Rewriting the Training Rulebook: Lessons from Dr. Phil Maffetone

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. We just finished a episode with Dr. Phil

and there's just so much rolling around our brains that we wanted to do an episode where we simply reflect on some of the things that we've learned, some of the things that we were thinking about. So,

Paul and Marjaana why don't you guys start? What are some of the things that stuck out with you? What are some of your reactions?

Well, first of all, just, you know, always a pleasure to speak to Phil. And he's just so, you know, I love, I don't know, am probably, you know, wisdom is the first word that kind of pops into, into my head. Right. So like Phil has been around the traps in this whole area of, know, creating healthy athletes for all, you know, all his life. And the other thing, you know, he's really, he's been the

black sheep ⁓ for a long time on this as well. ⁓ received so much abuse ultimately from the public and the social media ⁓ areas. And I guess that's just part and parcel of when you're sticking your head out there and you're up there. And Tim Noakes as well, I was on a podcast with the two of them recently.

The two of them, that's just been their life. So that's part of it. But there's so many pearls that are in there, right? And I think the first pearl that he kind of brought, and Marjaana really resonated with this, when that was ⁓ being fit but unhealthy. So, UMJ?

Hmm.

Totally.

Yeah, totally. ⁓ I think as unfortunate the abuse as it is, it's almost like, does it come with the picture? it like when you want to change the world for better? Unfortunately, you know, some people that are brave enough to try to change the world.

I have to take it, but yeah, the healthy athlete concept is so important. And you know what? It's boring. Like I'm just referring again to the 1%. But if you're healthy, if 90 % of what you do is focusing on becoming healthy, ⁓ it's powerful.

I've certainly experienced it myself.

Yes.

One of the questions that I had while he was talking was how do we know when we're not healthy? Because as athletes, I think that we are kind of programmed. We're doing all this exercise. We're healthy. How do we know that we're not?

million dollar question.

Yeah.

Well, I think you'd find that, yeah, you basically, you're that athlete that he spoke on that had the higher heart rate and the lower power output or the lower running pace relative to that high heart rate. Remember, the math method is just one tool in the toolbox that you can use to determine that. Heart rate variability is another one.

You

Right, yeah, and then he even mentioned a little bit about the aches and pains and ⁓ these sorts of things. So you put all those together and then you've got the picture of the unhealthy athlete. And if any of that's resonating, then that's worth looking at a different way of doing things. But why don't we now go refer back to the podcast and let's hear what Phil had to say.

about being fit but unhealthy.

a very important concept, but it's even more important to put into practice. And basically, it's that we don't wanna ⁓ push our training to compete better, thinking that we're gonna compete better at the expense of our health. In other words, we don't wanna sacrifice our health to be better athletes. And ⁓ it may seem logical, but ⁓ it's not.

applied because people are ⁓ hearing so much stuff about training and especially the latest thing, the latest hype. And a lot of it's no pain, no gain related. ⁓ Or a lot of it is ⁓ some narrow piece of research that shows that if you ⁓ sprint every day as fast as you could, you're going to get better.

Yeah, that's true. After a week, you might get better if you take a rest day at least. ⁓ But we need to look at the whole picture like you mentioned, Paul. ⁓ We need to look holistically at what's going on, not just right now, but this week, this month, and the rest of our lives, how it's going to influence us.

One of the questions that I had while he was talking was about if we are doing constant slow heart rate training, how do we accommodate progressive overload? Do we continue to go a little bit longer, a little bit longer each week? And how does that play out?

my God, that's a good question, Paul. I think like, okay, so this is when I go back to when I was like deep in the hole, ⁓ the only way to get out of it was to recover and not even think about TSS. Like I had to let go of the whole idea of progressive overload and forget about my data.

But

Thank

as scary as that sounds. And it was, I was crying on the couch thinking that I will never climb out of this couch again. I had to let go of everything. But the beautiful thing it was that when I was healthy, it all came back like multiplied. And that was, to me, obsessed about data that really taught me that the numbers, they

Mm-hmm.

don't really mean anything. Like we are so focused on those numbers, but we don't understand what goes under the hood. Right? Didn't you see that too, Paul?

Yeah, totally, but I kind of almost go back to some of the things that we were speaking to Phil with at the end where we're really talking about these alpha and theta waves in the mind and the brain. And it's to me, these are more of the mind states that you want to have when ⁓ your system is within its parasympathetic dominance. ⁓

you're not gonna be able to, I don't believe you can get that parasympathetic dominance and the creative states unless you are kind of more aware, low stress and listening and whatnot. And I think as strange as it kind of may seem, that's where you gotta go to recover your body and that's where you need to, I think we're trapped.

as a society a little bit in this fight or flight, looking at the next fire, we've got to put out, right? And it's exhausting. And that's what you state that you were in ultimately, I believe MJ. And it's, yeah, you've almost sometimes got ⁓ to go away from all of that and you got to get healthy first. Remember that all of these wearables, numbers, data, these are tools that are supposed to help guide us.

Mm-hmm.

But if we're over-obsessed about them all, then ⁓ that's not good either.

Yeah, my second point was gonna be exactly what you said. We don't even realize how stressed we are sometimes, especially when you're living in a big city where you hear constant noise, traffic, everything. It's just like you're always on this fight mode, but then you can realize when you go to a vacation somewhere beautiful, rebel stoke or wherever nature where it's dead quiet, right? And then you just like...

you

first couple of days you're on edge like, okay, what are we doing? Where are we going? Like a crazy monkey. But then after a few days, hopefully you can kind of like get to that state. But it can take a while and maybe some people don't ever get to there where they realize, ⁓ this is what the parasympathetic, calm state is. But for me, I am aware ⁓ now.

You

I wasn't before, but I am aware now that living in a big city is highly stressful. And when I get to go to countryside or mountains, especially, or somewhere in the ocean, here I come, BC, Canada, ⁓ Norway or Finland, they will do too. Every time I get into the forest, it's just, ⁓ wow.

like port ran through.

Yes. Yeah.

One of the questions that I asked Phil was about how who needs to actually slow down like this and you know, take four to six months or a long chunk of time before adding speed work. And he essentially said everyone but especially those who have not developed their aerobic system and I kind of wanted to talk more about that is that

just a reflection of the math test that we know that, you know, how do we know that we don't have a aerobic system that's as well developed, you know, as possible.

Yeah, well, I think, you know, it's a lot of the, you know, the indicators and markers that we've talked about before and that he's talked about before. But I thought there was an interesting moment in the podcast. Well, I thought, yeah, I thought it was interesting, but it was when I mentioned about the Ingval Auden study about the importance of the adaptive energy of that MAF foundation.

Hmm.

And if you don't have that math foundation, as her study showed, you don't adapt. So if you've only got the no pain, no gain mentality, if all you do is hit exercise, don't, yeah, you might adapt to a little bit, but you're not really going to the level that you really can. And because all of that aerobic fat burning foundation work.

goes to adapting the whole body to do this sort of new level of performance that we all wish to do. So, yeah.

Yeah.

⁓

I agree and our bass training blocks are really good in going back to the basics. And ⁓ I actually pull them back into my schedule now a little bit more often. I make up an ⁓ imaginary race a year from now and then I pull back ⁓ bass weeks.

When I feel like, if I see that I've been on a build phase for a long time, and this is so individual, right? Depends on your goals and depends on when your races are. If you're racing a lot, then I would definitely pull some base weeks there. ⁓ But I find, and maybe that's very individual to me, ⁓ like post overtraining, I just...

do really well with base season. Right. So when I'm on the build phase for a long time, start like, I noticed that I started stagnating. So I don't, I'm not like, I I get run down basically. And that's an indicator for me when, before I reach that run down feeling that, okay, now I need just a few, few weeks of base going back in there and do my, my aerobics training.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and I just love that feature that we've adapted on on Athletica where you can pull as many base weeks in as you want, right? You can actually just you go to your overview tab, click on the on the date in question, change that to to a base week, change it to a recovery week is super valuable ⁓ from that. So this is again back to, you know, developing that that feel. So, yeah, let's let's hear now what Phil has to say about

the importance of that aerobic base.

And whether you're a basketball player or soccer or ⁓ track and field athlete ⁓ or Ironman athlete, you're ⁓ very dependent and even people who don't compete.

you know, we're all as humans dependent on our aerobic system, which burns higher levels of fat for energy. The aerobic muscles are the so-called slow twitch muscles that have endurance. So the aerobic muscles obviously allow us to train for endurance, but they also support the joints ⁓ all over the body. And they keep us ⁓

you know, they keep the muscles balanced so the joints are more stable during activity. ⁓ so the question is, how is my aerobic system? And if it's not great, ⁓ then you need more pure aerobic training to build that up. Because if you're not purely aerobic training, you're...

aerobic system may not develop as well. So if you do one speed workout a week or one ⁓ fatiguing weight workout a week, or if you have a lot of stress or you have a lot of non-sports obligations in your life, all that interferes. So the pure aerobic base period that ⁓ Arthur Liddiard referred to,

is a valuable thing. ⁓ And again, we want to monitor that. We want to know, A, are you improving? So if you can run faster at the same heart rate, for example, at the same low heart rate, the MAF test, and you can apply that to a bike, to rowing, to anything. ⁓ If you are

getting faster at the same heart rate, you're improving. And so if you're getting faster and faster as you, as the weeks and months go by, ⁓ and you're in endurance sports, why would you want to stop that process? Cause if you start doing, interval training and you start jumping into some races to kind of think, well, I've got to, you know, just kind of race a little bit to get my race thing back.

⁓ that could put a hold on your aerobic development. So why not go longer and four months, five months, six months, ⁓ it's really whatever it takes.

So we asked Phil about how these changes can be made and what we should be working on. He basically gave us three good answers that were not the answers that I was expecting. And the first one was refined carbs. The second one was training intensity and lowering that. And the third one was reducing stress.

Yeah. Yeah, you don't always think about that last one, you, necessarily? So, yeah, but ⁓ for sure. And he mentioned the hormone cortisol. He mentioned, you know, and cortisol is the stress hormone. So if you're under a lot of stress, you know, cortisol is in the, well, first of all, it links in the brain. You have the pituitary and the hormone is adrenocorticotrophic.

Why did they surprise you?

No.

Mm-hmm.

hormone, stimulating hormone that goes down and causes the adrenals to leach out all of this cortisol. You get all of this and that cortisol is what's called a glucocorticoid. Listen to the word there in its classification, glucose. So you get all this spill out. Its job is to make all of this glucose. So you got big glucose level. Well, what can that potentially cause? can glucose, insulin, over fat phenomena that we spoke about.

Right? So this is the, you know, that your body's going to store fat if you're always stressed. And I can actually, I've spoken about this before, but I can remember this. I was experimenting with a Dexcom ⁓ continuous blood glucose monitor. And I was working for New Zealand High Performance System Olympic program. And I got, I was leading physiology and I got this ⁓ email.

This email came in, I'm wearing this monitor and this email came in from accounting. It made me so mad. You know how an email can just make you fuming, right? And I was, and then I look back later and what do I see on my continuous glucose monitoring? But my glucose, boop, boop, boop, sitting up there like eight, nine millimoles. Like I was doing the VO2 max test or something. It was crazy. Like where did that come from?

Wow.

but I proved it to myself that that's what happens, right? So imagine if you're in that fight or flight stress situation all day, even if you're on a potentially low carb diet or whatever, that stress, like Phil said, is going to hammer you and anything else that you're doing, exercise or nutrition around it, it's only gonna do so much.

you

So let's hear from Phil.

We become great athletes from the brain down. We have to start in the brain, not just in the muscles.

the idea, the concept of stress is often misunderstood. People think it's some ⁓ psychological thing. It's an emotional thing. Well, it is, but stress can be physical, stress can be biochemical and metabolic.

I'm to do a thing. It's a motion. going say, well, you can get the foot. It's great. And it's just a foot. It's great. It's going be a high-level catapult. And it's

and stress can be mental and emotional. And

just going to be a mental and emotional thing.

actually the mental part of stress includes education and miseducation can create a lot more stress than obviously education. So when you read an article in one of the rags ⁓ in your sport or these days it's online, you're...

includes education and this education can bring out more stress than obviously education. So if you read about it, you know, we want to at the reference.

you

bombarded with all kinds of junk online. can cause stress because your understanding of physiology is distorted. Your understanding of individuality is distorted. ⁓ One size fits all is the thing. And athletes...

You know, athleticism is all about going hard and going long and feeling the burn. ⁓ And so that stress concept starts here, our brain takes in that information or our body sends that information up because we've overloaded the muscles.

Thank you.

⁓ Or the joints are inflamed and hurting so all that stress comes here and then the body says okay how are going to deal with this stress and we often ⁓ We often have ⁓ increases in cortisol and other stress hormones, which then again you have this domino effect so cortisol will ⁓ affect our sleep ⁓ It'll affect our body fat

storage, especially abdominal fat, which then has inflammatory cytokines, which ⁓ can become body wide problems ⁓ in say a joint or a tendon. ⁓ And again, one thing causes another and then another and then another. And then the end result is some symptoms, something breaks down and that's when people tend to go to a doctor.

Marjaana asked him about the difference between men and women and he talked about the individualization and I thought that was a really interesting idea and that it all comes down to individualization and even there's not much difference between men and women.

Yeah. I love that part. was amazing for me. it was just so, yeah, I was just like nodding my head the whole time he was kind of saying that. you think we've, you know, long-time listeners of the podcast will know that we've done a, you know, we did a study on female athletes with, you know, looking at the various different menstrual cycle hormones. And we were looking at those alongside of HRV.

Yeah.

And look, at the end of the day, we didn't find much, right? It really wasn't, these weren't huge big rocks. What we did find was that individualization, that, you know, different women had different responses, different women had different cycles, that they're just all individual human beings at the end of the day. that was kind of, think Phil's point, Marjaana, where he was just, who's this individual that I have in front of me?

And even cycles differ from month to month. So it's very difficult to compare even within a person.

Yeah.

And Paul, you asked him about the differences using the, the one 80 minus your age formula. And we talked about that with junior athletes too, and it still comes down to, into individualization and trying to figure out, you know, going a little lower might be a little bit better. Um, but it still comes down to treating that individual person and their heart rate at their spot.

Yeah, does. Yeah, absolutely. mean, yeah, you spoke about the junior athlete. I spoke about the potentially fits a master's athlete that's coming in. And then we also had the individual that's just going couch to 5K, be a little bit more on the unhealthy side. Like every one of these individuals has their own context and they've got to figure out where best their math heart rate is going to lie. Remember the...

You're trying to kind of pick that point of where fat ⁓ metabolism is maximized and you're trying to maximize your power or pace at that heart rate first because that's kind of the area, the cutoff before stress really gets going, right? If we were doing too much of the no pain, no gain, HIIT training, you're just adding more cortisol to the whole problem, right? We want to just kind of do this nice, easy training first.

build up that resilience, build the fat metabolism marker, get the mitochondria firing, and then health kind of comes and Marjaana's story is one of millions, right? That of I don't know if millions, yeah, that's what we want. We wanna see millions doing this.

I think

it's pretty common, but people have hard time putting the dots together, right? ⁓ The high stress processed foods, high intensity, because we want to get exercise in and if we only have a little bit of time, we want to do it hard.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

and then the emotional stress. I'm talking to moms now or ⁓ stay at home dads. They exist because your day is just go, go, go, go. Then you squeeze in a training session and then you go to bed, you're exhausted. Then you wake up middle of the night because of high cortisol or your system is so out of whack.

you're sweating night sweats and then you think that it's perimenopause when it's overtraining. True story. You're always on that fight mode, but you don't know what to do and you go like this for months until your body says stop and you get an injury or you get sick and then like the...

.

The warning sign should be like the check engine light should be if you have recurrent injuries that are a little bit of unexplained like why did I get sick or why did I get Bell's Palsy or why did I always get plantar fasciitis? Those are the warning signs. Those are the check engine light really. Is my stress

Mm-hmm.

Because when you're in a stressful situation, you don't really understand how it has like got to this point from here. Because it's continuous, continuous, continuous. So that was, I think that was one of the learnings that I took.

Totally.

Totally.

Well, let's hear now what Phil thought about the individualization aspect.

All we know is for sure is that women are different from men.

you

you

⁓ Do we do anything different because we're dealing with a female athlete compared to a male athlete compared to a younger compared to an older not really I mentioned ⁓ I think on our podcast with Tim that in the beginning ⁓ I thought because women had you know, their resting hearts heart rates on average were a little different and therefore the 180 form is gonna be different for

for women compared to men. that just never, it never worked out. It was just not logical when we consider the individualization of the female athlete. ⁓ You have obviously other things that you might have to deal with, but none of it matters because you're focused on this person as a

Thanks for listening today to this special edition of the Athletes Compass podcast. Make sure you listen to the episode with Dr. Phil Maffetone. 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 Marjaana Rakai and Dr. Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast.

Thank you for listening.