13] Trevor Connor: Okay. Then Dr. Ser, you get first.
[01:21:17] Stephen Seiler: Okay, well, I guess I’ll go back to what I tend to say is that the biology’s complex are amazing bodies. The, all that signaling and adaptation is really complex, but training can be pretty darn simple.
You need to communicate and intensity zones seem to be a tool for communication, but it’s, there’s nuance in it. I don’t think AI is gonna take over, for example, I think watching athletes, listening, speaking, trusting, all of those beautiful classical communication tools of human nature, they still matter.
And the intensity zones are just a tool for kind of regulating stress and signal, and let’s not make it more. Difficult. And let’s remember. Intensify. Intensify or rectify. Ooh. Feels like Chris should go next. And now you’ve grabbed his
[01:22:09] Chris Case: stern. I can. My take home has to do with the fact that there’s 40 plus zone systems that you identified, and then there’s also.
Elite Ethiopian runners that we spoke about that use no system whatsoever that we, at least that we have identified, they must have their own system. Right,
[01:22:28] Stephen Seiler: right.
[01:22:29] Chris Case: I think the system that you use, the zones that you use are simply a skeleton and there’s so much more to the training process that gets you to the next level or gets you to a place where you are making progress, not going over the edge.
It’s merely a starting place and so much has to do with not just communication with a coach. There’s a lot of people I think, out there listening, don’t have a coach, but there’s a communication you have to have with yourself about. What works that sometimes can be pretty difficult. Takes a lot of letting go of the ego and being honest with yourself, which athletes just have a hard time doing so.
It’s really interesting to know that all these various systems have been created all over the place, attempting to do the same thing in a way. And I think that’s fine. But to go back to what Steven just said, like it’s making something more complicated than it needs to be in a lot of ways. And it’s pretty simple to effectively train if you know the foundation.
[01:23:34] Trevor Connor: Alright, well for mine, Dr. Seiler finally said, I said something smart, so I gotta milk it for all. No, I mean I was very interested in this whole concept that, as you said in the paper zones. Came from coaches and athletes originally and was really a communication tool, and now we’re starting to bring into the research realm and get physiology behind it and put some science behind it.
But it remains a communication tool. But to me, what I realize listening to both of you is there’s an education side to this as well. It doesn’t matter how well you form the zone system, if you just hand it to somebody and they don’t understand what does zone one mean? How do you use it? When should you not use it?
Same thing for zone two, same thing for zone three. You’re gonna get in trouble. So it is a communication tool, but it’s also providing education in how to train and give a context there. So I think that is another important side of zones that we need to recognize and sirn take us out.
[01:24:39] Siren Seiler: So I think. My takeaway is that the sewn systems or whatever sewn system you use, and in, in this case, the Norwegian five zone system, it’s not meant to be set in stone.
It is a framework that should be individualized, and we use heart rate percentages in this paper, but I think there is a real value of RPE or perceived exertion and just the feeling of the training sessions. It can be even more guiding for the athlete maybe than specific metrics or tools. Just getting in tune with your own body, your physiological response to the training, learning what it should feel like to run or cycle or row, easy, moderate or a threshold.
And then also hard just really taking time to learning your body and maybe start with the simplest. Framework or intensity scale and then add nuance from there.
[01:25:43] Trevor Connor: Fantastic. Well, a real pleasure to have both of you on the show, Sierra, we’ve been excited to get you on the show for a long time now. So thanks for joining us.
[01:25:51] Siren Seiler: Thank you. It was very fun.
[01:25:54] Stephen Seiler: Well, these last year, Sierra and I have all done three things together. She dragged me into high rocks, almost killed me. Intensify.
[01:26:02] Chris Case: Yeah,
[01:26:02] Siren Seiler: that was intensify.
[01:26:04] Stephen Seiler: See, that was intensity. We, years ago said someday we were gonna write a paper together. We have achieved that. Now we’ve managed to ruin a podcast together, so I, I feel like we have achieved so much this year together as a team.
[01:26:22] Chris Case: Thank you so much guys. Thank you. Yeah, you’re welcome.
[01:26:26] Stephen Seiler: That’s what we do. We come, we see, we conquer. That
[01:26:31] Chris Case: was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. And don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube. Give us a like, give us a subscribe and help us reach new audiences.
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To Fast Talk labs.com for Sn Seiler, Dr. Steven Seiler, Neil Henderson, Tim Cusick, Dr. Stacey Brison, Jamie Whitfield, and Trevor Connor. I’m Chris Case. Thanks for listening.
