From Lab to Athlete: Optimizing Training with Dr. Andrea Zignoli

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. Today we are talking with Dr. Zignoli, one of the architects of Athletica, about the Workout Reserve, a tool that helped athletes like Marjaana Rakai in her training for the Ironman World Championships. Andrea, welcome to the podcast. It's good that you are here.

Can you give us a bit of a background about you and how you came to Athletica?

Hey, thank you. Thank you, Paul. And hi, guys.

Yeah, but to begin introducing my background, I think I can start from my first studies after high school, perhaps I was interested in robotics. So that's why I enrolled in a course in engineering and mechatronics. But yeah, year after year,

I got more interested in humanoid robots. And after all, said, maybe it's even better to start studying the human body and how the human body works. I got really interested in biomechanics and bioenergetics. I thought it was truly fascinating to me that I could apply the studying I was doing in physics and mechanics to...

to better understand the human body. I landed, after I graduated, I landed in a functional evaluation center where I met people that introduced me to the cardiopulmonary testing and VO2 oxygen consumption in exercising conditions and lactate concentration. And so...

That was really the spark for my curiosity to deepen my understanding and the practice of using mathematical models to study how the human body reacts to exercise. a PhD opportunity was offered to me, so I spent the next three years in trying to apply mathematical modeling today.

to the human body and especially in the exercising human body. After that, yeah, sure.

Andrea, can I just interrupt for just a sec? So if you've just tuned in and you're listening to this and you might want to, who are we talking to? This guy that we are listening to, this is the brain of Athletica. So if you're wondering why things get updated and changed and adapted and elicit amazing performances to you.

This is the guy that's built it all. This is, you not all, we're a team, we're a team, but so many of the models have been taken by Andrea and put into code. So yeah, we're, I'm not sure if that was completely clear, but it wasn't just the Workout Reserve. And I know Andrea, you're feeling all embarrassed, but this guy is amazing and we all bow down and worship him.

Sure.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you. you, Paul. I wish I was that brain behind it. But no, just I was getting to the point where we met actually after my PhD. And that was kind of funny. And that speaks about how we met and how my passion for mathematical modeling translated into the sport practice. were at the time we were studying the

And then we presented that work at the conference. And then I approached Paul, who was like a seasoned professor at that time. I'm not going to say old, but seasoned. And I was still kind of youngish. So we spoke about the opportunity of leveraging these kind of mathematical modeling techniques to the design of a training platform.

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where we could leverage the power of computation and artificial intelligence to solve some of the problems that coaches were having and still have this time. from there, that was the beginning for me, having me involved in athletic really.

Yeah. And think of how long, I mean, it's eight, nine years ago. It's amazing, right? Like that's how long Athletica has been in in the build for and obviously continues today. But yeah, can, I can remember that, that meeting, it was yesterday, Andrea, at the, was the start of the Tour de France. It was the cycling science conference that Anton runs. And, and yeah, and we clicked, obviously. I watched your presentation and I said, now you have my attention.

Yeah.

Thank

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Yes, yes. I remember that. I remember that. Yes. And that was pretty much at the start. We had a vision in common. We shared the same approach to the HIIT high intensity interval training puzzle, let's say. And we had the same idea of trying to leverage the computer for what they were best at.

Yeah.

which means computation and memory and processing and leave more time to the human coaches for actually talking with the athletes and devote more human time to them. So that was the idea that we both shared at the time and we share it right now. We just have a much clearer picture of what is that we can do and what is that we shouldn't be doing.

Yeah, it gets clearer and clearer every day. yeah,

I think.

And what is the first tool maybe even overall in Athletica that you're most proud of maybe to start?

Well, I think that the very first tool that Paul we developed at the Athletica is the logic itself. I remember you asking me about how can we approach the problem of having a race in weeks from now. And we have a

Thank

an athlete with some given physiological characteristics. How do we guide these hypothetical athletes from point A to race day? And really that was the start of the coding in athletic, let's say. So we started from the most basic, let's say, concept, which is the supercompensation.

concept that you have like if you receive a training load, whatever you define it, you will react with an acute stress and a chronic stress. So if you

Mm-hmm.

