How "normal people" can train like the worlds best endurance athletes | Stephen Seiler | TEDxArend

Okay, one hundred, that seems out of place just for walking well, no pain, no gain, this popular slogan has been described as a mini American Amana narrative and I grew up with it, but when it comes to

train

ing the body to endure , running, skiing, cycling. or swim faster for longer this slogan in the recipe for development you suggest is simply wrong, destructively wrong, I am an exercise physiologist, scientists like me study how the body responds and adapts to exercise in all its variations, often This means being well

train

ed and not

people

so well trained in specialized laboratories and making them sweat for science, the study of exercise physiology has gone on for over a hundred years and during that time we have taken the

athletes

of the time to the laboratories to better understand human physiology and saw We have also used our knowledge of human physiology to inform and hopefully improve the training process in our modern laboratories.

We can now simulate and quantify the effects of variables such as heat and humidity, altitude or exercise intensity on these acute physiological responses and long-term adaptations. we measure and puncture we take blood samples sometimes we place sensors in uncomfortable places and we can even extract a little bit of muscle from an exhausted athlete we also try to connect the perceptions of effort and fatigue that are created by the brain and connect them to what is happening in the body , exercise is a powerful stimulus for adaptation. You know almost every type of cell in the body, from brain cells to bone cells, and sometimes scientists choose to remove cells or even entire organs from an exercised organism to understand these mechanisms.

I did this myself in my PhD studies many years ago. I studied hearts, red hearts, of course, but always with the goal of better understanding human physiology. Specialized laboratories and highly reductionist approaches like this have served our field well, but they have serious limitations because when we leave. controlling the laboratory and going out into the real world where the training takes place our short-term controlled studies do not always give us an accurate understanding of a complex long-term process Twenty-five years ago I moved to Norway and above all What I took away it was my physiology training, my interest in

endurance

and, painlessly, I have no idea that I grew up in Norway, a great place to study

endurance

because endurance sports are very popular and Scandinavia in general has a long reputation and research in exercise physiology, so When I arrived, I really wanted to bring local

athletes

into the lab and study them the way I had been trained, but then two random events happen that forced me to reexamine what I thought I knew about the training process. of endurance and also how it should be studied and to be honest those events have brought me to this stage in you tonight first I was running on forest trails near my house and I saw a woman running in front of me.

I recognized her because we had tested her in the lab and I knew she was a well-trained endurance athlete and better trained than me, but what NIC did surprised me: she reached the bottom of a short but steep hill and instead of running uphill she started to walk quickly and then when she got to the top she continued running again now, personally, I never encountered a hill during training that at least I didn't try to run panting and straining all the way no pain no gain so why this woman who was well trained chose to walk instead of run that day and then she was reading a newspaper article and an interview of the cross country ski coach of the national team at that time, he was the coach of real endurance titans with medals Olympic gold medals and outstanding laboratory test results on the resume. but he said we don't train at medium-hard intensity, it's too much pain for too little gain.

Now this was fundamentally opposite and different from what I had been taught to believe in laboratory studies, so I realized I was going to have to give up comfort. from the laboratory and we study the athletes in their laboratories, we are on forest trails and skating on ovals, hills and lakes where they trained and tested themselves daily. How did top endurance athletes actually train every day for weeks, months, and years? They are highly motivated to do their

best

and work with purpose and motivation towards that goal every day, but it wasn't always like that. For many years the amateur spirit of very limited training prevailed, but then in the 1950s the athletes and their performances became a kind of Cold War television brought a lot of money into training and sport and the result was that the process made athletes professional and their coaches began to experiment with the training process and over six or seven decades hundreds and thousands of

people

and even thousands of athletes have contributed to a kind of optimization process.

It's really all quite Darwinian in the world of high performance sports. Training methods that give consistent results, so me, and those that don't work well, fade and become extinct within about two decades. Now, I and others have gone back and forth through these different types of labs and methods with the goal of answering three questions: one, what have athletes learned about the training process, why it works and three, how can the rest of us to use your effort. The knowledge gained to quantify resistance training is necessary to accurately measure the two fundamental variables that combine to form each resistance training.

Training intensity and duration is easy, but intensity is more challenging because we can measure intensity from two perspectives: external and internal, external or intensity. Workload is just the pace or power we produce with 200 watts on a bicycle, for example, but that same external intensity can produce very different internal workloads or physiological responses in an athlete or when comparing between athletes depending on the physical capacity at that time, fortunately the laboratories in which we work are designed to very precisely control and regulate the external workload and then measure those physiological responses, this gives us a calibration to leave the laboratory and prove that without pain there is no real world gain when we have endurance athletes of all abilities.

Levels go into the lab and exercise at increasing intensity and then measure these physiological responses, such as oxygen consumption, ventilation, heart rate and blood lactate, three distinguishable intensity zones emerge and I'm going to call them green, yellow and red, quite simple, green, low intensity, low perception. effort relatively comfortable talking pace yellow somewhat strong too strong only short response and a type of perceived effort high and then red strong high intensity panting rhythm, so by using these three intensity zones from careful physiological testing, we have cooperated with scientists from different countries and We have quantified the training of hundreds of athletes in cycling, cross-country skiing, rowing and cross-country running and we could ask the question: no pain, no gain in the way the

best

athletes train the answer is no, absolutely not, this is the basic intensity distribution that comes from studying the best in the world in different sports, different countries, men and women, about eight out of ten of their training sessions, many training sessions are done in its green zone, now the rest can be quite demanding, but it's like that Norwegian coach said so many years ago, the best athletes didn't train much in that medium intensity zone.

Let's look at some examples. This is Mark Bjorgen. She is the top male or female Winter Olympian of all time. She won eight gold, silver and three bronze medals which she allowed to the sports scientists in Norway. to digitize and analyze her entire training career and publish it internationally and one of the scientists involved was a former national teammate who became a PhD student. I thought she was great, here are the intensity distributions of her resistance training during her five most successful years. years of competition hundreds of hours spent in the Green Zone lay the foundation for those red zone performances that were among the best in the history of the sport here is another example of Kenyan distance runners specializing in 5,000 and 10,000 meters 85% of their training in the green zone here is Another example, this is from professional cyclist data recently collected by Dutch sports scientists I know and this data has become my favorite for a reason that will become clear in a moment.

Four years of data that I'm going to capitalize on in just two. figures of one hundred and ninety-one watts and sixty-five percent of maximum heart rate, which was the average external and internal workload that these professional cyclists trained at over the course of an entire year, now to put those numbers in the green For perspective, these same professional cyclists lead in a hard race they can maintain 300 watts for four or five hours during a breakaway and they can climb an alpine mountain pass at 400 to 450 watts and their maximum heart rate for half an hour this is me pedaling on the comfort of my living room on a lab-grade Bike Ergometer connected to the huge online game called Swift.

Well, actually, that's me. I'm wearing that orange cap. When riding a bike in the virtual world, it is not really necessary to have a helmet and yes, I know what you are thinking. I've heard it before, but the point is that I can ride 190 to 200 watts at 65 percent heart rate quite comfortably for two hours, me and many others in this group of people with limited talent, limited training time and real jobs. Hey, we could train with a professional cycling team on one of their easy days on very flat roads for two hours of a five-hour training session, but I'll still take it so we now have a good understanding of how top endurance athletes work. they train when they have the time and resources to train as hard and as much as they can they don't train in the yellow zone in the red zone every day because they can't they train very much yes and sometimes they push themselves to levels of effort and fatigue that most of us we will never experiment, but most days they train in the green zone at an intensity that is relatively comfortable for them and they can go for a long time and recover and repeat day after day and that is what gives them success years ago I coordinate polarized training erm lots of low intensity training sessions some high intensity training sessions but not too much in between it's like that honorary athlete who climbed that steep hill that day it was an easy training day the best endurance athletes trained with discipline intensity discipline easy day stay calm on the hard days well, they are hard, so why does this polarized approach seem to work better than training harder more often and maybe less overall?

Well, for the highest levels of performance to be achievable over time, the process itself. The training process has to be sustainable. Training produces very specific molecular signals for adaptation and all these different types of cells that add up to improve performance, but that same training is also a source of stress in the system as a whole and research has shown us that the levels Moderately high levels of chronic stress, whether daily stress or physical stress, can lead to burnout, stagnation, and overtraining. You simply cannot activate the fight or flight response every day during training. Athletes have learned that some days are low intensity and other days are high intensity.

Intensity days appear to provide an optimal balance between adaptive signal and systemic stress. Without pain there is no gain. It's false. Athletes have learned this, but apply these lessons from the top ladder down for people like us with some training ambitions but limited time. The answer is yes, absolutely time. Stressed out amateurs often in their effort to get the most out of every minute of training end up in a sort of regression towards the mean where each training session becomes a bit harsh and with too little variation it is as if there is a black hole of training intensity that is developed. in our brain and that drags our good training intentions into a chronic routine in the yellow zone, but when we slow down most days and maybe go longer and then train hard on Sundays because we have the energy and motivation to Doing so, performances improve. better and the process is more pleasant and sustainable, but let's be realistic, let's be honest,Most of us don't have high ambitions for endurance performance, for many people resistance training is too painful, but the good intentions of adding exercise to a healthy lifestyle have often been derailed by fitness instructors and personal trainers too much. exuberant and super fit neighbors who take people from the couch to the red zone and the result is that they often return to the couch and stay there.

The training process I love has gotten a bad rap, but I'm hopeful that a hundred years of physiological research has shown us that the human body has an incredible ability to adapt to exercise. Resistance exercise is integrated into our biology, but studying the best athletes in the world has shown us something else and that is that the process is not about pain and suffering or training brutally in the red zone every day, the process It's about enjoyment, perseverance, patience and lots of time in the green, so get out the door, hit the gym or the local forest trail and if you hear that voice in your head screaming oh no pain no gain ignore it find your Green Zone and when you do that and stay there for a while you are already training like a champion thank you