In this week’s potluck episode, we discuss whether there is a true ceiling to our potential, whether there’s a value in “wintering” or taking time off, and what cross training our hosts recommend.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Rob Pickels: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Fast Talk Your source for the Science of Endurance performance. I’m Rob Pickles. You haven’t heard my voice in a while, but I am here with Grant Hokey Griffin McMath and Jeff Sanko, and we have a potluck today. Yeah. I’m glad you have a video of the expression that comes
[00:00:23] Griffin McMath: along with that.
Oh,
so good.
Radio voice.
Everyone needs to get the feeling for the radio voice now. You need the radio voice.
[00:00:30] Grant Holicky: You gotta work into the radio voice. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. You can’t just sit here deadpan in radio voice. I had some warmup banter and then, yeah, right into it. Nice. Right.
[00:00:38] Griffin McMath: Well, we do have a new potluck guest, Jeff, officially welcome to what the potluck experience is from the mic side.
[00:00:45] Jeff Sankoff: Well, thank you. I’m very excited. My son and I are big fans of the potluck episode, and I always contribute from in the car when we’re listening, so actually. It’s nice to actually be heard when I contribute. He’s like this time wrong. Like, no, you
[00:01:00] Griffin McMath: idiot. You’re wrong. Yeah. Was gonna say, I was gonna say, it’s really nice to be called an idiot to my face instead of behind my back.
Well, in the spirit of you having your first potluck as a co-host, I think you should start out with the first question.
I agree.
[00:01:16] Jeff Sankoff: All right, well, nothing like trial by fire, so here we go. My question for discussion today has to do with something that I’ve given a lot of thought to as a coach and as an athlete.
And that is whether or not anybody who starts in for me multisport, but really in any kind of sporting endeavor. When they set out to accomplish whatever goals that they set to themselves, can they really do anything they want in terms of those goals? And can they do that just through hard work or do people come with sort of a preset ceiling to what they’re able to accomplish without necessarily knowing what that is?
And then just not be able to break through that ceiling. And as a coach, if you determine that yes, in fact they’re up against that ceiling and they’re just not gonna be able to get any better through hard work, how do you help them manage expectations?
[00:02:09] Grant Holicky: Definitely a ceiling in my opinion. I mean, hard work, let’s be honest, gets you pretty far for a lot of people.
And depending on what those goals are, sure hard work might be enough. But what I’ll say is me, when I’m working with athletes, the biggest thing that I’m trying to do is to be efficient with their training so that they get the most bang for their buck and oftentimes. I think that my athletes end up working less hard, less often, maybe less volume than they were previously doing, and hopefully for the most part, seeing better results.
[00:02:44] Griffin McMath: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to put it. We know there’s a ceiling. We’re all born with a ceiling, right? We’re born with a VO O2 max, which essentially is a ceiling and it’s genetic. There’s not much we’re gonna be able to do about that, which we can get on another topic, which I think the reason I think VO two max testing is kind of silly ’cause you’re gonna get within.
Pretty close to that by training at a moderate level. My biggest question then shifts to what do we think the ceiling is more? And it probably depends on the athlete. Is it a physical ceiling? Is it a mental ceiling? You and your, is it an organizational
[00:03:21] Jeff Sankoff: ceiling? I think you’re getting to something. Grant, that is really kind of buried in my question because I know for myself, when I came to, and I’ve been in Multisport as an athlete for more than 20 years, and I was convinced that I had a ceiling and then all of a sudden I just broke through and was establishing results that I just never thought was possible.
And it was because of a mental barrier. And so I think your point that. There are different structures that kind of lead to that ceiling, and as a coach you have to find them is really valuable.
[00:03:53] Griffin McMath: Yeah, and like I was saying, you’re a hundred percent right and we talk about the mental piece of it, but I think there’s simple things like organizational ceiling, like can you organize your life to get out the door to do the training at a high enough level?
All these things come in and to an extent, my answer to that question, your original question is, of course there’s a ceiling, but we can get so close to that ceiling. Does it really matter that there’s a ceiling? And my point is this, okay, VO two max is a physical limitation. If we took the VO two max of every triathlete or every cyclist that’s World tour or pro, you’d see most of ’em range pretty high.
But you’d see outliers that were ridiculously high and kind of ridiculously low to the point where people would go, oh, they couldn’t make it. But they have, all right, so what’s the difference? Well, maybe they just. It gotten a little tougher mentally. Maybe they’ve gotten better at organizing their life so they can sleep and they can recover, and they can do all those things better.
So I guess my point is with most athletes, my thought is yes, of course there’s a ceiling, but they’re probably never gonna see it.
You don’t think so?
No, no, no. What I mean is there’s so many different levers to pull. There’s so many different ways to modify, to change, to adapt, to get better outside of purely physical training.
Whether that’s recovery, whether that’s when you train, whether that’s how you eat, whether that’s mental performance, all of those things. I’m sorry. I’ll sit down and I’ll watch the greatest swimmer of all time. Michael Phelps win seven Gold Medals and Go. He could be better. Here’s where he could be better on this turn.
Here’s where he could be better on this. Here’s where he could be better on this. We can break those things down and go, this person can improve. So do they hit a ceiling physically? I don’t think so. I think they hit it
[00:05:40] Grant Holicky: mentally or organizationally or holistically. I’m gonna tease this apart a little bit more, grant, because in, in listening to you, you’re bringing up some really great points.
I don’t know that I would be terming them ceilings, though. These sound like barriers to performance. All right. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. And I will say, I don’t know that hard work gets you through all of your barriers to performance because you need to be identifying and working on those specifically a place that a coach can be really helpful.
Yeah. Now, let’s pretend, you know, an athlete did everything right. We’re pretending, right. This is never gonna happen in real life. Right, right, right. Then, yeah. I do think that there probably is a performance ceiling that somebody does hit eventually, after all the right years of all the right training and all the right ways in the event that’s perfect for them.
In which case, there’s probably nothing that they can do that isn’t illegal to enhance their performance. Right. Some athletes that is lower than others, but I do agree with you that really nobody is probably ever truly hitting their potential, and that one of these barriers to performance is probably slowing them down before they ever get there, and those barriers could be.
They could be mental, they could be, you know, nutritional, they could be your workout prescription. And identifying and working on those weaknesses or barriers is what’s important.
[00:07:00] Griffin McMath: I think the two that I can speak to, I don’t wanna touch the idea of a physical ceiling because I just don’t feel confident to explore that.
But what I do feel confident to explore are how you categorize them as. Mental and organizational, and I think for many historically. Those can absolutely be very apparent and be very rigid. I think the advances that have happened and increased accessibility to a variety of different treatment types and attitudes on mental health now, I think we will see a change in the mental ceiling, in the organizational ceiling.
I say that because we’ve identified things like A DHD and other things so much earlier on that you are seeing people, athlete or not. Who would’ve 10 years ago been dead set on a life of absolute chaotic lack of executive function here, who are now making massive lifestyle changes and able to at a rate that we have not seen in the past decades.
So I think organizational. Yeah. Still depends on does that person even want it? Are they able to make that? But I think that one can be adapted way more than we recognize, at least now. And mental. We actually do have an episode with Dr. Scott Fry where we talked about mental reserve and how, unbeknownst to you, there’s this extra layer you can tap into.
Right.
But depending on cognitive load,
how much you’re tired. Yeah. So if you’re listening, go back and listen to that episode.
[00:08:26] Jeff Sankoff: To piggyback on what Griffin was saying, I think that there’s a much. Better recognition now of how mental capacity is so integral to physical performance. We understand better this whole flow state idea and how it’s something we’re desperately trying to achieve as endurance athletes, and if we ever get to experience it, we could see how it unlocks abilities that we.
Previously didn’t necessarily know were there, but both of you, grant and Rob also touched on kind of the periphery of what I really intended with this question. You know, there are two aspects to this. There’s the idea that we all have a set ceiling that’s genetically determined by our VO two max, but most of us never get there because we are not exploiting the full potential of our physiology.
I mean, a professional athlete who’s able to train as much as they are. Take advantage of all of the resources they have. They’re probably operating around 95% of their physiologic potential. And so that is one thing, and getting an athlete to get out of the 50th percentile to their 60 or 70th percentile is something that we as a coach can do.
But then there’s the other aspect, which is, okay, you have this athlete who has these goals. And again, I’m using myself because I coach a bunch of athletes who look at me and say, oh, you know, Jeff, you’ve been to the World Championships for Ironman and Half Ironman. That’s a goal that I would like to accomplish, and I look at these athletes and would love to feel like, okay, I’m gonna help you train for those goals.
But year in, year out, they’re not getting to that goal. And I don’t feel like there’s an obvious organizational and obvious mentor or obvious one of these things, and so I struggle sometimes as a coach to help them manage those expectations and keep them motivated.
[00:10:09] Grant Holicky: I think that for me, it’s honest conversations that begin early in the relationship.
If I’m working with somebody, then I do think that we try and do the best that we can to set goals that are within reach, but stretches, right? I mean, that’s motivating to people. But I do try to make it sort of painfully aware when something is a stretch and not necessarily two weeks before the race. Oh, by the way, you’re not gonna get that Boston qualifier, just so you know.
You know, I lied to you this whole time. But to be honest, when things are going well, to be honest, when things aren’t going well, when progress isn’t being made, but to really be doing that over time so that you’re not having one hard conversation out of the blue, the athlete needs to be as knowledgeable, aware, and invest.
Did as you the coach are.
[00:10:55] Griffin McMath: I think that’s the biggest thing is okay, goal setting or goal achievement, goal attainment. The goal has to be relatable and believable to the athlete, right? That’s step one. They need to believe they can do it, and unfortunately, I think in a lot of coach athlete relationships, and this isn’t necessarily the coach’s fault or the athlete’s fault, you’re getting a lot of athletes telling you what they think you want to hear.
I want to get to the highest level. Okay. Does that necessarily mean that they believe they can get to the highest level? A lot of them don’t, and I, I’ve spent years working with teenagers and I think it really comes up with teenagers a lot because of they’re around their peers and often they’re around a peer.
That’s very, very good. Oh, I wanna be that good. Do you think you’re actually capable of doing that? Their answer, honestly, a lot of times they’re gonna say no. Well, if they’re saying no, they’re just likely not gonna get there unless they hit that flow state, Jeff, that you referred to. But flow is we need to do a potluck on flow because this is coming from the guy who studied sports psychology.
I think trying to get into flow is the worst thing an athlete could possibly do because part of the definition of flow is that. You don’t know you’re there. You’re not entering into it willingly. It just happens.
[00:12:08] Jeff Sankoff: It’s an after the fact kind of recognition.
[00:12:10] Griffin McMath: Absolutely. So let’s say aside from something like that, if that athlete doesn’t believe they’re gonna struggle to get there.
So that’s first thing, a goal attainment. Second thing is, is it a realistic goal with the time that you have available to give, with the recovery time that you have behind the scenes with your job, with the money, all these things, is it something that you can achieve? These conversations, I think are really important right out of the get go, right?
Can we do these things? And if the answers are no to those things, then the first step is maybe we pair that back. Maybe we think about getting into this or running this marathon pace, or completing this half Ironman or any of those pieces. And then we talk about growth from there. One of the things that I think is really important is if we’ve tried something for a couple years and it’s not working with an athlete, they’re not reaching those goals.
They’re really adamant that they believe they can get there. We’re pretty adamant that we believe they can get there and it’s just not working. We gotta try something completely different. We’ve gotta throw the book out the window. We’ve been working on volume now. We gotta go to all intensity. I’ve been working, we all know I like to go with intensity, but I’ll have athletes that I’ve thrown that book out the window and we do a ton of volume now.
I have athletes that reverse taper three weeks out. Their rest is three weeks out and then it’s two weeks of full on training before a race and they’ll light it up at the race. Do I believe that’s right? Physically? Probably not. But that’s irrelevant if the belief is there and this is what they think is right.
So. It’s really hard in my mind as a coach to be able to take that step back and go, all right, this isn’t working the way I want it to work. Let’s try something completely different. But it starts in so many levels with. Is the goal attainable?
I think that’s one of the things I appreciate about the two coaches on this call who I am familiar with somewhat to your, your training philosophies are you two are so crystal clear with athletes at the beginning of the goals, but not only that, it is an ongoing conversation, always coaching the athlete in front of you of who they are now, not who they could be or something else because that’s who you have to work with.
So that being said, that ongoing conversation and coaching the athlete in front of you as they are, I think is such a key aspect.
[00:14:26] Grant Holicky: The other side of this too is for me, goals are not often performance based. I don’t work with a lot of highly performance based athletes, grant and I co-coach somebody, uh, right now who is just at 70.3 worlds, but they are one of the very few people that are sort of trying to out and qualify and get a time.
Oftentimes for me, when I’m working with athletes, the goals are more execution based and anybody can achieve execution goals, you know, so even if somebody does have these very performance goals that they can quote unquote, fail. Make sure that as a coach you have these other goals that are achievable, that are bringing positive progress around that, and that can always stay motivating.
Even if your time was minutes or seconds or whatever it may be off of what your goal or your qualifying time was. How’d we do, Jeff?
[00:15:21] Jeff Sankoff: I think that’s great. I mean, I think the biggest thing is the ongoing conversation. It’s something I do with my athletes as well. I struggle a little bit when. Even with the ongoing conversation, the goals seem a little bit out of reach with what I perceive is their ceiling, but I work with them and uh, you know, sometimes they surprise me.
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[00:16:38] Grant Holicky: All right. Who’s next? Who’s next? Griffin, I think you go next, Griffin. I think you do. Rob likes to go last. He likes to back clean up.
[00:16:46] Griffin McMath: Perfect. I love this.
All right, so this time of year it’s getting colder. People’s habits are starting to change On bike. Off bike. We’re starting to eat more soups, right? We’re starting to try to wind down.
[00:17:00] Grant Holicky: Soups. I had soup last night. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:01] Griffin McMath: Soups. Weather.
[00:17:02] Grant Holicky: Weather sweater, weather. Thank
[00:17:03] Griffin McMath: you, Jeff. Sweater. Weather. You’re
[00:17:06] Grant Holicky: tuk.
[00:17:08] Griffin McMath: Tuk. Basically there’s this concept of wintering that people start to talk about across society, sport, what have you. I think one of the things that tends to come up is off season in general, but I wanted to take this a little step further in the concept of wintering for athletes. We talk about fitness, and one of the things that the three of you have reminded me over the last couple of years is that fitness isn’t lost as fast as many think, but recovery and adaptation often can be.
It’s like, what if we leaned into wintering? As athletes and as coaches who train athletes, what’s the physiological value of wintering? Can a true off season reset our stress hormones improve metabolic flexibility? Could it even, dare I say, extend our career longevity?
[00:18:00] Grant Holicky: Griffin, when you say off season, I think before we answer a little bit more, can you define more what you’re defining as an off season?
Are you talking about total time off? Well, for a month or three months, or just reduced workload
[00:18:11] Griffin McMath: you are playing into? Exactly. I don’t wanna say the trap that I set up, but like,
[00:18:16] Grant Holicky: dammit. I always play a Griffin’s
[00:18:17] Griffin McMath: trap. I know it’s not a trap. It’s like I love setting the definitions and I think that’s the first part of the answer is if you have.
An off season that is defined as complete inactivity. I don’t think that’s an off season. I think that’s like a sabbatical and an abandonment of sport. So I think off season is inherently off season from the competition from. Some of the more rigorous goals and the recovery that’s needed during that time.
That’s how I would define it for the sake of this conversation. ’cause I don’t think any of our listeners are abandoning their bikes completely. It might
[00:18:52] Grant Holicky: take a little bit a week or two. Yeah. So not exercise.
[00:18:55] Griffin McMath: I think that’s very level dependent, right? Yeah. At the very, very highest level, we watch people completely walk away from their sport for two weeks, sometimes even three weeks.
And do a high level inactivity.
Yeah.
Purely for the body, but for most of us. We can’t afford to do that. I can’t do that. If I stop exercising for two to three weeks, things go downhill in a hurry, mood goes downhill. Weight gain, I just don’t feel like myself. I depend on exercise for a lot of things, so an off season.
Here’s your trap. I’m gonna tell
if only you could see the studio. He just grabbed, lean the mic on lean, lean back, back and looked at me fiercely. I
just am. Remember Trevor’s not here. I am remembering talking to the microphone. Grant no rules. That rule stays, I guess. I think my biggest thing I have issue with your question.
Please take issue. I love this because
you said. Physical.
Physical.
[00:19:50] Jeff Sankoff: Yeah. She did say physical. And I was gonna jump in and say, oh, there are psychological benefits here. No, I said physiological.
[00:19:57] Grant Holicky: Physiological. Yeah.
Now physical.
[00:20:00] Griffin McMath: Physical. Stop. Olivia, stop. My point is that psychobiological, mental, psychological, all these things play in and probably to me.
The biggest aspect of an off season is this lack of competition, which to me is not a physical. Physiological piece as much as it’s a mental reset. The hardest piece of this puzzle is when we are training for an end to an end, to a race, to a performance, to a result that is always on our minds in some capacity.
So when we wake up on a recovery day, we’re recovering for that event. When we go out on a training day, we’re training. For that event. When we’re sleeping, we’re getting good sleep for that event. The ability to turn off, and I’ve watched this, this cross season with my athletes. It’s so crucial. Some athletes seem like they don’t need it and they’ll seem like they don’t need it through a period of time, and then they’ll just crack like a pinata.
Some athletes will say, I need this mental break, but more often than not, it will present as physical fatigue. Physiological lack of performance. And what it is, is a desperate need for a break from the pressure, the stress, the anxiety, and the oddness of preparing for that event. So when I talk about an off season or a break, because very, very difficult to get a true off season for multidiscipline athletes anymore, when we’re talking about cyclists and they’re going from road to cross or mountain to cross or cross the mountain or any of these things.
Incredibly difficult to get this traditional three weeks off the bike. Nice reset. That doesn’t really happen. So we have to look for these resets where we’re going. Yeah, maybe we’re still gonna compete after this break, but it doesn’t matter. It’s training.
[00:21:58] Jeff Sankoff: So I was gonna take this in a a little bit of a different direction because I believe, just to answer your question straight up, Griffin, I believe that the wintering or the.
Off season is vitally important to your physiology, but I also think it is so important to your mental health, not just for all the reasons Grant said, but also when I think about triathletes, especially those who are training for the longer distance events, their whole life becomes all encompassing around swim, bike, run.
They socialize only with other athletes who are doing swim, bike, run. And so I tell all of my athletes, your season’s done now, we are gonna take some time for you to recharge. I want you to find other pursuits that you enjoy. And the other people that you’ve disengaged from for the last several months, and I want you to purposely reengage with them.
[00:22:43] Griffin McMath: Triathletes don’t do that. Triathletes don’t disengage. Whatcha talking about?
[00:22:50] Jeff Sankoff: So I forced them to reengage by pursuing other types of pursuits and I. I feel like they all come back very much refreshed and very much renewed, and the lower intensity that goes with it, there’s no doubt. All of those things that you mentioned, your stress hormones, and it allows for that recovery.
And I purposely say, look, we’re gonna take a bit of a downtime from running because that’s the thing that beats you up the most. We’re gonna shift the focus over a little bit to swimming and weight training, and we are gonna. Once you feel totally recovered and healed, we will start rebuilding your, your volume and your intensity from there.
And along with it, let’s fortify your mental reserve and let’s really get those relationships back in order that may have been sacrificed because of the degree of training that you’ve been doing.
[00:23:40] Griffin McMath: You’re answering it in exactly what I’m talking about. I love that your comment was, I take issue with the question.
The question was mostly just focusing on physiological but not in negating the psychological. And what the two of you just emphasized, and I think you’re gonna probably have a fascinating take on this too, is that first aspect, it’s kinda true off season reset are stress hormones and what you just talked about with a psychological impact of off season directly impacts.
Those stress hormones. Yeah. Now, unless we were to specifically define the requirements of a consistent definition of off season, I actually don’t think. We can make a claim for career longevity or metabolic flexibility, but I absolutely stand with you hand in hand on the psychological benefits and their direct impact on our stress hormones.
So clarity, completely agree. The question doesn’t negate psychological though,
[00:24:36] Jeff Sankoff: Rob. No pressure. But you better have a fascinating answer here. I
[00:24:39] Grant Holicky: better have a fascinating answer. This brings up just a broader question for me, but it’s interesting that you’re talking about reinforcing these social connections that athletes have.
And I’m sure that Grant does this, Jeff, you obviously do it. I will prescribe two athletes, like, no, go hang out with your girlfriend today. You know? Oh, I’m going on vacation. Yep. It’s our honeymoon, but I can bring a bike. Yeah,
[00:25:03] Griffin McMath: dude,
[00:25:04] Grant Holicky: that
[00:25:04] Griffin McMath: one kills
[00:25:04] Grant Holicky: me. Yep. Right. Yeah. So, and now it’s just funny to me that. I think us three coaches are like, no, no man.
Take the time. Like go enjoy the connections and like do these other things that you should do. Is that broader of the larger coaching commun, are all coaches moving in this direction? I do think coaches are moving in this
[00:25:22] Griffin McMath: direction. I, and I agree. I hope so too. But I think the problem is that often coaches are apt to allow the athlete to want to do more.
They almost are like, okay, there’s something to that. Let’s lean into it. Oh, they can bring their bike. Great. That would be a kind of an inconvenient time for a break, this and that. This holistic approach to coaching though is growing. Mm-hmm. Right. And we’re seeing more and more of it. And to answer, part of Griffin’s original question was, can this increase longevity in an athlete?
I think the answer is yes, and there is some. Research that will speak to that, but it’s mental performance research. You know, it’s soft science. It’s this stuff that people don’t necessarily love because what it’s really attached to and to what I was speaking about before, this unloading of the mental capacity from a performance standpoint.
Is a ball work against burnout.
[00:26:16] Jeff Sankoff: Yeah. You know, you don’t need research for every question, right?
[00:26:19] Griffin McMath: Oh, but Trevor’s not here. We don’t need any research.
[00:26:23] Jeff Sankoff: Well, I don’t need a study to tell me that jumping out of an airplane with a parachute is better than doing it without a parachute. It’s self-evident, and I think that getting a study on.
Whether or not an off season promotes longevity or injury mitigation is not gonna be possible to do. But I think we all have our own personal experience. We all have our own coaching experience that tells us that that is the case, and that by giving people some downtime to recover and heal, not just their mind, body, and soul, but just their whole approach allows them to stay in the sport longer and allows them, especially as we age, it’s just so important.
[00:27:01] Grant Holicky: I think all of this plays into a balance, right? Where traditionally, I would say that the vast majority of the year athletes, especially high level athletes, are out of balance, right? They are bordering on burnout and over training because they’re really trying to push the envelope, and let’s be honest, for us to improve, we need to be out of balance.
That is a stimulus for us to get better, for our bodies to adapt. I will say with more of a holistic coaching approach for the common athlete. For me and for you and for 90% of the athletes that we’re working with. Through the holistic coaching, I’m gonna call it a method, but or holistic coaching considerations.
I don’t know that athletes get so far out of balance that they need an entire reset off season. Like we would traditionally talk about it before, and I see this a lot in athletes who either do things to improve their balance throughout their training season if they’re single sport. Or people who switch things up a lot.
I have a few athletes that are like, oh, I’m gonna run for half the year and have this marathon goal, but then I have this mountain bike goal, and that provides the balance for them. Mm-hmm. Or an athlete who, you know, does some bike events, but also does some high peaks events and then, you know, that balance comes in and with them.
I don’t take a very traditional. Off season like I would with others because we have been working on that holistic balance approach throughout the year and we don’t have to rush to bring everything back to center. But I do think Griffin, in the people that you’re really pushing and out of balance with, either because they’re a high performance athlete or because that’s what they’re looking for for their training, we do run into issues that they may have if they’ve been skirting that over training burnout line and an off season does have.
The ability to pull them back from that mental, physical, emotional, endocrine sort of edge. Yeah.
[00:29:00] Griffin McMath: And to pile onto that, I think we are seeing this. I have a couple athletes that I ride with on a regular basis that when they listen to this, they’ll start laughing. We’ve seen this push towards optimization.
We need to optimize what we’re doing in our lives, whether that’s our sleep, whether that’s our nutrition, whether that’s our training time, all these things We’re watching the pros. We’re watching Todd a do this. We’re watching Taylor Nib do this. We’re watching the very best in the world. Go out and optimize their lives, and so we’re watching.
Other people downstream from that, some at a very high level and some at a master’s level thinking, well, I need to optimize my life too. I have the ability to optimize my life, so I’m gonna go all in on this optimization. The problem with optimization is it takes a lot of the joy out of what we’re doing as an athlete.
It makes this prescriptive, right, and Jeff, you alluded to this earlier, it eliminates our relationships. It eliminates all these other things that we get to do. That’s what an off season becomes really important for with that type of athlete, and I will make a stereotypical comment here. There’s a lot of triathletes and ultra endurance or long endurance athletes.
I wouldn’t always throw cyclists into this, but ultra runners open water swimmers, Ironman athletes, marathoners. Who have very much this type of brain, they are very type A individuals. I need to do this, then I need to do this, then I need to do this. And they start to structure their lives that way, day in and day out.
That gets really hard. And Jeff, you’ve said this beautifully. It really eliminates all these other things. My concern is it stops becoming joyful. It starts becoming rote and that’s dangerous. So I really, with that type of athlete, the off season is about go find joy in movement again. And that may be a different movement, that may be the same movement, but without any direction.
Mm-hmm. But joy in movement is the baseline I believe. Unless we’re talking about Trevor, in which it’s anger in racing, but joy in movement is really what speaks to us and has this, doing these things in the first place.
So I’m gonna close out this question with getting the perspective of the three of you as coaches and what I think you could uniquely offer by giving you an example of a specific athlete and asking you for one tip that you’d give this.
Athlete. I met a listener yesterday at a coffee shop in Fort Collins named Graham, who’s near the end of his non cycling, like his job career, but is picking up on his travel and cycling career, specifically gravel, and he is able to take his bike. Anywhere around the world. So seasons like the ones we’re talking about, wintering don’t really, I don’t wanna say apply to him, but for a lot of athletes at that point in their life, that’s an opportunity.
So what I would like to ask you is, knowing the question that we just talked about, what is the off season recommendation you would make, Jeff? I want one semi clinical or recommendation. That’s not medical advice. You talked about the travel earlier. And then grant for you joy and mental health related, if we could close out this question with that type of athlete in mind, that’d be great.
[00:32:11] Jeff Sankoff: Just periodize. Just make sure that you’re building into that because I look forward to being in that period of my life as well, which is actually not that far away. And because I don’t envision myself competing 12 months a year, even though I’m doing that, as long as you’re periodizing what you’re doing and taking your bike with you, and maybe one time you’re taking your bike with you and it’s just for sightseeing and not necessarily for training.
So just periodize and make sure that you’re allowing and building in some recovery time. That is still finding that joy and movement. I think that’s the most important thing I would say.
[00:32:44] Griffin McMath: Great. I would say, honestly, and Rob, you alluded to this earlier on some of the trips, don’t bring anything. And sometimes when you’re off purposely, don’t bring a bike and just go be human for a little bit, or go lean into your relationships.
It leans very much into what Jeff just said, it’s planning. I think we get in trouble when we react and we don’t have a built-in framework or a built-in set of structure or rules. Then we just react. And for a lot of us as endurance athletes, we just react by doing more. We’re just gonna react by going again.
We’re just gonna do this over and over and over again. So really truly planning out okay, I’m out of town this time. I’m not bringing anything and I’m just gonna go have some fun for a week.
Great answers.
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[00:33:59] Grant Holicky: Well, guys, I think that if we hop into my question, it’s somewhat relevant to this situation in that it’s for the most part a seasonal question, and that is this time of year especially. I think that I’m oftentimes looking for alternatives for athletes, either because, hey, maybe they don’t have much time.
The clocks have now changed. We don’t have as much daylight. Maybe somebody is injured or maybe frankly, just after a year of training for something, they want to do something else. When you are thinking about alternatives, right? Maybe you have a cyclist and you want to do a different sport. Maybe you have a runner and they’re gonna run on the treadmill instead of running outside.
I’m thinking alternatives is a bigger sort of category. What alternatives are you looking at and how, what considerations are you making? I would love for this to be super actionable, right? Like if a cyclist is gonna run, you know, Jeff, maybe you are the best person for this. How do you prescribe running for somebody who doesn’t really run?
You know, what are your considerations there? Obviously, you can’t replace a two hour bike ride with a two hour run and think it’s gonna be one-to-one.
[00:35:03] Jeff Sankoff: Yeah. Running is fraught, right? Especially for people who are coming from a non-running background. And so I’m very, very careful whenever I begin with any athlete who’s just starting running, it’s real slow build of volume and I go, by time I don’t go by distance because everybody runs at a different pace.
But I want everybody to start out at. The very conversational pace and running no more than 30 minutes at a time. Maybe do that two, three days a week and then sort of build from there. And that often is difficult. If they’re coming from a very high level of cycling, that’s just not gonna be enough. And so that will be something that will be done.
Over time and then get them to the point where it actually is sustaining them and helping them with cross training. You can do that on a treadmill, you can do that outdoors, but I think you just have to be so careful, and I’m very careful about not adding any kind of speed work until they’ve got a really good base of volume.
Because speed work and longer distance, those are the two workouts that really get you into trouble with running injuries. And then in terms of other activities, I tell my athletes all the time, just. Do whatever it is that you enjoy that you haven’t been doing because you’ve been swimming, biking, and running.
And the one activity that I think I, I try to encourage people to take up is cross country skiing, which unfortunately is not something that’s gonna be available to us anytime soon. But when the snow comes cross country skiing is by far the easiest thing for people to pick up, and probably the best in terms of aerobic and anaerobic training for them to sustain any kind of endurance activity.
[00:36:33] Griffin McMath: I’m gonna easiest, I think I, I, this guy teach me skate skiing if it’s easy. Well, not necessarily skate. I mean,
[00:36:40] Jeff Sankoff: classic is very easy. Skate skiing is not. So it, I was gonna say, you know,
[00:36:45] Grant Holicky: for me, in my limited experience, so real quick caveat. When I lived in Lake Placid, I was friends with a biathlete named Lowell Bailey.
He was a biathlon world champion at one point. And he had a basement full of atomic skis because his sponsor had changed to gna. And he was like, yeah, I’ll set you up with something. And so I show up at Mount Van Hoberg, you know, the previous Olympic venue with skis stamped with inspection from like the world championships the year before and promptly fall on my face.
Yeah. Trying to put them on good stuff and I don’t know that I ever, that’s amazing. Got a good workout while Nordic skiing because my technique and ability, much like swimming. I might be working hard, but I don’t know that I’m doing a lot of work. That’s funny.
[00:37:28] Griffin McMath: By the way, I, I can attest to what Jeff’s saying.
I grew up classic Nordic skiing, you know, fish scales in the kick zone and all that, and it’s wonderful when you have snow, just something to go out and experience. Snowshoeing is another one where there’s snow. That’s a low barrier entry. My big pieces here are thinking about accessibility. Is this something we can go do?
So snow becomes an issue, right? Both with it or without Daylight becomes an issue. So are we on the trainer? Are we on a treadmill? Are we at a gym? Are we doing something along those lines? Do you have a pool available? All those things that create barriers. To switching up sports, but accessibility to that sport, and then the individual ability of the athlete.
And this speaks to what you’re saying, it’s probably not the best thing in the world to prescribe swimming as a sport change to somebody who’s never really swam. Jeff and I can both attest to adult onset swimming. Trying to teach that for triathletes is. Challenging to say the least,
[00:38:27] Grant Holicky: especially if you’re remote at all.
I will say I think that there’s maybe value in learning something new, but it’s not gonna be a one-to-one. Right. Aerobic, right replacement for riding or running or whatever.
[00:38:37] Griffin McMath: Absolutely. And I think one of the best examples to this, ’cause we’ll have some triathletes that are listening, it’ll be blown away by this, when I graduated college as a swimmer.
The highest I could get my heart rate in any exercise I would do was swimming.
[00:38:51] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:38:52] Griffin McMath: And you can take somebody who’s not an efficient swimmer and they’re gonna see a cap in their heart rate. Well, lower than I could put my heart to. I’d get my heart rate over 200, no problem in a hundred breast stroke.
Couldn’t do that yet running because I couldn’t run long enough at the speed in order to do that. Couldn’t do that with biking, same thing. ’cause I didn’t have the musculature. So all those things become really important. And then I think the enjoyment piece. What do you see yourself enjoying? What do you feel like you’ve been missing that you’ve really wanted to go do?
I do love that shift for athletes every five years. Sometimes it’s 10, sometimes it’s 20. I’ve done this for a long time. It’s time for something new. I’ve raced bikes for a long time now. I wanna race skis. It’s hard to take the racing or the competitiveness out of a competitive athlete. So shifting that, we were talking about this earlier and this dovetails, I think back to a little bit what Griffin was asking.
Avoiding burnout by shifting sports is a brilliant approach. We used to do this in swimming, avoiding burnout by shifting events. You feel like you’re a sprint freestyler. Let’s go do something slightly different For a little while. Take the pressure off Sprint freestyle. And you see this progression, you see this growth, you see this improvement, which just buoys the soul and gets them excited and gets them excited globally.
And maybe that involves the old sport or the old discipline or the old event. And now they’re excited about that again, where for a long time they felt like they were banging their
[00:40:23] Grant Holicky: head against the wall. So Grant, Jeff threw out kind of a hard cap on running and maybe Jeff, you didn’t mean it as a hard cap, right?
But starting beginner runners, no speed work. 30 minutes of just easy, conversational running. You know, grant, when you’re working with athletes, let’s make this super actionable two hour ride on their schedule. Snowstorm comes in. What do they do?
[00:40:44] Griffin McMath: I usually shift to, I have a hard, fast rule of two thirds to three quarters if you’re going inside on the trainer.
Right? So if you’re two hours outside, it’s an hour and a half on the trainer. Yeah, maybe three quarters as well. Yeah. Depending on their ability level on the skis, it can be pretty one-to-one, but most people don’t have that high level ability on a skate skis. So again, we’ll cut that back a little bit. A lot of it comes down to RPE.
A lot of what Jeff was referring to of like, if you’re gonna start running, it has to be conversational. If you have to start a new event, it has to be conversational. If this was a base ride, whatever you shift to. Has to be conversational pace, and that’s a really tough sell, right? Because cyclists go run.
I remember watching swimmers go run. It was hilarious. You’d have swimmers go do the mile in gym class and they’re ripping five thirties. Yeah, because they can do it because the lung capacity and cardiovascular systems through the roof couldn’t walk for a week after it. But they can do it. So you have the capacity to go very hard, but really making sure that you’re understanding that RPE can translate across sports, and that we wanna make sure that it’s conversational.
On the bike and on the run and on the skis. All across the board
[00:41:55] Grant Holicky: and RPE probably translates sport to sport better than heart rate zones too. Absolutely right. Running, running heart rate zones are gonna be five, 10 beats higher than always bike, heart rate zones always. Jeff, what are your thoughts here?
[00:42:05] Jeff Sankoff: Yeah, I agree. I think that it’s so important to remember that when you’re transitioning to a different sport, you may feel. It’s easy simply because you have that cardiovascular capacity, but you’re using muscles you don’t usually use. You’re impacting your joints in a way that you’re not used to. And when you wake up the next morning, you, you don’t wanna pay for it.
And I try to tell my athletes all the time that it’s not the, the short term gains that I’m really interested in, it’s the long-term preservation and the long-term gains that we’re gonna get from being able to do this over time. So don’t. Expect too much from these workouts initially. Don’t expect too much from your abilities when you get into something new, but the, I think it’s just so valuable to have these things in your quiver to be able to reach for them when you’re traveling or when in Clement weather or whatever.
[00:43:00] Griffin McMath: What a word choice first off. In your quiver. Thank you for that.
[00:43:05] Jeff Sankoff: I try to provide, you know, some kind of a loquacious. Your is fantastic.
[00:43:09] Griffin McMath: Yeah. So this was brought up a little bit in an episode recently, and Trevor had brought up a study, well, again, this is another episode, we’ll link in the notes, but when prescribing an alternative, ultimately the conclusion of our conversation on that episode was.
Talking about how diving into something and kind of cycling through in an amateur capacity, a variety of alternatives, haphazardly is really dumb, essentially, and I hate to be crass, but that’s essentially what it boiled down to and how we talked about picking things that bring you joy or bring you happiness, but are going to compliment and where you can develop a skillset.
That you’re not necessarily gonna compete, but you’re still really good so that the risk of injury isn’t there. And so to the cap that you made about running and a couple other things, when I saw this question come up, I thought about no high impact. You know, no high impact. I probably wouldn’t suggest going out there for a contact sport.
Because it’s like the day after Thanksgiving, throwing the pig skin kind of effect when you suddenly get really excited or Grant and I, we’ve talked about recreational basketball before on this and kind of what happens there, but no high impact. I probably wouldn’t recommend anything that was contact related.
And then no matter what. I would pair any alternative activity with an increased strength and mobility, a training paired to this because ultimately you are going to be exercising a variety of different postures and a variety of different joints than you normally would on the bike that don’t get the same attention to detail that the coach you are paying to help you is monitoring.
So if suddenly you’re using different joints in your body and different postures that don’t get the same. Monitor and attention immediately. You have to have a maintenance care plan in there physically to reduce the risk of injury.
Yeah. I to echo that, I mean, most of the people we’re speaking to right now are cyclists, runners, something along those lines of very linear movements.
Lateral movement is not something that to steal from Jeff in their quiver typically. And so making some lateral movement and starting to get used to that again, even skate skiing has some of that. Right? No skate skiing, a hundred percent. And even the upper body piece to skate skiing is something that a lot of cyclists and aside from the swimming
[00:45:30] Grant Holicky: triathletes aren’t getting a ton of.
To close this out, Jeff, it’s funny you mentioned speed work. I’ve been running a pretty decent amount recently just because of time and life and work and whatnot, but I haven’t been doing any speed work. And uh, a couple weeks back my daughter ran the northern Colorado Cross Country Championships. And like a good dad.
I was sprinting around that course trying to cheer her on the cross country parent. Right. Uh, I do the same. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. I couldn’t understand why I was so sore the next day. Even though my run volumes as high as it’s ever been, that like dozen, 32nd all out sprints I did, ruined me for days after we had one of
[00:46:11] Griffin McMath: the mechanics.
We had the first muddy cross race. Oh, a couple weeks back at Cincinnati. Yeah. And he said he woke up the next day just from the sprints, from the far end of the pit to the power washer. Back to the pit. Yep. In the mud, in rubber boots. He said he barely could walk when he woke up the next morning. That’s funny.
When your kid signs up for a sport, I can just think of that comedian who goes, you sure about that? The parent. Are you
sure about that? I, we have a great idea for all the coaches in here. Child specific sport training for the parent.
[00:46:39] Jeff Sankoff: So I, I have the sport for your kid. Pole vault.
[00:46:42] Griffin McMath: Oh, my wife pole vaulted.
[00:46:44] Jeff Sankoff: My daughter’s a pole vaulter. I basically just sit by the pit and watch her pole vault. There’s no sprinting. There’s no nothing. It’s awesome. I like that. That’s awesome.
[00:46:52] Grant Holicky: Good for you. Good for her. All right. Well, another potluck. Yeah, I think we did it.
[00:46:56] Griffin McMath: Jeff. Thanks for bringing your great language perspective and expertise onto this episode.
[00:47:01] Jeff Sankoff: Well, thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciated it. I really enjoyed being part of it.
[00:47:05] Grant Holicky: Well, that was another episode of Fast Talk. I don’t remember any of these words and I’m not faking it like Trevor does. It’s just been a year since I’ve done the outro. So for Griffin and Grant and that guy over there, Jeff, um, Rob Pickles, go to the website, do the education for coaching and Yeah.
Social with us and all that. Yeah. Social.
[00:47:25] Griffin McMath: You know what? And we’re also on YouTube. Oh
[00:47:27] Grant Holicky: yeah. YouTube hit us up on the tubes. Yeah. Subscribe. Like, and subscribe. Yeah.
[00:47:31] Griffin McMath: Kids or the forum. Yeah. Let’s get chatty. Mm.
And please be safe this off season.
Peace.
