Mastering the Basics: Mikael Eriksson’s Endurance Coaching Essentials

if you can't commit to sleeping eight hours a night, then you shouldn't want to train X hours a week because it's just too much for the amount that you're sleeping basically.

hundred episodes with millions of downloads. Today, we're going to be digging into some of his knowledge over all those podcasts and learning the top lessons Mikael has gleaned out across nearly a decade as a coach and weekly podcast host. With insights drawn from hundreds of interviews with coaches and sports scientists, as well as hands-on experience working with both age group and elite athletes, Mikael has learned a lot about triathlon training.

So we are going to be asking him about to share, his training lessons that have stood the test of time and shaped the way he coaches. Mikael, welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast.

Yeah, thank you, Paul. Thank you for the intro and thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, well, we're really happy that you're here. And I'm really excited to learn from you today. let's break down the top 5 lessons that you feel you've learned over the years. And we'll discuss each of them in order.

How do you want to start?

⁓ Yeah, I can start with one that I think Paul, the other Paul will recognize and that is that there's more than one way to skin a cat. Obviously with having talked to lot of coaches and other people, you start to see that there are some people that do things in complete different ways, but they still achieve great results in their different ways.

So I guess that a strong learning has been that you have to be quite humble about the fact that there's not one right way you can achieve the same results in many different ways. that's also, think, quite an encouraging and positive lesson to have because it makes you not feel like you have to, you don't have to promote yourself as a coach as coming with a specific

coaching strategy or coaching approach, is how you approach it. You're just a coach and you can try different things. Or that's how I view it anyway. So I don't think that when people think about what is Mikael Eriksson's coaching approach, I don't think that people would say that I'm this kind of coach or that kind of coach because I'm pretty agnostic to the method, but just trying to...

to get to know the athlete well and apply the right strategy for the right athlete. And then if things don't work, I'm happy enough to scratch that strategy and try a different one.

So can I double tap on that one, Mikael? So with that sort of philosophy, which I really appreciate, how do you still go about your art as being a coach to find that way that you're going to skin the cat with that athlete? Where do you sort of start when you meet an athlete for the first time?

Yeah, I start with, which I think a lot of coaches do, just a questionnaire. So you get a lot of information from that. And then you follow that up with a call and you start to get a feel for the athlete. Where are their strengths? Where are their weaknesses? Try to get a feel for that in a triathlon context, of course, swimming, biking and running. What are strengths and weaknesses there? But also physiologically speaking, are they more of a...

fast twitch dominant athlete or slow twitch or hybrid type athlete. Those are some, I guess, high level variables that I would pay a lot of attention to. And that would maybe bring me closer to what the starting point that I will use. Of course, their training history, what is the training volume they've been doing? What is the training intensity they've been doing? Nowadays, most athletes come with a lot of data. You can do some very

very simple power profiling and get a lot of information out of just power profiling, especially on the bike, but also speed profiling running wise. I think those are, those are some of the really some of the main things, but a lot of it I want to emphasize comes from those first conversations with the athletes and then just asking questions like where are they, where do they perceive that they're strong? What do they perceive as their weaknesses in their best races?

What are the things that went really well when they have failed to achieve certain goals? What are the things that went wrong? You can learn lot from those sorts of questions.

Is that something that's evolved over time for you?

Do you?

⁓ That is a good question. I haven't even thought about that. I don't think it has changed too much. I've never been really committed to this is the one way or the couple of ways that I coach. I've always been quite or very open-minded in that way, I guess I would say. So no, perhaps that's not something I would actually say that no, it hasn't evolved so much.

So you mentioned that at some point you might have to change your strategy of coaching. What are some of the indicators that this is not working for this athlete? Can you give us an example where you took a 180 turn?

Yeah, well, if you do some kind of formal testing, let's say you do a critical power test and I wouldn't necessarily use one test result to do a 180, but let's say you followed that up with another test or just another couple of weeks of key work, it's not really going so well. You start to see the, I guess the red, the yellow flags. No, if not red flags that maybe you should

try to change something. Same thing with race results. Again, one bad race is not designed that you should turn everything upside down, but when you combine that with maybe the training not having gone so well as you expected, or you have a couple of races that don't go so well, and the athletes feedback that they're not feeling that they're getting stronger. Sometimes an athlete feel that they're really getting stronger and they can have a couple, two, three, four,

races where they don't really achieve that performance that they think is in there, that I think is in there. And in those situations, I would quite often stay the course if the athlete really feels that it's working and I don't see any big yellow or red flags in training, and then you can have a breakthrough performance the next race. So I think it's a combination of factors. And I think you need a bit more than just one single instance of a test or a race or

a couple of workouts not going so well. yeah, it's a lot of it is something you can see in objective data from testing and racing are pretty easy because those are all out efforts. So it's easier to judge than submaximal work that you do in training. But if you have enough of a few weeks of training and you see that it seems to be definitely seems to be underperforming compared to where they should be then

You can definitely with the additional data points that you have from several weeks of several key workouts not going so well, you can also start to draw conclusions from that even though it's not maximal work. yeah, objective data combined with some subjective feedback. think that those are the key things to look at.

All right, so the first one is that there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's lots of ways to reach a certain goal. That's lesson number one. What's lesson number two?

Yeah. Lesson number two is, I'm a big believer in the biopsychosocial model of performance. not getting just too blinkered, too focused on just the physiology, just the power, the pace, et cetera. Actually more recently in the last year or so, I have even started to learn about

I guess, extending the biopsychosocial model of performance to more overall athletes as complex dynamic systems when it comes to how athletes adapt to training. but I would say that the biopsychosocial model of performance still is, I guess, more approachable, more easy to understand, and it falls nicely under the bigger umbrella of complex dynamic systems. So, yeah, that's one point, but basically what that implies is that

When you try to improve in an endurance sport, improve as an athlete, then you can't just look at the biological systems. You can't just look at VO2 max, your threshold, whatever metrics you're looking at, and completely disregard the psychological side of things, or even the social side of things. I would like to extend the biopsychosocial

model of performance to bio psychosocial environmental model of performance, because I think the environment is really important there. So that's something that I would also really consider environment there, meaning, of course, like where you train, but ⁓ it can also be, you know, more not abstract, but more indirectly related to the environment. So are you training with others? Are you always training alone? Are you training?

outdoors on the bike or training indoors on the bike, a number of factors come into that. looking at all of those factors, basically, it's just about having a more holistic perspective on the training that you're doing. And I think that that's really important for how the athlete adapts.

Yeah, couldn't agree more. I've changed my training environment a few times and you can't perform or train in a vacuum without taking the environment into account. So, yeah, thumbs up for that.

Yeah. So could you?

Can you give us some examples of how that's played out with your coaching and with what you've learned?

I think one example that comes up quite a lot is some athletes really don't do well if they don't do quite regular sessions with others. So you have to, as a coach, facilitate that. That's not every athlete, but many athletes or not all. Yeah, I don't know if it's 50-50, but so I wouldn't also say that it's necessarily the majority, but a fair number of athletes.

fall into that category where you have to facilitate. sometimes even the athlete might not even be aware of that that's something that they're missing because they're also very ambitious. And they think that maybe just strictly following the coaches program is the way to go. But then you as a coach, maybe have to step in and say that actually, think that you're, you know, you're missing an element here that, that you used to have, and that is important to you. And that is that swim squad that you used to swim with, or that training partner that you used to go out with for

some certain run sessions or bike sessions. so that's, would say the most common example. But then of course you have in terms of the pure psychology of things that comes up in so many different ways with athletes going through some rough time. It might be job changes, family changes, ⁓ breakup, all of those sorts of things really in a great, in a big way impact training and the ability to adapt to training.

So you have to be really aware of that and change things because if you just carry on with your, let's say, biological training strategy, just applying a stress and hoping that that stress will result in a linear response, then that's inevitably going to fail. So the psychological side of plays out basically every day. Every day there's at least one athlete where you have to in some way account for that, I would say.

So, Mikael, as an online coach, mostly, I'm assuming, how do you try to enact that bio-psycho-social environmental model within your coaching practice?

Yeah, of course, it's a bit more challenging than when you're with the athlete in the same place, there's no doubt. But it's just about trying to have an ongoing good level of communication with the athlete, get to know the athlete, get to know their environment and build a relationship where even if you're mostly talking about training, but the athlete is also comfortable about

talking about these things with you, like saying to you if they're going through a rough time. And it's not always easy. Some athletes, it's very easy. Other athletes, it's not that easy. They're a bit more closed. so those tend to be more challenging and you as a coach have to try to, try to work out. don't, can't say that I have any great tricks other than encouraging the athlete that, yeah, tell me what's going on in your life. Is everything okay? Asking questions, but without being too...

You're not being too probing so that it feels like you're invading on their privacy, of course. So you have to find a balance there and that's going to be different from athlete to athlete. having regular calls, it's easy to have online calls, of course. Having regular text-based communication and adapting that to what works for the athletes. Some athletes prefer to have less frequent calls and more keeping in touch with text-based communication. And that's...

That's fine with me. I do personally prefer to have somewhat regular calls because I think you get a bit more out of that. But yeah, you have to be a bit adaptable with that as well, I think. yeah, think communication is the number one thing there that you can do. then that way, it's not easy necessarily, but it's very doable to enact that model.

So the biopsychosocial model of performance is your second lesson. What is your third?

It's to try to be a world champion at doing the basics really, really well. So I think that that's basically, and I'm guilty of this getting excited about new training interventions or new tech, et cetera. sometimes, and that it's not to say that those things are not good and cannot be important improvements. The problem is that so many athletes

leave, most athletes leave so much on the table still in terms of the basics and even very experienced athletes do that. So I think that it's just a matter of, you you don't have the resources, time, energy, financial resources, all of that to do all of the things that you could be doing. And what ends up having the best return on investment for pretty much everybody, unless you're already at the very top is to

try to keep improving at doing the basics better because there's almost certainly going to be something and the basics being things like, yeah, executing your sessions well, going hard enough where it's supposed to go hard, going easy enough where it's supposed to go easy, executing the intent of the session, but also being flexible enough when one day is when you're not feeling it, so not being a robot, just a slave to the program.

Examples of basic things are course recovery. So focusing on sleep, nutrition, hydration, rest, or having recovery as integrated into the training program as well. So that falls on the coach as well as the athlete. The stimulus and the recovery is what leads to the adaptation. So you can't have just one and expect to get better. You have to have both.

Yeah, nutrition, hydration in training, race execution, executing well in the race, learning how to pace well, all of those sorts of things. think those are some of the key things and that would come way before you start to think about key training protocols, altitude training, all of those important things, but that, you know, until you reach a certain level,

probably not as worthwhile to pursue.

What would you say is the first thing to be dropped off those, you know, basics?

the basics.

⁓ it's for sure. would say sleep. Yeah. Sleep is the one.

Hmm.

So this is something that I've said recently to some athletes that if you can't commit to sleeping eight hours a night, then you shouldn't want to train X hours a week because it's just too much for the amount that you're sleeping basically.

Hmm.

So do you have an opinion in terms of the basics of keeping your hard days easy, hard days hard and easy days easy? Do you have an opinion about how you structure those? Like how many hard days a week do you go? How many easy days? Those kind of things.

Yeah, it does vary, I do as a, guess, for reasonably experienced athletes that have a decent level of fitness already, a model that I find quite good is the 1-3-1-2 model. So one deload day, three load days, one deload day, two load days. Load days doesn't necessarily mean that the days have intensity. They might have, or they might not have, but it means that relatively speaking.

those days are higher load. So it could be long longer days or it could be intense days or it could be both. But that's a system that I use quite a bit. Not for every athlete, but it's something that I come back to quite often.

Matches with Athletica, hmm Paul.

Yep, that's a good model, absolutely.

Yeah, that's kind of what Athletica is all about,

With some,

yeah, I've also, I also actually had some, some pretty good success with, with pro athletes with a one three one three. So just going on one D-load day followed by three load days. I think that can work when you, in that context, when your, your job is to train because then you can, you have more time to recover on that D-load day from the three harder days and

So you get slightly less recovery relative to the load, but then again, it is your job. So you're fitter as well. So that's another model that I've used, but yeah, for most amateur athletes, one three, one two is my standard, my go-to.

Totally.

Excellent. All right. So we've had more than one way to skin a cat. two is biopsychosocial model of performance. Number three is being a world champion at doing the basics really well. Number four.

Yeah. Number four, and this is not a training lesson that athletes can take away, but it's a lesson for, it's been a lesson for me as a coach. And, it's that as a coach being a great communicator, being good at listening and being empathetic, that's as important, if not more important than most of the things that probably first comes to mind for most people when they think about things that a coach should do. for example,

having a good knowledge of physiology, sports science, having a coach's eye, of those kinds of things. But those communication and soft skills in general, I think are actually so important. And it's something that just as you have to work on improving your craft with learning more about physiology, learning more about training science, et cetera, you also have to work on those.

social skills and soft skills to improve as a coach, think, because that can at some point be a bottleneck. Otherwise it can be that your limiter as a coach from growing and developing further.

Yeah, we couldn't agree more. And again, it's why we're placing an emphasis also on developing our coach platform. Because again, we agree that all the tools and physiology and monitoring is all great, but we need coaches with those important soft skills and communication skills who listen well, who make important observations, which is key. love that fourth point, Mikael.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I've been thinking, you know, when you started talking about the biopsychosocial model, I started thinking of some of the, both junior and adult athletes that I coach and how much their daily mental health and daily.

emotional capacity to do the work changes based on whatever else is going on in their lives. And it's my job as their coach to listen and to really get at their motivation and to get at what it is that's driving them. And, you know, do they have the motivation to go out and do a hard ride today? Or is it better just to go take a walk and, you know, to be empathetic with them and to be a listener?

Because I don't have all the answers, obviously. And I've got to be able to reflect back to them what I'm hearing from them.

Is that something that, yeah, that something like you're part of your experience as well?

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, I think that the counter argument to that is that, and this is something I think especially, I don't know if any of you are into team sports or something. I grew up playing soccer and that's something I still follow to some extent, less so, but the culture among soccer fans is that the coach's job is to use the hairdryer method, which is basically you go in at halftime, your team is down.

And the coach just screams at the players to get them motivated. That's what team sports fans often think that a coach should be doing. And I think that, I guess maybe there are some cultures in endurance sports where that is still also the case. I've definitely heard of those stories, but I think it's definitely less common for people to think like this in endurance sports. anyway, my point with that is that if you have ⁓ your athlete comes to you on that day with a lower...

Okay.

lower capacity to do work. If you try to be that, you know, hard ass coach that you see yourself as the person to make the athlete, it's all about how much you want it. You just go out and do it now, do the work. That's what it's all about. You might get the athlete to do it that one time, but I think in the long run, you're probably just reducing motivation and increasing chances that the athlete is not going to.

be able to consistently train and do good work. Whereas if you take that more empathetic standpoint, then you might still get a sort of medium good training out of the athlete on that day. You shorten things a bit. I think that the long run result of that is probably that the athlete is going to feel more bought into the process. They're going to have more motivation in the long run and they're going to do more work in the long run. Even if maybe in the short run.

did less work than they would have done if you used that hairdryer method. So, yeah, I actually can't remember anymore what the question was, but I think that that's what I was thinking about when you were talking about how you deal with your athletes in that way. I think it is the right way to do it. And it's not just because it's the kind of nicer response in terms of just generally how we accept

a nice person should behave. But I think actually even from a coaching perspective, when you think at it from a longer term perspective, I think that you get more buy-in, you get more work over the long term by doing that. by being more, yeah, but not being the strict hardest coach in the short term.

you

I think as a coach, helping and supporting the athlete to find the small wins. some days the small win is to go for a walk or go for a swim instead of a hard bike ride. Or maybe it's just to take a day off. Dr. Steven Seiler just told us yesterday to be more graceful to yourself.

Hmm. ⁓

you ⁓

and take a day off every once in a while. So maybe that's one of the small wins that we can help the athlete to focus on.

Absolutely.

Yep. And I'm also reflecting further. I've finally captured the memory in my brain, Mikael, and it was a quote from Dan Vaff, who's a famous running coach, short distance running coach. And he's tweeted before, he says that, the most important monitoring tool is a coach that pays attention. And that's ultimately, you know, what you've just described here

Hmm.

Absolutely.

All right, and what is your fifth lesson?

Yeah, the fifth one is have restraint and don't chase shiny objects. So, and that is a bit, guess, a little bit of a cheeky answer to the original question ⁓ that you asked because it was the, or it was at least related to a bit lessons that I've learned from all of these interviews and things.

But guess, one of those things is not necessarily something that anybody, it's not something that anybody told me, but just I learned through trial and error that I don't think that you shouldn't hear something or read something and just immediately commit to doing that. You can commit to small experiments, but within reason, with some thought about what are the success criteria for the experiment if you want to do it.

But I kind of set the rule for myself that when I hear or read something, if I find it interesting and I want to try it, I write it down and I go back and revisit this regularly. And I put a date to the thing that I write down and I have to let 30 days pass before I actually implement things. And if I still think that it's a good idea after 30 days, it passes a bit more of that kind of initial gratification.

test that you could get otherwise, that when you first hear of something or read of something, you think that, well, that's the greatest thing I've heard in a long, time. But when you let some time pass, I think you see it with a slightly different perspective, or you might at least, you have a bit more restraint and a little bit more maturity to make a more objective decision on whether it makes sense to implement something or change something. And this will save you time. It will make you more consistent in the long run.

because you're staying the course when necessary, you're making changes and doing experiments when they make sense to do. when you really have a objectively, have, you think that you have a good reason for doing that. It makes sense to do it. And you've thought about it more thoroughly than starting to jumping into something right away.

Yeah, I love that. It of almost comes back to your point three around doing the basics really well first. If you're doing the basics really well first, you just need the key things that you're able to, that was the old adage, you measure what matters, right? just say it's your external load, like your power and your pace profiles, and then maybe an internal load marker, like your heart rate, and you're getting those.

Yeah.

just a real simple, they're measuring your consistency. You're doing the base, you're able to kind of get in some sort of a measure of your ⁓ polarization or whatnot, how much hard work you're doing, how much easier work you're doing. And then I think almost for me, the first thing I thought was maybe reflecting 20 years ago, the shiny object might've been a field that I've been involved with and that's developing the area of heart rate variability, right? And 20 years ago,

That would have been an extra step that is almost like, well, okay, maybe there's something there. But at that point, 20 years ago, it's just a shiny object, right? And it's up to us scientists to go in there and make these tweaks and detect these sorts of things.

It's not to say these shiny objects don't become something and become a helper of us doing the basics later. But maybe at that point, it's not the big rock that you need to of look at. But I would say now today, heart rate variability is so easily non-invasively monitored. If you're wearing your, for us, if you're wearing your whoop strap or your aura ring or your Garmin device or whatever,

and you're measuring that nocturnally, it's a real simple marker of your sort of, your strain level, because you're just measuring that at night. It's just kind of invisibly monitoring what your strain status is. And then it's now all of a sudden become doing, you're getting insight into doing point three, doing the basics right, because it's like, oh, I'm sleeping well, I'm recovering well, all these sorts of things or not.

So our long-winded answer there just to kind of agree is like, don't chase the shiny objects until you're doing the basics, number 0.3 really, really right. And it's not to say they won't become part of the basics later on, but they might just be a shiny object.

Yeah, and one follow-up on that is that today, if you measure heart rate variability, not only is it easy, but you have a lot of information out there. And you have best practices out there, so to say, which makes it quite easy for you to implement. Whereas today, if you start to implement the timeware and the respiration, you don't really know what you're looking at. You have to spend so much time

to figure out what are you looking at? How do you actually use it? How do you get something out of it? Is all of that time really even, because at best you're hoping to get a marginal gain out of that, but you're spending an un-proportional amount of time and effort on that where I guess this is something that I think and I've come to think in more recent years to.

I don't really want to be an early adopter. I'm fine with being a medium adopter. And then some other people do the heavy lifting and figure out how things work. then I can really keep focusing on the things that I know work and that I know have a return on investment, the basics. And then when there is a bit more information about something, whether it be HRV or respiration, then I can come in and start using it.

you

Just from my perspective, that makes sense as a return on investment perspective.

All right, so we have our five lessons and, you know, Mikael, we had some additional questions as well. We wanted to kind of get a sense from you. What are some ideas that you have changed your mind about over the years? What are some things that you maybe once thought this and now you're thinking this and because of your coaching, because of your guests on your show?

Yeah, this was a pretty hard one. Most of these things are maybe not so much like a 180 turn, but definitely going from, let's say neutral to one side or going from one side to neutral, something like that. So the first one that I could think of was that now I have a much more conscious focus on recovery and on the adaptation process rather than just...

putting the training first and then recovery is almost an afterthought. So that's definitely something that I would say has changed. Not that I didn't think that recovery was important, but you can say that recovery is important, but it's not necessarily implemented with top priority the way it should be. So that's something that I've changed in my practice.

Okay. What else? So recovery is one thing. Is there other other things that you've thought about that are things that you have learned something directly and have changed?

Yeah, I think this is almost more from not from when I was starting to, not from since I've been coaching, but almost since I was starting to do endurance sports. And I almost didn't think about it because it feels like it's been such a long time, but I certainly did. When I thought about it a bit more, I definitely did fall into that thinking of ⁓ lighter is faster.

And again, it goes back quite some time to when I was an athlete. Um, it probably still subconsciously seeped into my early years as a coach as well, even though I never encouraged people to lose weight or anything like that. But I also didn't really pay attention to or realize the, that actually for a lot of athletes now, the problem is that they're a bit too light. Yeah. This is something that I come across quite a lot. Definitely. If we're talking about.

Hmm.

triathletes, cyclists, depending on the focus, not climbers, but time trialists or classics riders, then you see that happen quite a lot with athletes being too light. so actually this is something that I would say that, yeah, has come around quite a bit from when I was first starting to run and from the early years of my running and then triathlon myself.

What made you change your mind?

Yeah, there's not just one situation, but just, I guess, of anecdata accumulated over the years with people gaining weight and performing better. Especially, when you have athletes that are already relatively lean, it doesn't mean that they're

skeletal, but you if you can see athletes that have, that do have weight to lose, and I'm not saying that they should put on more weight consciously. That's not what I'm saying. But, but I think you have a segment of athletes in the endurance sports that, that you could look at them and see that they have a classic endurance athlete build, but actually in reality, they might perform better with, with a few more kgs on them. So yeah, lots of anecdotal data, both with athletes that I coach myself.

with myself personally and with just stories that you see and hear from other coaches or even out there in the media world.

Mm-hmm.

So that's cool. And I just echo those two key points. You might have some others, Mikael, but that's,

Hmm.

I would say I've had the same sort of revelation in the last decade or two as well. Just, the priority of recovery and just, yeah, just how that's, you it used to always be about the training stress, but again, there's that, you know, training, you know, the whole training equation is training plus recovery, you know, equals the adaptation.

And yeah, and sleep is usually the key tool to get that recovery. And then I've also seen the same thing, especially with females on the lighter is faster philosophy. No, it's not.

You want for whatever reason, adding fuel to the, like adding calories at the end of the day is just so important for the adaptation. The weight seems to just kind of come off naturally as a function of that increased training load ultimately. But it's like, you've got to be fueling that whole recovery process too, right?

And yeah, and you should not be stepping on the scale to try to find a lighter version of yourself. That's probably not what you want to be focusing on at all is what I've learned. back to the female, it's the females would come to me and they would have this old kind of almost the hairdryer coach in the past that

would almost emphasize the importance of that reduced weight. The menstrual cycle would be evidence of the menstrual cycle being active would be lost. And the thing that is usually coupled is the increase in the calories, the quality of the diet and the return of the menstrual cycle is usually the scenario that winds up happening with great improved happiness and great success. So yeah.

So.

Anecdotally, I agree with your second comment, Mikael.

Yeah. And to

one of the things you said there, you said that sometimes the weight comes off naturally. I guess I could clarify even that point to sometimes, yes, you think that a person is maybe a bit too light. need to fuel more. But as you say, it's about the fueling. What happens with the weight is less important. And what might happen is that you gain lean muscle mass. You might actually lose some body fat even. Your weight stays the same, but...

but you gain muscle mass and you're stronger, you perform better. yeah, it's even less to an extent about the weight and more about just the fueling properly.

Mm-hmm.

the body composition for sure. The body composition changes and you want to feel the active mass and that's the muscle, right? So if the muscle is not able to get the energy that it needs, yeah, you're going to be in trouble and your brain is going to be sort of screaming and the whole hormonal system is going to be messed up. Yeah, that's the classic overtraining syndrome, unhealthy athlete. Phil Maftone tells us about.

Very good.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Mikael, if you had to pick one change in endurance sport that's made the biggest impact across your coaching practice, what would it be?

I would say that it's the proliferation of power meters because it just has made cycling training so much more specific, so much easier to monitor, so much easier to track adaptation and prescribed training even. So yeah, that is the one for sure.

⁓

What's your favorite power meter to go to? Like when an athlete comes to you and they don't have power, like brand new athlete, but they want to do this. Can I get your recommendation?

Yeah.

Yeah.

For me, it's the Favero Assioma. It's an Italian brand. It's very popular now. They have the single sided and dual sided. I haven't checked the prices recently, but it used to be probably the cheapest on the market, but it's very high quality, very accurate, very reliable, super easy to swap between bikes, which I think is an important, it's a pedal based system. And I think that that's a good thing in most situations because then if an athlete has a road bike and a TT bike, they can always use the same.

power meter on both bikes and it takes one minute to swap it over. ⁓ that's my recommendation. And ⁓ I, yeah, yeah.

Nice.

I love it. You didn't even hesitate. That was cool. ⁓ We'll include

Hmm.

that link in the show notes. That's awesome.

What about innovations and tools?

⁓

innovations and tools. I think that AI has the potential to be it, to be honest. I can't say that it for me has played out just yet, but I think it has the potential to be it. One thing that, something that has actually changed. I mean, it comes, maybe it comes back a little bit to that body weight discussion, the fueling discussion. Yeah. ⁓

higher fueling, I think that that has been a big change. It has definitely impacted my coaching practice. And yeah, so I think that that's a second place for her perhaps.

So you mentioned AI. Obviously, we have an interest in that ourselves with the podcast and the business. How are you using AI in general right now in your own practice?

Yeah, I'm using it for a lot of like research tasks and things like that. It's, know, summarizing research papers, all of those sorts of things, compiling multiple, multiple research papers into, you know, summarized PDFs, that sort of thing. Less so in terms of the direct coaching, if that makes sense. That's not something that I really do at the moment.

Yeah, so a lot of day-to-day tasks, it's like constantly running, but it hasn't really yet come into the, haven't really, yeah, in the full coaching yet. I'm still on training peaks. So yeah, I'm definitely always trying to learn more and look for use cases and applications. So, but yeah, I think a lot of research and reducing busy work to have more time for.

for the actual coaching. So basically doing more of the coaching myself because I can reduce the amount of like the time I spend on the busy work that I used to be doing. That's a big change already.

Yeah, it's moving so fast. It's crazy. So yeah, I agree. We'll watch this space.

good. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate your presence and thank you for your work.

Thank you so much. It's always good to hear and yeah, thank you for your work.

All right. 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 Mikael Erickson, Mariana Rakai, and Dr. Paul Laursen I am Paul Wurlowski, and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening.