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

all right a hundred that seems off of high for just walking well no pain no gain this popular slogan has been described as an Amana merican mini narrative and I grew up with it but when it comes to training the body to endure to run ski cycle row or swim faster longer this slogan in the recipe for development that it suggests is just wrong destructively wrong I'm an exercise physiologist scientists like me study how the body responds and adapts to exercise in all its variations often this means bringing well-trained and not so well trained people into specialized laboratories and having them sweat for science the study of the physiology of exercise has gone on for over a hundred years and during that time we've brought athletes of the day into laboratories to better understand human physiology and we saw we've also used our knowledge of human physiology to inform and hopefully improve the training process in our modern laboratories we can simulate and quantify the effects of variables like heat and humidity altitude or exercise intensity on these physiological acute responses and long-term adaptations now we measure and prod we take blood samples we sometimes put sensors in uncomfortable places and we may even extract a tiny bit of muscle from an exhausted athlete we also try to connect the perceptions of effort exertion 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 most every kind 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 doctoral studies many years ago I studied hearts red hearts mind you 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 limitations serious limitations because when we leave the control of the laboratory and go out into the real world where training occurs our short-term controlled studies don't always give us an accurate understanding of a complex long-term process twenty-five years ago I moved to Norway and about all I took with me was my physiology training my interest in endurance and that no pain no gain idea that I had grown up with Norway's a great place to study endurance because endurance sports are very popular and Scandinavia in general has a long reputation and exercise physiology research so when I arrived I was keen to bring local athletes into the laboratory and study them in the way that I had been trained but then two random events happen that forced me to re-examine what I thought I knew about the endurance training process 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 jogging out on forest trails near my home and I saw a woman running in front of me I recognized her because we had tested her in the laboratory and I knew she was a well trained endurance athlete better trained than me but what she did NIC surprised me she came to the bottom of a short but steep hill and instead of running up the hill she started walking briskly and then when she reached the top she continued running again now personally I have never met a hill during training that I didn't at least try to run up panting and straining all the way no pain no gain so why did this woman who was well trained choose to walk instead of run that day and then later I was reading a newspaper article and an interview of the national team cross-country skiing coach at the time he was the coach of true titans of endurance with Olympic gold medals and off the charts laboratory test results on the resume but he said we do not train at medium-hard intensity it's too much pain for too little gain now this was fundamentally opposed and different from what I had been taught to believe from laboratory studies so I realized I was going to have to leave the comfort of the laboratory and study athletes in their laboratories we're out on the forest trails and skating ovals and hills and lakes where they trained and tested themselves daily how did the best endurance athletes actually train every day over weeks and months and years endurance athletes are highly motivated to be their best and they work with purpose and motivation towards that goal every day but it wasn't always that way the amateur ethos of very limited training prevailed for many years but then in the 1950s athletes and their performances became a kind of geopolitical proxy for the vitality of Nations it was the Cold War television brought lots of money into training and sport and the result was is that the process became professionalized athletes and their coaches began to experiment with the training process and over six or seven decades hundreds and even thousands of athletes have contributed to a kind of optimization process it's all quite Darwinist really in the high performance sport world training methods that give consistent results so I've and those that don't well they fade away and become extinct over about two decades now I and others have moved back and forth across these different kinds of laboratories and methods with the goal of answering three questions one what have athletes learn about the training process - why does it work and three how can the rest of us use their hard-earned knowledge to quantify endurance training you have to accurately measure the two fundamental variables that combine to make up every endurance training workout intensity and duration duration is easy but intensity is is more challenging because we can measure intensity from two perspectives external and internal external intensity or workload is just the pace or power that we produce 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 across athletes depending on the physical capacity at the time fortunately the laboratories that we work in are designed to very precisely control and regulate the external workload and then measure those physiological responses this gives us a calibration for leaving the laboratory and testing that no pain no gain hypothesis in the real world when we have endurance athletes of all ability levels come into the laboratory 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 pretty simple green low intensity low perceived exertion relatively comfortable talking pace yellow somewhat hard too hard short response only and kind of high perceived exertion and then red hard high-intensity gasping pace so using these three intensity zones from a careful physiological testing we then have cooperated with scientists from different countries and we've quantified the training of hundreds of athletes in cycling cross-country skiing rowing and distance running and we could ask the question is no pain no gain the way the best athletes train the answer is no absolutely not this is the basic intensity distribution that emerges from studying the best in the world across different sports different countries male and female about eight out of every ten of their training sessions many training sessions are performed in their green zone now the rest can be quite demanding but it's like that Norwegian coach said so many years ago the best athletes don't train very much in that medium intensity zone let's look at a few examples this is Mark bjorgen she's the all-time Winter Olympian male or female eight gold for silver and three bronze medals she allowed sport scientists in Norway to digitize and analyze her entire training career and publish it internationally and one of the scientists that was involved was a former national team teammate who became a doctoral student I thought that was pretty cool here is her endurance training intensity distributions during her five most most successful years of competition hundreds of hours spent in the Green Zone build the foundation for those red zone performances that were among the best in the history of the sport here's another example from Kenyan distance runners 5,000 and 10,000 meter specialists 85% of their training green zone here's another example this is from professional cyclists data collected recently by Dutch sports scientists that I know and these data I've kind of become my favourite from a reason that will become clear in a moment four years of data I'm gonna capitalize in just two numbers a hundred and ninety-one watts and sixty-five percent of maximum heart rate that was the average external and internal workload these professional cyclist trained at over the course of an entire year now to put those green numbers into perspective these same professional cyclists steer in a hard race may maintain 300 watts for four or five hours during a breakaway and they may climb Alpine mountain passage in 400 at 450 watts and your maximum heart rate for half an hour this is me cycling in the comfort of my living room on a laboratory quality bicycle ergometer connected to the massive online game called Swift well actually that's me I'm in that orange cap inin cycling in the virtual world you really don't have to have a helmet and yeah I know what you're thinking I've heard it before but the point is is that I can ride at 190 to 200 watts at 65 percent heart rate pretty comfortably for two hours me and a lot of these others in this group of folks with limited talent and 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 but still I'll take it so we now have a good understanding of how the best endurance athletes train when they've got the time and resources to train as hard and as much as they can they do not train in the yellow zone in the red zone every day because they can't they train a lot yes and sometimes they push themselves to levels of exertion and fatigue that most of us will never experience but on most days they train in the green zone at a intensity that is relatively comfortable for them that they can go for a long time and recover and repeat day after day and that's what brings success years ago i coordinate erm polarized training lots of low intensity training sessions some high intensity training sessions but not too much in the middle it's like that fee athlete that walked up that steep hill that day it was an easy training day the best endurance athletes trained with discipline intensity discipline easy day stay easy in hard days well they're hard so why does this polarized approach seem to work better than training harder more often and maybe less overall well for the highest performance levels to be attainable over time the process itself the training process has to be sustainable training produces very specific molecular signals for adaptation and all of these different kinds of cells that add up to improve performance but that same training is also a source of stress on the system as a whole and research has shown us that chronic moderately high levels of stress whether it's daily tedtalk stress or physical stress can lead to burnout stagnation and overtraining you just can't turn on the fight-or-flight response every day in training athletes have learned that some low intensity days some high-intensity days seems to give an optimal balance between adaptive signal and systemic stress no pain no gain is false athletes have learned this but do these lessons from the top scale down to folks like us with some training ambitions but limited time the answer is yes absolutely time stressed amateurs often in their effort to get the most out of every training minute end up in a kind of regression towards the mean where every training session becomes kind of hard and with very little variation it's as if there's a training intensity black hole that develops up in our brain and it pulls our good training intentions into a chronic grind in the yellow zone but when we slow down on most days and maybe go longer and then train hard on Sundays because we've got the energy and motivation to do it performances get better and the process is more enjoyable and sustainable but let's face it let's be honest most of us do not have big endurance performance ambitions for lots of people endurance training is just too much pain period good intentions to add exercise to a healthy lifestyle have often been derailed by over exuberant fitness instructors and personal trainers and super fit neighbors who take people from the sofa to the red zone and the result is that they often return to the sofa and stay there the training process that I love has gotten a bad rap but I'm hopeful a hundred years of physiological research has shown us that the human body has an amazing capacity for adaptation to exercise endurance exercise it's built 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 and brutal training in the red zone every day the process is about enjoyment persistence patience and spending a lot of time in the green zone so get out the door go to the fitness center or local forest trail and if you hear that voice in your head that screams ah 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 you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 986,345

Rating: 4.920167 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science, Extreme Sports, Sports

Id: MALsI0mJ09I

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ieatthings]

TL;DW: Train for endurance mostly (~85% of the time) at low intensity. It’s what professional endurance athletes do.

[u/furism]

I posted this because it confirms most of the principles explained in TB2. I know most people here are already convinced but I find it great when different sources (especially those with a medical research background) come to the same conclusions.

[u/Sorntel]

Great post/vid. Agreed, always like seeing different povs supporting the training methodology.