We talk with Brad Culp, author of “The Norwegian Method,” about the main tenets of the training philosophy, as well as who should and shouldn’t apply the method in their training.
Episode Transcript
Chris Case 00:05
Hey everyone, welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Chris case here today with Trevor Connor, the Norwegian method is much talked about nowadays, and for good reason, top Norwegian athletes, including the likes of triathlete Christian Blumenfeld and runner jacobierson have been employing the method to crush long standing records. Their success is undeniable. So what is the Norwegian method at its simplest form? The Norwegian method, as Brad Kulp defines in his book, involves huge amounts of low intensity volume training that is guided by lactate measurements and performing double threshold days for intensity. The more important question might be whether the Norwegian method should be reserved for genetic superstars like ingebrigtsen, or if it’s something that we can all do. The other important question is whether these double threshold days in lactate guided training are the secrets to success, or if it’s something else in the Norwegian sports culture that is making the difference to discuss both the method and the debates surrounding it, we talk today with Brad Kulp about his book Culp describes the history of this training philosophy some of the key players in its development, the attributes of the method, whether it is a universally applicable regime or best used only in certain circumstances. And finally, how Norwegian culture going back all the way to the days of the Vikings, has played such an important role in the country’s sporting success. Joining Culp today will hear opinions on the Norwegian training method from Dr Steven Seiler, who has been intimately involved in the Norwegian Olympic program, elite coach and performance director for the project Echelon Pro Cycling Team, Isaiah Newkirk and physiologist MOLLY BREWER, so get your Norwegian flags flying, and let’s make you fast.
Trevor Connor 01:48
Well, Brad, welcome to the show. This is your first time on fast talk. We got a real interesting subject here. So thanks for joining us.
Brad Culp 01:54
Thanks for having me on. It’s a tremendous honor. Well, appreciate that. So give
Trevor Connor 01:58
us a little bit of your background, because we were talking off Mike here, and you, Chris and I actually have a little bit of overlap in our background. You worked for a competitor group as well. Yeah,
Brad Culp 02:09
my first job out of college, actually, while I was still in college, was an intern for Triathlete Magazine. I was their first editorial intern. I’d sent them an email and said, Are you interested in hiring one? And they were like, we’re not, but sure. So they had me out for a summer. They ended up hiring me as their first web editor the next year out of college, and it really archaic website back then. We couldn’t even upload pictures. We just had red, white and yellow colors. Yeah, it was there for three or four years. Somehow became editor in chief at a very young age, because, as you guys know, there was a lot of turmoil and buyouts at that time, and people coming and going, offices moving so, yeah, just kind of right out of school, was full on into the triathlon scene. And I grew up as a swimmer. Swimming was my whole life. You know, it was sort of a natural transition. I knew I wanted to continue to do something after finishing school, and triathlon was kind of the thing. I thought Iron Man was really cool, yeah, from there, went to ITU for a year, the International triathlon union that’s now known as World Triathlon. And from there, back to San Diego, we started a magazine called lava, which I’m sure you guys were familiar with, because it was a competitive title, yeah. Starting in hindsight, I think we found out what we knew that starting at print magazine in 2010 was like the worst thing you could possibly do. But yeah, I had a nice run with lava for six or seven years. I think it went and it just sort of been freelancing and continuing to write about the sports that I love ever since, and found my way to Norway to do a project for a Red Bull on Christian Blumenfeld. And I don’t know, a year or two later, that sort of spiraled into a whole book about Norwegian athletes and their culture. And yeah, I guess that’s why I’m here with you guys today.
Trevor Connor 03:49
And so you wrote the book The Norwegian method, and we know that that has become a real buzz term. People are excited about the concept. So it seems like this is a really relevant topic right now. So what motivated you to write this book? Think
Brad Culp 04:05
that just seeing that term, that idea that something perhaps a little different was happening in Norway, in Norwegian sport science, and the way that really the three athletes that are highlighted in the book, the level that they were able to reach such a higher level than their peers, and all of them hailing from such a small country, is rather unique. And at first I thought, you know, there was maybe a series of longer articles on it. I didn’t know if there was a whole book, but the more and more I looked into it, and, you know, read more about Norwegian culture, I thought that there was enough on the cultural side of things, to kind of flesh out a whole book and make it more interesting than just straight sports science book about this is double threshold training. This is how you test lactate. This is an altitude protocol, if you want to see it. So, yeah, just try to build something a bit broader, a bit more holistic. Look at what I think the Norwegian. Method is, and that’s something I hope people have realized that this is, you know, this is my take on it. I’m certainly not the ultimate authority on the Norwegian method. I’ve spent all of three days of my life in Norway, so I just spent a lot of time talking to their coaches and athletes and trying to just conceptualize what I think it means. And, yeah, my publisher was very flexible, and just told me to take the Norwegian method and make it your own weird thing. And so I tried to do that as best as I could. That’s
Chris Case 05:29
really interesting that you say it’s your take on it, because it’s a little bit open to interpretation, or maybe there’s not one exact way to do it. And so I’m curious how that came to be in your mind. Like, when did you know that this was not a wholly unified thing?
Brad Culp 05:47
Probably just talking to the two triathlon coaches, I was really familiar with Marys Bakken, and had read his blog, and you know, his conception of the Norwegian method, which is so important. So I understood that. And then, you know, when I met aralt at the end, he sort of talked about how he had, sort of, he had taken on Christian and Gustav in coaching. It sort of taken his own thing. And he really, it wasn’t so lactate based, and it wasn’t based off of what Marius was doing. He was going back to seeing what these rowing coaches were doing. And then, you know, later, when Olaf came on. He was he sort of took a wholly different approach as well. So I just looked at all these Norwegian coaches and athletes who, you know, they were really making it their own thing, and taking what worked for them and tweaking and modeling it to fit the unique demands of their sport or their events. And honestly, before I started researching this book. I didn’t know much about ingebrigtsen training. I really hadn’t researched it that much, and I just watched a bit of his show. And so that was good to get bringing a different, true runner and a different sport, and see how different the runners and the triathletes, or even the rowers or other athletes are taking this method and using what they can and how different it really is. Yeah, so just the handful of coaches that are highlighted in the book and the athletes just in our conversations, I could see how their view of the Norwegian method was so different, and I tried to just bring that all together and just look at it as a whole.
Trevor Connor 07:17
So that’s something we’re going to get into a little bit later, because we have actually done an episode with Dr Seiler talking about his take on the Norwegian method, and he was a little more adamant about there really isn’t one method. And so that’s something I would love to dive into with you. But before we get there, I think it would help for our listeners. Let’s talk about what is the definition of the Norwegian method? When people talk about the Norwegian method, the easiest
Brad Culp 07:45
way, or the most familiar would be, it’s a relatively high volume, relatively low intensity training program with threshold sessions ideally controlled by lactate and control being a really important word there you don’t you can prescribe to the Norwegian method without having a lactate meter. If you it’s very invasive. It’s not, certainly not for everyone. But I think that the theme that you’ll see throughout the book is is control and controlled intensity, and that is, you know, really paramount to the method, and the similarity, you know, across all the sports and all the athletes, is controlling those threshold sessions so that you can achieve a level of volume that ultimately is going to get you to where you want to be and fits with, you know, the unique demands of what you’re training for, and for athletes like a Christian Blumenfeld, who’s training for Ironman, that that volume is truly extraordinary, and they’re able to push it to, you know, upwards of 35 hours a week by really, really controlling those hard sessions and not not spilling over to the point where there’s too much cost, which is another theme that you’ll read throughout the book, is that idea of controlling the cost for the next session and really focusing on building long term and I think something I write about A few times in the book is, you know, in its purest form, in its essence. So the Norwegian method is trying to build the fittest, 2425 2627 year old athletes on Earth. Who are, you know, winning Olympic medals? They’re not. It’s not there to build the fastest 1213, year old runner on Earth, or the best 13 year old basketball player in the country. Like, you know, a lot of people in the US are focused on so very long term approach on development through very high volume. And in the case of youth development, that’s high volume and controlled intensity from a very young age. I write quite a bit about what Christian and Gustav were doing as teenagers, and I think that’s so vital to where they are today, is, is that they were really, really pushing their metabolic systems at a young age as they were developing. And it’s hard to catch up for other athletes who weren’t doing that. And Jacob, of course, as well, was insane volume from AJ. He is a unique outlier.
