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The Relaxed Running podcast is a behind the scenes conversation with the best athletes, coaches and professionals in the world of distance running. From training, hydration and nutrition to racing and recovering, we learn from the best in the world.
Relaxed conversations which are packed with actionable takeaways to help you take your running performance up a notch. Save yourself years of guess work and learn from the people who are doing it at the highest level.
Tyson Popplestone (00:00.318)
So it's so good to get the opportunity to sit down with you. I'm grateful to Brenton Ford, a mutual friend of ours, it seems, who put me in touch because I first read a triathlon training Bible. It must have been coming on a year ago now. And it blew my mind as a distance runner that I'd not yet come across it. I felt as though I'd been across the literature a little bit, at least in the distance running world. And I had a triathlete mate and he goes, Hey, have you read?
Joe frills, triathlon training Bible. I said, give me a look. And I reckon I've gone through the audio version a couple of times. I've now got it on my shelf and it's amazing. And maybe not so amazing why it's been such a powerful message for such a long time. Cause it seems that so much of what you speak about, despite a couple of updates remains true over a long period of time. And with that said, was saying to you, I was, I was so keen to pick your brain
you know, the training principles specifically, because so much of what you talk about, I think has been overlooked sometimes in the name of science, we overlook some of the obvious simple factors. And I thought maybe as a foundation to the conversation, we could speak to that a little bit. Like, I'm not sure if there's a broad stroke of the brush, which would paint a picture of what your training philosophy is. But if there was, I thought I would have an attempt at asking you that just at the outset.
Yeah, my philosophy is very simple. It's that which is measured improves. So I'm always looking to see what can I, what does this athlete need to improve to perform at a higher level to achieve their goals? And once I figure out what that is, then the next issue is how can I measure that, whatever that metric is, to find out if we're making progress or not. So that's really the whole thing in nutshell. It's a real simple concept.
I think I have kind of a engineering background, I suppose, and engineers are always looking for ways to solve problems. And that's when I first started coaching, that was what I saw the problem as being is how, what's standing between the athlete and success? If I can figure that out, that thing, that thing, call that the limiter, the athlete's limiter. And if I can figure out if that limiter is, then I can figure out a way to measure it and I can start turning to improve it.
Tyson Popplestone (02:28.046)
then I know I can help the athlete become much more race ready by having gone through all these, this process and making sure we're doing the right things to, to, to overcome the, to correct, if you will, the limiter. So that's really, that's the whole, the whole concept in one, in one sentence, actually. Yeah. I had Mark Allen on here, as I mentioned to you the other day, and a picture that he drew that really sort of resonated with me was about the levers that you can pull during training.
And I guess with the example you just gave you, have an athlete come to you they might have a hundred different levers and it's hard to decipher which lever to pull first. Maybe you pull some volume, maybe you reduce some intensity, maybe you change the diet. I'm not sure if you've got any structures in place to know, what lever needs to be pulled with this particular athlete? Cause it seems that every athlete that I work with and myself, such a big part of my career.
The only lever that seemed to be pulled was, hey, train harder and run more and try and do that for as long as possible before you get injured. Yeah, I understand that. That's pretty much the way everybody, everybody approaches the concept of training. I'm a little bit different than that. know, using Mark's idea of the levers, there are three of them that I'm concerned about. is frequency of training, how often the athlete works out.
Second is the duration of training, how long the workouts are. And third is the intensity of training, how intense are the workouts, how fast are they or how hard are they? And I'm trying to get a balance between all three of those things over the course of a season, which is rather a complicated process, but once you get used to it, really not all that difficult. You start with frequency, you start just trying to get the athlete working out. This is the weather, this is,
months when we've got probably something like, I don't know, five, six months until the first aid priority race. If we can work on that, just starting with frequency, just trying to build up the athletes, getting out the door and getting into the workouts. Then after that, after we've got that to where we need it, then we start building duration. How long should the workouts be? And that depends on what the athlete is training for, what's the athlete's unique
Tyson Popplestone (04:51.688)
characteristics, what are they all about? How do they, how do they come to me as far as, as their, their background in the sport and their experience with training. And finally is intensity. And that's really not, none of that is really complicated, just very simple stuff. And it's pretty much what every coach does. They may not think of it that way, but that's pretty much the whole concept in a nutshell right there. Yeah. I think it's interesting that you've got an engineering background. It seems as
over eyes of a couple of elite coaches, especially in the triathlon scene who come from this background. it seems as though it could be a huge blessing in disguise because I think despite the simplicity of what we just explained, a lot of the time I know my own training, the emotion can get the better of you and you can feel good and think, okay, it's time to ramp up the intensity because it'd be a really great confidence boost for me to finish this session faster than what I did last time. But the logical part of my brain says, no, no, Tice, hey, this is a six month plan.
You don't need to be a hero today. Let's be a hero in six months on race day. And yet it seems that the balance between logic and emotion is a really difficult power play for a lot of the athletes who are out there training. I agree with a hundred percent. What I think the biggest mistake most self -coached athletes get into is they try to increase the intensity because they think that's going to make them faster.
thing I hear often from athletes on this whole topic is, you know, I'm already good at going slow. I don't need more training and turning there. I to go learn to go fast. So they're going to run everything as fast as they can. So if the workout calls for doing a, you know, zone too easy run, they're going to do, you know, I'm going to do zone three because that's faster. And you think that somehow that's going to work out to make them a faster athlete, but it really doesn't. does. really, it disregards some of the most basic concepts of physiology.
and because of that, athlete never really achieves their goals. So they wind up frustrated again with another season because. Just keep doing the same things over and over again, which is trying to make the workouts a little bit harder than what they've done in the past. If they can do that, they figured they've got it made, but it doesn't work that way. Yeah. It's, funny how universal that approach is. mean, I have a lot to do with running based sports here in Australia, which, you know, well and truly outside of being considered endurance sport, but one of them in particular.
Tyson Popplestone (07:13.934)
is Australian rules football, which is quite a running based game. And there's like an unspoken rule in pre -season training that if you're not on your hands and knees at the end of the session, you probably haven't gone hard enough. And I mean, for a lot of clubs, they start to recognise how ridiculous that is, but in the community world, which is where I spend most of my time, it's almost, it doesn't matter how much you word them up before the session, that this is not going to be a 10 out of 10 effort.
It seems like that's the one thing that's ignored. And I mean, it doesn't matter. It seems. The experience that you have in coaching or in racing. read this in your book and I have the same experience with the athletes that I coach. A lot of the time, the feedback that you're given after six months of coaching an athlete as to how the training is going, or is it the same or different to what you would expect is a lot of athletes. Hey, I really thought there would have been more faster running. I didn't realise I'd be training this easily or this slowly so many days of the week.
I agree that when I coach somebody, I'll usually ask them somewhere around six weeks or so into the coaching relationship. You know, how is this turning different from what you did prior to my coaching you? And the almost the answer is almost invariably the same thing. I'm not going as hard or as fast now as I used to on average. I'm going a lot slower, but they're also finding out they're getting faster in the process. So there's really a lot more to it than
pushing your limits every time you go out the door for a workout. That's not what really does it for you. That's kind of a simplistic way of seeing training. Pro athletes don't do that. They don't go out the door and hammer themselves every day. That would be ridiculous. They're trying to make a living off of this. They don't see themselves as being somebody who needs to go zone three when the workout calls for zone two. There's no reason to do that. That's just kind of bass -ackwards, actually.
Yeah. So anyway, they, that's, that's the bottom line is you've got to, you've to have a lot of churning, which is slow and easy. If you want to get fast, that's the bottom line, this whole thing, but that's, that's the physiology of churning. If you don't have a degree in physiology or sports science or exercise science or something like that, it probably doesn't make sense to do this. But once you've studied what's going on in the body, begin to figure out why this works. So it's,
Tyson Popplestone (09:42.656)
It seems to be counterproductive to the athlete, but it's really not. It's actually very beneficial to the athlete to slow down most of it, not all of it. Sure. And that's the interesting thing. That's the question that I think a lot of athletes have is, okay, well, I'm well acquainted and I'm very familiar and well -practiced in running slow. Whether that's a correlates to the effort that's going in or not, I'm not a hundred percent sure. But the slowness factor, as you said, we're well acquainted
The intensity factor that we like to do more is, I mean, at least from my own experience, that's what we lean towards. But striking the balance between those two things seems to be where the real magic is found. I mean, even for myself at the moment, I've been a distance runner for at least 20 years now, the last seven not as competitive, but I've been really trialing and playing with Phil Maffetone's...
sort of approach to training and mixing it in with yours and Gordo Burn. And there's a number of sort of things that I'm just flirting with and playing with at the moment. But the thing they all have in common is, right, like let's make the base for this relatively easy and we'll dip our toes in intensity from time to time. Are there any things that we should look at or should be looking out for to know that we're ready to dip our toes a little further into the intensity window? I mean, we can get into this further, but.
from one to three intense sessions a week seems to be where majority of the people that I've had anything to do with have had their experience. But I mean, three leans towards quite a lot. And for a lot of people, one leans towards maybe not enough. But I guess it depends on the intensities and the durations and, you know, the things that you mentioned at the outset. Yeah, I use what I call a five two procedure. I'm talking now about the, the,
more specific period of churning, the build period, call it, know, the last, typically something like the last 10, 12 weeks before the A priority race. In that period of time, I use what I call a five -two program, a routine. That means five days are easy and two days are hard. And the five days are easy could include one day off. It kind of depends on the athlete, but that's fairly common for athletes to take a day off.
Tyson Popplestone (11:59.372)
So five days easy. And by easy, mean, we're do a lot of churning in one and two zones. Heart rate, I'm gonna use heart rate for these workouts because it reflects what's going on more in terms of metabolic fitness than does for example, pace or power. Those things don't really reflect your metabolic fitness all that well, but heart rate does.
And that's the purpose of doing this zone one and zone two training is to improve metabolic fitness. And that's where athletes fall down. They don't understand how important metabolic fitness is to their performance at a high level. So for example, if I've got an athlete turning in zones one and two, what I should expect to see happen, this is now going back to that idea of trying to figure out the limiters and how it can measure limiter.
I always assume that's a limiter for an athlete when you start the season. They're just not metabolically fit yet. And it's gonna take several weeks to get there, if not months for some athletes, because some athletes have never done it in their entire career. Some athletes have got a little bit of metabolic fitness. We need to bring that around. And so what I use is something called efficiency factor. It's available on churning peaks, but you can do it yourself. It's just a little bit simple math. What you would do is you'd
the athletes, if you're talking about running, the athletes speed for the workout, not pace, but speed, how many kilometers per hour, and divide that by their average heart rate for the workout. This number is really reflective of what's going on with your body metabolically. So we're comparing output and input. So that's efficiency. Whenever you compare output with input, it's efficiency. So if you started a business and you wanted to make your business more efficient, in other words,
produce a better profit, what you would do is you'd figure out a way to lower the cost of production. And that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to lower the cost of production, trying to get as many, as much speed as we can per heartbeat. That's the bottom line. And over time, that EF number, the efficiency factor number should be changing and it should be gradually going up. It'll kind of ratchet up. It will just go.
Tyson Popplestone (14:23.72)
linear up, it'll kind of like ratchet up. So it'll kind of go like that as it begins to improve. And that is a great sign that your metabolic fitness is coming along. And that's only accomplished in the lower zones, zones one and two. You start turning zone three, four, five. Now we're getting too much lactate in the system. It's the body no longer acts the same way with burning fat, which is the key here. The body now starts burning more carbohydrate.
because of that fat metabolism is quite as robust as it should be. We should be having a lot of fat being burned by our system. And you mentioned Phil Maffetone a little while ago, and you also talked about Mark Allen, those two guys, you know, worked together back in the 80s when Mark was trying to improve his Ironman distance racing, which he did quite
noticeably in 1989, but Maffetone had him on a program where he ran at 180 minus his age. I don't know what his age was. If it was 30, that would be 180 minus 30 would be 125. So he's running at a heart rate of 125 or thereabouts. I'm just kind of guessing the numbers for him right now. So that's a relatively low number for professional athlete to be running at 125.
But he got to the point, if I recall right, when he started running at 125 heart rate, his speed wasn't very good. And I've forgotten the numbers now, but by the time he had been through this for several weeks, he got to the point he was running five minute miles, if I recall right, at 125 beats per minute. Five minute miles is pretty damn fast for somebody who runs at 125 beats per minute.
And that's what he was doing. He was just trying to build all all Maffetone had doing was just trying to build his metabolic fitness, which most athletes know nothing about. But it's it's instrumental to performance. That's really the heart of performance is metabolic fitness. And yet they disregard it by going to zone three, four or five and doing all their charting there thinking that's going to make them faster. And you're giving up all this metabolic fitness.
Tyson Popplestone (16:44.622)
What happened after after Mark Allen got to the point he could run pretty fast at at 125 beats per minute or whatever his numbers were. I'm just using numbers off the top of my head here. What happened after that was he started got to the point he could he could go really fast and never used carbohydrate or use very little carbohydrate. He was burning body fat and you know how much body fat an athlete has. We have something like 50 ,000 calories of body fat stored away. Even the skinniest runner.
has something like 50 ,000 calories of body fat stored away, but they only have about 20 ,000 calories, I'm sorry, 2 ,000 calories of carbohydrates stored away. If you're always going out and burning carbohydrate, but you're not burning fat, you're missing out on what your body's trying to do to make you faster, which is to be better at burning fat. Mark got to the point, he was able to run whatever his pace was, very fast pace, burning
Most good athletes never get to that point because they disregard this whole thing about low intensity zones. So you're gonna get me started here on one of my key, my major issues with me in terms of coaching and talking with athletes. But that's the bottom line is, and the way you can measure is with this efficiency factor for runners, it's simply taking your average speed for the run, divide it by your heart rate. And that gives you efficiency factor eight, a number.
And then you start comparing that number over time and that number should be rising. That's telling you that your metabolic fitness is improving. That's the bottom line. It's actually very simple. Yeah. And so it seems that the trade -off at the moment is you'll see metabolic increases or improvements over a slightly longer period of time. And from what I can tell, a lot of people who do want the bang for their buck or to see improvements in a week or
That's their tendency to lean towards more zone three, four or five training. They say, okay, yeah, sure. Maybe those metabolic improvements do take place over a longer period of time. I want to be fast in two and a half weeks. And so they sacrifice that long -term improvement for that, hopefully that short -term game. Would that be true? Because it seems Mark was saying that when he first started out with Phil, he couldn't believe he was embarrassed at how slow he had to run to maintain whatever heart rate it was. I think he said he was running seven and a half minute miles.
Tyson Popplestone (19:07.722)
And the, the athletes that he was trying to beat were going out there and running six and they're like, what are you doing, man? Like, this is no way to train. And he said, he said he ran down there with some element of confidence in Phil, but also the person who recommended he go and train with Phil. And then over time, he got to a point where, I think it was at Kona. He said he was in the lead pack on the bike and he looked at his heart rate and he was still in zone two. And he goes, okay, this is, this is a really promising sign. The fact that I'm here, but Joe.
One thing that I get a little confused about, and there's often questions in the YouTube comment section about this is, if this was so effective, this is coming from a marathon perspective. Why is it that so many athletes who are operating at a world stage and the marathon are still fueling using carbohydrates? Is this metabolic change more relevant to things like the Ironman and longer than sort of two hour duration? Or do you think that there's just a lot of world -class athletes who haven't?
given it a full opportunity to really see the benefits over something even like the marathon. Yeah, it applies to all all sports, all endurance sports. If I was coaching 800 meter runner, we'd be working on metabolic fitness. You've got that that's the base. That's the platform on which fitness is built to be able to run 800 meters. So if I would do an 800 meters, I would certainly do it with a marathon runner. There's no question about that marathon runner.
you like you see the like Mark talked about with Mark, it's the point you can run, you know, a marathon in zone two, and have it be fast by your standards. Then I think that's that's quite an achievement. And that's really quite possible. There's all kinds of examples of that in various events, various types of sports, from triathlon to running to cycling to swimming, you name the sport, if it's endurance sport.
metabolic fitness is the bottom line. You've got to get that first. You've got to get to the point where you're burning fat for fuel, not carbohydrate for fuel as your primary source of energy. You've got to get to that point. Most athletes don't understand the importance of that. When I have this argument, or I shouldn't call it an argument, use discussion with somebody who's telling me they really don't need to work on the metabolic fitness. They need to work on their speed, is what they're going to call
Tyson Popplestone (21:31.586)
that point, I'll usually ask them what their degree is in. Is your degree in business? Art? English? What is your degree? how do you know all this? How come you're so brilliant on this topic and all the people who have a background in sports science disagree with you? Why is that? They really have no argument to support this other than I want to get faster. Well, obviously you want to get faster. So does Mark, you want to get faster too.
Right now the Tour de France is going on. We've got Tati Pagaccia being coached by the guy who is a zone two nut, if you will. Everything is zone two with few exceptions. And right now Tati Pagaccia, the last I read, I haven't seen yesterday's stage yet, but the last I saw, he was up by something like three minutes over second place, which is gigantic in the second week or by the second
So anyway, it works in every sport. works for every, if it's an endurance sport, you have to build your metabolic fitness. You cannot bypass metabolic fitness to start working on speed first. It does not work that way. And if you go back and study physiology, you'll begin to figure out why. But if you don't want to study physiology, hire a coach. Hire somebody who knows what's going on and help you to do a better job of training.
It's really a very simple concept. All you have to do is run slow for, in my case, five times a week and run fast twice a week. And that'll get you going really well, I think, toward being a faster endurance athlete. Yeah. I'm not sure if I've just caught the bug and I've become more aware of it over the last 12 months or if the conversation or the community of people who are at least open to this style of training has really grown.
One thing I can tell you for certain is that the YouTube algorithm is currently really favoring these kinds of conversations with the amount of people that it's pumping it out to. So whether it's what we're talking about now, whether it's math method, whether it's low heart rate, Norwegian method, doesn't matter what language you put around it, this idea of a lower heart rate approach seems to have captured the imaginations and the hearts of so many endurance athletes.
Tyson Popplestone (23:49.166)
Is that true? Have you noticed a rise in the last couple of years or is this something that sort of ebbs and flows out of fashion? Well, the turning is always changing. This has been going on. I've been around in endurance sports now since roughly 1973 or something like that. So I've got a big background and I've watched all kinds of things go on. I started out as a runner myself and took up triathlon and then bike racing.
And so I've seen a lot of things go become common that athletes did, but never quite the same that we're doing right now. There was a period of time when we were doing a long, slow distance back in the 1980s. There was a pretty long, slow distance that was going on, but it wasn't measured. And I really suspect people really weren't going slow. It just wasn't as fast as they wanted to go, but it was still too fast.
So it's a little bit different now because we can measure things now, whereas back then we couldn't really measure things. We didn't really know if you were working on your metabolic fitness or not. We didn't know if it was coming along. We had no way of knowing that unless you went to a lab and spent a few hundred dollars to have a test done and then go back every six weeks and have it done again for a few more hundred dollars, which nobody's going to do that. So consequently, it is changing.
Now, the marriage is between low intensity and measurement, which we can now do. And we can measure in all kinds of different ways. I talked about heart rate a while ago, which is the most, a very basic way of doing this. every runner has a heart rate monitor and you can use that as one way of doing it. We can make it even simpler than that. If you want to make this really simple, if you want to know when you're really running at your metabolic rate, in other words, not too
If you want to know when you're there, I've got a really simple little thing for you. Count to 1 ,006 out loud without taking a breath. So it would be something like 1 ,001, 1 ,002, 1 ,003, 1 ,004, 1 ,005, 1 ,006. If you can do that, you're working on metabolic fitness. If you have to take a breath before you get to 1 ,006, you're now burning sugar instead of fat. So that's not scientific.
Tyson Popplestone (26:15.47)
But it's kind of like what I've found just in working with athletes that it kind of works out to be around 1 ,006. If you can count to 1 ,006 out loud without taking a breath, you're working on your metabolic fitness. If you can't get to 1 ,006, you're burning carbohydrate. You're burning glycogen for fuel. It's not nearly what you're trying to do. But heart rate's a better way of doing it, more precise. Even better way would be the lactate measurement.
There's a lot going on right now with measuring lactate to determine intensity and the athlete's response to intensity. I expect sometime in the next few months we'll have a device that you can probably stick to your arm. It'll tell you real time on your wristwatch or perhaps on your phone at first, what's
current level of intensity is based on lactate, how many millimoles of lactate are you burning right now. And you'll be able to look at your wrist and know what that number is. This is the direction we're going with this. I'm sure this is going to happen. It's just a matter of when it's going to happen. So we're on the verge of having something which is going to change our perspective about intensity once again. In this case, it's going to be a very good thing,
There's always a downside to this kind of stuff, which I don't get into, but there's a downside to technology. Whenever there's a new technology, there's something that's gonna suffer because of that. But anyway, bottom line is you can measure your metabolic fitness quite nicely. But if you can just do the EF thing I mentioned earlier, the end of a workout, take your average speed divided by your average heart rate, watch that number over time.
and see what happens every time you do a workout that's supposed to be like zone two, see if that's what that number is. And what should happen over time is that number should be gradually going up, which tells you metabolic fitness is improving. Doesn't cost you any money at all to do that. All you gotta do is have a calculator and you can figure out this number for yourself without having to go to the laboratory someplace to find out. So it's actually simple, but it can be very complex also.
Tyson Popplestone (28:34.998)
It's very, very deep information that we're talking about here in scientifically, but at the user level, it doesn't have to be that way. You can make it simple. For sure. I think it's funny when you say the, the thousand and one thousand and two is not very scientific is that's an example that sits really well with me. I think I'm going to be taking that approach to a lot of my training. I bet also over the years, you've seen a lot of athletes in the lead up to events.
putting in some really hard work and doing some of the fastest counting from 1001 to 1006 that you've ever seen. Yeah, it's okay to count fast. Okay to count fast. That's part of it. That's why it's 1006 to 1004. Because I know people are to count fast. But that tells you, you if you can count to 1007, 1008, that's not bad. It just means you're probably in zone one. You're a low level.
burning fat, which is okay also because zone one and zone two both burn a lot of fat. There's a point you come to called the crossover point, which happens kind of varies where it happens with the athlete. But that that happens when your your carbohydrate burning begins to rise rapidly at the same time your fat burning is decreasing rapidly. And those two lines cross each other at some
And this crossover point should be moved as far to the right as you can get it. Which means I'd like to see it in zone three, if possible. I'd to able to get that crossover point to zone three, because that means I'm burning fat in zone three. For most people, that won't happen. It'll be someplace in zone two. But when somebody comes on brand new to doing this, unfortunately, they'll probably have this crossover point in zone one. In other words, if they go to zone two, they're already becoming
glycolytic as far as a source of fuel as opposed to burning fat. but that can be developed. That's the whole idea of this whole process of going long, slow distance is to move that crossover point as far to the right as possible. So when it comes to the fueling of this longer, slower distance,
Tyson Popplestone (30:49.006)
Uh, one thing that I often see and the approach actually that I'm using for my marathon, which I'm, I'm running in October this year. I mean, I'm not doing crazy miles. I'm currently sitting at around. I only know it in the, in the kilometers. I'm around 75 to 80 K a week, most weeks with a longer run of currently about 26 to 28 K. But even recently I've been going out and just taking like 30 grams of carb gel every maybe 60 minutes, maybe.
And the runs are very relaxed. The pace is slow majority of it's at zone two. Is that, is that counterintuitive to do that? Like what's the impact that has on my body's ability to actually use fat as fuel? Cause I can imagine with the injection of, you know, 30 grams of, of carbs like that. It would affect the body's, you know, impact or a body speed that it goes to that fat for a fuel source. That's true. Yeah. Um, it really depends on the athlete. Bottom line is
Most endurance runners who are well -trained, I'm not saying great runners, but well -trained runners probably go an hour and a half without taking any carbohydrate at all. In fact, it's probably good way to do it. You probably don't need anything but water for an hour and a half. Some athletes, it's two hours. Kind of depends on the athlete. I'm talking now about doing one of these workouts, we're in zones one and two. If that's the case, we don't really need that much carbohydrate.
early in the workout. We want to get to the point where the body is burning fat. When you start introducing carbohydrate to the system, the body begins to shift over to using carbohydrate for fuel because it's readily available. So you're probably better off holding off on taking in carbohydrate until you've gotten to the point where the body is shifting over the crossover point and duration if taken to the point where you're now burning, starting to burn carbohydrate. That's a good time now
The reason you take in carbohydrate during a workout or during a race is because you're burning carbohydrate and you're burning at really rapid rates. You're going to take in quite a bit. But if you're in a workout, you're running zones one and zone two, you're not working out all that hard. So hopefully if everything's going as it should be, you're burning fat and carbohydrate is not being burned all that much. The carbohydrate burning is very, very low, very small by comparison with the fat burn. So you don't need to replace any carbohydrate yet.
Tyson Popplestone (33:10.03)
Just let it burn. You've got 2000 calories of it on board. Just let it burn. That's fine. Take advantage of that 50 ,000 calories and fat you've got on board and start burning it. And then at some point, probably an hour and a half to two hours, beyond that for some athletes who are really good metabolic shape, you can start taking in carbohydrate because now you start running a low on carbohydrate and that can be dangerous if you've ever experienced a bonk where you run out of carbohydrate glycogen.
It's a terrible sensation to experience and you basically you stop the workout at that point, it's done, you're finished. You don't want that to happen. So, you you got to kind of figure out how far can you go before you bop and what you want to do is push yourself a little bit farther as time goes on. You if you started out early in the season with an hour and a half before you take in carbohydrate, that's fine. But we need to start moving that back to the point where we get to two hours eventually
carbohydrate. Yeah. it's really interesting to me with all of that said, how much of a focus there still seems to be on so much of the literature and so much of the advice given around using carbs as fuel. And for a bloke like you, who's been speaking about this for as many years as you have, it must drive you wild. Like even me dipping my toes in the water of this and seeing the, it's really a controversial conversation I've realized. I mean, I knew
that there was some, there was some conflict between vegans and carnivores and wherever else you put yourself there. But the conflict is real between fat burners and, carb burners and what the most effective way to approach endurance training is. I don't know if you can speak to that at all. Yeah. Well, the bottom line is that, for health purposes only, let's, take a step back one step. What comes first, health or fitness?
Well, I think everybody would agree health, although a lot of people don't behave that way when they train, they seem to think that fitness comes first, but it's really health that comes first. And what we should be doing health -wise, not talking about endurance sports now at all, but just health, is helping our body become better at burning fat for fuel. I wouldn't have nearly so many obese neighbors if everybody had did that. It's just remarkable.
Tyson Popplestone (35:36.536)
how I don't know what Australia is like now, but in the US now, it's like, know, it's fat is just like obesity is just remarkable. How many people are obese? And now we're to see kids, know, grade school kids who are obese. It's becoming one of the biggest problems of our society.
And it's because we're not good at fat burning. People don't get out and move enough. You just go for a walk. know, people just go out and go for a walk. That would burn fat. Now, at first it won't because the person who is obese, they're going to burn carbohydrate as soon as they get out of the chair and start moving, they're burning carbohydrate. But if you can get to the point where you start doing more walks, easy, gentle walks, that person will start building more fat metabolism and consequently they'll become healthier. So the bottom line is that
This, what we're talking about here is not just for performance, it's also for health. It's just something we should all be doing is having our bodies work better at burning fat for fuel as opposed to carbohydrate. Burning carbohydrate for fuel is easy. Anybody can do it. Burning fat for fuel is difficult because you've got to go out and move to do that. You've got to get to the point where you're actually have a program that you do regularly at low intensity like walking.
in order to be able to, to burn fat. So, know, if I was starting somebody brand new who's wants to go into running, I would start them out walking. that would be the starting point. Cause that, that way I could be fairly sure that we're working on fat metabolism and then we're going to build on that over time. Yeah. I mean, this conversation around health and fitness is, one which is really interesting. And I mean, you
so often, especially in endurance sports, that you'll have very fit athletes who, as you say, are probably not doing anything long term or even short term to invest in the actual health. And as a result, I mean, you see so many breakdowns both during and post careers. the conversation one is one which I'm really interested in as well, because the carb fueling aspect of training is one that I
Tyson Popplestone (37:51.05)
On paper, doesn't seem healthy. Like you look at the amount of sugars that you're consuming, especially in a marathon buildup. If you're taking two or three gels on a Sunday, most athletes that I know are taking two or three gels and then they'll have some drink filled with like an artificial sweetener after, and that's happening all throughout the week. I think I can kind of justify it because it's like, I mean, I can't, but I say I try and justify it to myself and I have been.
By saying, no, you know, it's a relatively short part of your year. You're not going to be doing this all through the year. You'll be quite cautious with it. But really when you look at the amount of sugars and things you're taking in, it's probably no surprise. The incidents of like just mouth decay or tooth decay and endurance athletes is so much higher than the general population. It seems that when you're looking at this from a health perspective, that carbs as fuel is, is not a great approach. Yeah, I've heard of athletes before who I've talked with who,
who see exercise as a way of allowing them to take in more sugar. They're basically addicted to sugar, which is very easy. In fact, there's a few studies that show that even animals become addicted to sugar over things like cocaine. They prefer sugar to cocaine, if given the option. Even once they're addicted to both of them, if they have an option, they'll chew sugar. So it's a very addictive food product that we have available to us. Our ancestors, you when I think about things like health,
I typically go back mentally to how do we get to this point in time? Or we've been around for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years, humans have, and sugar was very difficult to get before something like at the very earliest 10 ,000 years ago, sugar was up until then sugar was very, very difficult to come by. You go to a beehive and you could, you could try to get the honey out of the beehive.
which is the best sugar you can get, but you had to go through an awful lot of discomfort and pain to get that sugar. So it was not the sort of thing you did real easily. So it was not a common practice just to go grab a bunch of honey out of the tree someplace. That's a good sugar way to wind up early injured. But anyway, that was about the only source of simple sugar that our ancestors had.
Tyson Popplestone (40:17.036)
And yet they were moving all the time. They were always moving. They're not like us. didn't sit and watch the television or sit and watch, look at a computer like we're doing right now or things like this. They were always moving. You know, they were hunter gatherers. had to hunt for their food and gather food and then bring it all back together. This hunting process could take hours. And they didn't, by the way, they didn't run fast. They ran very slowly.
There's one study I just read not too long ago that showed they were running at something like about a 10 minute per mile pace. can't convert that very easily off the top of my head to kilometers, but that's very, very slow. Most people would be embarrassed to run that slow, but that's what our ancestors did when they were hunting. If they were hunting an animal, they wouldn't run fast to try to catch it because they know the animal's faster. We're one of the slowest animals on the planet, these humans. We're among the slowest animals on the planet.
But we're among the most endurance capable athletes on the planet also, athletes, mean animals. So if you're chasing, let's say a deer, you're not gonna run the deer at end, you're not gonna run that fast. So what they do instead is they've just run for hour after hour after hour chasing that deer until finally the deer just ran out of energy and collapsed someplace and then their hunt was over.
So that was the way they did it. And it was very, very slow. It wasn't fast at all. They had great metabolic fitness. They would bring that back to the wherever they were meeting the rest of their tribe, their group, and others would be bringing in vegetables and fruits and things they had gathered along the way. And they would prepare a meal. And then after they the meal, they would dance until they went to sleep. So they were always moving. were not. They were not doing what we do. It's sit around all the time eating sugar.
So sugar is something you need to be very cautious with. If faster you run, more likely you are to need sugar and the longer your runs are, the more likely you are to need sugar. But I would try to limit your intake to the minimum. I would try not to say take it early. would try, like I said a while ago, an hour and a half. If you can go an hour and a half without sugar, that's great. It's a good starting place. Try to get to two hours without using any sugar.
Tyson Popplestone (42:39.744)
eventually over time. That will be good not only for your performance, but also for your health. You'll become a much better fat burner all the time. Not just when you're running, but all the time that way. Yeah, that's awesome. It's funny. As you speak, I started to realize that I always thought that the story of the tortoise and the hare was a story about taking your time in life and making sure, but it turns out that it could be one of the best endurance training books ever written. That's right. Good point.
Joe, I understand like there's so many different directions that I knew we could take this conversation. And I mean, everyone would be worth probably a podcast series rather than just a podcast conversation, but maybe as a way of rounding this up just quite quickly, because I'm aware of the time, but I was just curious to pick your brain. We've mentioned heart rate. You've mentioned, you know, just a couple of things to measure your metabolic rate and things over your training runs.
Are there any other data points that are crucial to you when you're monitoring an athlete that you coach? There are all kinds. I'm very much an analytical sort of guy. I like to look at numbers, but the key for me is not just all numbers. I try to figure out what is the number or a couple of numbers that this athlete needs to be achieving. And then I start watching those numbers. You know, there's all kinds of stuff we can look at. What was
talked about efficiency factor already, that's, you know, you're just taking your average speed divided by your average heart rate. That's a very basic number. And whenever you're working on a fat metabolic workout, zone one, zone two, that's something I would highly recommend looking at after the workout is over and see what happens to it over time. What happens over time is should be going up. But there are so many other things we're looking at. And some of this is really, you know, obvious stuff
How fast can you run a kilometer? That's pretty basic, but that's data, that's looking at data. Then we can start digging into things like lactate. How much lactate are you experiencing when you work out? And this is now getting really technical and it's not a place that every athlete needs to go. In fact, very, very few athletes would be even concerned with the whole idea of
Tyson Popplestone (44:57.976)
But that's another one of these metrics we can be looking at, which just gives us a lot of information. But at some point, we begin to overwhelm the athlete with information and even the coach. can spend as long analyzing a workout as you did doing the workout because there's just so much data available anymore. When I started running back in, gosh, the 1970s, we had almost nothing. We didn't have heart rate monitors.
We didn't have anything at all. All we knew was roughly how far we had run and pretty precisely what our time was for that distance we had run. And that was about it. And beyond that, how you felt on a scale of one to five, how did you feel, know, sort of thing. And that was all we had. Now we're overwhelmed with data. to the point that it's very, very difficult to see it any other way, but we're just seeing this.
trying to deal with too much data and most athletes don't need all that data. They need some much more basic way of looking at their, at their training, their performance. So I would try to simplify this little thing, get it down to one couple of, know, two or three of most data points to figure out. Yeah. Joe, are you coaching at the moment? You're still taking on athletes or you're all, you're all chocked up at the moment. I'm not taking on any athletes right now at all. I just finished my 18th
In fact, I just sent it to the publisher yesterday. And so I'm kind of taking a vacation right now. I'm not sitting on my computer all day long. I took almost a year to write that book. started on August of last year. So it's been almost a year and I'm kind of like, I'm ready to take a break. So I did find something with my wife over the weekend. We did something together for a little many vacation. Went to the mountains here in Arizona and overnight and had a good
But, but no, I'm not taking anybody at all right now. No, sure. I was trying to get excited and let everyone know where to go to contact you for coaching, but we'll hit pause on that for the time being for everyone listening. I'll make sure I've got your links to your books and website and things like that all in the description to this episode. But Joe, Hey, I was really looking forward to this one man. And thanks so much for the time and patience, particularly now I know that you just finished a 12 month long project and you probably should be putting your feet up, sipping a margarita somewhere.
Tyson Popplestone (47:24.108)
I'm about to go sit in front of the television, so we'll see. enjoy that. thanks again, Joe. Thank you guys. Enjoyed it. Thank you.