In this week’s potluck episode, we discuss when and how to best use average power from our rides, whether there’s a ceiling to our VO2max capacity, and how we can replicate success from season to season.
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Chris Case: I will bring us in because you’re an embarrassment to the bring in.
[00:00:08] Trevor Connor: That was kind of where I was going. Keep that. 3,
[00:00:13] Chris Case: 2, 1. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Fast Talk, your source for the Science of Endurance, perform. Trevor Grant. Hi, how are you? I’m good. I’m good. You got that coffee
[00:00:26] Trevor Connor: right there? It’s decaf. I just wanna get to this question ’cause I know Grant and I are gonna, we’re gonna go out, he’s a out for each
[00:00:32] Chris Case: other. He’s, I thought he was a pacifist. No, he’s antagonist. He’s. Totally an antagonist. He loves an, he’s been in America too long. He’s become an antagonist.
[00:00:41] Trevor Connor: Do you really think when Grant was coming up with this question, he wasn’t trying to think of something. He is like, Trevor’s gonna fight me on this. No. So I gotta do this question. I don’t. This was honestly
[00:00:50] Grant Holicky: just me. Anyway, get to the question. We touched on this a few potlucks ago. Correct? I think when we were talking about. What do you see when you look on your screen when you’re training? And we got a little bit into this idea of average power to me, and there’s a whole bunch of variables to this, right? Like I don’t ride with auto. Pause on. Yep. We talked about that, right? There’s a number of reasons why, among the number one is when we do a switch back and I hear everybody’s computers go because they got to zero miles per hour according to the computer. We talked about being at a stoplight and how the heart rate doesn’t completely come down. Sure. And just little things like that.
[00:01:28] Trevor Connor: Yeah.
[00:01:28] Grant Holicky: With that in mind, how important is your average power in a ride? We can go into very different types of rides, right? And we can talk about straight average power. We can talk about normalized power, but here’s where I wanna start. And Trevor is, dude, he is like wound up. There’s steam coming out of his ears. Let’s start with a base ride. How important is average power for a three hour base? I look at it all the time. Well, I don’t care what what you do, how
[00:02:00] Trevor Connor: important is it? You
[00:02:02] Grant Holicky: do a lot of shames that are important right outta the
[00:02:05] Trevor Connor: gate. And he claims he wasn’t preparing to pick a fight with He’s not an antagonist.
[00:02:09] Grant Holicky: No, he’s, I’m a pacifist, but I will defend my self against the antagonist. Aggressors, yes. The aggressors of the world, like Canadians.
[00:02:19] Trevor Connor: I think it’s very important. I think particularly looking at average power on a base ride, looking at average power relative to average heart rate is one of the best ways you can see progress in the base aerobic fitness.
[00:02:32] Grant Holicky: Okay, but how important is average power over the course of a ride? And this is why I’m gonna say it this way. Okay. Because I’m not necessarily disagreeing with what you’re saying. Power versus heart rate and how they uncouple is very important, right? It tells us a lot of things. But when average Chris Schmo, not Joe Schmo. I feel bad. Joe always gets, Joe always gets, he gets a bad rap. Yeah. His brother Chris, his brother. His brother Bob Schmo. Bob sch Bob, go with Bob. So Joe’s brother Bob goes out for a ride and he’s got a base ride. Right? Yes. And he’s in hilly terrain and he goes and rides a base ride and he’s trying desperately to keep his average power at 180 watts. He’s not gonna be able to do it. He’s gonna be spending a lot of time in that base ride out of base
[00:03:19] Trevor Connor: zone. He is going to do in a base ride on a bunch of category one climbs. I didn’t
[00:03:24] Grant Holicky: say category one, climb
[00:03:25] Trevor Connor: hilly terrain.
[00:03:26] Grant Holicky: I’m saying hilly terrain. Yeah. I’m even saying this is unfair to the people who have never been here, but right in the front range of boulder. Like the roads kind of, they’re never really truly flat. Mm-hmm. For that long out here. I mean, you can find them, sure. But 60 third’s not flat, 75th isn’t flat even that you’re going to have some struggles unless you are very, very good at backing off on the incline and being aware and engaged on the dissent to keep your average power. In a place where it is resembling how you’re actually pedaling your bike.
[00:04:00] Trevor Connor: Does that make sense? Yes. I have an athlete that I coach who is just the base master. Okay? Base master. He loves base rides. He loves going out and riding steady. So he will watch his average power, but he will also watch his if f. Intensity factor, and he is on this mission and I have never asked him to do this. It’s just he enjoys it. He wants to get his IF down to 1.00. Which is basically, he is as steady as can be. Right? Right, right. So when he is on that hilly terrain, he backs down going up the hill.
[00:04:36] Grant Holicky: Yep.
[00:04:36] Trevor Connor: But he keeps pedaling going down the other side. Right. And so he lives up in Toronto where you have those short, punchy, one two minute climbs, and you see the difference in his approach from the other guys. The other guys there can put out a real good one minute. But you don’t often see really good base endurance, right? He in the spring and summer goes to the group rides. That’s kind of his racing thing, and he kills him. But he doesn’t kill ’em going up the one minute climb. Sure. They all die on the one minute climb. He’s built that steadiness. He’s built that base aerobic fitness, so they’ll gap him by a second or two, but as soon as they’re over the climb, they’re all panting.
[00:05:17] Grant Holicky: Yeah.
[00:05:17] Trevor Connor: He keeps the pace going. He
[00:05:18] Grant Holicky: pops all of ’em. Okay, so I think this is funny because in the end we’re gonna be on the same side here. But it comes down, how dare you to how dare you. Fair. This is fair, but it comes down to how you’re riding that base ride. I guess what I’m saying is if you’re looking at that average, and that’s the only thing you’re trying to really care about, that doesn’t tell me that much as a coach, just looking at that average. Yeah, I have to go look at that five.
[00:05:50] Chris Case: Well, the position, like an average can be computed in many ways. You could do way outside of where you’re supposed to be for. Short amounts of time and kind of quote unquote, make up for that by not pedaling or pedaling extremely lightly for the rest of the time. And then you’re kind of this stochastic all over the place stochastic.
[00:06:11] Trevor Connor: But you know, to that point, there is no single metric that you go, all I have to do is look at that and I’ve seen everything about the ride. This is why you and I both have a bunch of charts, right? When somebody goes, does a ride, right? I think average power, I came into this. The message I wanna convey is there’s this notion that average power is an old metric and not to look at it.
[00:06:31] Grant Holicky: Oh, I don’t think that’s fair.
[00:06:33] Trevor Connor: So we’ll cover that in a second, but I think there’s a value to average power. Oh, we’re definitely old.
[00:06:40] Grant Holicky: No, I’m
[00:06:41] Trevor Connor: not.
[00:06:41] Grant Holicky: You are. Thanks. I’m what, three months older than you maybe? See I did it. I broke his train of thought.
[00:06:49] Trevor Connor: I broke my train of thought. Oh, I was thinking about cracking a joke. You got kids, so
[00:06:54] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I’m older than you. You can see all the gray in my view. Exactly.
[00:06:59] Trevor Connor: But I think it is a valuable electric. But if that’s all you look at, no, you’re gonna miss out on a whole bunch on the rides.
[00:07:05] Grant Holicky: Right. I think the point I’m trying to like convey here, and I think it’s a really important point for a lot of our listeners is, so I went on a ride the other day and I was riding with four people. Three of them are road pros. They’re guys.
[00:07:20] Chris Case: You outta your league.
[00:07:21] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Yeah. And it for no other reason. Just from an age point of view, right? Mm-hmm. Like, okay, when I was 20 years younger, I could ride with these guys, no problem. So I’m riding with ’em, and I’ll do this, and I plan for this, right? I’m like, okay, Wednesday’s my group ride with my athletes. It’s gonna be majority tempo, it’s gonna be a lot of tempo, and that’s okay. And so I build it into my training plan, but I was watching my average power purely outta curiosity. We stopped in hygiene ’cause somebody needed to use the bathroom and somebody ran in and got some food and somebody did this and somebody did that. And we came outta the ride at the end of it. It wasn’t a long ride long. That’s a half
[00:07:57] Chris Case: an hour from where you started from basically, right?
[00:07:58] Grant Holicky: Yeah. And again, I don’t use auto pause and part of it is laziness and part of it is just. Whatever. So we take a little bit of time, we do the ride, we come back and I look at my average power, and it’s still 2 0 3, 2 0 4, something along those lines, which is perfect average power for a base ride for me. And I’m sitting there going, well, that wasn’t base. I know that wasn’t based right, so that’s what kind of got me thinking about this. Mm-hmm. Sure. Is that it’s not the end all be all when you’re paying attention to how you’re riding and the way you’re approaching a ride. It’s an incredibly useful metric. But the other thing I don’t love. Is skipping out on straight average power and always looking at normalized,
[00:08:41] Trevor Connor: which I agree
[00:08:41] Grant Holicky: with
[00:08:41] Trevor Connor: completely. First of all, before we go to, normalized to what you were bringing up, this is why you have segments in the training software. This is why I hit lap buttons on a ride. Yeah. So if I’m saying I’m going out and I’m targeting a particular average power, and I suddenly get in a group. I’m gonna hit the lap button. Mm-hmm. And I gotta look at both my overall average power, but I’m gonna look at the lap average power. And as you said, if two hundred’s a perfect base ride and you look down and go, I’ve been riding with this group at two 50. I’m not doing a base ride. Right.
[00:09:10] Grant Holicky: So I couldn’t agree more. And this is kind of what I wanted to tease out, right, is that the approach, your approach to a ride almost matters way more than purely the base ride number. That’s right. And ’cause we get into this world that’s so data driven that we wanna look at just the data. Without any context to the data, and that’s where we lose a lot of the fight. And we’ve said this for years with Cross, like I can look at cross data and it makes no sense.
[00:09:38] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:38] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Right. It makes no sense. Especially Belgian races make no sense. These guys get done with CO and they look like they’re gonna die, like literally just. Fall over. They’re empty at the end of those race. And you look at it and it’s truly, TSS is like 45. Yeah. Right? Because they spend so much downtime running. Yes. Or they’re going downhill. Scared to death, trying not to go over the bars and all the computer reads is zero. Right.
