Dr. Ray Browning joins us to answer a question that even some exercise physiologists get wrong: what is the difference between efficiency and economy?
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:00
Trevor, hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Coach Rob pickles, back in the 1990s the work of researchers like Dr Michael Joyner and Dr Alejandra Lucia identified what became known as the Joyner model, or the three pillars of aerobic performance, two pillars we know well and spend a lot of time working on our vo two Max, or ability to use oxygen and our threshold, think FTP, but the model had a third pillar, efficiency. While exercise physiologists generally agree that vo two Max and threshold are trainable, they debated for a long time whether efficiency could be trained at all, and the discussion only gets more confusing when you add another factor to the equation, economy. Even experienced exercise physiologists confuse efficiency and economy. While it may sound like splitting hairs, the difference is actually very important, because one is arguably very hard to change, while the other can be changed, probably more than any of the three pillars. So it’s important to know what you’re dealing with when you’re investing a lot of time and energy into improving it. Our guest today, Dr Ray Browning, is very familiar with the important differences. He is the co founder of biomotum, a company that helps people walk through robotic gait training. But that’s not the only hat he has worn. Several years ago, he ran the two hour project for Nike, which focused on getting a runner to do a marathon in under two hours. They came painfully close. Dr Browning had no control over the athlete’s training, so he couldn’t impact vo two Max threshold or efficiency. All of his work, which helped set a record marathon time focused on economy. In today’s episode, Dr Browning will explain to us the difference between efficiency and economy, including why it’s so much harder to measure than the other. More importantly, he’ll explain why the difference between the two is so important and why he feels we should put our focus on economy. Finally, we’ll talk in depth about the importance of neuromuscular and strength training for endurance athletes, because of their impact on both efficiency and economy, joining Dr Browning, we’ll hear from friend of the show, Dr Andy Pruitt, along with the tri doc, Dr Jeff sankoff, who together will talk about the importance of neuromuscular and positional changes. We’ll also hear from legendary physiologist, Dr Ed Coyle, who wrote one of the most famous papers on efficiency. So find a good efficient listening position, or is that economy? And let’s make you fast? Well. Dr, Browning, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure to have you with us.
Dr. Ray Browning 02:30
That’s great to be here. Trevor, thanks for the invitation. So we
Trevor Connor 02:33
brought you on to kind of help us resolve a debate. So I will put this in the show notes. I actually don’t even remember what episode this was, but we talked about efficiency versus economy.
Rob Pickels 02:44
I don’t even remember what we were arguing about. Trevor, this
Trevor Connor 02:47
is the issue. So Rob and I started arguing about the definition of efficiency and economy, and I put it in the outline for us to continue that argument. And I was coming here this morning and realized, I don’t remember what we thought.
Rob Pickels 03:01
The same thing, man, it’s water under the bridge. Trevor, I still love you, even though you were wrong with whatever we were talking about. No, you know, it’s funny that I think that actually, the thing I remember about the situation, I literally, I don’t remember the episode, or really even the topic, but it almost feels like, Have you ever seen that illustration? It’s two people, and they’re looking at a number on the ground, and one person’s like, it’s a six, and the other person’s like, it’s a nine, yes. And I feel like we’re kind of, maybe that’s where we were. I don’t know that we were actually disagreeing with each other. I think we were talking about the same thing from two slightly different angles. But anyway, maybe at some point we can go back, or listeners can go back. Listeners listen to all of our episodes, every single one from episode one, and try to find our argument. Let us know what it was
Trevor Connor 03:44
I like, where Rob went with that. That’s the message. Listen to every single one of our episodes so dr, Browning, here’s why you were immediately the first person that came to mind. Actually, first of all, to take a step back. This sounds like splitting hairs talking about efficiency versus economy. But even last night, preparing for this, I read a new study that was looking at efficiency and cyclists. It had efficiency in the title, and then the first paragraph of the intro, it talks about economy. And you could see these authors were just using the words completely interchangeably, and would just randomly use the word economy when the whole paper was about efficiency. And so it’s really important to understand this difference. And when I was a student at CSU, you were a professor there. I actually worked in your biomechanics lab for a bit, but you had defined for the whole department what efficiency is and what economy is. And I remember spending literally about 40 minutes with the professor who ran the metabolic lab. She and I were trying to go through your definition and understand what the difference was. So here was even professors in exercise physiology who were sitting there going. Going, I don’t get it. So the hope here is we can, in this episode explain what the difference is, because it really is important to understand the difference, make it very understandable and clear, and then explain why for our listeners that it’s important to understand and how that applies to your training. So maybe we go right there. Dr Brown, are you up to this? Can you tell us what the two are and what the difference is?
Dr. Ray Browning 05:25
In this case is, I usually refer to the formulas that dictate how you calculate these measures. So efficiency is a ratio. It’s a percentage, generally, of the amount of output divided by the energy input, and it could be power output divided by power output. It could be metabolic, and it’s a way to quantify how much of the energy that’s being used is actually translating into meaningful work. So if you think about an automobile, you know, there’s a certain efficiency of an internal combustion engine and drivetrain, and that isn’t really that changeable. I mean, it might change a little bit with fuel type or other things that you can put in the car to change the power output for the energy of the gasoline. It’s the same with humans. And I think part of what gets confusing is we’ve tried, over the years to define efficiency with gross efficiency and net efficiency and delta efficiency. And we start, you know, using all of these terms that are basically different baseline subtractions. So I look at efficiency as a system level metric, right? So how much energy Am I using to produce an output? The challenge with it is that both of those measures can be difficult, right? So you we use oxygen consumption, for example, as a you know, the metabolic energy or the power that’s required. And we in cycling, we often measure the work at the crank, right? So how much power output? But that doesn’t necessarily reflect all of the energy that’s being both consumed and or produced. So efficiency is a tricky one. It’s a tricky one to measure economy, on the other hand, I think is more intuitive in that it’s the energy required to move at a given speed. You can measure the same numerator, metabolic, you know, consumption, or the denominator, in this case, but the numerator that it’s the energy that’s required divided by the velocity that you’re traveling, and so it’s really the inverse of miles per gallon in an automobile. So, you know, gallons per mile, and it is an elegant measure of how well you’re translating that metabolic energy consumption into movement. You know, because if it’s if you are able to go faster with the same metabolic power, you’re more economical, and that, to me, at least, has a really direct performance translation. So one is energy out divided by energy in. The other is energy that’s being consumed divided by speed. So if you think about those measures, you know, they’re definitely not the same. You’re not going to get the same numbers. One’s a percent, and one’s going to be some sort of, you know, joules per kilogram, per meter, for example, is the typical metric units.
Trevor Connor 08:04
So let me take your analogy and see if I got this straight. So we’ll use that car analogy. So efficiency is when you are burning fuel. Energy is released when you burn the fuel. Some of that energy goes into powering the engine. A lot of that energy is lost as heat, correct? And efficiency is what percent of the energy is actually going into to work in the engine. The more that goes into the engine, and the less it’s lost to heat, the more efficient the engine is. So that would be efficiency. But to carry the analogy further, you could take a very efficient engine. You put it into a sports car that has great aerodynamics, right? And that car is going to be very economical. You could take the same engine, put it in a Mack truck, which has this huge front that takes a lot of wind. It’s not going to get very many miles per gallon. It might have an efficient engine, but it’s not going to be very economical,
Dr. Ray Browning 09:01
right? That’s a good description. I
Rob Pickels 09:03
think that what’s important, right, to denote there is when we’re discussing efficiency, again, it goes back to energy versus energy, right? In this situation, but in the economy, it’s energy versus performance, right? Both cars, the sports car and the Mack Truck, will say can be using one gallon or 200 horsepower or whatever. What’s going to be really different, though, is the speed that they’re getting. Mack Truck might only be going 30 miles an hour, if we hold that energy input constant, where the sports car might be going 100 miles an hour. I want to tie this back to running and cycling right to bring this sort of home for people, but it also illustrates some differences on the cycling side of things. It’s very easy to measure both of these because we measure cycling in terms of power. Like Dr Browning mentioned, we can measure the work that you’re doing at the crank. We can measure for the most part. Or make some really good assumptions the work that your body is doing. To do that by measuring breathing and putting that through some calculations, we get sort of the energy that you burnt. So to say so in cycling, we can measure sort of work to work, or energy to energy, but we can’t necessarily do that in running as easily, because we don’t have a great way to measure the work that people are doing while running, right? And so in my experience, using things like efficiency, at least at the practical level, kind of falls apart a little bit. And that’s where running economy can be really beneficial as well, because we can say, Oh, you’re using this much energy to run an eight minute mile right now we’re translating that into an overground running speed situation. So that’s one way that I personally sort of use them a little bit differently for sport, by sport sort of applications.
Dr. Ray Browning 10:54
True Robin economy has a utility across, really any sport and sports that require a high level of skill, which I would not necessarily put cycling and running in, no offense, you know, but compared to swimming, for example, you can still benchmark an economy measure. Whereas, you know, swimming, it’s the same as running, it’s difficult to quantify how much work is being done. That’s a hard calculation to make. So efficiency is a little harder to calculate, and we know that swimming economy changes dramatically with skill. I mean, an elite swimmer is remarkably more economical than an amateur swimmer at the same speed, they just use far less energy, and as a result, they use that economy to increase overall performance. They’ll swim 100 meters in 49 seconds, instead of, you know, you and I swimming in a minute and 30 seconds?
Rob Pickels 11:45
How about 75 meters and never for me, that’s about, I don’t even make it, you know.
Dr. Ray Browning 11:53
Okay, nothing about the swimming. Sorry. I know it’s about a swimming audience, so, but skill sports, it applies across a wide range of activities.
Trevor Connor 12:00
But, dr, Browning, you’re a great person to talk about this, because you were part of Nike’s two hour project to get a marathon runner under two hours, and your whole focus was on the shoe. You weren’t giving the runner training plans, right? You were trying to do everything possible to make it more economical for the runner,
Dr. Ray Browning 12:19
yeah. And that was a really interesting project, because the way that we approached that was, could the footwear actually perform some of the energy storage and return that’s generally done by the biological limbs, the legs. So the leg, when you run, you’re basically bouncing along on a spring right. Your center of mass is a ball, and your legs are springy objects which compress and then extend when you run. And if you take some of the work that’s done by the muscles to both compress that leg spring, and then also some of the work that requires were required to extend that spring, and that’s done by the footwear, presumably you’re putting less demand on the muscle. If you’re putting less demand on the muscle than the metabolic cost. Metabolic cost goes down to move at the same speed. And in fact, that is what we found. The combination of a very low density, resilient foam with carbon fiber plates ended up translating into about a 4% change in running economy compared to other, you know, racing flats at the time. And that was fine, but one of the second question that we needed to answer was, what does athletes do with that improved economy? Because, you know, some of us would just say, well, it’s a little easier to run at the same speed. That’s nice. I like that. And the question was, did elite, you know, high performing athletes, did they use that increase in economy to run at a faster speed, at the same relative effort, and which is what they actually wasn’t quite one to one, but it’s actually what they did choose to do. So that was important because it got us closer to being able to break this two hour marathon record. That was a fun project to work on, and it was really insightful in a lot
Trevor Connor 14:02
of ways. During the two hour project, Dr brownie focused a lot on biomechanics. Here’s Dr Andy Pruitt and Dr Jeff sankoff giving examples of how much small biomechanical changes can make a difference, while also admitting that it’s easy to confuse efficiency and economy.
Dr. Andy Pruitt 14:18
I still struggle defining them and making them somehow different. So for me, training in general, if done correctly, should affect both.
Jeff Sankoff 14:29
Yeah, when I think about that, I often use them interchangeably, knowing full well, that’s not totally appropriate, but I think about it. Often when I think about biomechanics of running, for example, I tell my athletes I really put a big emphasis on cadence, because we know that if you can run at a biomechanically economical cadence, then you’re going to run more efficiently. And I recognize that’s sort of blurring the lines between.
Dr. Andy Pruitt 15:00
The two. But I do think, I think the point that I’m trying to make is that, yes, it is possible to target those things and that it can have very real impacts on performance. I think a good example of that would be back in my early days of the D motion capture. It was introduced to me in the world of running and Frank, shorter had a halicus injury, torn flexor, and he went to an Israeli biomechanist who I ultimately worked with for years, who videotaped him, turned it into three emotion, and he found out that on his good foot, he moved horizontal. On his bad foot, he went more vertical, so he obviously wasn’t efficient. So we worked at getting him stronger and equate his gait, and I think in doing so, we made him more efficient and economical.
Jeff Sankoff 15:54
Interestingly, I had a similar situation myself. Personally, I had a torn labrum in my hip, but before I had that, I had the cam lesion in my hip. And when I went for a bike fit, they did the retool thing, and you could see that my right knee, the knee with the bad hip, tracked in a very lateral way. My left knee was tracking vertically. And so I was economical in that my cadence was really good 90. I was generating good power, but I wasn’t very efficient. I was wasting a lot of energy with this lateral movement. And then after I had my surgery to repair my labrum, I went back for another fit, and now I had the same economy, but I was much more efficient because my leg was moving in a vertical fashion. So I fixed the efficiency. The economy was still the same.
Rob Pickels 16:44
Before we go too much further, I want to touch on something that Dr Browning said kind of earlier in the opening, and that was on the definitions of efficiency. And you know, you mentioned Dr Browning, gross, net, work. I don’t think you mentioned Delta. But, you know, there are these sub sort of sets of efficiency. Could you explain a little bit more why they exist for the listeners?
Dr. Ray Browning 17:07
Yeah, I think the simplest explanation is they try to account for things that are maybe less relevant to the movement. So, you know, it takes a certain amount of energy just to live, and so if you subtract that amount of baseline metabolic rate, we all have a resting metabolic rate. And so if you subtract that, then presumably what you’re looking at is the net efficiency of the person. So to do the movement, because you’ve subtracted out this delta efficiency is a little bit different, where it looks at how it changes across workloads, right? So it’s if you go from 100 watts to 200 watts, what happens to the the efficiency? So there are really ways to try to isolate the system that’s really producing most of the energy and work output. And unfortunately, they really haven’t shown to be terribly useful compared to gross efficiency. You know that? I think that I think that the scientific community kind of goes around and around about, you know, which one of these is the best to use. And it seems as though there still isn’t any real great consensus, you know, that, Oh, you want to calculate it this way, people kind of keep coming back to gross efficiency as an okay measure, yeah.
Rob Pickels 18:15
And one way to illustrate this for listeners, and I do this a lot when I talk with athletes, I work with when it comes to cadence, if we talk about a work efficiency, right? That’s sort of the work divided by the energy expenditure above, like a zero load, right? So let’s pretend that you’re on your trainer, and you take the chain off of your bike, and you just sit there, not doing anything. You’re going to expend some energy just sitting there right if you pedal at 30 RPM, you’re going to expend a little bit more energy, but you’re not technically doing any work, because there’s no chain. You’re just spinning cranks with no load. If you go to 100 rpm, you’re going to be doing even more. You’re going to be spending more energy to just spin your legs that 100 rpm. And so I always tie this back to, hey, there’s lower oxygen cost oftentimes to spin at a low cadence, right? Or maybe even a lower energy expenditure. And so people are like, well, maybe I should be at a lower cadence all the time, and maybe that 90 to 100 rpm isn’t as efficient, but this is sort of the reason why that is right, because it just takes more energy to move your body that quickly, even though it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a worse sort of thing overall for your performance, we do have to think about the amount of energy just to move, not necessarily to move against workload, right?
Trevor Connor 19:40
Something else I want to add to that, because Dr Brown, and you mentioned the there’s a certain amount of energy that we expend just to keep our bodies alive. So if you’re sitting on the couch doing absolutely nothing, you’re still expending energy. And I think the important thing for everybody to understand is, if you are just going out for an easy walk, then so. Significant amount of the energy, a significant percentage of the energy that you’re expending is just going into keeping your body alive, and then a smaller percentage is going into the movement. If you were doing a full out sprint, a much smaller percentage of the energy that you are expending is going into keeping your body alive, a much larger percentage is going into that movement. And so that could affect calculations, if you start comparing them, because when you’re hooked up to a metabolic cart, we’re just measuring total energy expenditure, but you have to understand that a bigger percentage of that’s just going to body function when you’re going at an easy pace versus when you’re going at a very hard pace.
Rob Pickels 20:38
And now, Dr Browning, I’m just going to sort of kick this back to you. Is the nuance that we’re talking about ultimately even relevant, right? Because you said there’s really the other systems aren’t necessarily much better than a gross efficiency measurement, maybe when it comes to research, and maybe I don’t know or like, the nuances that Trevor and I talking about, maybe more just to understand the physiological nuance and gross is really what we should be concerned with?
Dr. Ray Browning 21:01
Yeah, I think I’ll start by saying I don’t know how much we should be concerned with it period. I think I would focus my attention as an athlete on economy and its relationship. One thing we, I hope we will talk about is the effect that body mass has on some of these measures, because that’s clearly something relevant in cycling right now. So I think that the general idea that having some measure of your efficiency can be illustrative. It can tell you I’m relatively efficient or not. Large efforts to change that efficiency may not translate into much of a difference. And also, Trevor mentioned something interesting in terms of high intensity activity. Remember that the way that we typically measure the work the energy required is through metabolic carts. And metabolic carts are great at measuring steady state aerobic energy consumption. They’re not great at measuring energy that’s being expended through non aerobic pathways. And in fact, we measure oxygen consumption, we generally want it to be at steady state, and if the oxygen consumption is continuing to increase over time because the workload is super high, then that isn’t a reflection of the total amount of energy being used by the system. And so your denominator, of your calculation, it isn’t reflective of all of the energy that’s being required to move at really high intensities. And so that’s a problem, and we don’t really have great ways to measure the total energy requirements in those really high intensity periods of time. These measures are most relevant around steady state aerobic exercise, and we need to remember that. So if you’re, if you’re talking about, you know, a 32nd steep uphill climb where you’re just over the top, and either one of these measures is going to be very reflective.
Trevor Connor 22:45
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Dr. Ray Browning 24:11
So you can make changes in economy relatively straightforwardly. You can do it with aerodynamics. There’s several ways that you can influence economy, and it has a very nice relationship to performance. If you have a certain size engine, and that engine is able to get you down the road faster, you will perform better, end of story, whereas efficiency, to me, I’m not saying that it’s unimportant. It’s a little bit harder to change. You’ll get a benefit in economy. So you know, you can sort of take your economic benefit and say, Well, part of it could be, I’m more efficient. Yeah, that could be, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, endurance athletes are oftentimes, how do I get from point A to point B as fast as possible? And so I would say that a focus on economy. And if you feel like you’ve dialed all that in, right, you’ve got all. All of the determinants of economy, sort of dialed in, sure, then we want to explore some changes in efficiency. And, you know, that’s probably done more through technique and or, you know, trying to modify some muscle fiber types that are being used in the activity. That’s a little trickier. You know, it requires really more of a training intensity approach, as opposed to a How well am I moving even things economy, like you watch elite runners or elite cyclists, they’re contracting muscles that are getting them down the road, and that’s about it. Everything else is relaxed. Their face is relaxed. And those kinds of modifications, or one of the characteristics that we always describe in elite athletes is they make things look really easy, and part of that is, is that they’re really actively producing mechanical work using the muscles that get them down the road, and they’re not using muscles to do extraneous activities.
Rob Pickels 25:55
One other thing to touch on too, with efficiency, you know, Dr Browning, you were saying it’s a lot harder to modify some of the factors that play into there. You know, in one category that we can look at is what my grad school teacher, Dr Dan Heil termed as effectiveness. And, you know, a big part of effectiveness are things like muscle architecture. You mentioned muscle fiber type, you know, being played in there. We do have a bit of a way to improve muscle fiber type utilization, but we don’t necessarily have a great way to make changes to fiber length or pination angle or things like that that are going to affect how efficiently that muscle is working. One thing that does play into this, though, is the length tension relationship of muscles, and this does play into cycling, because it’s a bit position specific, right? If we’re changing, you know, our seat tube, angle, our seat height, you know, the height of our handlebars. And we are changing the length tension relationship. And we can put our muscles into some positions where they’re not very efficient because that length tension maybe they’re working at the very end range, or you’re too crunched up, and, you know, we’re at the other end of the range of motion. So this is something we can affect the effectiveness a little bit, but for the most part, it’s pretty hard wired into just how we’re physically, structurally built.
Dr. Ray Browning 27:06
Yeah, I used to do an exercise with the class. I used to teach a biomechanics class at CSU, and one of the problems that I would give students was, let’s say you have a elite athlete who has an Achilles tendon rupture, and so now you’ve got to reattach the Achilles onto the calcaneus, onto the heel. And as an orthopedic surgeon, you have some flexibility as to where you staple that thing back in, or, you know, attach that back in, and you can move it farther away from the ankle joint center, so further down and out on the calcaneus. Or you can move it in closer. And I have students talk about, what effect would that have on a muscle contractions ability to produce angular velocity. So if you move the muscle closer in as it shortens, it produces a much larger rotation and a larger angular velocity. The disadvantage of that is that you don’t get as much torque right where you move it out. You get high torque but low angular velocity. So that’s a fairly extreme example of how you might schedule a transplant or a transfer of your main movers, but it does illustrate the architectural limitations that we have, even though the variations in tendon mechanics, what’s the shape of the tendon? How stiff is the tendon, and its ability to store and return energy? Less of an issue in cycling, but a big deal in running, the Achilles is essentially a giant spring. So if you have a stiff spring, you don’t get much deflection. If you have too soft a spring, you get way more deflection. There’s probably an opportunity in the middle, but there’s not much you can do about it, at least not right now. I mean, there’s probably will be pharmacological interventions you could do at some point, but fiber type seems to be one place that you can experiment, but the bang for the buck is so much bigger on the economy side than the efficiency side.
Trevor Connor 28:45
Yeah, right, yeah. Going back, this is what, 25 years now, you have all that research by Dr Lucia and several other researchers who are looking into what is it that separates the very best? And they were looking at cyclists, CPO, what separates the best from amateurs? And they really looked at three factors. They said the way you define an endurance athlete is their vo two Max, their threshold, particularly as a percentage of vO two Max and efficiency. And in Dr Lucius research, he basically said, you just can’t do much with VO two max or efficiency. So really, where you see the improvements is just raising that threshold as a percent of vO two max. And then you saw this debate in the research of, can you improve efficiency or not? And there’s the famous study by Dr Coyle about Lance Armstrong, where we know the truth now, but the claim of that study was, over seven years, you actually saw an improvement in Armstrong’s efficiency. And he, in the study, claims that he actually measured this improvement in efficiency. So I do want to ask that. And I. Certainly have my bias here, definitely you can’t improve it in a month. But is efficiency something that is trainable? Can you improve it at least a little bit?
Dr. Ray Browning 30:09
I think so sure. I mean, I think that there are ways that even just normal training probably has some modest effect on the efficiency of the system. In general, you have cardiovascular plumbing that gets changed depending on the demands. And so there are a number of structural changes, physiologic changes that would take place that would have modest effects on efficiency. I guess, though, that when you’re at the level that most athletes reside, I would take that as a nice consequence of my training, I wouldn’t be driven by it. I’d make sure my vo two was relatively high for my capabilities. And what we did at the breaking two project with Nike is we didn’t focus on efficiency. We focused on economy, right? And the thing that really separated their runners was economy varied quite a bit, and so did the threshold. And the thresholds were stupid high I can imagine. I mean, the fact that you can almost redline the engine for a fairly long period of time was just shocking. These are not people who have a vo two peak of 85 or 90. It’s in the mid 70s, but they’re able to operate at 90 something percent of that for at least a couple of hours. That’s just mind boggling to me, that they’re able to do
Trevor Connor 31:27
that. That’s what Lucia was showing. That some of these absolute elite endurance athletes, their threshold could get up as high as like 93 to 95% of vO two Max, yeah, it’s absolutely crazy. Basically meaning, for anybody who’s listening to this, if you ask them to go out and do an all out five minute effort, and then you ask them to go out and do like an all out 40 minute effort, you’d actually be shocked how close the power is right on the two. Dr Edward Coyle wrote, arguably the most famous study on efficiency, for both good and bad reasons, it became the topic of debate for over a decade. One question it did raise is whether efficiency is trainable. So here’s the legend himself offering his thoughts on how to train efficiency,
Dr. Ed Coyle 32:09
even over some short durations, like six months or three months. We’ve shown that efficiency is related to your percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers. You know, there’s some recent evidence you can increase your slow twist muscle fibers with years of training, especially an interesting study in twins. Identical twins train differently for years. If you can increase your percent slow fibers, and if having more slow fibers makes you more efficient, then you know training can improve your efficiency.
Trevor Connor 32:39
So why do you think there is some contradiction in the research? Some has found it and some hasn’t? Is that just the quality of the research, or there just isn’t enough research? Or do you think some people can improve and some people can’t?
Dr. Ed Coyle 32:51
I don’t think we have enough research. You can look at some of the studies, and some of the studies are pretty good in their methodology, or they’re only a couple months long, which just way too short. I think if you can change the muscle fiber type and become more efficient, it’s going to happen over years. The example for that is we measured Lance Armstrong’s efficiency over six or eight year period, you know, and he progressively increased his efficiency. I think you can change it. There have been studies in rats showing they can change fiber type, and that’s pretty convincing. So there’s enough anecdotal type studies in people, but nobody’s done the five year well controlled study in cyclists, because they put in such large volumes.
Rob Pickels 33:36
Dr Browning, is there kind of a law of diminishing returns for improvements? You know, you said, Yeah, I do think that there are improvements to be had in efficiency, but do we maybe see more in beginner athletes and then a law of diminishing returns as people become more adept or more trained?
Dr. Ray Browning 33:52
That’s a good question. I don’t know that we’ve really studied, you know, that question, unfortunately, what happens is that this sort of the novice athlete, gets kind of left out of the conversation. We don’t have as much data, you know, in terms of how we tend to get interested in these topics when we’re talking about really high performing athletes. And so there are so many changes that are happening in novice athletes that there probably are some pretty significant changes in efficiency initially. I mean, when you go from being sedentary to physically active, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that starts to happen, and I don’t know that we’ve really dug in a lot into that cohort. We tend to just focus more on people who are trying to win Olympic medals or Tour de Frances or other things like that. So
Trevor Connor 34:31
actually, Dr Bradley, I do have a bit of an answer for you, but I don’t know if it is actually efficiency or economy that we’re talking about here.
Rob Pickels 34:38
Okay, Trevor, go back and listen to this episode and then re give your answer again,
Trevor Connor 34:43
I get to take my guess, because this is another study where they use both efficiency and economy interchangeably. So the title of the study is CO contraction and economy of triathletes and cyclists at different cadences during cycling motion. So they use economy in the. Title there, but then you read the study, and they keep using efficiency and then economy, but basically what they’re getting at, even though they’re comparing cyclists to triathletes, they also talked about amateur cyclists, and what you saw in less experienced cyclists was a lot of what they call co contraction. So that’s the whole idea, that in that pedal motion, you have multiple muscles that are evolved in the motion, and some of those muscles are antagonists, meaning they fight one another. So the example I always give people is because there’s a real simple one. The legs complex is when you do a bicep curl, so triceps work against the bicep. And if you’re trying to lift a weight using your bicep, but your tricep is contracting at the same time, so you get co contraction, you’re not gonna be able to lift as much weight because it’s fighting the bicep. And so what you see in the pedal motion in an experienced cyclist, is a lot of CO contraction, where muscles are fighting one another, and a very experienced cyclists who do a lot of so the key thing they said in the study is doing neuromuscular work. It’s not just time on the bike. You have to do a lot of neuromuscular work. You see a lot less CO contraction. So is that efficiency, or is that economy?
Dr. Ray Browning 36:16
Well, you’re going to measure it in both. I mean, if you go back to the formulas, those muscles that are active, whether they’re active in producing meaningful work, I would argue that the CO activation some of those muscles are actually acting against the production of useful power output, but they have the metabolic costs, right? Because that muscle’s active, so that’s going to decrease efficiency, for sure, but it’s also going to impair economy, right? That same athlete is going to have relatively low economy. And that’s where these two things, I think it’s easy to get them sort of intertwined and mixed up. And, you know, cycling is a really, it’s a fascinating example from a co activation standpoint. The reason is that you’ve got a lot of muscles in the lower extremity that cross two joints, not one. So you know, your hamstring muscle crosses the hip and the knee, your gastroc muscle crosses the knee and the ankle, and you have the rectus femoris, which crosses the hip and the knee as an extensor of one and a flexor of the other. So if you think about a cycling pedaling motion, and you’re pushing down on the pedal, so you’re extending the hip, but you’re also extending the knee. So a muscle like the rectus femoris is like, Wait, okay, it was my job here, right? I shouldn’t be extending the hip, but I need to be extending the knee, and so measuring co activation in a task like cycling is an interesting strategy, but we tend to not think of it as a very complicated movement, but from a musculoskeletal control or neuromuscular control, it’s actually relatively complex because you’re trying to manage these two actions that muscles have. And of course, there’s strength, or ability to produce power around the joint also depends on the joint angle. So if you are really flexed at the hip, and you’re trying to use your rectus femoris to do additional hip flexion, it’s not going to work very well, right? Because it’s really short to go back to rob to talk about link tension, you’re going to have a very short muscle that’s going to be unable to produce much tension and
Rob Pickels 38:00
potentially also to extend the knee, right? If that overall length is extremely short, yeah, or long, right? I mean,
Dr. Ray Browning 38:06
if you’re at the very end of the pedal stroke, right, and your knee is at 25 or 30 degrees, you’re definitely on the other end of the link, tension, relationship, sweet spot somewhere in the middle. So it’s interesting in that we don’t sit there with most cyclists and train out CO contraction. I’m not aware of any coach that’s doing that, because it would require pretty sophisticated tools to actually see it. You’d have to have muscle activation patterns, and they happen, you know, at 90 RPMs, you’re not visually going to see it. And maybe this is one of the lessons around deficiency, is we tend to do things that over time, if we want to be skilled at an activity that lead to improvements in both efficiency and economy, it’s relatively innate. There’s some part of that that doesn’t require coaching. It requires experience. You just have to do the activity.
Rob Pickels 38:56
So one thing I want to point out, and Dr Browning, you said it’s both right. It is both efficiency and economy. And a reason for that is that efficiency plays into economy. We’re not talking about two distinct end points. It’s not either efficiency or economy. Efficiency is just one of the factors that goes into economy. Right now we can have probably good efficiency and bad economy. We can probably have bad efficiency, but good economy, if different things within the pathway are optimized right like equipment plays into this, you can have terrible efficiency within the body, but great shoes. You know, I’m selling shoes for Nike right now and your economy is going to be better. You can have great efficiency in your muscles, but be 30 pounds overweight, and your economy is not going to be very good. So it’s one of the factors that plays in
Dr. Ray Browning 39:53
Yeah, for sure, yeah. And I think it’s where we probably should spend less time debating which one. But really. More time discussing the interplay between the two that you don’t try to optimize one or the other. What you’re really trying to do is find the sweet spot where efficiency is relatively high and economy is relatively high. And that is probably why bikes are set up how they’re set up, because you’re in a saddle height and far off position that sort of dials in the functions of those muscles that produce the power at the same time, reducing the aerodynamic drag, which is the primary thing that you’re overcoming as an elite cyclist. So we kind of end up in these places that are sort of the sweet spot for both. They’re not perfect, it’s not perfect economy and not perfect efficiency, but they’re probably a good compromise,
Rob Pickels 40:41
and that’s like time trial and triathlon bikes and positions are the prime example for this, right? In that TT position, you are not your most efficient, you are not your most powerful, but you probably are your fastest compared to a road bike position where you are stronger, quote, unquote,
Dr. Ray Browning 40:57
yeah, exactly. It’s always an interesting thing to take elite level cyclists to put them on a ergometer that has a lot of adjustability for position, but also watch what positions they prefer to adopt depending on the power output. You do not see cyclists go into a deep, aerodynamic crouch in a laboratory on an exercise bike when the power outputs are over three or 400 watts just doesn’t happen. I mean, they might come up onto the nose of it and pedal right on the nose of the saddle, which you see all the time, in a TT effort, or they might get out of the saddle. And that’s another thing that I think is worth mentioning here, that we oftentimes make these measurements in fairly controlled environments. You know, where you’re in a laboratory, you’re on an ergometer. That ergometer is set up a certain way. You do this protocol. You’re not permitted sometimes to get out of the saddle or to do other things that you might preferentially choose to do, change your cadence. Yeah. And so we’re not always measuring the real world implications of those strategies. And when I see people wanting to achieve really high peak power outputs, especially when they’re climbing, they’re not on the saddle at all. You know, they’re off the saddle. And so, you know, if you’ve done all your measurements of efficiency and economy over here, and then the athlete actually goes over here when they have to produce 500 watts, or 600 watts of per 100 watts of power output, What’s that telling you? It’s telling you now I’m using my arms, I’m using my torso, I’m using all kinds of muscles that I really haven’t measured the efficiency or economy of in the laboratory, because you don’t have a very good way to do that. So I guess what I’m saying is watch what people do as well as you know the measurements that we can make the best in the world, adopt strategies generally that translate to optimize performance for them.
Trevor Connor 42:53
To that point, a study that I read a couple nights ago, getting ready for this. Here’s the title, gross efficiency and cycle and economy are higher in the field as compared with on an axiom stationary ergometer. And the main point of this study is they bring elite cyclists into the lab, put them on an ergometer they’ve never ridden on before, and try to do all these measurements of economy and efficiency. But they’re not used to that gear that in itself, has an impact.
Dr. Ray Browning 43:22
Yeah. I mean, even measuring economy efficiency, or even maximum aerobic capacity, you know, VO two Max tests are in many cases terrible, right? You know. And anybody that’s, we’ve all done them, and we kind of go well, that clearly wasn’t, you know, my best effort. I just, you know, if you’ve used treadmill like a modified Bruce protocol, you know, where, as an endurance athlete, you’re like, I would never do this, right? Yeah. And I think it’s the same with, you know, some of these measures. So having a little kind of grace around, you know, this topic, like we’re debating some of the value of these terms, but oftentimes they’re measured in artificial environments. And so, you know, there’s a little bit of buyer beware, a post ride beer and pizza may be delicious, but is this the best fuel for your performance? I’m Jared Berg, and I’m a registered dietitian and exercise physiologist with fast talk labs. I’ve created a new eight week sports nutrition course to help you break old habits and set high performance fueling guidelines to power your best training and racing. See more at fast talk labs.com look for athlete services and sports nutrition.
Trevor Connor 44:29
So I want to go back. You mentioned the biomechanics course that you taught, and I took that class. And by the way, you were talking about the change in the insertion points, I always remember from the class, you talked about how some Eastern countries with their strength athletes would cheat by actually surgically reattaching their bicep a little further away from the joint to get actually more strength for
Rob Pickels 44:54
what it’s worth. I did not take Dr Browning’s course and I heard the exact same thing.
Trevor Connor 44:59
There we go. So we both have heard about it. But something else you did mention in that class when we were talking about efficiency and economy, and again, this might be a bit of both. You did say, if you’re looking to improve, one of the things you can do is that neuromuscular work, but also strength work, lot of strength training. So how does that help?
Dr. Ray Browning 45:21
Changes the recruitment so you have the neuromuscular work and strength training can both change the available Well, the power output of the fibers that you have at your disposal can go up with strength training, right depending on the type of strength training that you’re doing, and if you know when to use those muscles in the context of the movement, essentially, you’ve got a more capable engine right in terms of being able to produce torque around a joint, or power if the joint is moving. So I think it’s something that most endurance athletes intuitively know, that there’s a role for strength and power training that doesn’t have to be done on their piece of equipment, or, you know, while running, and you know, neuromuscular changes. So when we do strength training, the changes that you see early on are mostly due to that neuromuscular control and optimization, and then later on, you actually see changes in the muscle fibers and the size of the fibers and things. So both of them can play a role. And I think that it’s, gosh, I can’t imagine an endurance athlete not doing strength training and not having that strength training change over the course of a season to address maybe core, functional, foundational strength early, and then translating that into the ability to produce high, relatively high power output closer to peak season that’s been done for years.
Rob Pickels 46:43
I want to throw out one other way that it’s beneficial, and that is with strength training, we also typically see increases in stiffness of the musculo tendonist unit, which Dr Browning ties back into, kind of like that Achilles tendon is a spring, right? And so if we can improve the stiffness of these components, then we’ll have more energy return. We won’t get energy lost in stretching the Achilles, or really, other ligaments and tendons all throughout our body.
Dr. Ray Browning 47:08
Yeah, and it depends a little bit on the task. I mean, cycling has a lot more concentric power development where that elasticity of the tendon is less relevant than it is, for example, in running, you know, where that stiffness of the tendon could be beneficial in regards to storage and return of energy. So I think it’s a little bit task specific. That’s
Trevor Connor 47:27
another thing I actually remember from your class was talking about kangaroos and how incredible the spring action is in their Achilles tendon.
Dr. Ray Browning 47:35
It’s long, yeah, long and stretchy, yeah, for sure, their economy is off the charts,
Trevor Connor 47:40
right? Like they can hop at extraordinary speeds and they’re barely using any energy. Yeah,
Dr. Ray Browning 47:44
it doesn’t change much when you put them on a treadmill and have them hop and you change the speed. Same thing with antelope. Antelope are remarkably efficient in that way. So go out and chase antelope for training.
Rob Pickels 47:55
Good luck. Don’t chase a kangaroo. They punch.
Dr. Ray Browning 47:58
No kidding, right? I wouldn’t get anywhere near one of those things.
Trevor Connor 48:02
Geez. So one other thing I want to ask about is this, what you see in elite athletes, of this inverse relationship between vo two Max and efficiency, where they have shown in studies that athletes who have an extraordinarily high vo two Max actually tend to have a lower efficiency, where athletes who have an extremely high efficiency tend to have a mediocre vo two Max, and you don’t see the two together, like where somebody is extraordinarily high in both and I will point out I did a Long time ago a whole research paper on altitude adaptations. And always love to point this out, where I read a paper that looked at the difference between very high altitude natives in two different locations, and you saw a similar thing, where one of these high altitude groups developed an extraordinarily high vo two Max, and unfortunately, tend to have high rates of heart disease as well, where the other group actually had a very typical or average vo two Max, but were extraordinarily efficient. And what you actually saw, and this is getting really technical, complex, four in the electron transport chain, had almost no leaking. So it was an extremely efficient electron transport chain. And so that’s how they were able to adapt to altitude. So one of the theories here is that there’s just different genetics, and you either adapt the one way or the other way, but you just can’t adapt both. But I’ll throw it to you. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I think
Dr. Ray Browning 49:34
that’s right. And you know all of these, whether you’re Sherpa, whether you’re a bike racer, whether you’re a runner, oftentimes these events that we’re preparing for and engaging in are not us alone, right? Even a time trial. You know what’s happening and what other people are doing and how fast they’re moving. And so I think it’s important to consider that for the Sherpas, you know, for example, how are they going to get from A to B? B and but the time it takes for those two groups to get to AB is the same, so they’ve had to adapt in different ways, right? So I’m going to carry 8080, pounds. I’m going to carry it this far, and you have these two groups that are kind of working to there may be two individuals that have these two characteristics, and they’re walking side by side. And so I think the same thing is true of most endurance sports. They’re not done solo in the context of performance measures, right? So in races, for example, oftentimes you’re racing with or against somebody side by side. So, you know, I think that matters in this case, in that the end goal is the same, is to get to the finish line first, but it can be first by a fraction of a second oftentimes, doesn’t matter how much. It’s by faith. He’s just trying to win. And so, you know, it’s two pathways to the same outcome, right? So if I’m genetically predisposed to have a high vo two, I’ll capitalize on that to get to the end. If I’m genetically predisposed to have good economy and efficiency, then I’ll use that. But the end result is, I’m going to run a 204202, or I’m going to be able to ride it, you know, 28 miles per hour, and keep up with the other folks in the peloton. So I think it’s this is where these are individual measures we’re talking about. But in the context of where the rubber hits the road, no pun intended. It’s not individual, right? I mean, unless you’re talking about the hour record or something like that, right? But in the context of most endurance sport, we get out there and participate in those sports, in groups, right? In races, and then the ultimate criteria for success isn’t economy or efficiency, it’s being first or accomplishing some goal across the finish line. And I think that’s really important to keep in mind. It’s not like when you do a vo two max test in a laboratory. There’s no finish
Rob Pickels 51:52
line, there’s a collapsing line. But,
Dr. Ray Browning 51:55
yeah, but you wonder whether or not, if you put a group of people on a large treadmill and you did a vo two max test, and they were all running side by side, right? What would happen in that context? Right? That’s a really more real world outcome. So I think the homogeneity of human performance, you know that these elite level people, regardless of those two strategies, end up going about the same speed, is fascinating. Yeah, you know, it’s not like there’s somebody that comes along and goes completely off the charts. I mean, occasionally you get the Bob bemens of the world, which sort of go, okay, Geez, that changed what we thought was possible in the long jump, but not that often. Yeah.
Rob Pickels 52:31
So the underlying message is, it doesn’t matter if you have a high vo two Max, it doesn’t matter if you have high economy. Both of those people can compete against each other. One isn’t necessarily preferential over the other. One doesn’t necessarily always define success better than the other. So to say, you know, and I’m one of those people, pretty poor efficiency and economy in the whole scheme of things. But at least when I was training, had a pretty high had like an ad, VO, two, Max, you know, it just kind of meant I plowed through calories to do the same amount. So yeah, I had a big engine.
Trevor Connor 53:04
One thing that is important in the difference, but unfortunately, that gets into the doping. And I think I’ve mentioned this before on the show, but this is why you can’t make the argument that if everybody dopes, it’s equal. Because doping really helps raise your oxygen delivery, really helps that vo two Max, right? You can’t dope efficiency.
Rob Pickels 53:24
Are you implying that doping might be more effective for highly efficient people?
Trevor Connor 53:28
If you have a highly efficient athlete with a mediocre vo two Max, they could become that Superhuman by doping up their vo two Max. If you are that athlete who naturally has a very high vo two Max, but a poor efficiency, you can’t do much with doping products.
Dr. Ray Browning 53:44
I hadn’t really thought about that. Trevor, yeah,
Rob Pickels 53:47
we should try it. Trevor, buy EPO for both of us, actually, and we’ll see who gets more better.
Trevor Connor 53:52
I actually thought about it because I was asked to write an article for Vela news about doping and is it equitable? And that’s where I ended up going. Is doping equitable? I love it answering the question, if everybody’s doped, is it a level playing field? And that was the answer I had in the article.
Dr. Ray Browning 54:10
Well, you know, that extends to I would call mechanical doping, is not any different, right? So in the sport of triathlon, the introduction of hydrodynamic wetsuits with five mil thighs was intended purely as an advantage for relatively less economical swimmers who would swim, you know, with their legs down in the water, they have a significantly greater benefit to that technology than an elite swimmer who’s already got a good position in the water. Now, there are other economic differences between those two but mechanical doping is the same thing, right? People’s body shapes. Some people have body shapes that can be really slippery, and others they’re not. They have wide shoulders, or they have a deep chest, or they have limitations in their flexibility. So I think that kind of disparity across the effects of performance enhancement mechanical. Physiological pharmaceutical. It probably applies everywhere, right where, you know, there are the winners and the losers. And, you know, I think that’s one of the things that UCI tried to do, you know, with sort of bike standardization, it’s not effective, but we’re trying to take advantage of all of these things, you know. And some people have a little bit looser relationship with rules and will venture into some areas, but we’ve had this fabulous long history of trying to make us go faster, and we do it in a whole bunch of different ways. And I find it interesting that oftentimes we don’t necessarily look too hard at mechanical doping, but we look really hard at pharmacological doping, and they’re both doping, and I think it speaks to when getting from A to B as fast as possible is the goal. There’s a lot of levers you can pull.
Trevor Connor 55:53
Unfortunately, we’re getting towards our time here. I guess the question that I want to ask you, and I know you’ve been answering this the whole way through, but let’s finish out here. If you had a cyclist who came to you and said, Okay, I’m sold on this whole efficiency economy thing, and I’m going to use both for the question, but somebody comes to you says, I’m sold on an efficiency economy. I need to improve both, or just get some improvement there for myself. What are your top recommendations to them
Dr. Ray Browning 56:20
achieve a high level of technical skill. So get coaching in terms of how to do the movements. Integrate both well established aerobic and strength routines into your program. Focus more on mechanical interventions that will improve economy, and then evaluate where you are. Are you good enough? And if you’re not, then I would start to dive into the efficiency
Rob Pickels 56:43
questions. My answer is to get faster tires. That’s true. Yeah. You just always want to start there. Isn’t that always the answer, Trevor, but is more economical, yeah.
Dr. Ray Browning 56:54
So train at 60 psi, and then, you know, just go to 120
Rob Pickels 56:58
on race day, then your overground speed is going to pick up quite a bit. No, I do think that assessing those limitations, Dr Browning, like you pointed out at the end there, I don’t think that the same strategies work for everyone, right? What are we optimizing in this individual ultimately, is going to lead to their best economical improvement? Yeah.
Dr. Ray Browning 57:18
And I think, you know, just to get off of the economy efficiency question altogether, one of the real determinants of performance is the psychological ability to manage the discomfort associated with high performance endurance athletics, right? And I think that trumps everything else. And so that’s the other thing, Trevor, to your point about with the athlete, that’s another thing I would be focusing on, is, what is the mental training that is associated with these other issues? Because I’m convinced then, through personal experience, you can make a very significant impact in your ability to tolerate discomfort as an endurance athlete.
Rob Pickels 57:56
Sounds like we need an episode with Dr Browning, Scott fry and grant holocaust.
Dr. Ray Browning 58:01
There we go.
Trevor Connor 58:02
Yeah, yep. We actually, just a couple episodes ago, talked about pain management, addressing that. But one last thing to throw at you, because you had said you wanted to cover this, and I always remember a story that you told that I love where you, I think, went to CSU as a student yourself on a football scholarship, and you were out for a bike ride, and you were climbing up the reservoir, and a cyclist blew by you, and you were this big football player, and you tried to catch him, and you couldn’t, and it got you so angry, you started training really hard and ended up becoming a triathlete. Do I have the story, right? Well,
Dr. Ray Browning 58:39
I did cycling first for a number of years, and then switched into the sport of triathlon, when I realized my lot in life in cycling was going to be Domestique, so I was going to be going back and getting the mussette bags and water bottles for the people that were going to win the races. And that was just less appealing, you know, so, but yes, the general story was I had this epiphany moment where I’m like, I’m big and strong, but I’m not fit, and that was really eye opening to me. And
Rob Pickels 59:07
now correct me if I’m wrong. Dr, Browning, you have multiple Iron Man World Championships under your belt. I
Dr. Ray Browning 59:13
wouldn’t say World Championships. The only World Championship that I won was actually in the sport of winter triathlon, and that was actually a cross country ski, snowshoe and speed skating event, but I’ve won seven, yeah, seven Iron Man races around the world during my career. A long time ago,
Rob Pickels 59:28
we could say you’re accomplished. You know, you made the transition pretty well, sure, yeah,
Trevor Connor 59:34
but you did say you wanted to address impact of body weight and efficiency and economy. So I just wanted to give you the opportunity to bring that up, yeah, I think
Dr. Ray Browning 59:42
it’s a really interesting topic right now. So one of the things I think, that I’ve been watching with interest is how in elite cycling, you know, there’s been this watts per kilogram conversation. So, you know, it’s not just power output, it’s power output per unit body mass. And how, you know, the elite climbers in particular. Are extraordinarily lean and small, and so I think that it partly, you know, we think about economy and efficiency almost always measured, you know, in essentially flat ground conditions. But when you look at major endurance events, they’re oftentimes not dictated by flat ground performance. There’s a lot of people that can go fast on the flak. It’s the guys that can produce these extraordinarily watts per kilogram in climbing. Maybe that’s a topic for another conversation, how that happens and the role of economy and efficiency in those moments. And I’m seeing somehow these men and women are reducing body mass and maintaining high power outputs. That’s a really hard thing to do, you know, and at some point you get so lean that it’s certainly, definitely not healthy. But I’ve seen that over the last several years, that these watts per kg just continue to go up. And there’s two ways to do that. One’s increasing power and the other is decreasing mass. And I’m really curious about that. I don’t know that we’ve explored that very deeply in regards to how it is affecting the measures that we’re talking about. You know? I mean, it’s certainly improving uphill economy, because they’re able to go a heck of a lot faster for the same power output. I just think that’s a really rich topic, and it’s one that applies to recreational athletes, in that body mass matters, and you’re not going to be that economical, especially if you’re going to going against gravity, if you have body mass that really is just along for the ride, which we all do. So it’s a fascinating area.
Trevor Connor 1:01:32
Well, I think we have to leave it there. It was a great conversation. I’ve been excited for this one because I wanted to revisit the debate with Rob, but we forgot,
Rob Pickels 1:01:40
even though we forgot what it was, if I remember right, it was some of the specific definitions around, like delta and work efficiency, yep.
Trevor Connor 1:01:51
So we do have a question for our forum. So please go to forums. Dot fast talk labs.com. If you’d like to be part of this conversation. And the question we have is, have you done anything with your training or gear that you are certain has improved either your efficiency or your economy? So jump into that conversation and let us know what you think and with that, Dr Brown, you’ve been on the show before we finish with our one minute take homes, you have a minute to summarize what you think is the most important thing to take from this conversation? And so would you like to go first, or would you like to go last?
Dr. Ray Browning 1:02:27
I’ll go last. I want to listen to my two esteemed colleagues. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 1:02:31
boy. So that is a good question of what is the takeaway? I think Dr Browning, you’re probably going to have a more insightful one. My takeaway is going back to that research of Dr Lucia, the you know, what are the big factors that impact, you know, what makes an elite versus a recreational cyclist, and looking at that vo two, Max efficiency and threshold, and at the time, really, they just said all that we seem to be able to improve is threshold. And what you have seen in the research sense is actually it’s not that simple, and there might be more than three factors. And what I have found fascinating is, as we’ve gotten better and better at the research, we find the nuances that might have been difficult to understand at the time. And one of the great examples we talked about strength training can improve efficiency, the research at the time that Dr Lucia published that basically said strength training is a waste of time for endurance athletes, because they were having endurance athletes do strength training, and then measuring their vo to max, going vo to max is changing, but their efficiency was and so we’ve flipped that around. And as you said, every endurance athlete should be doing strength training. We at one point just said, Yeah, can’t improve this. There’s nothing you can do. I think it has become a more and more nuanced conversation, and I think now we’re seeing a lot of the advancements in the sport in areas that 25 years ago, kind of Yeah, you can’t do much there. Rob,
Rob Pickels 1:04:02
for me. Trevor, you know, we talked about it. Dr Browning brought this up when he talked about the sub two hour marathon project that he worked on with Nike. And that is, we know that probably the best determinant of performance is the performance of somebody at their lactate threshold. We also know that one thing that plays into that is going to be your economy. And one thing that plays into that is going to be your efficiency, and that there are other whole host of things, like we talked about, that affect economy, your aerodynamics, the position that you’re in, your technique, your muscle co activation, all sorts of things all along this pathway, we have a great ability to affect your performance, and I always tie this back to the individual. Be honest with yourself, or have a great conversation between you and your coach, and identify the areas that you’re good on this pathway, and identify the areas that are weaknesses, and really try to work on the things that are going to improve your economy. So. That you can improve your performance at lactate thresholds, so you can improve your performance in the event. All right. Dr,
Dr. Ray Browning 1:05:05
Browning, okay, well done. Team. The efficiency economy debate isn’t going to go anywhere. It’s going to continue to circulate. And I think it’s important to recognize that they are related to each other, and there are a lot of ways to relatively accurately assess economy. They’re much more difficult to assess efficiency, and so my recommendation is to focus on improving economy first, and then, if you’re interested in its effects on how to change your efficiency, that there are probably some things that you can do, but economy seems to be, I mean, you can sort of measure it with a speedometer and a heart rate monitor in some ways. So it’s a very tangible and achievable outcome measure that you can experiment and explore with. And I would encourage people to do it, because it does have meaningful effects on performance. Efficiency is a little more nuanced. It’s probably good to know where you are on occasion, you know, in terms of, you know, VO, two, peak and your relative efficiency, it’s easier to measure cycling. And I really would also like to end by saying it would be nice if we could be more consistent in the terminology. And I would ask if you’re going to use the term define it, what’s the equation you’re using to calculate it? So is it work out over work in or energy in? Is it how much energy it takes to go a certain speed? Because that’ll help us avoid the confusion of they’re not the same thing. They’re not even calculated the same way. And I say that as much to the exercise physiology researchers as I do the athletes and coaches that are using these measures.
Trevor Connor 1:06:38
Great. Good answer. Well, Dr Browning, always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, sure. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual. Subscribe fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube, as always, be sure to leave us a radian review to learn more about this episode, from show notes to References, visit us@fasttalklabs.com and to join the conversation on our forum, go to forums.fasttalklabs.com for Dr Ray browning. Dr, Jeff sankof, Dr Andy Pruitt. Dr, Ed Coyle and coach Rob pickles. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