Chris Case 09:54
Just give us a sense of what you mean by insane volume as a for them, I mean,
Brad Culp 09:59
even. At 1516, Christian would upwards of 25 hours. And that’s really, really heavy on the pool especially. And I think that this was our old working with Dr Mattson, who was a swim coach in Bergen, and just realized that they could handle a lot of volume in the water, and that was a good place to do it without a lot of cost. So yeah, if they’re doing, say, 25, hours a week, you know, maybe 678, of that would have been in the water, 10 hours, maybe even 12 hours on the bike, and five or six hours of running, which you know as a teenager is, is a lot, and it only works if you know they were they were sent to, this is great sports school in Bergen, where you can sort of cater your lifestyle to to your sport. And another thing that’s not wholly uniquely Norwegian, but they do it just on a much higher level, and they’re doing it very well.
Chris Case 10:59
The Norwegian method, as we’re defining it here is a bit controversial. Some believe it is the next revolution in training with plenty of evidence, while others have expressed concerns. We’ll represent both perspectives in this episode. Here’s Dr Seiler talking about why many of us need to be careful about trying it.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 11:18
Obviously, there have to be genetically talented. I mean, there’s huge potential in these three brothers that has been developed. But it’s also important to say that all these kids, they were running early. You know, Jacob ingebrigtsen, everything that he did was a product of the learning that his father did for the first two brothers. The first two brothers, I have to say, have both had surgeries. They’ve both been pretty significant injuries. The third brother seems to have stayed healthy. So it seems like they first two brothers, although successful in somewhat, were sacrificial lambs in that they did push the ragged edge, and they did go over at times, whereas Jakob has managed to stay remarkably healthy. So that shows kind of a progression in learning. But these athletes, these young men, they started running well, they were skiing, also at an early age, but they were at 10 years old. Jakob was doing interval workouts, okay, following his brothers. So he was adapting to these kinds of sessions at a very early age. Now I know firsthand because my daughter moved to Oslo, joined one of the top clubs there with a lot of good female athletes, and I know that, yes, this ingerbitson model, with some of these specific sessions like the 20 times 400 have become kind of the rage. But I have to say, and I’m just going to be honest, for a lot of athletes who did not have that platform, that base, that they have when they’ve tried to do these double threshold sessions, or these 420 times 400 sessions, they have initially had improvement, and then they’ve either gotten injured or kind of collapsed because they don’t necessarily have the fundament the foundation to tolerate the load and the huge mechanical load of these sessions. So it has not been a universal victory in Norway with these methods.
Trevor Connor 13:20
So I think a really important thing that we need to clarify here, you talked about the double threshold session. So you do one in the morning, one in the afternoon or evening. But when people, at least around here, hear a threshold, they think, right at that lactate threshold, or anaerobic threshold, so fairly high intensity. You’re talking about threshold more in the scientific definition. So we’ve talked a lot about this on the show the three zone model. You have the zone one, which is below your LT one, that point where your lactates just start to turn up. Then Zone Two is between the LT one and the LT two. And LT two is what people think of as that anaerobic threshold, what you do in a time trial and a fairly hard, longer effort, and then zone three is above that. And when you’re talking about threshold training and the scientific community, they refer to it as that zone two. So it’s really more in America, people would think of it as sweet spot training. Those two threshold sessions are really two sweet spot sessions, not at the LT two. Yeah,
Brad Culp 14:24
yeah. And that’s, that’s something that I think Marius tried to make pretty clear in his writing, because I think that he was the first person to really use this term and proliferate this term, and he was so focused on for him, that 3.0 millimolar number, which was roughly, it wasn’t right at his LT two, but, but a little bit below, I think that people a sweet spot is probably, it’s a term I use a couple times in the book, and it’s probably a better way to look at it is, it’s a, you know, it’s a window where you’re training and and even in a threshold workout, you know, you’re not sitting at one spot the entire time. You’re you’re coming. Up and down. There’s a lot of movement. So, yeah, I think that it’s important, even if you, if you decide to use lactate to guide these threshold sessions, double threshold sessions, that you don’t have to take it to the extremes that Marius Did you know In being so dedicated to a specific number, you know that the magic of the method isn’t necessarily in a whole number or in this this perfect, you know, hitting this exact spot. It’s it’s more about the using the control to allow for the consistency that you need to keep, you know, moving like this and not plateauing or going the other way.
Trevor Connor 15:35
You literally drew pie charts in your book and contrasted it to the polarized method and the polarized method. So both your Norwegian method and the polarized method, lots and lots of volume in that zone one, but it looks like the big difference here is where the polarized method says and you’re also going to spend the bulk of the rest of your time in zone three. You’re saying, no, actually, we’re going to spend more time in zone two, and virtually no time in zone three. Yeah. And
Brad Culp 16:03
then again, it’s specific to you know what you’re what you’re training for. If the triathlete is training to first sprint at the end of a Olympic distance triathlon, they’re going to spend, especially as they get closer to race, they’re going to spend a lot more time in that upper end of zone three, or call it zone five, if you’re in a five zone system. Yeah, I think in the the purest inception, call it various is inception of the Norwegian method, or what Dr Seiler might call him, Norwegian method, 1.0 Yeah, you’re really until you get close to to race day and you know, want some specific sessions, you’re almost completely avoiding that that zone three, it can be as little as 10% or less of your training. But also keeping in mind that that if your volume is huge, you know, 10% of really, really high intensity is still a good bit, and should be enough to to give you the stim stimulus that you need and and, of course, it varies so much by by athletes. You know, it’s something that worked very, very well for an athlete like Marius Bakken, who definitely a smaller athlete, got the most that he could using that really, really limited, high intensity. Or if you look at an athlete like a Christian Blumenfeld, you know, people always say that when I say the Norwegian method is relatively low intensity. It, you look at his training, it is, I mean, he that guy goes to insane levels all the time, and, yeah, and it’s, it’s specific to to what he’s training for. So, yeah, it’s, you certainly don’t want to be spending too much time regardless of what you’re training for. You know, the higher end of zone three should not be a huge focus of the Norwegian method, but it certainly varies based on the specifics of your event and in the specifics of your body. Olaf has talked about quite a bit that he feels Christian needs quite a bit more of the really, really high intensity stuff than Gustav, and it comes down to just the differences in their biology and their body makeup. So yeah, there’s certainly a lot of trial and error in there for every athlete.