[00:10:05] Chris Case: Well, that’s why you have to check every ride against RPE at the end of it. Right? Like that in and of itself would tell you, well, that’s not a base ride. Even though it says based on this average power number, it was a base ride. No. Those two things that does not check out. So,
[00:10:19] Trevor Connor: you know. No, and there’s the good old,
[00:10:21] Grant Holicky: you know. Yeah. But we, yeah. But at the same time, we all know how much we lie to ourselves too. Yes. Yeah. It, listen, it took me until probably. Right after COVID to start to go, okay, I’m outta my league with these guys. Hmm. And I was probably outta my league for a few years before that, but I wasn’t out by much yet. Yep. Right. And you’re still faking it. You’re like, oh no, I can do this, this, and that. I mean, I don’t know that I’ve changed what I use as my threshold numbers since I was 37 years old. And it’s probably still fair. And I was probably under it points and I can probably still pull it off. It doesn’t mean I’m the same rider I was when I was 39 years old. Yeah.
[00:11:00] Trevor Connor: I’ll give you an example of what you’re saying of the, you gotta be careful about fooling yourself and what you see with really good riders. My nephew used to be on the CU cycling team in January. They had Alex Howes come as a guest rider, so he talked a little bit to the team and then they went out and did a big base mile ride together. And of course, everybody’s on the team’s like, oh, I’ve gotta impress Alex. How? Right? So they just start going harder and harder and they hadn’t noticed they popped him.
[00:11:28] Grant Holicky: Alex is gone because he’s sitting there
[00:11:29] Trevor Connor: going. Middle of January. I’m not going that hard. Yeah.
[00:11:32] Grant Holicky: Yeah. There’s no reason to go that hard. I think that’s really valuable. And you know, this is, again, taking us a totally different direction, but this is why I think we’ve talked about the group rides in the past, but this is why pick your group ride. Yeah. Know what the point of a group ride is. Use that effectively within your training plan. Don’t just go on a group ride when the dude I’m leading the group ride says, oh, we’ll be based today because they won’t be, be based they never are. Right. Or who’s base is it? Yeah. You know, I can go out with Cade Bickmore and, and Eric Bruner and you know those guys and Yeah. We’re riding their base.
[00:12:11] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:12] Grant Holicky: But their base is high twos and they’re lighter than me. Right. So that ain’t my base. Not your base. Nope. Yeah, and the only only respite I get is if we have a long, slight downhill that we have to pedal on. Then I go, Hey, look, I’m at base. Yes. Look at
[00:12:28] Trevor Connor: this. More power to me of pulling it to the gas station. I got 10 minutes of base. Yeah, exactly. Or 10 seconds, sorry. Exactly. Well, okay, what about normalize? I think you know my soapbox on this. No, I wanna hear it again. Everybody is jumping over to normalized and I’m gonna get myself in trouble. But I think it’s mostly ’cause normalized power is always higher than average power and people wanna see a bigger number. But you have to understand the purpose for why normalized was invented. There are external measures and internal measures. Internal measures are trying to show what’s going on in the body. External measures are trying to show basically how hard or fast or whatever you’re going. Power and average power are an external metric. Normalize was calculated in a way to turn power into an internal measure, equivalent to heart rate. It is not a measure of how fast you are or how strong you’re riding. It’s just telling you how hard it felt. Right?
[00:13:25] Grant Holicky: Absolutely. And there’s value to that, right? Right. You can come out of it and go, you know what? I feel like that group rider, I feel like that race was really, really hard. You look at your normal eyes, you go, oh, it was, that was
[00:13:36] Trevor Connor: really hard.
[00:13:36] Grant Holicky: Right. You know, it’s another way to look at some of the intensity factor of pieces and stuff like that. I think that the usefulness always to that end is looking at it for like a crit. Right. How hard was that? Crit? Yep. Because there’s a million zeros in a crit. Now you get an idea of like, oh wow, that was hard. We were going hard when we were going.
[00:13:56] Trevor Connor: So on a base ride though, ’cause we’ve been focusing here on the base ride here is actually where you can use normalized power. ’cause the whole point of a base ride is to be steady, not to be attacking, not to be on that group. But I like hitting every hill hard. Yeah. You know where I’m going. If you have a good steady base ride, your normalized power and your average power should be very close to one another. Very close.
[00:14:16] Grant Holicky: Yep. Yep. And that’s a great, you’re absolutely right. That’s a great way to use normalized. And this brings us full circle, right? This comes back to the whole point of my question, which is, does average power app base matter? You brought it to a place that says, obviously it does. But brought it to a place of, it depends on how you’re riding it. Yep. Right? Mm-hmm. And if you’re looking at those two metrics and they’re close, you’re doing a good job of riding base correctly. And we even touched on this in the base piece with the old episode of like, keep the base rides on the flat stuff, guys. Mm-hmm. Like it, it’s gonna make a big difference. Yep.
[00:14:51] Trevor Connor: Awesome. That was a good conversation. Very good.
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[00:15:26] Trevor Connor: All right. Let’s do my question. We’re gonna finish with Chris ’cause Chris came with three questions and he’s gonna surprises I will. Which one he is gonna ask. Yep.
[00:15:33] Chris Case: All three of them combined into one question. They’re
[00:15:35] Trevor Connor: all crap.
[00:15:38] Chris Case: Trevor, this sounds like a question that you have that is appropriate for an old person like yourself. Thank you. Thank you very
[00:15:44] Grant Holicky: much. That’s good. Coming from the youngins in the room. Atta boy Chris, I
[00:15:48] Trevor Connor: don’t remember my question. There you go. So Jack Daniels in the Jack Daniels running formula. Not the drink, not grant. Grant got super excited. How are we going with this? We gotta give a tribute to Jack Daniels ’cause he passed away last year. That’s true. Yeah. So he wrote one of the definitive books on running and it is earlier versions. He had, well all his versions, he had the principles of training, but in some of his earlier versions he had the 11th principle, I believe it was, which is time erodes. Memory, and the way he explains it is you see all the time athletes who are at the top of the game, nobody can beat them. Then they get injured and when they come back, they never hit the same level. And his explanation was they forgot what it took to get to the top level, and so they can’t replicate it anymore. So. My question particularly to us because we live in the cycling world, we do a lot of coaching and we’re trying to always give secrets and tactics to our athletes. Do even us do. We forget our secret sauce, the things that we used to know that were no longer applying to our own training. That used to be really beneficial to us and for everybody. How do you make sure you don’t forget these key things?
[00:17:11] Grant Holicky: I mean, as a coach, it is not rare to be. Writing a set of programs come across a workout in my library and go, oh, I love that workout. I haven’t used that in a while. And it repopulates and it’s almost like I remember how to use it well. But there’s definitely things about myself as a coach and I starting with the coach piece. I’ll go down the road and go, you know what? I used to be really, really good at that, and I don’t do that very much anymore. That’s not the tactic I’m taking, or that’s not the way I’m going. And I think for coaches, it’s the same thing that it is for a self-coach athlete or an athlete. There’s so much noise out there right now that we latch onto things sometimes and go, I wanna try that. And we get down this rabbit hole, we get down this path, and it’s easy to forget the stuff that made us whatever it is that we are. As an athlete who also coaches. Now, let me rephrase that. As a coach who also competes, there you go. You go. Yeah. Much more appropriate for what I do. I think I, I’ve gone through a good bit of this lately. I know I don’t train at the level I used to train at,
[00:18:21] Trevor Connor: right?
[00:18:21] Grant Holicky: I don’t hurt at the level I used to be willing to hurt at. I used to be willing to go down in the basement on any day, any weather outside, any time, and just. Crush a 90 minute VO O2 max workout. I don’t think I can do that anymore. Not the same way. Yep. I mean, now I’m like, I gotta get outside so I have the momentum or I have the feel I have that I have this. I don’t think that’s a product of anything other than, yeah, I forgot a little bit. I don’t know that I have the same drive either.
[00:18:51] Chris Case: I find this a complicated or complex question because as we go from season to season. So many things can change regardless of age. Like I think as you get beyond a certain age, things change more significantly from season to season. So to the question of did I forget what worked last season or am I just physiologically different or am I is age mm-hmm of factor or did that injury that I had that didn’t seem so significant actually impede something more significant? It’s just hard to tell. But I don’t think it has to do exclusively with masters athletes. Even people in their twenties are changed, maturing in different ways, and so what worked one year? Is not, or should not be seen as the formula or secret sauce for the next season. There’s always adjustments to be made potentially, so that’s why it’s hard to say, is it something we can’t do anymore? Is it something we’ve forgotten to do? Is it something physiologically has changed? So we’re actually incapable of finding it again. There’s so many reasons why it could be the case that we just can’t replicate. From season to season,
[00:20:08] Grant Holicky: I think one of the things that I’ll, I always wanna start this conversation with from a physiological standpoint, especially with cyclists. Look how many great one Day classics riders were true sprinters younger in their career. They have the highend power, they have this explosiveness and it starts to mute level out. They put it into a different realm. As they get older they’re,
[00:20:29] Chris Case: they’re like, Tom Bonin,
[00:20:31] Grant Holicky: Bon is phenomenal example. Right, right, right. Yeah. Hin Cap, another good example. And there’s a lot of ’em out there even. Wow. Right now, van Art, he’s not the sprinter he was before.
[00:20:41] Trevor Connor: Sure.
[00:20:42] Grant Holicky: Right. So you see this change physiologically in how people go. But I think one of the really relevant pieces of this is the psychological piece of this. Yes. Right? And this can go a bunch of different directions on the psychological piece. Is it a matter of priorities as you get older in your career? Changes? And by priorities, I mean, where does cycling fit in? Does it come behind family? Does it become behind this? Does it come behind coaching, you know, or whatever that might be. Does your tolerance for the pain. Change and there’s ways to train pain tolerance. We can get in the lactate threshold, lactate production, lactate tolerance. There’s a million different ways to put that, and I think you need to train that in order to have that. That’s not a number on a chart. That’s not a power number, that is a pain thing, and you gotta train that, but. Did you forget that? A little bit. I think one of the things about this question that’s super relevant too is this idea of frame it a completely different way. How many people do you know that finished a marathon or an Ironman or a gravel race and look at you immediately afterwards and say, I will never do that again, and the next year they line up and they do it again. Yep. We forget a lot of things, but one of the most important things we forget is how much it hurts. How we are going to react to how much it hurts changes as we go through life.
[00:22:06] Trevor Connor: So part of the reason I’m asking this question, it’s something I have noticed in myself. I
[00:22:11] Grant Holicky: like how you come to the podcast for therapy. Yeah,
[00:22:16] Trevor Connor: I’m going back. The original intent of the potluck was to use our own experience. Okay? Okay. That raises questions that would be interesting to everybody and bring ’em. So I’m just sticking true to what this is about. Love it. Love
[00:22:29] Grant Holicky: it. We’re here to help you become a better man. Thank you.
[00:22:32] Trevor Connor: No, but seriously, what motivated this question was a realization, and I’m sure a lot of people have this of. It’s not the big stuff right now. Like I can look back and I’ve got everything in training peaks going back 25 years. I can go back 15 years, say, what work was I doing in January? And I could literally build the exact same plan. Sure,
[00:22:52] Grant Holicky: yeah.
[00:22:53] Trevor Connor: But what I’ve realized this year is there were all these little things that I used to do in the execution and the attitude, like you said, the psychology of it, suffering through the pain, a lot of things. That I have forgotten. Yeah. That means even though I’m doing the same workout, I can go, okay, I did this workout this year. I did the same workout 15 years ago. But my execution was probably 80% of what it was then.
[00:23:21] Grant Holicky: Or just different. Like, I mean, it could be a hundred percent of what it was then only two feet to the left. It’s just different, right? Like how we approach those workouts and what we do. Why are we doing them? I had a conversation recently with an athlete and I have a couple athletes that I’ve coached for a long time and they were saying, Hey, you know, I’m struggling with this. I’m struggling with the high end. And I said, I think we just need to do something different. Same goal of the workout. I just need to write a different workout. And we need a little variety to get you excited again. ’cause this person was talking about going out and being able to do this and just kind of knock it off, right? They get the numbers, they hit the same numbers they had maybe five years ago. But to me this is a really under spoken about fact that we get good at a lot of stuff. We can even get good at the framework of a workout of how to hit the numbers Well, is that pedal economy maybe? Is that just workout economy? Maybe. I mean, I’ve gone through a number of years. I remember when we used to ride on the Compu trainers, there were a bunch of ways to trick the Compu trainer into a huge sprint number. Just the same way you’re actually learning to sprint outside. You can learn to sprint. On a trainer so you can produce the same number and produce it at a lower energy level than maybe you produced it in the past. Keep the system a little bit. You’re cheating the system and maybe you’re cheating your system.
[00:24:46] Chris Case: That’s right.
[00:24:46] Grant Holicky: Right. Yeah. So what were those variables? I don’t know. And I think sometimes we work a little too hard to try to find what those variables were and to recreate those variables. Sometimes we just need to do something different and go really freaking hard
[00:24:59] Chris Case: again. Well, to go on a slight tangent and make it personable about me. Now, this is not therapy. This is more of just a, we’re here for you Chris. Admission that I gave up, wanting to reproduce. Yeah, the same efforts and the same results. You know, cyclo Cross became my thing and then I kind of just got bored with it. The motivation wasn’t there to do that. So I’ve gone in other directions and found other ways. And become a different athlete and maybe sidestep the question of, could I do that again? Yeah. Ah, sure. Maybe I could, but I don’t want to. So I’ve just sort of gone over here and done these other things, whereas I’m not saying this is your why, you’re asking this Trevor, but I feel like you have been locked into. I’m a stage racer. I’m a road racer. And that’s what you’ve wanted to reproduce year after year, after year. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And I think that’s what a lot of people, they have their love and they wanna do that somewhat. There’s
[00:25:54] Trevor Connor: not stage racers anymore, so I am changing what I’m doing.
[00:25:57] Chris Case: That’s true. That’s true. And I don’t know what my point is necessarily, but I guess if people are out there and they’re frustrated because they don’t have the motivation to. They find themselves cheating the system just to get the numbers to look like they were, but they’re actually, yeah, kind of a lesser athlete or just not performing well. Maybe it’s time for a more distinct change to another type of racing or something else.
[00:26:20] Grant Holicky: I just think change can be really good, and that doesn’t mean you need to change Coach. Can your coach change approach, right? Can you change approach? Do you have to change discipline? Maybe not, but you might have to approach the discipline in a different way. I think we get very good at whatever we do. This is human beings. The more you do it, the better you get at it. And not to get too deep on this, but like what’s the point of your brain? Your point of your brain? No, seriously, it’s to keep yourself alive. It is to keep your body alive and keep your body out of struggle, out of pain, out of discomfort. That is a big job of your central nervous system. What we do when we train. Is to purposely override that and go to a place where your brain is screaming, I don’t like this. I don’t want to do this. You’re having to overcome that. Fear. Fear, sensation. Fear. Yeah. Like I, this is what I don’t wanna do. I used to feel this a lot in swimming. Because swimming is an interesting world. Like you push off the wall and your brain’s going, get up. Get up and breathe. You’re not supposed to be down here this long, and when you do a hard swim race and you’re two minutes into that swim race, and you push off the last wall and you’re gonna stay under for 10 seconds because you’re doing your kick outs or your pullout. Your lungs are trying to breathe and you’re underwater going, no, stop that you, you can’t do that. So like we’re trying to override something that’s not learned. It’s inborn. It gets harder and harder to override that the same way you’ve always done it. And I think that’s something I’ve always tried to remember is that you mind is trying to keep you from doing this so you get better and better at not doing it. So we have to find new ways to do it. Yeah,
[00:28:08] Trevor Connor: I was gonna bring in the evolutionary biology, but he might kill me. What’s the evolutionary biology? We evolved to be a society, not to survive as individuals, but to survive as a group. Sure. We evolved in a time of caloric scarcity, so we evolved to figure out how to minimize the overall use of calories of the group. So A, we have this desire to stop doing things because you don’t wanna just waste calories, right? You wanna use them when they’re key. So when we’re going really hard and using our muscles and doing work, our body isn’t going, oh, we’re winning the race, our body’s going, you’re being productive. You’re either hunting or you’re gathering right now. So you are a productive member of society. I would challenge that for, hold on, let me finish, and then challenge. Therefore we wanna give calories to you and we wanna keep you around. Big part of what contributes to aging is to stop doing a lot of this work. Yeah, because then your body goes, you’re not contributing to society. I haven’t seen you work hard, therefore you’re not hunting, therefore you’re not gathering. Therefore, you are just a drain. You’re just taking calories without contributing and accelerates your aging and slow down. Hate to say, mother Nature goes, let’s get you outta, outta the group and slows
[00:29:23] Grant Holicky: down your metabolism so you don’t need as many calories. I would make an odd challenge, and I don’t think there’s any real evidence to this, but I would say that racing is akin to going out hunting and gathering. Racing is akin to going out and protecting the social order. Yeah. Training isn’t, and what I mean by that is that when we raise, our brain turns off, it’s just. Inborn. We just act. We can get like that sometimes in training, but when we’re tired, when we’re low on motivation, when we’re struggling in some of those things, and this is when some of these workouts matter the most, it is hard to overrun. That fatigue level and we have to sometimes. So like I said, I don’t feel like there’s any evidence to that, and I agree wholeheartedly with what you’re saying. What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, but that’s why we race at sometimes such a higher level than we train at. Yeah. Training is an override at high intensities. There is an override necessarily in training, and it’s hard to do that. I find it harder to do that at 52 than I had to do it at 24
[00:30:23] Trevor Connor: now. Interesting. Going back to the evolutionary biology. If you look at hunter gatherer societies, they rarely went really hard, right? Because it’s dangerous. They went really long. They went really long, but they avoided really hard efforts. ’cause you break a leg, there’s no hospital, you’re dead.
[00:30:39] Grant Holicky: Useless.
[00:30:39] Trevor Connor: You’re dead. Yeah. So they would avoid those things. So there has been the argument that we’re seeing things like AFib and Endurances. Athletes have been doing it for a while, and one of the arguments here is. We weren’t actually designed to go that hard, that much for that long.
[00:30:53] Grant Holicky: Right. And I think all that’s really fair, and it’s a really fun tangent to get on. But the bottom line to, oh, we’ve completely lost my question. Yeah. But no, we haven’t. We haven’t. But to me, again, I’ll say this, when I was 25 or when I was in college and swimming, I just show up and go hard. Just go till I could puke. Right. Like I can’t go that hard
[00:31:12] Trevor Connor: anymore.
[00:31:13] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Even when everything’s aligned, even if it’s not standing there at the beginning of a race going, well, you know, I got two kids at home and I’m a little scared and I don’t wanna break something in Spain. I don’t wanna break something here. That stuff’s real. It
[00:31:24] Chris Case: seems like to me, it just comes down to desire. Yep. Like when you’re a kid, when you’re 25. And you wanna go out there and train and to the point of puking, it’s because you have this really strong desire to be the best that you can be. And you think. Maybe erroneously. That’s the way you get to be your best. That’s fair. Now you’re kind of like, I do this for fun and I don’t need to do this, and it hurts real bad, so why would I do it?
[00:31:50] Trevor Connor: Here’s what I gotta say to our listeners, and this was not at all the message I was expecting outta my question, but I’ll give this one. That’s
[00:31:56] Chris Case: why
[00:31:56] Trevor Connor: we do a potluck. It’s harder to make yourself go that hard. You want one of the big secrets to longevity, go that hard. Force yourself to, yeah. That is you communicating to your body. I am still a valuable part of this society. Don’t age me. Yeah. Fast Talk listeners. We have exciting news. The Fast Talk podcast is now available on YouTube. Subscribe now for our a hundred best episodes, plus upcoming video summaries of new episodes and featured content. Our episodes on YouTube have closed captioning and transcripts all made convenient by the familiar YouTube platform. Listen and subscribe on YouTube. Just search for Fast Talk Labs and hit subscribe.
[00:32:38] Chris Case: Chris, your question, well, this question. Has to do with sort of the arc of VO two max, if you will say you are born with a. VO two max of 75, you’ve been tested. Oh, a
[00:32:53] Grant Holicky: boy.
[00:32:54] Chris Case: Yep. And then all of a sudden you just say, you know what? I don’t wanna train. I’m not just, that’s not for me.
[00:32:59] Grant Holicky: You’re retired Belgian cyclo CROs. That’s
[00:33:02] Chris Case: right. At the age of, at the age of 25. Yeah. And then you’re 50. Suddenly like that, you’re 50. You haven’t trained, you haven’t done any cardio, you haven’t done anything. If you were to start training, can you get back to that original ceiling? Can you get back to 75 or close to it?
[00:33:20] Grant Holicky: I wanna hear what Trevor’s take on this. Because he’s a little bit more scientifically adept.
[00:33:26] Trevor Connor: I get to give you my theory on this, and there is no research partially goes, I don’t think the study could ever be done, but Oh, I could,
[00:33:34] Grant Holicky: but not planned.
[00:33:36] Trevor Connor: Yeah. But here is my belief is that you have a genetically predetermined potential for VO two max. Mm-hmm. I do think as you age can start very high or you know, everybody’s different. But let’s say it starts very high at a certain age that genetic potential is going to start to decline. Doesn’t matter if you are an elite athlete,
[00:33:58] Chris Case: sure it is. Or a
[00:33:59] Trevor Connor: couch potato. So think of the genetic potential for VO O2 max as kind of an area under the curve. It sets the line and then in that area underneath, and I know I’m not quite using area under the curve correctly. You could be anywhere in there. Sure. Mm-hmm. And so, yes, if you are the couch potato with a low VO two max and you’ve got that high genetic potential and you start training it forward it, you can bring it up. Mm-hmm. Significantly. Significantly. But you’re still gonna eventually hit that point where it says, this is your potential. And yes, as you age, that potential is gonna decline no matter what. So if your potential is a 75 and you were 20. And you start training at 45, you might be able to get up to 65, but by that point, 75 isn’t available for you anymore essentially.
[00:34:49] Grant Holicky: But I don’t know that it’s overly influenced by the long period of lack of activity.
[00:34:54] Trevor Connor: Right,
[00:34:54] Grant Holicky: right. It shouldn’t be in the moment. It’s influenced by the long period of activity, but potential shouldn’t be really influenced in theory by a long period of inactivity.
[00:35:03] Trevor Connor: I mostly agree with you. The only potential counterargument is, for example, they’re now showing. There was always the belief that max heart rate declines at a a certain rate, right? They’re now showing in elite endurance athletes, they don’t fit the expectation. They’re actually able to maintain max heart rate longer. Max heart rate’s one of the major contributors to VO two max, right? Uh, okay. So there is an argument that if you are constantly training your peak might still be capped at 75. But you might be able to delay that decline, like the erosional of
[00:35:33] Chris Case: your Yes. Mm-hmm. And make it less steep. So push the curve out to the right, so to speak, right before the decline hits. So if
[00:35:39] Trevor Connor: you had identical twins, one became, so they both had the potential for 75. One was an endurance athlete. Elite earns athletes from the time they were 15. The other one was a couch potato until they hit 40. That one that was elite at the age of 50 might still be able to hit 70, where that couch potato will still be able to bring it up a lot, but they might only be able to get 65 because the limits of their highest heart rate. Yeah. At other factors.
[00:36:06] Grant Holicky: Let me ask you this, and I don’t know if this research has been done. You’ll know better than me, but certainly know anecdotally that different athletes have different heart rate.
[00:36:15] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:36:16] Grant Holicky: Peaks, you know, you’ve got people that truly have a bird heart. No matter what, and it goes way up. And you have guys that have never been able to get their heart rate high. Does that have a correlation to VO two max?
[00:36:27] Trevor Connor: I’m sure study probably exists. I just haven’t seen it. Where they correlated VO O2 max to max heart rate. But what I’ve tended to see is in endurance athletes Sure. When they have a lower max heart rate, they have a bigger stroke volume. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And when they have a really high heart rate, they have a smaller stroke volume and it kind of equalizes.
[00:36:47] Grant Holicky: Yeah. It seems to come out in the wash. Right. But I’d be curious, I, it only kind of dawn on me just now when we’re having this conversation about that correlation, if there is one, be interesting because, I mean, I know personally to your conversation, I’ve always had a bit of a bird heart. Like I could get it really high really quickly. And you know, there’s other weird pieces to this puzzle, like economy of sport. What are you really good at? I could get my heart rate higher swimming than I could running up a hill when I was 20, which is a weird thing to say because it’s such a specific thing that you’re trying to do swimming. And most people can’t do that.
[00:37:29] Chris Case: But is that what’s also interesting to me, correct me if I’m wrong, is that you were a good swimmer, but you weren’t a good runner. So you were having higher heart rate peaks in the pool than you were out running up a hill.
[00:37:40] Grant Holicky: I mean, I ran when I was young. I was always a pretty good runner.
[00:37:43] Chris Case: Okay.
[00:37:44] Grant Holicky: I mean, I wasn’t good for triathlon, but I was good. I always found that interesting. Like I get hit well over 200 in the pool. Which was wild.
[00:37:53] Trevor Connor: I could see a couple factors. One is swimming. You’re recruiting more muscle mass. You have to use all that upper body. Yeah. You move your arms and you run, but you’re not right. Mm-hmm. Holding weights or anything. Right. You’re not doing that much work with them. Other factors to, to Chris’s point, you know, we have seen this where your body will put limiters on yourself if you are. Not overly neuromuscularly adapted to an activity. Your body’s gonna prevent you from going really hard because you can damage your, your body, right?
[00:38:23] Grant Holicky: So my point by saying that though, is when I, like, I always had a really high heart rate and now at 52 you see that start to come down, right? Like I remember at high thirties, I, late thirties, yeah, yeah. Late my thirties, I, we did cross Vegas and my average heart rate for cross Vegas was 1 96. Wow. And now I’m lucky if I’m one high, one seventies for mm-hmm. A really good cross race. So you see that potential drop. Mm-hmm. Too, and I mean, this has come in vogue lately too because we’ve talked about VO two max and its correlation with all cause mortality. Trying to keep that up. And there’s charts all over the place now of like what’s a high VO O2 max at a certain age. And all those charts dip. And it is exactly like you’re saying that area under the curve, like what can you get to,
[00:39:14] Trevor Connor: right?
[00:39:15] Grant Holicky: But the potential is the potential,
[00:39:16] Trevor Connor: right?
[00:39:17] Grant Holicky: In a lot of ways, and this is why I am not personally a huge fan of VO two max testing for the majority of athletes. Because you’re gonna get really close to your potential. And then, I mean, unless we can measure this constantly and we can measure everything in and out and we can do, you know, treat you like the million dollar man, which isn’t, what would it be now with inflation? Trillion, trillion dollar, man?
[00:39:44] Chris Case: Not higher.
[00:39:44] Grant Holicky: Yeah. Unless you can do all that testing on that person over and over and over again. Do we really raise it one or two?
[00:39:51] Chris Case: Yeah.
[00:39:51] Grant Holicky: You know, what’s it matter?
[00:39:53] Chris Case: Mm-hmm.
[00:39:53] Grant Holicky: But I feel like VO two Max has gotten like super in vogue with all the wearables telling you VO two max.
[00:39:59] Chris Case: Yeah. And they’re not right
[00:40:00] Grant Holicky: What this says, mine’s
[00:40:02] Chris Case: 96. Yeah. Okay. Then as it’s gotta be right? Gotta be right.
[00:40:07] Trevor Connor: I need to go be a cross country Nordics gear. I will tell you, when I was doing a lot of testing. When I was testing high level endurance athletes, I tended to do lactate tests with them. Mm-hmm. Those were the numbers I wanted to see. Yeah. When I was testing firefighters, we did a VO two max test because I find actually VO two max to be really useful as a health metric.
[00:40:28] Grant Holicky: Yeah, I could see that. Yeah. Yeah. Your
[00:40:30] Trevor Connor: VO two max is really low. You are potentially looking at health issues, particularly as you get older, so you don’t have to be in the eighties. But if you’re down the thirties, you need to get out and get some exercise.
[00:40:42] Grant Holicky: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point that you make that like testing endurance athletes, you know, threshold gives us way more information.
[00:40:49] Trevor Connor: Yes. But
[00:40:50] Grant Holicky: in a lot of ways, testing the gen, any general population. VO two max can do a lot of things.
[00:40:56] Trevor Connor: Mm-hmm.
[00:40:57] Grant Holicky: But this does come back to one of the things that, for different reasons I’ve always said about training, you brought it up even today, you gotta go hard, man. Mm-hmm. You gotta go really, like how hard you can go for a minute. Might matter more than how long you can go, especially as you age. It might, you know, it might not be the thing that’s trying to win you a gravel race, but it’s really good for you. Like you gotta go hard for whatever reason, whether it’s evolutionary biology, whether it’s VO two max, whatever it is. If you do anything and ’cause of this potluck, go out tomorrow and go hard. Well, no, don’t do that. That’s really bad advice. We’re in January. If you’re significantly trained and you’re fit, consider going hard.
[00:41:42] Trevor Connor: That’s such. On that note,
[00:41:45] Grant Holicky: Brett,
[00:41:45] Trevor Connor: you’re gonna be proud of me. I am not responsible for the, you are actually responsible for this.
[00:41:52] Grant Holicky: Oh, this.
[00:41:53] Trevor Connor: I’m gonna be proud of you. You’re gonna be proud and you’re responsible. I have completely changed up my base season. Ooh, Ooh. As you know, I have always done the five by five minute threshold intervals in the base. Yep. Last couple years I’ve been having issues and I have been listening to you and Neil and everybody else, and they say. You might need to raise your ceiling before you bring that threshold up. So I have changed things up and my go-to workout for the last three weeks and it’s gonna be my go-to workout. I don’t know how you do this till early February. Yeah, you gave me this, I call it the Hokey 30 thirties. Oh yeah. 30 thirties where you do see, he even put that on ST 30 thirties and then two minutes of threshold. Then two minute rest and then two minutes of threshold, and then 4 30, 30. Such a good workout. I’ve never done anything like this in January and I’m, I’ve totally changed it up. That’s what I’m doing now.
[00:42:41] Grant Holicky: You’re gonna be amazing this year in March. That’s actually cool to hear. And there’s a lot to there. That is such a good workout. 30 thirties on offs. So you are responsible. Responsible for something. Everybody. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I’m responsible for something. A lot of things I’ll tell you in April. Watch out for those icky boys. I’m responsible for them too. Ooh, sorry.
[00:43:04] Chris Case: Yeah, sorry. Worlds. Are we done here, Chris? I think we did it. I think we are done. We are done. As long as we hit record. Did you hit record? Probably.
[00:43:16] Trevor Connor: If not, nobody will know. That’s a good point.
[00:43:19] Chris Case: That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to buy your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating. Get a review. You could tell he was a swimmer because those are like the official footwear of all swimmers. Are they not? The Adidas? No that these are soccer player. Okay, slides? Yeah. Swimmers are flip flops, man. A little chilly for some flip flops today. Okay, keep going. Come on. Where was I? Be sure to leave us a rating and a review and give Trevor the thumbs down. Don’t forget we’re on YouTube. Give us a like and subscribe there to and help us reach new audiences. This could be the worst outro I’ve ever done. As always, remember that the thoughts, welcome and opinion opinions, especially Trevors are expressed on fast talk and those are of the individual. I don’t know if that made any sense, but you know what I’m saying.
[00:44:09] Grant Holicky: It’s
[00:44:09] Chris Case: legally binding. We love your feedback. Join the conversation at forums fast talk labs.com and join us. On social media but not Trevor, we’re gonna get a lot of comments for access to our endurance sports knowledge base. Continuing case, this is a for coaches, I didn’t realize how much is in here For Trevor O’Connor and Grant Haw. I’m Chris Case. Sorry for listening. Uch. Perfect.
