- Whoa!
(breathing heavily)
Good morning, Trainiacs.
That is the end of a high-intensity
Team Trainiacs swift drive.
We've been doing them every week.
They're open to everyone around the world,
not just on Team Trainiac,
but anyone who wants to
look like this at the end of a bike.
(grunting)
So, we all know that we've gotta train hard,
that it can't all just be zone two, nothing but easy.
While that's an important part, training hard is
the stuff that actually makes us faster, better, stronger.
But at what point does too much hard become too much?
When do those diminishing returns come in?
That is what we're gonna talk about today,
because there's actually a study that shows
an exact amount of minutes
that you have to start worrying about diminishing returns,
and apparently, sloppy thinking.
(upbeat music)
Good pops.
I, as you can see, am feeling kind of summery.
Summer came for a couple of days here in Winnipeg.
That's nice.
Might be a shade of dark pink soon.
All right, so let's get right into this.
What we support on teamtrainiac.com,
what I support, what I find works well,
and what studies show work well is a really high volume,
like the vast majority of your training
should actually be at quite low intensity,
very, very relaxed, going out for just a conversational
ride or run with your pals.
Really easy, building that base of fitness,
building the mitochondrial density
with low-intensity training.
Then sprinkle in.
You itchy?
Then sprinkle in a little bit of high intensity work,
that real sharp effort, the hit efforts,
the high-intensity interval training efforts,
the VO2 max building efforts.
These are the efforts that make you
better, stronger and faster.
The low-intensity stuff really just gives you a foundation
to be able to execute those really well.
But then the questions come up along the lines of,
well, if some high-intensity is good,
why would more not be good?
Or if 80-20, where 80% is the low-intensity work
and only 20% of your training is high-intensity work,
why if high intensity is what makes us
better, faster, stronger,
why isn't that more like 70-30 or 60-40?
And what in the world happened to that
adage in the '80s and '90s of no pain no gain?
All you had to do is just log huge amounts
of training volumes
And you saw swimmers that were as 12 year old kids
doing 75,000 yards a week,
and runners like just amateur runners
logging hundred mile weeks.
Where did all that go?
I'll tell you where.
People ask me what I wish I knew
about training five years ago,
and the answer is really very simple.
In 2017, I went into that season,
thinking that more pain, more gain
was going to end up being the way to do it.
I was ready to commit to triathlon
and see what I was capable of.
I was ready to bleed to do it.
So, month after month, I trained hard.
Every single workout seemed really hard.
Rest week and the on weeks
really didn't have that much difference.
And after the course of 13 months of this,
I was so sick that I could only train
about 10 days in a row before I actually got sick,
and then had to take a week or two off.
I ended up having depressive states
where I was at the start of doing this,
but I was lying in bed Friday night, crying,
worrying that I would never be able to do triathlon again
because I was so sick and injured.
And I'd love to say that I've got this all figured out,
but that year was such a huge detriment to me physically
that in the middle of that year,
my hormones tested low.
And since that time, here we are three years later,
I still battle low hormones and issues of weight gain,
as I'm sure you all have seen over the past 14 months.
Cortisol levels are in the tank,
and we're actually working with a doctor
that has told me that he has some 84-year-old patients
that have better-looking hormones than me.
That 2017 season is such a huge chink in the armor
of me as an athlete that it isn't just this
short lesson of like,
"Alright, well I won't do that another season."
It is something that stays with me
for a long period of time,
and I don't want that to happen to you.
In a study that was published
in the International Journal
of Sports Physiology and Performance,
researchers studied 35 subjects,
and these subjects were fit adults, you and I.
They trained on average for eight hours per week.
And what they ended up doing was,
over the course of three weeks,
they tested athletes at the start of the three weeks.
Throughout the three weeks they monitored
their heart rate levels.
And at the end of the three weeks,
they looked at the outcomes,
depending on the different types of training
that each of them did.
And what they found was the athletes
who in the three weeks prior had spent 40 minutes or more
at 90% at or above their maximum heart rate.
They saw an increased level of cortisol
that didn't come down after the workout
as much as the athletes who had spent
less than 40 minutes on average per week
at that heart rate level.
Now what does this mean?
How does that translate to what you need to do
and what I went through?
Well, I wanna show you something.
This here is a really basic chart
of what happens during the stages of
overtraining essentially, what the progress is.
And what you can see is that cortisol raises.
Cortisol is like our fight or flight hormone
that when we start going into periods of adaptation,
it's normal for cortisol levels to go high.
But if that raised cortisol
continues for a long period of time,
essentially we burn our body's ability
to produce cortisol out, and then it ends up crashing.
And what happens at this point is cortisol is burnt out.
And what we see in my test
is that cortisol is very very low.
Well, to make up for that, to continue going,
our body starts pumping out adrenaline,
but adrenaline is like your backup battery.
Eventually, adrenaline can't even keep up,
and that's when you start getting into overtraining.
And what we've got here is I've overlaid another chart
that actually basically matches the feeling.
So think about this, the adrenal fatigue stage
is here where the function of the adrenals,
the function of the hormones is gradually deteriorating
as time goes on.
In both of these, the time is not to scale
and it differs for each athlete,
but this is kind of how it feels.
You feel a little bit beat up, and then you come back,
and then a little bit beat up, and then you come back,
and a little bit beat up.
But eventually you reach this point
where cortisol starts to tank,
and eventually you just can't keep up.
And this is essentially where I'm at here right now,
still from what happened in 2017.
It went down here all the way back in 2017,
and hasn't really recovered
because I'm still Triathlon Taren.
Fortunately, this lockdown is--
(object rattles)
You lie down?
Fortunately, this lockdown and the lack of reason right now
couldn't come at a better time,
because now I get to spend the next seven months
essentially just worrying about my health.
Now, what do you do?
Well, a very simple three-step system
to make sure that this isn't something that you encounter.
First, you load up on a huge amount
of low intensity training.
On teamtraniac.com, during the off season,
we monitor and we give workouts
that are like 100% low-intensity training,
so that during the race season,
we can absorb a little bit more
and we don't have to worry about tipping over
that ratio of the 80-20.
It gives us that really nice foundation
to go into a race season and do the more intense work.
But when that intense work comes in race season,
we gradually increase it,
starting in, say, January or February
with a few minutes a week, and then a few more,
and then a few more.
And it allows the athletes to then see,
at what point does their body tip over
into not feeling good.
What is not feeling good?
That's step two, which is monitoring.
This 40 minutes per week is really just an average,
but you have to look at things like,
are you physically,
are your muscles more sore than you think they should be?
Are they staying sore for a while?
Is your sleep somewhat disturbed?
That means are you sleeping too much
or are you sleeping too little?
In either case, that's an indication that you are
getting a little bit overtrained.
Are you lacking motivation?
Are you supposed to do two workouts in a day
and you just can't get off the couch for that second one?
That is your brain telling you,
"Hey, maybe it's time to rest."
These are all the cues that it's time to back off.
When we get those cues,
it's important that you listen to them.
And the third step that you take
is looking retroactively in your TrainingPeaks account,
or your Garmin account, or Elevate for Strava,
or whatever it is that you use for training,
and just see time in zones.
How much time are you spending in that zone five
that is at 90% of your maximum heart rate or more?
And the biggest thing that I can suggest about all that
is back off and rest more before this becomes an issue.
You don't wanna be a guy who makes his living
on social media as the fit guy and has gained 13, 15 pounds,
even though I did do PRs last year.
PRs or not though, health is very important,
and these are things that I wish I knew five years ago
that I wanna impart to you now.
I'm going to do another video
about everything that I've found
that we're going through right now.
I've gotta wait for some testing to come back
and get a protocol from some doctors,
so you can just see what it is that I'm going through,
what are the physiological
symptoms that we're going through,
and what are the tests that you should keep an eye on
and maybe consider for yourself,
so that you can stop things before it's too late.
Because when it comes right down to it,
performance comes with good health.
You gotta have good health
to have good performance long term,
and I might've burn the candle
a little bit too hard back in 2017,
and it's time to fix that now.
It's kinda good timing for the lack of races right now.
Anyway, that is it.
If you wanna make sure that you don't miss that video,
hit the Subscribe button below.
Later, Trainiacs.
Bye, Trainiacs.
I wanna go play outside because it's nice out.