Trevor Connor 18:08
So you’re diving into some of the details, and I definitely want to go there. I want to ask you more about some of the thoughts behind this, some of the methodology. But you keep mentioning Marius Bakken, and in the book, you have a whole chapter about him, and you call him the godfather. Can you just tell us a little bit about him, and what makes him the godfather of the Norwegian method? Yeah, he
Brad Culp 18:27
was, until jakka Binge person came around relatively recently, he was the greatest Norwegian distance runner of all time. Was the, I believe, had a Europe I had a Norwegian record, I think even a European record for a minute in the 5k and was, yeah, Norwegian runner in the mid to late 90s. He went to the Olympics in 2002 1004 you know, never finished better than, like, 15th in the in the 5k but got pretty close to 13 minutes. And, yeah, he he was one of the he started using lactate in the late 90s, like 9697 which was very early the Norwegian School of Sports Science wanted to start testing some runners, so they did, like this three month lactate program, and then kind of pulled it away. And he just, it worked with him. He’s a scientist. He’s a doctor now, but he just, he loved it, and he felt that there was a lot of value in it. So even when the team, the group he was trading with, had stopped using lactate, he was like, no, no, I want to use this. I want to figure it out. And just became obsessed with lactate testing and learning his own body. And he had had an opportunity as a young kid to run and be coached by some of the best runners, running coaches in the US, here in Illinois, and then at Indiana University, and it was doing very, very high value, like they were doing 120k as teenagers. So maybe talk about, you know, value being so important to developing young athletes. I think the system that he started in here in Elmhurst, and then. At Indiana, it was just kind of see how much we can throw at these athletes, and the couple who will make it out will be really, really good. He had somehow made it out alive through all that, but really, really found that his body was breaking down from too much race and race pace intensity, or they were doing a lot of over race pace, which he just he knew intuitively he would do those workouts, and it would sabotage the rest of his week, and that would have effect on the rest of his month. So he really got into lactate to kind of control those intensity sessions, and really found that he could do a whole lot of, you know, his version of threshold training, which was basically right at his 5k pace, maybe a little bit below, if he kept his his lactate down to write it around three millimoles, yeah. And luckily for us, he wrote a lot about it as he was going through it. And afterward, after he retired, shortly after the 2004 Olympics, maybe 2005 but, yeah, if you Google his blog, I think it’s just Mary Spock and.com it’s, it’s, you have to understand, it’s written by Norwegian in English. So it’s not necessarily easiest reading, but it’s great scientific writing about everything he was doing at that time. And you know, the reason, the reason he got kind of pushed back into the limelight recently was with Jacob ingebrigtsen success. And, you know, people wondering how he had sort of formulated his training and a lot of what Garrett ingebrigtsen, who was his father, and you know, now there’s, that’s a whole nother story, but his former coach, he had really modeled a lot of his teachings, his understanding, off of Marius, and had emailed Marius a lot as he was developing. Jacob is a really young kid, and had kind of been asking about his training, and yeah, so I think a lot of the double threshold concepts that Jacob has applied really were based in what Marius had started. So that’s why I named him the godfather. And certainly a good It wasn’t the start of the Norwegian method, but of the as we understand it today, with the lactate and the double threshold and all that glitz and gland. He was sort of the first to really put that together. So
Trevor Connor 22:05
something that you really talked about, particularly in his chapter, was just the revolution of this idea of controlled intensity, which nowadays it’s hard to kind of go, wow, that’s revolutionary, right? You know now you have computers on your bike or on your wrist that will color code what your intensity is at at any given moment. But back in the 90s, most people didn’t have power meters. Heart rates were just monitors were just starting to come in. Still, the mindset at the time was really go by feel. And what you were saying in the book is what they were discovering was often going by feel. They were just going too hard, and my understanding is a key part of this approach. And you know, this is where I think, if Dr Seidler was here, agree with the 100% on volume is really important to be able to do that and volume, you’ve got to really control how much hard work you’re doing. And what you’re saying is, his change is to say we need to bring that intensity down so that we can handle the volume, because we’re doing too much, really high intensity. We just can’t recover enough to do the volume. Was I reading that? Right? He had 180k a
Brad Culp 23:10
week, is like his. And he this had been tracking his workouts going back to like 12. And, you know, he had sort of seen the the weeks and the months where he was able to hit 180k throughout his teenage years and early 20s. That was when he was developing the right way, and when something happened in injury or just a change in coach or training, he was doing less volume, you know, in usually more high intensity, above race pace stuff. That was when he was injured he would stagnate. So he really, you know, made that 180k It goes like, I have to hit this and now where can I how much intensity and how much do I have to control it to get that number? You know, we’re still doing as much as I can near that 5k race pace because he was training for, you know, one very specific event. And, and that’s the other thing when, you know, people talk about 3.0 millimoles, or this, you know, staying right at LT two. It might be perfect if you’re training for just the 5k like, that’s, it works, like, really, really well for that, that distance and that time of event. And then you kind of have to adjust it based on, you know, if you’re marathon, I like, if you’re going hours and hours longer, or minutes and minutes shorter, I think that that’s where a lot of the, you know, the coaches now and or even, like a Garren Inka britson, when he was modeling, you know, his son’s programs, you know, did a good job of sort of, because Marius was never training for the 1500 and now, of course, you have Jacob is, you know, one of, if not the greatest 1500 runners Ever. Very, very different events, very, very different approaches. And, yeah, it’s got to be tailored to each event specifically.
Trevor Connor 24:46
Yeah, so I was going to dive into that a bit too before we go there. There was something I really liked in your book that you pointed out, which was, at the time, the common belief about training was you got to do a lot of time at race pace. And you said in the book, which I really liked, was race pace could do more damage than good. There’s
Brad Culp 25:07
certainly a time and a place for it, and that might just be as you’re getting very, very close to, you know, race day. But yeah, I think you’re even seeing that now with some athletes who don’t necessarily prescribe to Norwegian method, but are have, you know, modeled and altered their training based on some of these concepts. And a lot of the elite athletes I’m talking to, especially on the triathlon side, you know, they’ll tell me we’re doing so much like, you know, upper zone one, zone one, stuff, Zone Two, really, really low, and we’re going, like, way higher than race like they’re on the treadmill running way faster than they’re going to do in an Ironman marathon. And there’s not, yeah, there’s not a whole lot at race intensity or right there, because there’s just cost there. You’re not really you can build the metabolic system in the same way, at a much lower intensity, without doing any of the damage long term, to muscles, tendons, endocrine system, hormones, like everything that a really, really hard session that if you’re doing time and time again, is going to add up in terms of cost and send you the wrong way. And you
Trevor Connor 26:14
did point out that Marius beckon spent time in Kenya seeing how the Kenyan runners were training, and he said they did basically no intensity, yeah. And
Brad Culp 26:22
he was sort of the one of the first to bring a lactate meter down there. And just wanted to see, you know, their numbers and get an idea. And, yeah, it was blown away at their, yeah, their threshold sessions. You know, most of them are like, like, down to two millimoles or 2.2 you know, some of the the best athletes that he was testing, and he was blown away at how little lactic they were producing, and just the in it was from so, so, so much, you know, zone one, Zone Two, real low intensity training. And it a big thing. And you know, this is why I’ve talked so much about Ingrid Christensen early in the book. She was the first grade Norwegian runner, and I think her training is very similar to a Kenyan method. Is she was running 13 times a week and almost never hard. But if you do that over a really, really, really long period from the time you’re a child, 13 runs a week are really going to add up, and it will make anyone a very, very good runner.
Trevor Connor 27:17
So you mentioned this, Mary has landed on three millimoles. And for our listeners, anybody who’s not too familiar with a lactate meter, so we now have portable lactate meters. So in this method, if an athlete is doing the double thresholds, they’re literally doing an interval. Them stopping, pulling out the lactate meter, pricking their finger, checking what their lactates are, and then that’s going to direct whether they speed up, slow down, but they’re targeting, as you said, this kind of three millimol. In the scientific literature, and a lot of people have said this is just too much of a generalization. But in the scientific literature, it used to be believed that the anaerobic threshold, again, what we think of as what you’d hold for that 2030, minute time trial is right around four millimoles, and that LT one, that lactate turn point is probably just a little bit below two millimoles, so you’re putting them right in the middle between those two. But as you said, there’s a lot of individual variants.
Brad Culp 28:13
Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s crazy how much lactate will will vary within from athlete who were seemingly, you know, can produce similar results and are seemingly, you know, similar levels of fitness. Yeah, there’s big differences in our biology in terms of how much lactate we’re producing all the time, how much like that we produce at rest. I mean, if we tested all four of us right now, we would have four different, very different numbers. So that’s that’s very important to keep in mind. And yeah, I think that, yeah, probably one of the best things to cut the 4.0 was just decided as the anaerobic threshold. Because, like, one study back in the 60s or 50s or something just pinpointed that, and it was just taken, like, all right, that’s it. That’s the anaerobic threshold. Now, most people, if you try to get up to 4.1 millimoles right now on a track, you would find that that is extraordinarily difficult, and is probably not at pace that unless you’re very, very fit, that you’re going to be holding for 30 minutes. So, yeah, I think that in when, you know, even when Marius had started using lactate early in his running career, that was what they were going for, was, was all these workouts that were upwards close to four millimoles, and he just knew right away that this was not a good place for him. He could maybe certain athletes are just better intuitively at the feel part of it, and he was probably an athlete who just had good instincts there and knew when too hard was too hard. And yeah, and luckily, had the lactate meter, and was sort of learning it as he sort of learned his own body and and wrote about it. And I think that that’s if lactate has the best use for most athletes, is it can probably help them understand RPE so much better. And you know, coaches are. Honestly saying that they want their athletes to train by feel trained by part. PE, you know, don’t go off these metrics. But like Trevor, like you had said earlier, if you just let people, especially lead athletes go by feel nine times out of 10, they’re going to go harder rather than easier. So I think that, you know, introducing lactate and learning your numbers can really help just learn what your RPE truly is. And athletes like like Christian and I’m sure jab now too, they could probably tell you on a track session very closely where their lactate is without the meter and it’s now they’re you know more for the coaches to track and make sure that the the progressing the way they should be throughout a season. Something
Trevor Connor 30:42
I do want to quickly point out, you said that for a lot of people, would be hard to hit 4.0 my experience has actually been particularly when you’re dealing with newer athletes, or less trained athletes. Actually hitting 4.0 is pretty easy. What you see in less fit is they tend to do a lot of high intensity work. They build up all those MCT four transporters which pumps the lactate out of the anaerobic cells, but they don’t have a ton of MCT one to take up the lactate so they can hit 4.0 just by thinking hard. I have literally seen masters athletes who can sustain seven, eight millimoles for 3040, 50 minutes, which is obviously in an elite athlete, that would be ridiculous. But it’s just because the all the lactates accumulating and it can’t go anywhere.
Brad Culp 31:25
That’s a good point to point out. For like, very untrained versus very fit, lactate could not be any different. And, yeah, I think that that’s another good point of, like, focusing on on a specific number as you get started, is, is, you know, probably, unless you’re extraordinarily fit at that high end level, is probably pointless. You should really just sort of learn your own curve and then, you know, make sure that it’s lifting in the right way. Instead of, you know, just being like, oh my LT, two is not near three. What is wrong with me? It doesn’t really mean anything. Yeah, don’t. Don’t get too caught up in the round numbers. Trevor,
Chris Case 32:04
I was going to ask you, I’m not sure how relevant this is to our discussion, but we talk about the individuality of these athletes and how they one might want to sit at 3.01 might want to sit at 3.3 etc. How much variability is there within a particular athlete given the time of season, their age, as they age, does it tend to change fitness level? What are the factors that would change where they would want to be sitting?
Brad Culp 32:36
Certainly throughout the season, you’ll see athletes at much, much higher number. The whole goal is to lift that entire curve, or maybe, you know, more specific ends of the curve, because there are they. It doesn’t all move at once. You know, if you move one point, it can move another, but yeah, typically more you’ll see higher numbers and higher intensity later in the season, as you get closer to to a big race. And you’ll see, in the case of the three athletes I really highlighted, they’re doing a lot more race based stuff and a lot more higher lactate stuff later in the season, for sure. Well, one
Trevor Connor 33:12
thing you brought up in the book, and to help answer Chris’ question, which I agree with 100% is one of the reasons to move towards lactate is you do see more consistency. So we’ve talked about the fact that heart rate can really vary depending on how you sleep, how hydrated you are. Other factors hydration will affect lactate as well. You mentioned that in the book, you can go out one day, and let’s say you’re trying to do intervals at LT two. From my own experience, I can go out in one day it’s at 158 159 beats per minute. The next day it’s at 160 768, it can vary that much. Lactate is going to be far more consistent. You will see it change with fitness, but day to day to day to day, you can, in my opinion, be more reliant on those lactates once you know your numbers
Chris Case 33:58
a practical consideration. I know I’m kind of jumping ahead. But how easy or difficult is it to take your own lactate measurements while training?
Brad Culp 34:10
I found, like, I obviously hadn’t done track workouts, and basically forever I, like I said, I grew up swimming and then got into triathlon, and I’m not a runner. I haven’t spent much time on the track, but I got a lactate meter as I was starting to write about it, because I, you know, figured that was the best way to learn about it and spend some time on the track. And I find it’s pretty easy. You have to do it, obviously, in an interval session. You know, if you have a coach, you could stop on a bike ride, I suppose, and do it really quick. But it’s best on on a track, or on a on a trainer, or next to the pool, but yeah, you can do it in a whole process takes less than 30 seconds. I really don’t like pricking my fingers. I like pricking my ear. Most people are the opposite. They go for the finger prick, but the readout takes 1012, seconds, tops. I. Absolutely and, yeah, I think it’s perfect for interval training or for track training, because it’s about, you know, the time that you would want to rest, and you could take a reading, you could walk or jog and have some active recovery and then get right back into the next interval. So in terms of time, it’s not disruptive. It’s more just wrapping your head around pricking yourself and adding that extra kind of invasive layer to your training. I
Trevor Connor 35:21
always love to tell this story about I had a listener to our show reach out to me about he had literally just bought his bike a month earlier, so he was brand new as you could get, but he was into it, and he wanted a lactate he had a trainer. He was on Zwift, and he’s like, I don’t think heart rate monitors are accurate enough. What do you think about buying a lactate meter and doing lactates on myself. And I’m like, no, no, this is a little premature, it is. And so I told him this. I’m like, You’re just get the feel for it. You can think about that after you have a year or two under your belt. And he ignored me lactate meter and did a lactate test on himself, and he sent me the data. And I’m sitting there going, Oh, this is going oh, this is going to look really bad. I pulled up the graph. It was perfect. I couldn’t believe it. So he did a, you know, a stage test where he was doing five minutes, I think it was increasing 30 Watts every five minutes, taking lactates on himself. So he was taking lactates when he was above threshold, nice,
Brad Culp 36:21
and it was perfect graph champion in a few years.
Chris Case 36:28
I’m sure the technology has also come a long way in the past 10 years in terms of the meters themselves and the ease of use. And I think
Brad Culp 36:36
with all the the attention on it, and as it grows and grows, I know that there’s a couple of big, big brands that are trying to make a less invasive, like a laser way to measure lactate without a finger prick. So I think that, hopefully that’s coming in the next five years. I think that that could really, really revolutionize lactate and just make it so accessible to the way it says now no more than 5% of endurance athletes are going to, are going to use it. But if, if there’s no blood involved and no pain, and it’s super quick in real time, you know, I think it could ultimately become what power became for cycling. The important
Trevor Connor 37:13
thing to keep in mind, though, is all this light technology, it cannot directly measure lactate. What they’ve been looking for is things that correlate with lactate, that they can measure and then say, Okay, this gives you an estimate of lactate, and that’s really important. Similar
Brad Culp 37:28
to the I talked about, the heat sensor, the core heat sensor, that the athletes are using, and, yeah, sort of similar technology is, it’s using an algorithm, and it’s measuring heat transfer. It’s still not measuring your actual core body temperature.
Chris Case 37:40
Let’s take a moment to hear from physiologist MOLLY BREWER, who shares her thoughts about both using lactate in training and what we’re going to discuss next double thresholds.
Mollie Brewer 37:52
I find the Norwegian work very influential in my own research and training. I love reading anything that comes out new from Norwegian researchers, and it’s one of the reasons I know Dr Seyler is not Norwegian, but I was so excited to be part of a Norwegian course in sports science so that I could just hear more about their philosophies of training. I am familiar with the lactate guided training, and as someone who studied lactate and lactate use for analysis and prescription sports. I find it a beneficial tool in metric and I apply it to my own practice, and I love the ways they’re using it with their coaches and athletes. I think that you do still need to understand lactate, and it’s a skill set that needs to be developed and used appropriately. And that could be a little bit of the missing piece of individuals trying to take what the Norwegian coaches and researchers are doing and trying to apply it to themselves, is that there’s a lot of consideration around how to use a lactate meter and apply it to training that should be considered. But I’ve applied a little bit of what they’ve put out in their research in my own practice, and I’ve seen huge benefits, and one of that is with a double threshold training. I just played around with integrating it into my own training, of having a threshold workout in the morning and at night, and I saw more improvements in my own physiology through like a pre and post lactate test than I have in any other application of training for myself.
Trevor Connor 39:20
Now, do you have any concern about this approach over training athletes?
Mollie Brewer 39:25
That is a good question. And I think there is definitely a feasibility and usability approach that doing two workouts in one day may not be the answer for everybody. There’s not a one size fits all. And I think another thing to take into consideration is that a lot of these athletes are applying this with a big training history and base, so meaning they put in a lot of endurance athletes to have this approach be beneficial. And I think if you don’t have that, it’s not the right time in your sporting experience to apply this.
Trevor Connor 40:01
So let’s shift gears here, because I really want to get to probably one of the most interesting elements of this Norwegian method, which is this idea of double threshold. So we talked about this before. We’re not talking about efforts at LT two. It’s here in the US, what people would think of as sweet spot efforts. And the whole idea here is, you do two sessions in a day. You do them as intervals, because it allows you to accumulate a whole lot more time at this intensity while minimizing the need for recovery. Do I have that right? Yeah, exactly.
Brad Culp 40:34
It’s a lot of people are looking at it as there’s some absolute magic in the double threshold itself, like it’s going to, you know, give you this super boost just from hitting those numbers twice in one day. And that’s not so much. I think it’s the the magic of it is that it’s a better way to block your high intensity session so you can maximize those and maximize the recovery windows. So
Trevor Connor 41:00
what are the other benefits of this, besides just accumulating more time, I
Brad Culp 41:05
think especially for triathletes one, it’s something that a lot of triathletes and elite triathletes have probably been doing. I noted that that write a bit about Mark Allen and his training, and that he was probably basically doing double threshold training way too much. You know, almost every day, they just didn’t have a fancy word for it, it was, it was just training. So yeah, I think
Trevor Connor 41:27
doing intervals every day. Never heard of it, right?
Chris Case 41:31
And every day, every day, yeah,
Brad Culp 41:33
yeah. I think that it can be especially, you know, most runners, even at a higher recreational, elite age group level, probably don’t need to be running twice a day. And probably, I say in the book, and I said it on a few podcasts, like, if you’re under 50 miles a week, like, really, there’s just not a concept that you should be considering, because you just don’t have the volume to necessitate a double run day, unless it’s something that turns you on. If you’re like, This is sexy, it makes you excited about your training, then great. But there’s no use for it unless you’re really over 50 miles. And I think that the people who are really benefiting is when you get to that 7080, mile threshold, you’re talking high volume, elite runners, sub elite runners who may find that doing two high intensity sessions on a single day, and probably doing that twice a week, so let’s say a Monday and a Thursday. Now you’ve got, you know, for a threshold, high intensity workouts done, and you’ve got these in these broader windows where you can call them recovery if that’s what you want. A coach like Olaf boo would absolutely hate that he just, you know, looks at those as valium and those are, those are building days. They’re doing a lot of insane volume on those quote, unquote recovery days, because they’ve got, you know, they got three, maybe four days between before their next high intensity threshold session. So I think that the triathletes, you know, don’t be afraid to have two very, very high intensity sessions on one day, knowing that they’re not the same sport. That’s something that the triathletes would would never do. You know they’re doing. If it’s a double threshold, it’s it’s swim, bike, it’s bike, run. If they’re doing bike and run, they’re probably doing the run in the morning. That’s another good thing to consider if you’re a triathlete, is that there may be some benefit to the muscles, the tendons, to doing the one with a bit more cost first and in saving not that the a high intensity threshold bike session on the trainer is going to be recovery. But, you know, doing less damage later in the day is probably beneficial for most so yeah, I think that really it’s just a smarter way to block your training over the longer term. If you’re if you’re able to hit four really good, high and high quality threshold sessions a week by doing double threshold over months and months and years and years, there’s going to be huge benefit to that.
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Trevor Connor 44:35
So you touched on something I wanted to ask about, which was, you know, is this for everybody, or is this more for an elite athlete, which I appreciate you’re already addressing. You talked about in the book, what you’re trying to do here is maximize stimulus, and this is actually something we’ve been talking about recently on the show, which is the fundamental principle of training, is you’re trying to put a stress on your body that’s beyond what your body. Can comfortably handle, and that causes your body to adapt. What I read in your book was, once these athletes are getting to a certain level, there’s this challenge of it’s very hard for them to produce enough of a stress to actually get a training adaptation. And if they try to do it through really high intensity, they’re also doing so much damage, particularly runners, because of the impact that to get enough of a stimulus, unfortunately, they’re doing huge amounts of damage to themselves that they can’t recover from. So the idea here is to create much more of a stimulus, but without all that damage, so that you can get some sort of adaptation, which is a really interesting concept. But the one question I have for you, and forgive me, I have an unhealthy love of biochemistry, something that has really explained why a polarized method is very effective, is we know the pathways that produce the sort of adaptations we want for endurance athletes, and polarized approach hits it very well where the low intensity, and this is true that this Norwegian method as well, really hits a lot of volume, hits that calcium commodulin pathway, which then leads to training adaptations. But the high intensity hits the amp pathway. My question is these double thresholds really doesn’t hit either of those. So looking at a pathway perspective, how is it producing adaptations in the body? I think
Brad Culp 46:23
that maybe. And I said this to Olaf, I was like, it seems like, you know, your your double threshold concept, and the way that you’re applying it works so, so well for Iron Man, like it’s tailor made for Iron Man, and maybe isn’t the best for, you know, shorter distance racing. I don’t know that he liked that, that take on it, but it was just my view of, obviously, his athletes were, you know, Christian won a gold medal in the Olympics. That’s, that’s incredible, but I know that race so well, and there’s a lot of luck and weird dynamics involved. And in one guy, you know, sprinting away and winning, whereas then they go to long distance and are just, you know, blowing the record books out of the water and really changing the way we look at the sport. And if you see the way the races in Connor has changed. I mean, they the Norwegian showed up, and they changed the way that the pace that that race is is contested at, you know, maybe that double threshold concept, where you are doing away with so much more of that higher ATP stuff you’re talking about it, maybe it is perfect for a very, very long event, an ultra marathon, an Iron Man, a half Iron Man. I talked to Dr silers daughter a bit for the book, who was not a proponent of the Norwegian method in its purest form, and for that exact reason, you know, when she tried doing very controlled double threshold sessions, she was getting slower and she she sort of looked at it the opposite of Mary, as she knew intuitively her feel she needed to be doing that higher intensity, above race pace, stuff similar what Marius was probably doing when he was running college at Indiana and and that really worked for her. So, yeah, I think that it’s definitely varies by athlete and by event. And people have been critical of the Norwegian method in its peers form are probably right in that. I think we’re finding that now, and Dr Seiler just says this a lot, is you have to train all the intensities all the time, and that includes the absolute highest then, because otherwise you are going to be missing out on some of that biological development that you’re talking about. Well,
Trevor Connor 48:22
you even touch on this in the book. So this is getting towards the end of the book, where you say this might not be as applicable to swimmers and cyclists. You really point out the fact that runners, it’s a high impact sport. You know, you are hitting your joints hard. They have to be so much more careful about injury so much more careful about the damage that they do. Cycling and swimming, you don’t have to be as careful about that. So in those sports, you might be able to do more intensity and get away with it. So you’re already touching on this, but that was really my question of, is this an approach that you say this is universal, everybody’s going to benefit from this, or is it really something that’s more elite and in particular sports or disciplines where it’s going to be really effective, when you have to be so careful about that damage?
Brad Culp 49:10
Yeah. And I think as the volume, as the total volume, goes up for whatever you’re training for, then the control has to become more dialed to because there’s so much more risk and so much more cost. And so, yeah, when, if Christian is putting in a 40 hour week to train for cona, it, yeah, you really, really, there can’t be this absolute highest end intensity, because it’s going to come with too much damage and just not make it possible to to do the kind of insane volume that it, you know, has produced these incredible results at a seven and a half hour race, a race that we used to think of as, you know, eight hours was an untouchable barrier, and now they’re so far beyond that. Yeah, it’s definitely very specific to the event. And yeah, I think that that kind of training, I think it really, really can be beneficial to Ironman and that distance, the. Length of a race because it is so unique and the absolute highest intensity. I mean, you’re just, you’re not going anywhere near there during Iron Man ever. So
Trevor Connor 50:09
I was reading this book as a cyclist because, you know, that’s my background, that’s what I did. And, you know, one of the reasons we talk in cycle mode you got to do the high intensity is because something that we have that’s so much more important cycling is the whole drafting effect, and people are going to attack, and you have to be able to respond. You have to have that big one minute burst or 32nd burst, or your race is over. And I did notice that you mentioned a few times in the book, and for anybody who’s interested, there were great bios in this book of Christian Blumenfeld and Jacob Inger britson And a lot of these great athletes, and just the stories and the struggles of what they went through. But one thing I did notice that was mentioned multiple times is often they, well, they could do these incredible times they couldn’t respond to the kick that some other athletes had.
Brad Culp 50:59
Yeah, and that’s, again, been, you know, it’s been the most critical thing for both the triad face and for Jak and, yeah, we see it repeatedly anytime there’s a championship race. And if Jakub doesn’t win, and he’s like, the Olympics was the perfect example, he literally tried to run away in the 1500 and I’m watching it with my best friend, who’s, you know, nose running a little better than me, and he goes to the front. I was just like, I think he can win this way. I think this is the way he’s got to win. And he’s just like, he’s already lost, like he’s already lost the race. It’s, it’s, there’s no way that these guys are going to come out and kick the crap out of him. And that’s been, you know, the Josh Kerr who’s been, obviously very critical of Jacob. And they have very different training. He’s definitely leading something on the table in that not focusing on that kick and developing that kick. He’s going for what he believes is his idea of a perfect race, or that he wants to run the fastest 1500 of all time. And to do that, he can’t be spending too much time working on that, that specific race tactic training, like you’re talking about in cycling. So it’s a bit of a sacrifice to to know that he’s probably giving up something in those kind of races and and honestly, I mean, if you look at jak just naturally, I mean, he’s naturally a, probably a 5000 10,000 meter runner. That’s, I think, when he goes up to 10,000 it’s, you know, he’s gonna do some extraordinary things. But I also think that’s the appeal for a lot of athletes to go after an event that might not be most suited towards them. You see this with Christian to constantly going back to the Olympics. He could win iron you know, 15 Ironman titles in the next 15 years, no problem. But the Olympics, you know, he views, is probably harder, harder to win, more prestigious. And, yeah, just having something really hard to go after, whether it’s the 1500 for Jacob or the the Olympics for Christian, excites them, but also means they have to tweak their training and, you know, give up something at the at other levels or other distances.
Trevor Connor 53:03
I loved in your description of Jacob is it almost sounds like he doesn’t want to do tactics like it’s almost an annoyance to him that other people are there. He just wants to go and run the absolute fastest 1500 or 5000 that he can and his hope is he’s just going to go so fast nobody can keep up with them. Definitely. Yeah, it’s
Brad Culp 53:26
the Norwegian Prefontaine. I think that’s why he’s so polarizing. And I love his attitude and the way that he approaches races. And I loved watching the way he lost that 1500 in Paris, because that was the only way he was going to run that race. Is he was not going to sit and let someone else dictate it. And, yeah, when when you lose, you have to take it on the chin. And I think he does that pretty well, and it’s great for the sport. Like I said, I didn’t grow up around the track and watching track, and I mean, right now, track is a sport that I’m so much more into than anything else is great rivalries, and I think that he’s just been awesome for the sport. And, yeah, I think that the speeds that they’re going now, we’re going to see a lot of those sort of untouchable world records from the past start to go down here.
Chris Case 54:14
One of the things I’ve been wanting to ask we’re about to I think I feel like we’re on the cusp of talking about the cultural aspect here. But before we get there, I’m curious in your research, you focused on these three Norwegian athletes and many of their Norwegian coaches, and hence the name of the book and the method and all of that. But there has to be other people out there doing this, or have settled into this way of training that are not from that country. Did you talk to any of them? How did they land on this place? Was it a similar path? Were they influenced by Norway? I mentioned
Brad Culp 54:52
really briefly that Flagstaff, Arizona has sort of become the North American hub of the Norwegian method. So. And that probably stems from the Norwegian athletes have been going there for a very, very long time to seek altitude, going back to the 70s and 80s, the rovers were there and and that’s sort of Northern Arizona University was kind of the first program to pick up the double threshold training at the NCAA level and have extraordinary success. And I think that that was really, that’s probably when I started thinking about a book in this concept of something bigger. It was honestly seeing what was happening to in northern Arizona, and that this everyone in Flagstaff was talking about double threshold is the thing. And I saw them get so fast. I was like, man, every college team is going to be so focused on, like, double threshold. Like, I was just thinking, it’s absolute magic. But so, yeah, that sort of, that immigration from Norway to Flagstaff is sort of what turned me onto the method. And yeah, it’s, it’s funny, a couple of Swedish people reached out to me after reading the book, and they’re like, why didn’t you just call it this? Just call it the Swedish method? And you know, just writing about some of the Swedish athletes who did the exact same thing and who were probably teaching them. And there’s so much crossover between those two countries in terms of their they share a lot in terms of sports science and coaches. And like even Olaf Alexander buhe helps coach the Swedish sailing team right now, which a lot of people like there, there’s, there’s a lot of great rivalry between those two countries, but also a lot of shared science and shared respect. But yeah, certainly some Swedish readers have been like, you know, these concepts are really rooted in Swedish, you know, cross country skiing and Swedish Nordic sports, and certainly some of that’s true or speed skating as well. So yeah, it’s certainly not specifically Norwegian that just seemed to be where was really the epicenter of where it was all coming out of, maybe a little bit Sweden too. So, you know, there’s some Swedish, sorry if I didn’t give you guys enough love. Love Sweden. Yeah, maybe that’ll be a next book, there you go,
Chris Case 57:02
Scandinavian series, right? Yeah, the Danish method,
Brad Culp 57:06
yes, yeah. I’m sure there’s some Danish people thought the same thing. And so, yeah, it’s definitely become global. And I think it’s cool. A lot of the a lot of the US triathletes I talked to, you know, they might not be doing the Norwegian method, but they have sort of taken these concepts. They’ve learned they saw Christian was doing really well with lactate. They’ve picked up lactate. They’ve picked up some of their altitude training, or some of these protocols that they’re doing. I know Hobbs Kessler, the American runner he is, is claims that he is, you know, pretty strict Norwegian method. He’s a big proponent of double threshold and very, very controlled intensity. And I think the Hobbs is really modeling a lot of his development after Jakob, and that’s really promising, because I think that he’s certainly the most promising young American runner we’ve had at some time, and can kind of give the Jakob sofa world a race hopefully the next couple years.
Chris Case 58:01
Let’s pause here for a moment and hear from Isaiah Newkirk with his thoughts on applying the Norwegian method.
Isaiah Newkirk 58:09
Yeah. I mean, I think I really enjoyed looking into the kind of, I guess, Norwegian method, or for whatever it’s being termed as right now. But I think in general, we’re looking at somebody that had world class athletes, and they were really willing to push the limit of those athletes. And that really, like was astonishing for all of us. And then now it’s in this situation that you have everyone trying to apply that to everyone else. And I think that’s always the tipping point, that kind of like flash in the pan style approach of what worked for X champion is always an interesting place. When you try and apply that to somebody that has a little bit less time to train or might not be able to understand their limits to the same degree. You know, it’s similar to the situation of like POJO car telling us what his zone two is. It’s that similar concept, like, Ah, yes, he could do 340 watts for X amount of time. But it’s more just, how do we take that training approach and maybe apply it to reality? But as far as kind of how they were able to push the limits, I give them a lot of respect for pursuing that.
Trevor Connor 59:21
So what I’ve kind of been hearing from all this, and Chris is right, I’m going to say this, and I think we need to jump over to talking about the culture. But what this method is really good at doing is building an enormous aerobic engine. This is your first time on the show. I can tell you. We have another co host, Grant holicy, who he’s going to listen to this and go, Wait a minute. Trevor was defending high intensity work, because I love building the aerobic edge. I’m the guy who loves going out for that seven, eight hour zone one ride and just spending all my time there. So like, when I’m reading this, going, wait more volume, keep it slow. Like, Sign me up. That’s kind of my mentality. But that was. Really the one question I’d had about the method is, are you losing something without that high intensity work, and particularly in some of the other sports, like cycling, where that jump is so critical? Do you need to be aware of that? And I appreciate your answering that you also have
Brad Culp 1:00:14
to look at in the concept of like a season, and cycling may be very different, because you’ve got specifics within that season if you’re looking to just develop your aerobic remove your race performances from it. If you take a random athlete, someone you coach, if you don’t think about the races and you just want to develop the aerobic system, then yeah, remove all that intensity. Do the seven, eight hours zone one. Do a ton of that. And you know, you can sort of completely do away with that higher end stuff. But it’s when you you put a race on top of it, and that puts, you know, time constraints on when you need to be at a certain level of fitness. And, yeah, it just changes the dynamics of your training. So that, yeah, I think that if you’re just looking at a 30,000 foot view of aerobic development, that you know that zone one, zone two is, is that? Is it that is going to keep you going like this, but then you have to consider the specifics of when you’re racing, what you’re racing, and what that requires from an intensity standpoint, and then kind of piece that together in the safest way you can.
Trevor Connor 1:01:11
So let’s jump over to culture. And part of the reason we really wanted to touch on this, we did an episode with Dr Seiler where we asked him his thoughts on the Norwegian method, and he really dived into its cultural and he sent us this pyramid of the Norwegian culture. And to your credit, you have that pyramid in the book, and you credit it to Dr Seiler. So I don’t think we’re too far apart here, but I did find it interesting in the book, where you had a whole chapter on Ingrid Christensen, who you called the mother of the method. But interestingly, you have a quote from her saying, lactate meters, double thresholds and altitudes aren’t the secret of the Norwegian method, according to Ingrid, even though she does admit that she was doing some form of double threshold workouts from the time she was a teenager, but she says the secret was spending a lot of time in Norway. And you do say in the middle of the book, the real juice of the Norwegian method is training in the Norwegian model of living. So it seems like you agree culture is a very big part of this. Yeah, and
Brad Culp 1:02:10
lifestyle. And just the way that it I was really blown away just spending a couple days with Christian in terms of his relationship with the outdoors and how that affects his relationship with training and and, and then getting to know Ingrid a bit, who was so gracious with her time for this book, and just getting an idea of what, how she had approached running, you know, in her hate and skiing, because she she had come she was a very, very high level skier before she transitioned to running, and was actually doing them both at a pretty high level as a teenager at the same time. And yeah, for it was just so much about getting outside in nature, you know, as often as possible. And you know, that’s that was for her. It’s just running every morning and every afternoon is just part and parcel of life. And you know, almost that she wouldn’t consider, you know, not doing it. And I think that’s why I opened the book in the introduction with the story of having coffee with Christian. And, you know, it’s a substantial downpour in Bergen, and he’s in his running gear getting ready to go for a run. And I’ve asked him if I can come along for the run earlier in the day. And, you know, he said yes. So now I’m committed, and I’m just looking outside like we could just wait, or just, you know, not like, this isn’t fun. No one wants to go running in this. And he was just like, let’s go, you know, like this. And I was just like, I don’t have rain gear. And he just grabs a jacket. He’s got anything I need. He’s just like, let’s and we just run up a mountain in the rain. And sure enough, after, like, I don’t know, 1015, minutes, you know, at your the rain is kind of subsided a little bit, and you’re like, Oh, this is running up a mountain. We’ve got a view of this beautiful, ancient harbor where Vikings used to come in, like, it’s this beautiful. Why wouldn’t we be outside? And, yeah, missing a session is just like that. That is something that would never occur to Christian. It never occurred to Ingrid. And that’s not purely Norwegian. I think that, like, if you look at someone like the Brownlee brothers in England, who, of course, had so much success in triathlon. They were from Leeds, from a place with miserable weather and, yeah, just sort of missing a session or not getting out and, you know, getting a workout in and in nature. Just it never occurs to them. You just get outside and you do it and you don’t complain.
Chris Case 1:04:20
They might not call it miserable weather, right, right, right. They it was just weather. It was just weather. And they just did it. I
Brad Culp 1:04:27
think the brownies relish like it. They, if they wake up and it’s not raining, they’re like, like, you know, Christian a bit different, like he, you know, the days. It’s funny that he’s back in Bergen for the first time in his adult life, and living there and training there. But one of the first questions I asked him were going out for dinner and Bergen. I was like, What do you like best about Bert? And he was like, leaving, he was just like, he’s like, it’s boring and the weather’s terrible, the training and the food are better everywhere else. It’s funny seeing that sort of transition now, and all of a sudden, yeah, he’s very he’s back at home and loving it. Gustav, totally different. Love. Was, loves Bergen, loves Norway, loves the mountains and the fjords and the but it just sort of, I don’t know. I of course, write a lot about the Vikings and where Norwegians came from, and there’s certainly still a a Viking mentality amongst them. And yeah, I do mention that it’s some of them might be more Viking than others. And you know, when I talked to the the director of the school who recruited Christian, that was his comment. He’s like, the first time I saw Christian, he’s like, pure Viking, and he just knew that there was something different about about him. And, yeah, just a hard, hard dude who doesn’t mind getting out there in the conditions. And, you know, worse is probably better for athletes like that. Is
Chris Case 1:05:38
that what you mean by a Viking mentality? I don’t want to presume what that is based on. My, you know, limited knowledge of Vikings, but now you’ve spoken with, well, you haven’t spoken with Vikings. But what does that Viking mentality mean to a Norwegian?
Brad Culp 1:05:52
Yeah, it’s a definitely, you know, very hardened, very stoic Norwegians are, I would describe them as very stoic people, which is cool. I talk a bit about the concept of Higa, which I love, and it’s just that’s throughout all of Scandinavia. It’s a Danish concept, really. But they’re not really seeking happiness. They’re seeking contentment. And I think that you go back 1000s of years that Vikings weren’t trying to be happy. They were no they were explorers. They were warriors. They were hard people who lived in the hardest part of the world that you could live in in that point, and their their lifestyle and their personality were were really molded by that. And yeah, I think that the voyaging concept is something that’s still very much there with Norwegians. They the Norwegians like leading Norway, aside from Ingrid, who, if it were up to her, she would have spent her entire life never leaving Norway. She wanted all the racist to be in Oslo, like she she was very different. But yeah, there’s also, and I obviously write quite a bit about sailing. It just something I’m passionate about, and is so core to Norwegian culture that, yeah, just these hardened warriors in voyagers, and that’s that’s still in their blood. And yeah, weather certainly does not bother them. That is one thing.
Trevor Connor 1:07:16
So that was actually probably my favorite part of your book, was you spent the first, I think, three chapters about the history of Vikings. Thank you, which I found fascinating, because I was a history major in college and studied European history. And it was always you were studying about Britain or France or Germany, and as you were studying their history, there’d be moments where and then the Vikings arrived. You know, 1066, Vikings showed up, but you actually had a dedicated history of the Vikings, which is something I’ve never actually read, and it was fascinating, and
Brad Culp 1:07:46
probably my favorite part of researching. And probably spent too long, like, right when, you know, we decided to sign everything, and decided to go, I picked up all these books on Norwegian history, and then spent, like, I don’t know, six weeks just reading these, I don’t know, these books that are this thick, and that was having so much fun. And then it got to, like, February. I was like, I should really start writing something. And as I started writing the book, and, you know, I knew I wanted to start with where, you know, people in Norway had come from, I, like, finished the first two chapters and sent out to my publisher. I’m like, I might be going a little too deep in this, you know, the Viking history. And I was really worried about that when we put the book out, that people were gonna get to, you know, 10,000 words in and be like, we haven’t even mentioned running. And I think that’s why we had to get Ingrid in there pretty early. You want to let people know that that’s where this was going. But that’s been the response for most people, is that it really drew them into the book and and they learned something new. Because, like you said, I was a history minor, and same thing, like we the Vikings just randomly showed up in other people’s stories. And I was always kind of like, wow, there was a whole and I thought they developed completely independently. I didn’t really real. I didn’t even know that they were Germanic to begin with, before I started this project, and where they had come from, and it was, you know, really cool for me to learn about and such an important part of European history. And, yeah, basically, everything that’s happening in Russia and Ukraine right now would not be going on if the Vikings didn’t move and kill a whole bunch of people 1000
Trevor Connor 1:09:19
years ago, did a lot of,
Brad Culp 1:09:21
yeah, they started, they were not too kind to the Slavic populations over there. So, yeah, it’s history that’s still important, you know, in Europe. And, yeah, it was just, it’s utterly fascinating, because we just weren’t taught about it. At least I wasn’t, unless you go out and seek it.
Trevor Connor 1:09:37
So you said you have a five year old son, yep, your old son. Okay, it’s about to say, if you had a five year old son, you’re about to discover that Viking history actually involved a lot of training dragons. Yeah, see,
Brad Culp 1:09:50
it hasn’t gotten to the dragons yet. We’re just on, uh, it’s three. We’re just into dinos. Okay, yeah,
Trevor Connor 1:09:54
I’ve got, uh, two nephews, and we did a whole lot of watching train your dragons. Yeah. Before
Chris Case 1:10:00
we wrap up this conversation, let’s hear again from Dr Seiler, who talks about the Norwegian culture that led to the development of their Olympia to open and the sports culture in Norway that we all agree is a key part of Norway’s success.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 1:10:15
It starts, I think, in Calgary, 1988 and that was the low point for Norway. They didn’t have a single gold medal, as I recall. And so this was a crisis, an existential crisis, for Norwegian winter sport. And at the same time, it had been announced that they would be the host of the Olympics in 1994 so you had two different events, a low point and a future high point that resulted in the development of what became called Olympia tolpin, which is kind of like the Olympic Training Center in Boulder. I think is it in Boulder, right? Or Colorado Springs? Sorry, so it was a physical location, but also a competency or a knowledge aggregation, I would say that was started in Oslo, and it was developed in order to try to put together, try to understand best practice and try to train athletes and do a better job of preparing for the Olympics. Now I want to say that I moved to Norway back in 1995 just after the 94 Olympics, and I had watched on the television from Texas, and was kind of fascinated by their culture and so forth. But when I moved there, what I’ve suddenly discovered was, man, it’s their way of idolizing athletes. Is different, because I came from the southern United States, where it was bigger is better. The athletes were big. They were very muscular. You could just tell by the bulging deltoids that they were American football athlete in the neck and their bench press. And you measured their football ability, or their athletic ability was in the form of their 40 yard dash and their bench press strength, right? And then I moved to Norway, and in the newspapers and in the news, they’re talking about endurance athletes, these scrawny athletes, and they’re idolizing their they’re popularizing this concept of they are enduring. They are able to go into the forest for two hours and come back with snot running down their face and win gold medals. And so it was just a different culture. And I found out that that culture goes back to Amundsen and to some of the great explorers, you know, reaching the North Pole and all of this. And it was a combination of people who had endurance. They were good at long term planning. They were process oriented, and they kind of were practical scientists. They had to figure out how to make things work. They would plan together. But then somebody had to ski to Antarctica alone, or across Antarctica alone. And so that was kind of a cultural foundation for being good at endurance. And then when olympiatoppin comes along this training center, then they start saying, all right, how do we develop athletes? Well, athletes are whole humans. There has to be a holistic approach. It’s not just physiology or just biomechanics or just nutrition. You’ve got to think of the athlete over a long term and give them the opportunity to develop at the pace they best develop, and you have to let them experiment. You have to let them sample sports. Don’t let mom and dad railroad them into one sport too early, because that’s the sport they did and things like that. So this was a holistic culture that kind of we seem to see, and it seems to be really consistent with success. It works, at least for Norway. And then you start going up the scale of this kind of Maslow’s hierarchy, you might say, and and what we start seeing is is that by creating this environment and then saying, hey, let’s have lunch together, let’s discuss across the table, the rowers are talking to the skiers, and here comes a cyclist and a coach of the triathlon team. And there’s this interaction across domains, across sports, across nutrition, you know, the biomechanist is talking with the sports medicine doctor and so forth, that you start to get knowledge sharing across sports. And there’s a synergy that starts happening. And then from that, you start developing a common language. They start saying, You know what? We’ve got one intensity scale. Let’s agree on it. Zone one is going to mean this, and zone two is going to mean this. And now we’re able to have conversations where, when I say zone three, everybody understands what I’m saying, because we have a shared mental model of the intensity scale. Does that mean it’s absolutely perfect intensity scale? No, but there is so much value in that common language that common kind of deaf. Initial agreement that, man, it facilitates good discussions. And now we’re getting this synergy, and we’re learning from each other, okay? And now we’re starting from that. We start to see a shared training philosophy. We start realizing, you know, what endurance training is more the same than it is different across sports, runners, cyclists, rowers, cross country skiers. We have more to learn from each other than we realize. Yes, there are subtle differences, there are mechanical technical differences, but there are a lot of universalities. So if we can get those right and then understand the details, we can be good in a lot of different sports, and we can learn from the ones that have been kind of the first adopters, maybe the cross country skiers and the rowers, as it were in Norway. So that has developed. And then you standardize testing, you start saying, You know what? It’s a great idea. If we develop some routines where we say, when we do a lactate profile, this is how we do it, and we do it the same way in Lillehammer, Christensen, Trondheim and Oslo. And now when that athlete, if they happen to get tested at different places, they can trust the data, it’s going to be essentially the same, because we’ve agreed on protocols, we’ve agreed on even equipment. We’ve equipped our regional labs with the same stuff, the same biosyn lactate analyzer, the same metabolic carts and so forth. So we’re creating an environment that maximizes, you might say, interoperability, right? And then finally, and we have simple routines that everybody kind of understands the way we’re doing it again, not because it’s perfect, but because we gain so much from consistency across laboratories and universities and so forth. And then finally, I said that mistakes are made. You have plans. You have strategies. You have an altitude camp that you plan on peaking and coming down and getting this many days. And then we’re going to be in the final it’s going to go, and you miss it. It doesn’t quite go you weren’t quite where you wanted to be in the final Okay, well, let’s think through it and see what we misunderstood in our logic, our understanding of altitude responses. Let’s learn from this mistake. This is an intelligent failure. It’ll make us better. You with me, so that’s the pyramid.
Trevor Connor 1:17:23
Well, we’re past the hour mark. So there was one last question we wanted to hit you with, which is just, let’s focus on our listeners, who most are not going to be trying to win any sort of Olympic games, but are competitive? Are training hard out of all this? What would be your recommendations to them? What can they take from this? Said this
Brad Culp 1:17:44
on a COVID podcast. I hope the biggest thing for most people is motivation, and that’s been the favorite notes that I’ve gotten, is that, you know, it’s motivated them to take a just a different look at their training, to step out, take a 30,000 foot view of, you know, what can I do to maybe improve my training, maybe make it a little bit more Norwegian? That’s what I write about in the Epilog, and a lot of that might be to make your lifestyle a little bit more Norwegian. And just, you know, whether that’s a better relationship with the outdoors, whether that’s whether that just means more volume and more time training. Yeah, I hope that it can, it can motivate you to just find an extra stimulus for your training, and that might be ordering a lactate meter. For me, that was actually really big. I never really been geeked out into the science part of training, aside from when I first got a power meter and, you know, got really, really into what it could do for my cycling training. And I found 20 years later that introducing lactate to running is that a similar sort of boost that just, it’s been fun. It’s fun to sort of see if I’m improving, where I’m improving. It’s fun learning about my biology. So yeah, if you can take bits and pieces to stimulate your own training and get you more excited, more motivated, and ultimately fitter, that’s that’s what I hope the average athlete can take from it. Well,
Trevor Connor 1:19:04
about time for our take homes, which we’ll explain to you in a second, but first, we always try for every episode. I don’t always remember to do this, but I did this time to put a question on our forum for all of our listeners to please come to the forum at fast talk labs.com and give us your thoughts on this. So the question I have for this episode is, have you ever tried the double threshold approach? And if you have, what’s been your experience with it and with that? So, Brad, first time you’ve been on our show, we always finish with what we call our take homes, which is you have one minute to summarize for our listeners what you think is the most important lesson to learn from this episode. And if you have any thoughts on that, we’ll let you go first, or Please take your time and give us some thought. Yeah, I
Brad Culp 1:19:53
hope for athletes, or maybe people like me who are hoping to develop young athletes, both in. And coaching, and you know, my own kids that I hope they can just take a more Norwegian approach to that athletic development their own or others, and look at it very holistically and healthy in terms of how we push ourselves, how we push kids, and how we ultimately are trying to mold ourselves and others to be the best that we can in the longest possible timeframe. And, yeah, something I write about it in the end of the book is just really, really looking at, you know, it’s easy to look at it endurance sports from a season. I’m trying not to do that right now. I’ve got a very specific season goal, but, you know, ultimately, I just want to be as fit as I can in five years and 10 years, in 20 years. And yeah, I hope that that’s an approach that people can can take out of this. And yeah,
Trevor Connor 1:20:51
Chris, you
Chris Case 1:20:52
have yours. Yeah, I think I don’t know if it’s the most important, but what resonates with me, the Norwegian mindset to generalize, is a controlled mindset, that they have stoicism, they have they have grit, they are relatively hard, again, generally speaking. And I think the Norwegian method for the average person might seem kind of, Wow, that’s huge, or that double thresholds, that sounds hard. There’s some of this flashy things about it, and you’ve got these proponents that are doing amazing things, and they’ve got a little bit of flash to their personality. But what it actually seems to me is that the Norwegian method has something to do with the Norwegian mindset, which is all about control, going slow to be fast, using a bit of intensity sparingly because of the cost benefit ratio, and I feel like that’s naturally how I train. I don’t know how I landed there, but maybe, you know, great minds think alike or something. And so I’ve landed there, and it appeals to me. So the control aspect is really interesting to me. Trevor,
Trevor Connor 1:21:58
so I still remember a long time ago, talking to an athlete I really respected, and asked him how he figured out his training method. And he said, I read the books of multiple different athletes and coaches of different methods, and learned about these different methods and then found the one that was right for me. And I think that’s something that always resonated with me, and I think it’s an important thing to bring up, because, as you know, I’m a big fan of the polarized approach. And I think sometimes we kind of promote there is one way of training and there are different approaches. I think there’s pros and cons to each you know, what I appreciate still, though, with the Norwegian method, is lots and lots of time at zone one. I think that’s really important for any aerobic sport. But what I find really interesting about this is it’s almost a method that is the extreme of building that aerobic engine, and you might lose some of that top end. As we said, they didn’t quite have that much of a kick, but in something like an Iron Man, where the kick is less critical, and just having that giant aerobic engine is really important, this could potentially be a really valuable method, and obviously the results are showing absolutely Brad, really appreciate having you on the show. It was a lot of fun talking with you. Gad, thank
Brad Culp 1:23:11
you, Trevor and Chris. This is awesome, like I said at the top, this is certainly one of the more professional operations that I’ve done for the podcasting world. So it lived up to my expectations, for sure. Wow.
Trevor Connor 1:23:21
Thank you. Appreciate that. So you’re saying that is your first podcast.
Chris Case 1:23:29
We’re wearing headphones. Trevor, I mean, that’s pretty professional. That does look they’re not on, they’re not they’re half, they’re half on your head. Yes, you’re
Brad Culp 1:23:36
a professional looking studio, a nice light, yes, yeah, yes. Thank you. Thank you. Usually it’s just like someone’s basement closet that they’ve converted. Well,
Chris Case 1:23:44
we started there, so we’ve come a long way. We were literally
Trevor Connor 1:23:47
at one point in a broom closet. I had to step over a mop bucket to get to my chair, nice, a long way. All right, thanks, Brad.
Brad Culp 1:23:58
All right. Thank you guys.
Chris Case 1:24:00
That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer, to find your favorite podcasts and be sure to leave us a rating and a review. As always, we love your feedback. Join the conversation at forums dot fast talklabs.com or learn from our experts at fast talklabs.com for Brad Kulp, Dr Steven Seiler, Isaiah, Newkirk MOLLY BREWER and Trevor Connor. I’m Chris case. Thanks for listening. You.