If you make these loads to perfectly align with your ups and downs in your performance potential, you eventually get to a point where your performance potential is maximized. That might sound quite simple because the equations are there, Bannister provided as with those equations. Those kind of equations are like experimental.

to say the least, so they can give us a good start for the average athlete. But then we have to make a lot of adjustments. So they might point in a direction, but then we have to be able to adjust on the fly and be compliant with some of the constraints, which might be some physiological constraints, which are unique to the athlete and some other constraints like time constraints.

because not all the outlets can work out at the time you want and not all the outlets have all the time of the world. So we started like really

trying to understand how to solve this problem to optimize the performance potential of the athlete by complying with their constraints. And again, this might sound quite easy if you think of a case and user by user case, and it might be easy if you look like manually on the data, you can adjust and move and correct your spreadsheet. If you're using something like that to inform your

your athletes, but if you need to build a product around that, it becomes quite messy. I often refer to what Elon Musk has to say about production and prototyping. mean, prototyping is much easier than production because you can build some proof of concept and that might work for an athlete or a user or a coach. But if you want that to

be robust to the requirements of 1,000 users or 2,000 users or 10,000 users, all with different requirements, all with different characteristics, that might become very difficult. So we are learning every day, as mentioned. But to re-

Thanks.

you

We sure are. We are learning from you, the user, the listener. If you're on an Athletica user, we are learning from you and we thank you so much for that. Because, and all your feedback in the forum. And actually I want to thank you, Andrea, for your contributions also on the forum, helping Marjaana, Paul and myself with that. And this is one of the key reasons why we wanted to put a face to the name for people that are getting

occasional feedback, technical feedback that only you can really provide sometimes. you on behalf of the three of us, we're really grateful for your contributions.

Yeah, thanks. I have to say that some of the comments are really engaging. I try to sometimes I say, I only reply to comments that I like or I find very interesting. Not that, yeah, I want to only to pick my favorites, but sometimes the discussion is so engaging that you cannot hold you back.

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that's something that I must say about the community that has been building within Athletica. Sometimes it seems that it has its own life and I'm so happy when I see a comment and we don't have even to reply because someone else is coming and adding a comment to that. It's pretty amazing and I couldn't think that could happen.

so quickly.

to get there.

Yeah, and you're really good with that too, Andrea. When you are engaging with our users, you're asking them for their opinions too, right? And users, if you're listening, we do so truly value, we learn from all of you. So again, yeah, we're just so grateful to the community that is building. Marjaana, you're a big leader in that community. Any thoughts from you?

is so fascinated talking about or listening to the history that YouTube have shared. Like it sounds like you saw the problem and then like someone would think that it's an easy solution to offer from A to B solution. But when you need to scale it, not just for one person, but to scale it to so many different athlete types and situations, it's really commendable that you

stuck to it. I know it hasn't always been easy, but we're growing and you've contributed in so many ways to everyday athletes' problems. So I am super grateful and I'm especially very grateful for the Workout Reserve, which is absolutely my personal favorite. Maybe we can move on to that direction.

Where did the Workout Reserve idea even come from?

That's a good one. I hope you have some time. I like talking about that.

You

Hahaha

Woo!

I would start by talking a little bit about the power profile, right? So the, how your ability to deliver power or force or maintain a given intensity for an exercise can change.

given the duration of that exercise. We often refer to it to a paper back in the 60s, I think, which was the result of the study done on a single muscle group. was like a leg extension. And those researchers proved that the ability to maintain the given intensity of that exercise for the single muscle group was lying on a nice line. And they

used an hyperbola to define that behaviour.

20 years later, more or less, another research group did the same study, but with a different exercise, which was cycling, so involving multiple muscle groups. And the behavior was still there. And they used, again, the same equation to describe this behavior. The point is that that equation has two parameters.

One is the horizontal asymptote, let's say. So it's the horizontal line. So your power will never get lower than that. And that parameter was at the time defined as the critical value, the critical power, if you're talking about power, and then eventually it became the critical speed because the same approach was used to study

running speed or swimming speed. So that became the critical value. But for the Workout Reserve, it's more interesting. The other parameter is more interesting, which is the W prime. Now we call that W prime, which is the area below the curve, below this hyperbola. But

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An area below a power core is a work or an energy. And the area below the speed curve is a distance. So at that time, late 80s, beginning of the 90s, that W prime took the name of anaerobic reserve or anaerobic speed reserve. You could read between the lines that that was

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an amount of work that you could do with the anaerobic energetic pathway. And you can see a number of works related to that. So that was an anaerobic worker capacity, pretty much. So that was an amount of work that your anaerobic system could do. Then eventually, the meaning behind that parameter changes throughout time. So we are now getting to...

the 90s where we have these compartments model where a fluid is coming out from this compartment. So the energy is exiting from this compartment as soon as you go above your critical value. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's a theoretical model that can be used to explain to an athlete how your

at the time the anaerobic sources are depleted.

Yeah, and let's just clarify this for the user and listener, Andrea, and specifically the Athletica listener as they have their critical power and they can see their critical speed on their charts, right? So that's the value that they're talking about. And maybe put simply, this is their threshold or FTP. Maybe that would be familiar. And then the other big word that you're kind of using there is asymptote. And so what?

What's the asymptote?

Yeah, sorry for that. It's like a mathematical concept. So the asymptote is really what is really the parameter of the equation that you use to describe the behavior. Yes, yes. And that is the, yeah, sorry, physiologically speaking, the critical power is the...

Okay.

Okay, got it. Okay, sorry to interrupt.

The limit, which is associated with a second ventilatory threshold or the maximum lactate study state, there's a lot of studies going on in that aspect.

Yep. just also users, you'll know that all your zones are determined by this critical power. You all have one. Everyone's got a critical power or a critical speed. And all your zones are kind of coordinated in alignment with this value, just to get and put it into perspective. yeah. So continue on there with the Workout Reserve, Andrea.

All good.

produce work above your critical power was depleting and recovering exponentially, let's say. So it means that implicitly you are assuming that the efficiency at which you produce energy is constant across all the intensity domains. And that this is something that we wanted to address.

Mm-hmm.

because we didn't think it was going to be so accurate that you could use this methodology to estimate whenever you're going to be depleted or not able to sustain much more work. So that was the start of the Workout Reserve. We started from the assumption that we were not happy with a

with the methodologies or the models that were available at the time out there.

Yeah, I just want to make sure that I understand this so that the Workout Reserve is a percentage of how the current effort compared to your best critical power so that you could use that. Well, why don't you take us through how an everyday endurance athlete could use Workout Reserve to guide their training? mean, how would that actually work?

Yes, that's a very good question. So to be more specific, it's the ratio between what you are doing right now with the best that you did.

And what we're showing is

Perfect. Okay.

the maximum value closest to the...

to one of your previous efforts.

So for example, if you're averaging 300 watts for 10 minutes, it might well be that you did that in the past. So after 10 minutes, you're getting to touch that point again. So your Workout Reserve will decrease and decrease and decrease. And when you will get to touch that point,

your ratio between your current power and your maximum power for that duration will be exactly one. So we can predict whenever you're going to touch that point. And at that point, your performance will equal one of your previous best performances. So you will be done pretty much. So to guide your training, we can see a lot of solutions to that.

If you have a tool that can tell you

how close you are from your maximum, and it can tell you what is the duration associated with that effort, you can calibrate your efforts accordingly.

For example, we have applications with pacing. We know that you can pace

your race better if you know how far you are from hitting your previous maximum effort for that given duration.

And now on Athletica, what you can do is to use the...

Workout Reserve live on your, your Garmin device, to pace your, your race or your training sessions. And you can use that in post-process to understand whenever you hit a one of your maximum effort and to reverse engineering from, from that.

And, and you, you confirm those in your, the world tour team, that you're associated with Andrea. and yeah, in both two, two stages of the, of the Giro, right. from two, separate athletes.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, two separate athletes, two very different contexts. One was a sprint at the end. So we have a guy who was built specifically for high powers at the end of the race. So you can see quite clearly that at the end of the race, 13, 15 second sprints, he could deliver high, very high power.

Thank

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values and he replicated one of his personal best efforts in that kind of, in that time domain, which is very short bursts. And another example we did together with Tim Bardiani was a totally different context, totally different stage was a mountain stage at the Giro d'Italia. And we could see from broadcasting that

the guy attacked on one of the climbs, but eventually he got caught by today's Pogačar on that climb. This guy went second, beautiful stage, spectacular stage, and we asked the athlete to kindly share the data with us and try to see if the workout result was doing justice to his effort. it actually did.

With the same team, we are exploring possibilities to evaluating whether the athletes are pushing to their limits, especially in time trial stages. Because sometimes if you're interested in the GC, in general classification, you don't want many riders to push a lot during the time trials.

Yeah, it's just the way it is. You can save the legs for the mountain stages and you don't get to get to the top 20. So you save the legs and this is reflected in the workout result. This is a kind of data that we like not to show because showing that a professional athlete is not going full gas in some stages is not always the best choice, but it's there.

Again, it's clearly shown on the Workout Reserve graphs.

Yeah, but you're highlighting that like there are so many applications to this, to this model Workout Reserve. And also now that it is onboarded via Phil onto the Garmin device, like you see this. So you just to your point, you can use it to make sure that you're not depleting too fast for easy training, which is very important because you don't want that. Let's just, know,

Thank

for the user's mind, think of it as a bit of a battery. I know you hate that analogy, Andrea, but there's a little bit of that there, right? Like save some energy, save something. Likewise, you can see personal bests or progressions. So I use it when I'm training on my mountain ride on a week to week basis. And I love seeing that as my heart rate is holding,

but I see I'm adapting and my power is higher and lifting for the same RPE and effort. And that gives me really confidence. And then I tend to hit personal bests over these longer sort of durations. I know I'm getting faster with these. So there are multiple uses in real time and also upon reflection.

you

And I know that's one thing we wanted to talk to Marjaana about is how

She used it in her recent Iron Man World Champs.

Yeah, I didn't before the, you know, the race, didn't quite fully appreciate all the things that the Workout Reserve can do. And, yeah, a couple of months before my race, because I live where there's, there's no heels. So I was stuck on a trainer and knees course had lots of elevation. So I had to practice the knees course on full gas app.

And I kept just tanking myself. Like I started way too hard every single time. And I, and I mentioned it to Paul and he said, well, use the Workout Reserve and hold back, like try to hit like 30%. At the end of that climb. And when I did that, allowed me to, you know, nail the six hour rides that I was doing. And then I took that pacing strategy and took it to the race day.

And, just held back the entire uphill. Like it was really hard because everybody's passing you, but I trusted Workout Reserve and I trusted Paul's advice to hold back and not, you know, trash my legs on the uphill because it was, the uphill was in the beginning of the race. Right. So I still have like 120 Ks.

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after I was at the top of the hill and run a marathon after. So it was absolutely like the best thing ever I could have done for practice and on a race day to learn to pace the course appropriately to my own fitness level. So thank you so much.

So what advice would you give to everyday athletes? How do you use Workout Reserve?

if you say you're training for a marathon and you want to work on your durability for long runs, at what point would you say...

an athlete should be packing it in, like...

That's interesting. Again, again, maybe not the best question that I can give an answer to because I it's difficult for me to translate that into an advisor for an average athlete, especially because everybody reacts differently to what we see on a screen, especially in live conditions. So

you

There are some kind of individuals for which I would tell them not to look at the watch while they're running, just because they might be like, you might receive a bad feedback from that. It's not guaranteed that it's healthy to see.

Thank

when you're going to hit your previous maximum effort. So it really depends if you like those kind of analysis or numbers, if you like to see numbers and you get some kind of good feeling out of them. To me, in the context of the maximum main power profile,

Mm-hmm.

and the context of the Workout Reserve, durability speaks to the steepness of your profile. So the steepness, what I mean by that is how steep is your curve between one point and the other. And if you're aiming for a good marathon time, a good preparation, you want to have those points well lying on it, on a flat line on that kind of duration of the race.

So many times I've been asking Paul, what would it change if we had to use Workout Reserve to design or adjust the preparation of an athlete? And often Paul says, you can add to that Paul, but you often say, it doesn't really change anything. It's important to keep those building blocks in place and the preparation really doesn't change.

What is changing is your ability to see that and appreciate that. That is what is

If you're in a race, keep an eye on the distance between your current effort and your maximum effort in that kind of duration, which is the duration of your race. Because you know that if your profile is reliable, you're going to hit your maximum point and you don't want to hit your maximum point at 10 kilometers to go in a marathon. So that is something that you would like to spread out and eventually get you your maximum.

Mm-hmm.

Paul and Andrea, the app is, we can use it on a Garmin watch right now. Are there other devices that we're going to be able to use soon or is it limited to Garmin for the time being?

Yes, unfortunately for the moment is available for Garmin users and Connect IQ. So only some devices. And at the moment, our suggestion is to use that for road running and cycling. It might not work as well for trail running, for example, or other activities, but...

Yeah, initially it was considered for cycling, which works best for cycling. and of course in-season cycling, because you're constantly refining your power profile. So that was considered for in-season cycling. yeah, if you think your profile is complete and reflective or through maximum effort, you can use that for cycling and running.

would be super happy to implement that on other devices

Yeah.

whole process and yeah, that's what it's all about.

So that was a pretty deep dive into Workout Reserve. let's see if I can, if I got my takeaways, you know, set here. So correct me if I have anything wrong, but the Workout Reserve is a, powerful tool on Athletica. That's a percentage of your historical personal best efforts. And it changes with your training. The more training you do, the better the data gets. Number

Two, the Workout Reserve is a way to monitor your intensity so it can help you make sure that you're not going too hard for endurance paces. It can also help give you your personal best or your progressions. There's a lot of future potential applications as well. And number three right now, you can use your Garmin app to monitor on your watch your...

road running and cycling progress and your training with Workout Reserve on Athletica.

is all for this week. Join us next week on the Athletes Compass podcast when we talk to Andrea again.

Yeah.

Ask your training questions in the comments or on our social media if you enjoyed this episode We'd appreciate it if you would take a moment to give us a five-star review For more information or to schedule a consultation with Paul Marjaana or myself check the links in the show notes for Dr. Andrea Zignoli Dr. Paul Larson Marjaana Rakai and myself this has been the athletes compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening