From Load to Strain: Dr. Stephen Seiler’s Latest Research p.2 | Athlete’s Compass #91

Hey, listen, do you think you need a day off? If you are even having the thought.

then you need a day off because your brain doesn't usually even consider that possibility.

you are allowed to take a day off. It's good for you. You'll get some stuff done. You'll be a good mom for your kids and you're letting your body recover. It's a win-win, you know?

Mattias asks, how does the type of workout you do on a given day, for example, 30-30 intervals based training or strength endurance, affect the type of breathing training you should do on the same day?

Marjaana.

Or should breathing training be done independently of the other training?

That's a good question. think we have to remember that a lot of the work we do, just the act of doing some of these hard efforts where we are having to ventilate and really accelerate ventilation, that's training. We're training the respiratory system when we do those sessions, know, purposefully. That's one issue just to keep in mind. ⁓ I give you an example. I don't know. Have you ever trained just with your

just breathing through your nose. Do you ever do that?

Yep, definitely.

Mm-hmm.

And what does

that do? What do you experience when you do that?

For me, it's harder. I just have to really focus on it, and ⁓ it also limits my intensity.

Okay. So it's a natural limiter, but is it, do you find that if you do it regularly, that that limitation on intensity pushes a little bit farther out that you can. Yeah. So it's a trainable. Okay. So what's happening there? And I guess I'm getting, what I'm getting at is just the simplest act of, of just nasal, nasal breathing, just breathing through your nose. It is a trainable.

Totally, yeah. Okay, I can go longer. I can progress it.

It's a good tool for to train to be one very aware of our breathing and two, ⁓ perhaps we, is contributing to some adaptations that make it possible for you to keep breathing under control at higher loads to again, keep the ventilatory efficiency as high as possible so that we avoid getting into that situation where now the ventilation cost is starting to steal.

Mm-hmm.

Oxygen we're having to steal oxygen for the working muscle. So if I can breathe efficiently longer, if I can continue to keep frequency down and tidal volume up longer,

then that's going to give me downstream, ⁓ benefits. So that's a really easy win. And it's a way of training the body, training the breathing apparatus

any devices. Now we can go farther than that.

But that's a good first step for almost anybody. And I'll even take it further. Now, I don't have hard evidence for this, but I have a little hypothesis. And that is, some people struggle with sleep apnea. They snore, they have issues at night. Their partner may be very keenly aware of it. ⁓ It's usually the partner that informs them of the issues they're having during breathing.

You

but sometimes people will wake up from their own snoring, right? Well, almost all snoring is happening with your mouth open.

Mm-hmm.

So if you can just breathe, if you can, anything you can do that will result in you sleeping a greater percentage of the time, just breathing through your nose is going to tend to bring down those problems. It's going to reduce the sleep apnea kinds of snoring types of problems because you don't snore with a closed mouth. Maybe very rarely, but it doesn't happen very much.

That's right.

One of the, someday I'll do this study, but I have hypothesized that if we do some, some nose breathing only sessions during training, number one, do it during your easy sessions when you're going to be, you're not trying to do interval workouts, but practice breathing just through your nose. A lot of people find that because they tend to be mouth breathers.

They had it, it's no fun at first, but slowly those passages reopen. Right. And they get better as you talked about it, they get better at being able to move air in and out of their lungs just through the nasal passages. There are some advantages to that. The air is filtered. The air is warm. There's probably nitrous oxide released that as a function of moving through these passages. So, so there seems to be some positive benefits, but it may also.

carry over to your sleep sleep more with your mouth closed. And that's a super cheap training intervention.

I tried it initially. Now I've done many rides, two hours just through my mouth. can now I can probably handle 250, 260 Watts, just nose breathing. And that's, that's a bit above my LT1. So I can be kind of in, that threshold region and just breathing through my nose. But that certainly wasn't true, you know, two years ago.

Wow.

That's a pretty impressive VT-1. Wow. That's a pretty impressive VT-1, my friend.

Stephen Hoon.

So it's trainable.

Huh? What?

Yeah.

Well, it's 2 60s, not my VT one. It's, it's, it's a, it's higher than that, but I'm just saying I can, I can get into above VT

and still be breathing through my nose. Now, some of you who see me are going to say, yeah, but you've got a big nose, Stephen. you, you, you have, you're anatomically gifted in that respect, but I don't, I think it's still a trainable issue.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I'm sorry.

Yeah

Yeah.

No.

Love it.

Love it.

Stephen, when you talk about the nasal breathing allows you to become more efficient with your breathing. Does that show up in the ventilation rate on the time wear strap or?

Great question. And the answer is absolutely. It's so

when I like, if I'm, let's say I'll just say, let's say I'm at 180 Watts, you know, cycling along at 180 Watts. And that would put me at about 32 breaths per minute with my mouth open. It'll put me at about 26 breaths per minute with my mouth closed. So my breathing frequency will drop down five to six breaths per minute. ⁓ just by closing my mouth and breathing through my nose.

And then what happens with me is obviously tidal volume increases in a compensatory way. But with me, what I see is that it doesn't completely adjust so that I'm more efficient. So my total ventilation goes down about 10 % when I'm just breathing through my nose based on the data from the strap. Well, you know, so I have to be, that's the caveat is whether it's

accurately picking that up or whether there's some issue that is not being captured. But it seems like I am slightly more efficient, meaning I'm using less ventilation to get the same oxygen delivery. And that's great if that's true, you know.

Yeah.

I've used nasal breathing. If I'm riding a long ride and I notice that my heart rate is starting to rise and I'm wanting to keep it down, take focused breath through the nose and then long deep breathing out through the mouth and it instantly drops to three beats per minute.

That's nice. Yeah. It just seems like I, you know, I, I'm not some zealot, a breathing guru or anything folks, you know, I'm a physiology guy, but I, I'm just telling you as a, as an endurance athlete, give it a try. You know, this is just a really easy hack to test out and see what, see how it does for me. When I do breathing, just nose breathing, I find it to almost be a bit meditative, you know, like kind of it's like a governor.

And I, from the data, what it shows is my breathing frequency just becomes really consistent. So there's less variability. So it's just kind of this way of, really getting chill and coming into a zone, test it out, see what it feels like. And you may say, this sucks. hate it. Okay. Don't do it. But you, you may also find that it's, it's kind of something that.

is helps you kind of get into the right zone, particularly on those easy sessions, know, the sessions where you want to go long and long and slow or long and low intensity.

So Cindy Maloney asks our next question, how much can breath training using a device or other method, nasal breathing impact endurance performance and perceived exertion during a long event such as a marathon or Ironman?

Yeah. It goes, brings us back to what the systematic reviews say and they're, they're equivocal, meaning that there's no consistent data to show that respiratory muscle training is positive or negative, or some studies suggest positive responses. Other studies show no effect. And I think that's a function of the fact that it's individual. So, ⁓ you know, all of these questions I'm going to end up answering similarly is that I think there's.

There will be athletes that will benefit from respiratory muscle training and other kinds of breathing focus to help them deal with, learn how to breathe more abdominally. You know, there's different strategies to try that in, and then see what fits and what works. And you may be an athlete that benefits, but you're going to have to with your coach kind of systematically make, do some experiments on your body and see how it.

how it responds, if that makes sense. I don't really know of any other way to deal with this because this is what it's all about, folks, is this individual response that we're trying to deal with. all different. ⁓ And so we're not, you know, we can't use cookie cutter solutions on very individual ⁓ responses.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Great answer. We're often looking for just this black and white answer, but that's not the way we work. As you've highlighted, we're such complex creatures. it really just means that you've got to... When Christmas comes and someone's looking for a gift for you, ⁓ get a device that can help you play around with your own individual responses, right?

like a Breathe Way Better bag. We've talked about that before. And it is a fun one. Just, you know, let's do a bunch of Breathe Way Better exercises interspersed. And then let's see how that's sort of affecting us. The VO2Max response, for example.

Yeah. I mean, there are some basics that are fairly inviolate. You know, we, talk about there's, there's a decent framework. We've, you know, you need, let's say the thing I've spent the most time on training intensity distribution. And it, you're pretty safe with you saying, you know, most of the training you do is going to be below the lactate threshold or, know, in the green zone. but then some of the training is going to be in a higher intensity.

And that gives you a starting point. So there are some physiological truths that, that we know, but so I'm not, we're not trying to neither Paul or I are trying to say, Hey, none of the things, everything's individual. You know, there, there's some frameworks that are, that are, we've got a hundred years of data on, but now we're getting to the level of detail that says now we've got to think individual. And, and I was given a symposium talk in, in Italy.

⁓ back in, in, ⁓ the first week in July. And I was saying that, look, as scientists, tend to, we'll take a group like a group of N equals 30 and we'll take the average response to some interval session or the average response to some respiratory muscle training. And that's the way we do. We try to look at generalizable results. Is this better on average for everybody? And then

And then we take our data to the coaches, to the elite coaches of Vizmo or some top team and they're saying, well, I'm sorry, but I do not have a single athlete that is not a N equals one. They're all off the charts. They're not on the normal distribution by the time they get to me, you know, at this level. So I have 30 times N equals one. You have N equals 30.

Hmm.

.

Yep.

Those are different worlds. And so that's kind of where we're at now is with technology, with wearables, with the different tools we have, we're trying to help not only the Formula One athletes, the elite athletes, but now we can also talk about the age groupers and the recreational athletes as helping all of us treat ourselves as the individuals we are and tweak those

good general practices to our specific needs. So I know you hate the it depends answer, but embrace it. Embrace the fact that you're a unique athlete and that we're trying to help you uniquely learn from both elite performers and coaches, but also just learn from experimenting on yourself. That's a useful thing to do.

you

Thank

.

Ha ha ha.

You know, and especially at certain times of the year, ⁓ you know, would say you're off season, maybe let's say November, December. It's a good time to experiment, you know, before you're starting to crank up for the next season. ⁓ try out a few things, see how it works and, and, and test your body. I used to put out a, like a Christmas list of experiments you could do on yourself, you know, and then it was pretty popular. So maybe I should keep doing that, but.

Yeah.

It's about this, you know, being a bit experimental ourselves and understanding that, we, you know, we can test things out and see how they work. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And we move on.

I've

been doing some heat adaptation stuff It's really interesting.

In Norway?

Yeah,

the way, and the way I have done it is sitting up in my loft. Normally I have this roof window and everything's, you know, it's well ventilated and I got four fans and everything. But when I was doing heat adaptation, I put on a winter fleece that up to my neck. Then I put on a hoodie. Then I shut all the windows, turned off all the fans and rode ride for 70 minutes at, you know, ⁓ a decent pace and just get cooked.

You know, and so, and then I was measuring, you know, the degree of cooked I was over several workouts and using the breathing and absolutely the breathing frequency goes up as no doubt my core temperatures going up and this is feeling worse and worse and yuckier and yuckier to have to ride when you're just cooking yourself, but it gets better, you know? And so with a few, a few instruments, we can actually become our own little

you

Yeah.

laboratory and really start to understand our own bodies and how we respond.

Yeah, I've experimented with the heat training too and the hardest part is the mental self-talk. ⁓

Yeah. Yeah. Cause it,

cause it, can make it go away so easily. Just, you know, take off the

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So

you mentioned an

point there and I want to double tap that. ⁓ You say that your breathing frequency goes up when you're heat training. You said 70 minutes of biking. ⁓ At what point do you call it quit? do you have some... Obviously you've been experimenting, you know your breathing rate. Do you have

threshold where you say, okay, this is enough stimuli?

That is such

a great question. And that's really at the heart of this. In that particular heat adaptation scenario, I don't think I got to a point where it was that drastic where I'm saying, ⁓ you know, do I quit or do I keep going? But in interval sessions, you know, really tough ⁓ repeats where I'm doing blocks of 30, 30s or 40, 20s and so forth, then you can imagine, you can say, well, how many of these blocks do I do?

Mm-hmm.

How many 15 minute blocks do I do two? Do I do three? Do I do four? And it's costing more and more and more. And that's when I look at that. What percentage of my breathing rate reserve in my ant relative to my heart rate reserve. And when those two cross over, when they intersect, then I'm cooked. ⁓ I'm at my ragged edge. so I, anything beyond that, then I'm probably just the gain,

The gain is not worth the pain, if you want to put it that way, because now I'm really stressing my body. And usually for me, that means I'm starting to have a breathing frequency of 70, 70, 75, 77 breaths per minute. I'm really at the upper end. breathing, my peak breathing frequency is about 80, 80 breaths per minute. I hit 82 the other day in a cycling session. Yeah. You know, so I'm, so I know my body really well. And I do exactly as you say is.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So you're really high up there.

Wow. Sweet.

Yeah.

I use breathing frequency to help me make that decision is when do I shut this down and say, this is enough for today? Because remember we're playing the long game folks as athletes, whether you're recreational age group national champion or elite performer, you have a long-term strategy. And one of the ways you measure your success is how many of my training sessions am I able to execute my plan training sessions?

What percentage of them am I able to execute them as intended? Meaning that you come to the workout fresh enough and ready enough. That is a very simple measure of the success of your training and your success in, in, in managing your body and resting when you need to. so, and, and, and breathing frequency is just one of a number of tools that can help us make good decisions about.

We'll

When is it enough? Because, ⁓ you know, the, signal that we've, we've generated enough signal, we've, we've got a good signal for adaptation and any more is just adding recovery. It's, it's extending the recovery demand. Right. And one of the ways I tell people is on average in your training, you need to be on a recovery clock.

Yeah.

24 hours long, meaning if you're training pretty darn regularly, pretty much every day, then on average you need to be recovering on a 24 hour cycle. If you're not, if you're consistently under recovered day after day after day, that, that cannot be sustainable. It's like withdrawing more money than you're making. Your bank account slowly drains and pretty soon you're overdrawn. Right? Well,

It's kind of the same with training. So, so we're managing this whole process in a way that we says we got to generate signal. want to turn on adaptations, build more mitochondria, build more capillaries, get more blood volume, all those things, build technical efficiency. But workouts are costly to the body workouts do stress. They damage the mechanical load muscle damage.

⁓ know, immune function gets delayed. have, you have, autonomic nervous system responses that become, ⁓ out of whack. You know, you have different issues that are systemic. So adaptations are cellular, but the stress responses are systemic primarily. And so we were playing a management game, you know, get the most training value for the most, for a manageable amount of stress.

And if you are not willing to take rest days, if you're not willing to listen to your body, you're going to go into a deficit. You're going to stagnate, you know? And so these are the kinds of, you know, the decisions that breathing that, that AI can help you with that different metrics. This is what we're trying to use all of them for is just kind of a management process. Signal versus strain, you might say. Does that make sense?

Mm-hmm.

Totally, Stephen. yeah, yeah. We've taken a page out of your book and we continue to try to amplify it. I think you've told us many times, it's not about no pain, no gain. The next session is the most important session and we try to promote that here. So, yeah.

Yeah.

And it's a long-term process. It's a long game.

Yeah.

Maybe. ⁓

So yeah, so it's the same story, but we're just adding maybe a new tool in the toolbox, and that's this issue of breathing, you know? And then AI adds to that.

Maybe you can add.

Maybe you can join us on our ⁓ HIIT sessions that I ⁓ am Paul coach on

Have you heard of, have you heard about Velocity, Stephen? it's really cool interactive, ⁓ you know, training group platform, very social and, but it's, you're, you're hitting your own individual targets on it as opposed to maybe Zwift where it's just like, you're, you're kind of having a race against everyone. ⁓ this is very,

No.

Are you tethered

in some way like the group, some of the group training sessions on Zwift so that even if you're going 300 watts and I'm only going 200 watts that we're still together? Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly,

it's yeah.

cool.

Yeah.

We'll send you a link. Yeah.

If you don't mind, want to tie

the velocity into the breathing and high intensity intervals. I've noticed that

Paul Laursen, he has his own way of breathing at high intensity, which is different than most of the other athletes.

And some of them clearly breathe more up top. ⁓ And Paul has a very deep way of like breathing forcefully out when he's doing intervals. And it's like very different than from the others, but I know when he's working hard and there's no way around it.

⁓

Say one more time

what you see with Paul. What does he do when he's really working hard?

he's

when he's working really hard, he has a very forceful breathing out. Exhalation. So I'm wondering. So obviously his his volume is higher, but maybe the breathing rate is a little bit lower than what I hear from the other athletes.

Okay. Exhalation. Right. Yeah.

Right. he's, and this is, ⁓ this is, there's so much to unpack here. It's really interesting.

we need to understand that initially the active process is the inspiration. So we use the musculature between the ribs to lift the ribs and pull down the diaphragm. Okay. And that creates this extra volume in the lungs expand.

you

and that's active. we, we, we pull on the ribs and the ribs that stores energy. then at low intensities, when we exhale, that's just passive, meaning that that elasticity that we've, we've kind of stretched and now we get that energy back and it just squeezes the air out. So initially the, the outward exhalation is essentially free. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

But then as intensity goes up and as Paul starts working harder, now he has to also actively push the air out. And that's when we hear him, you know, that's when we hear the athlete. You don't hear so much the inhalation, but you hear the, and that's when we know breathing is starting to become a bigger cost, right?

For sure. And back to Velocity, it is fully gamified. it's like, believe me, there's a game going on. all I'm doing is all my very best to move air, enhance my VO2, and hit my targets that are right there in the front. And everyone gets to see when you hit your target, and you get your points. You get your points for hitting your prescription of the day kind of thing. So that's why, yeah.

Hahaha

Okay.

Okay, my gosh you

guys are gluttons for punishment

it's super fun.

You'd love it. You would love

Yeah, I'd get all, yeah, that just sounds like something that would get me in trouble. I'd get addicted to that.

You would.

Yeah,

it's super fun and as a coach I can blind everybody so they don't know their target. They just need to go by feel and some people hate me for that but it's...

Hahaha

Yeah.

yeah, that's interesting. Well,

yeah. And you touch on a really interesting thing is just, is, how does, how do we respond to feedback? You know, do we do better with it or without it? Cause sometimes I think you can make arguments in both directions. Feedback can be constraining because we, we played, we've trained to the feedback too much. I think there's classic examples of that in the Tour de France where athletes have just said, no, screw that. I don't want any data.

And they've had their best, you know, cause they've been willing to push harder. They've crossed some, mental thresholds because they didn't have that feedback. But it can also go the other direction, you know, that you it's useful. helps you control yourself.

I see a lot of that people when they are blinded, push harder.

Yeah. You know, does it work? they, they do better or do they just shortly do better and then fall apart?

No, I think they keep consistently higher power than when they see their feedback.

Right. Okay. So it, it untethers a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it just more fascination with that mind body interaction. You know, Paul was trained the same way I was trained the same way, Steve Ingham, many people I know around and what I find, and I think Paul would agree is that we, the physiology types, we tend to become hobby psychologists as we get older.

⁓ It's interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know,

we, start to realize, you know what? The brain does matter. We can't just think of the, you know, the athlete is, is cut off the head and that would, everything would be great. You know, no, they're connected and, and, ⁓ it's, it's much more fascinating than, maybe we were taught. I think training and physiology, when you say.

the psychobiology or the psychophysiology of the training process. That's a much more interesting and exciting way of looking at it.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, couldn't agree more actually makes me think ⁓ Stephen of our latest, our latest paper and this is where Athletica really starts to becoming a, you know, a field laboratory and analysis tool and the most recent ⁓ sports science 3.0 paper that we've done with Andrea Zignoli is ⁓ is really looking at sentiment analysis. So basically where it's analyzing we've got had over ⁓

Yeah.

you know, ⁓ think 55,000 entries in terms of the data points on this whole analysis. it's, we're actually able to take the athletes comments that they're leaving for the AI feedback. And we're actually detecting a new strain marker. And it's in the words and the language that an athlete actually uses. So we can now, and we've published this in SPSR and

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's basically, we've got a new internal strain measure, I guess. It's kind of like HRV. It's like, when you're expressing your comments ⁓ in Athletica, well, you can see when you use bad, or sentiment words that are negative as opposed to joyful, right? And it's fascinating. this is going to be in a future version of the coach version.

this will be a new internal strain marker that is accessible for coaches. So they can know when their athlete is expressing ⁓ generally negative sentiments. So yeah, it's kind of cool.

Right. Well,

I almost have to tell you a little story. If you're a Tour de France fan, ⁓ you may have heard of a Norwegian athlete named Jonas Abrahamsen. He won a stage. did a 200 kilometer break this year and ⁓ managed to hold out and win the first stage. And was the first Tour de France stage that the Uno X team has won.

The reason I mentioned him is because two years ago, when we first started using this data hub that John Peters developed with Uno X and now Visma has their own version. That was one of the things, one of the types of data that was in the hub was the, was reports from the DS, but also after reports from the athlete after stages and saying, how do I feel? How did it go? And so forth. And this kid, know, Jonas, we were just astounded because

Every, every stage, it just didn't matter. He was so positive. He was just my legs are, I got diamonds in my legs. You know, he just had this enthusiasm and I thought, man, that guy, it's something good is going to happen with this guy. And, and he is, he was, he is just this amazing positive force and you see it in the words he uses. But there was one time point.

Yes.

you know, a year or so ago where he even he said, you know what, I'm tired. And I thought, man, those coaches need to really zero in on that because if Jonas says he's tired, he's exhausted because he doesn't, he's so positive. So you have his baseline, you know, his normal sentiment. If he deflects downward even a little bit,

That's means a lot with Jonas. Now with other athletes, it might not because they complain a little bit more. You know what saying? So you have to know how your athlete uses words, how they speak, what's their vocabulary, what do they put into the term? I'm tired or what do they put into the term? Heavy legs and so forth. it's a, you know, it, again, it's individual, but, yeah, the sentiment I think is a fantastic tool. And that's where large language models and

you know, some of these tools that we have with AI can really do a nice job. ⁓ it's that data is there in the background waiting for us to use properly ⁓ if we're getting those reports.

That's right.

Yeah,

and that's exactly to your point. We're taking basically a page out of Dan Plews, Martin Buchheit Marco Altini's HRV classic analyses where we're doing ⁓ a 60-day normal and then looking at the seven-day rolling relative to the 60-day normal. on the sentiment, exactly the same analysis but used in a different way from the words. yeah, again, it's all published. We'll include a link.

Right. ⁓ really? On cinema, you're

cool.

in the show notes, but because again, Athletica, we try to be as transparent as we can. show the science that we're using and yeah, we've done that there as well. yeah, it's, I love it. I love how the evolution of exercise physiology and science and sports science is just continuing with this, this, you know, this tech add-on and the wearable add-ons. It's so exciting.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

As a female athlete and coach for many female athletes, I want to throw in the sentiment analysis to tie it into their menstrual cycle because you might find something super interesting. ⁓ Luteal phase. I'm a little more cranky. I sleep a little worse. And I know other people who do that too.

Yeah, and HRV too fits in with that too. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Super, super interesting. Just throwing a challenge in there.

course.

And, and, and I have to say we, published, ⁓ some work, Sonbalk and, and, ⁓ Thomas Haugen, Espen Tonneson and myself around this issue where they did some beautiful interviews with world-class coaches, and, and

they were asked where their systematic differences in coaching women versus men, where their systematic differences in what the women tolerated a volume versus the men, you know, because of the menstrual cycle or because of whatever. the basic feedback from the coaches was they said, well, any differences that we see are the individual differences are

They far outweigh any systematic differences that we can ascribe to sex, to male versus female. And I thought that was such a good summary is to say, again, that we have to be really careful when we start. It's important that we talk about the menstrual cycle and that we are sensitive to it, but we don't want to make the mistake of saying that everybody is going to respond in a similar fashion, that every female is going to have this pattern.

It's not the case. ⁓ Some athletes are barely, they don't even, they barely notice it from a training standpoint. Others are affected tremendously. ⁓ So, so once again, ⁓ we generalizations are really dangerous.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Seller, we just have a few minutes left and looking ahead, what do you think the next frontier in breathing focused performance science, I what's coming next? Are we heading towards these kind of personalized breathing biometrics like how we use HRV or power profiles today?

Yeah, I mean, I don't want to oversell any particular variable because I think that's been one of the places where we make mistakes. I think the best way to think about training monitoring is to think of triangulation. mean, you know, that triangulation is a powerful tool in many areas. It helps us know where we are with triangulation and what are the three points in the triangle. One is just measuring what we're actually doing accurately. And we have great tools for that. Power meters and

good GNSS, GS, know, GPS types of tools. We, we have some physiology we can get at. We've got lactate, we've got heart rate, and now breathing comes in as maybe a new tool there that's going to be very accessible in a way that it never has been before. And then we have perception. We have sentiment, we have RPE, we have some tools that are both acute and chronic around just how is

What is this beautiful brain of ours? What is it telling me about how my body is responding? How I feel today and so forth and really listening to it and you in being sensitive to it so though that's the triangulation and I think it doesn't mean we have to measure all three of those every day, but on average we're using all three To get a picture. So breathing comes into that package as a potential improvement

Yes.

On one of those points in the triangle, if that makes sense. So I don't want to overplay it, but I do think it can be useful. ⁓ and, and, and we have to put it in that perspective that that's what we're trying to provide the athlete is a kind of a, and the coach is a heads up display. Like, ⁓ you know, I talk about pilots, you know, flying at the two times the speed of sound or whatever they're flying at, you know, and they have to, they, they need to be able to keep their head up.

on the horizon. If they're looking at all the instrumentation, the risk is they're going to fly into a mountain. So we want to be able to give them just the key information they need. Well, what do they do? Well, they put it in a heads up display so that they keep their eyes up, but they still can see the gas gauge and they still can see their elevation. They have the minimum number of variables that give them a good picture of where they are. That's really what we're trying to do with Athletica, with

monitoring with these different tools. And we don't want to use more variables than we need because that tends to create confusion. So what is the fewest number of variables that give you a good oversight of where am I from day to day? And it can be some AI as a tool. It can be breathing. It can be heart rate. can be just being tuned in to perception. know, find your help. Let's help each other find that.

set of tools and it'll be a little bit different for different people and maybe different sports.

And Stephen, one of the key themes in the podcast really kind of came down to at least the answer was all around the individual. So can you speak to that common thread and to that common athlete? What lens should they take on their own journey to make themselves better in the future?

I guess I would want to say most of the people that are listening to this probably should give themselves a pat on the back more often.

and say, hey, you're doing a great job because you have a real job. You have children, you have a house, you have a partner, you have life to work with, and you're still training for an Ironman and you're making it all work. But give yourself a break sometimes. You know, I think that's, I know that is about the wishy-washiest answer you can get from a physiologist, but

you

Thank ⁓

I find that it's amazing because most of the people who are listening to you, they are overachievers, right? They they're trying to get the most out of every day. So it's not an issue. There's almost never a question that you're having to kick them in the butt and say, Hey, come on, work harder. You know, that's not the problem. It's almost always saying, Hey, listen, do you think you need a day off? If you are even having the thought.

you

then you need a day off because your brain doesn't usually even consider that possibility.

you know, so if that's what I need to do and you need to do as a coach to give people, you know, confirmation that yes, you are allowed to take a day off. It's good for you. You'll get some stuff done. You'll be a good mom for your kids and you'll be able to pay some bills on the internet and you're letting your body recover. It's a win-win, you know? So that would be my take home message is don't be afraid to...

to give yourself a break, folks. You're all great. You're all overachievers. So don't let that, don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

hehe

Wow.

⁓ Such an awesome way to wrap up the

podcast. Don't you think, MJ? I think he's speaking to you now.

I feel like I can reflect on that for

That was a mic drop. But it made me reflect on my son who is 14. He

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, mic drop. Dr. Sila, go ahead.

turned. You know what happens to athletes 14, 15. They just turn it on and they can't turn it off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I've witnessed it that this summer he's been training like crazy. And yesterday he was a little bit in a slump. he pushed through, which he needs to learn too. But at the same time, you like you're risking always that injury, right? So I'm there like, no, I think this is enough. Like you look a little lethargic and you don't have your usual energy.

Maybe we'll just walk home and, but he just like, no, I'm going to finish this and I'm to do this. And he did, but that's is a good time for young athletes to learn to listen to that. But I have to say, I'm not a very good role model because I also pushed through So it's a learning. It's a

Well,

I want you to give your son some homework. It'll take one hour and 46 minutes, but I want you to have him listen to ⁓ a YouTube video. was me interviewing, ⁓ Nils van der Poel two time world record holder, two time gold medalist in speed skating. That interview and his journey as a young athlete and disillusionment with becoming a junior world champion and feeling he'd missed out on a lot of life.

Mmm.

And reorienting himself and training on his, on his premises, you know, his to, to make it sustainable. Uh, have your 14 year old listen to that talk because I found that Neils is one of the most amazing reflective, you know, really tuned into himself. Uh, so, so that might, you know, he might find that to be interesting and he's at 14. sounds like he's.

tuned in enough and he's focused enough that he would understand what's going on when he listens to the interview.

Thank you

Yeah, and that's on YouTube, isn't it, Stephen? And I think

we can include that link in the show notes. That'll be fantastic. I've seen that one. I might re-watch that one myself.

Yeah, it is.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

amazing.

Amazing. Appreciate it.

Holy.

Well,

Dr. Seiler, thank you so much.

Yeah, this was fun. I'm sorry that I gave the same answer every time. It depends, but I hope I contextualized it a little bit. ⁓

Amazing, Stephen.

you

You did, you did.

You did.

It was awesome. It was so good. So good, Stephen. Thank you. Can't thank you enough for everything you give to the field we're all so passionate ⁓ about. yeah, it's ⁓ just an honor and a privilege for you to have you here on the podcast. So thank you, Stephen.

Amazing job.

it's an honor for me to work with people like you. You're all, we all want the same thing, I think. So we want to help people get better and do it in a healthy way. Take care guys.

Fantastic.

Thank you for listening today to the Athletes Compass podcast. Take a moment now, subscribe, share, and let's keep navigating this endurance adventure together. Improve your training with the science-based training platform, Athletica, and join the conversation at the Athletica Forum. For Dr. Stephen Seiler, Marjaana Rakai, and Dr. Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening.