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Expand your running knowledge, identify running misconceptions and become a faster, healthier, SMARTER runner. Let Brodie Sharpe become your new running guide as he teaches you powerful injury insights from his many years as a physiotherapist while also interviewing the best running gurus in the world. This is ideal for injured runners & runners looking for injury prevention and elevated performance. So, take full advantage by starting at season 1 where Brodie teaches you THE TOP PRINCIPLES TO OVERCOME ANY RUNNING INJURY and letβs begin your run smarter journey.
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On today's episode, what separates everyday runners from the pros with John Hawley. Welcome to the only podcast delivering and deciphering the latest running research to help you run smarter. My name is Brodie. I'm an online physiotherapist treating runners all over the world, but I'm also an advert runner who just like you have been through vicious injury cycles and when searching for answers struggled to decipher between common runner. myths and real evidence-based guidance. But this podcast is changing that. So join me as a run smarter scholar and raise your running IQ so we can break through the injury cycles and achieve running feats you never thought possible. John is our guest today. He is a professor and director at the Australian Catholic University in the Exercise Nutrition Research Program. He has released two research papers of interest for this particular topic. The first one being a race within a race, starting together, finishing apart, which he'll unpack in a second. And the other one, which is open source, it is titled the Molecular Athlete, Exercise Physiology from Mechanisms to Medals, medals being Olympic medals and those extreme feats. The open source one I'll make available in the show notes. This other one we are discussing in detail today will be for those who have signed up to the research database. It will be coming out in November's folder of the latest research that has emerged. I can go on and on about John and what is achieved to date, but he gives us a pretty good summary to start off with. So let's take it away. It's emigrated from the United Kingdom to New Zealand, finished schooling there. Started a degree at the University of Targo, but then was running well and got a scholarship to go to the Lefkara University in England. Did my degree in sports science and human biology there. Then flew over to the States because a guy called David Costell, who some of your listeners may have heard of, the sort of grandfather of exercise physiology, went to work with him for two years and then eventually ended up spending 10 years in South Africa at the University of Cape Town Medical School with Tim Noakes. famous these days for the ketogenic diet and other such things. And did postdoc there and headed up the sports science institute of South Africa for four years dealing with elite athletes. So that's it in brief. Excellent. And you've recently released a paper titled the race within a race, starting together, finishing apart, can you give us a rundown of exactly what that means? Sure. Yeah. Well, we thought we'd. choose a sort of provocative title, there's lots of studies in the literature looking at athletes and their physiological characteristics. But one of the things that we were concerned with in this paper, and I should acknowledge the two co-authors, Louise Burke, who doubles as my wife and the world's best sports nutritionist, and Jamie Whitfield, who is married to an Olympic 5,000-meter runner. So we've got a good predegree for writing that first of all. But what we wanted to do very briefly was look at the differences between the two hour marathon runners in male terms versus, you know, three or four hour marathon runners, they're in the same race, but essentially they're not running the same race, you know, one finishes a couple of hours ahead of the others. So we want to look at not just the physiological differences, but some of the nutritional differences and some of the other quirks there, because, you know, a marathon isn't the same for all people who start on the, on the same start line. Yeah, excellent. Well, uh, I wanted today to discuss all those different elements or as many as we possibly can. Uh, Relating to the performance side of things, most people are familiar with VO2 max as like a good characteristic for performance or a good somewhat predictor for performance as well. Um, how much of that is genetic? How much of that is, can be trained, um, from your knowledge? No good questions. And, and we do have answers to those. So firstly, VO2 max, if you want to be a two hour marathon runner, yes, you've got to have a high one. It gets you into that club, but as we'll probably come on discuss, there are other factors apart from VO2 max. There's some athletes with very high VO2 max values who don't actually perform as well as their max values might predict. So there are other factors there. As far as trainability, yes, there is a genetic component to that. You inherit your, what we call mitochondrial DNA from your mother. So you need to choose your parents wisely, especially your mother. And as far as trainability, if you took a person off the street, one of your listeners who's never done any training before, which is probably unlikely because you're probably talking to a reasonably active audience, but we could expect with a fairly vigorous training program for them to increase their VO2 max by 20, maybe 25%. So there is a lot of potential for upside. Having said that, you know, genetics ultimately does determine how high that ceiling is. Is there much of a... variation between like a standard recreational runner who isn't as genetically gifted and a two hour marathon who is like, do we have a percentage range of like just how different we're talking? Well, the values could be almost double. And again, without getting into sort of technical numbers, the VO2 max values are expressed relative to a body weight of an athlete and You know, your listeners only have to look on the start line of a marathon to see that most of the skinny men and women are at the front and finish there. And most of the other people are not quite so skinny. I'm not going to say they're overweight because they're certainly not. But finish at the tail end of the field, so to speak. So you know, if you look at the someone like Kipchoge and some of the East African runners, they're 55, 54 kilos. Males I'm talking about here, the females are under 50 kilos. They're extremely light. So The analogy is having a five-star engine, if you like, in a, in a three-star body and that the body is very small. So the power to weight ratio is very, very good. So, um, again, the best runners not only have the biggest engine, but they have the smaller chassis. Wow. Yeah. And what's happening like adaptation wise, if we take a recreational run and try to increase their VO2 max, um, most people know of the term VO2 max, but what's What's actually happening to the heart, lungs, the body to adapt to be more efficient. All right. That's a whole physiology 101 course takes about a year to teach, but I'll try and be as brief as I can. Um, yes, things happen at what we call the central level, which is adaptations in the heart and we call the peripheral level adaptations in the skeletal muscle. So if you start with the heart, uh, we have an increased blood volume. We have a slightly increased extraction of the oxygen coming by the muscle. We have a greater cardiac output, which is the amount of blood coming out the heart each minute. At the muscle level, we have these things called mitochondria, which your listeners may have heard of, the powerhouse of the cell. We have what we call mitochondrial biogenesis, the making of new mitochondria. And this helps the muscle be better and more efficient at extracting nutrients, at extracting oxygen. And generally the highest runners have the highest VO two max is because they have a combination of both a better cardiovascular system and a better peripheral or musculoskeletal system. And I guess training more often, I think maybe zone two training more often helps with those mitochondrial function helps more mitochondria. Um, and I guess the harder efforts might help the heart adaptations, help the heart beat harder, those sorts of things. Yeah, you're leading into a nice sort of area without knowing it. I mean, the area of high intensity training has really sort of been put on the map in the last 10 to 15 years. And of course, it's not new. Athletes were doing this at the, you know, the turn of the last century, so to speak. But if you want to increase your VO2 max, you actually do have to do some training at or higher than VO2 max, you know, just tootling around if you're a, you know, four hour marathon at four hour marathon pace, isn't going to increase your VO2 max. You do need to do some intensity at or above, you know, certainly race pace, but certainly above your VO2 max or threshold, whichever training zones you apply. Could you maybe give like to say we have a recreational runner who's running a four hour marathon and all that training to race a four hour marathon. What might like a general workout look like, like above VO2 max? What time are we spending and resting and that sort of stuff? Yep, it's a good question. And again, specific practicalities for your audience. Look, let's assume they're training four or five times a week. They've got the standard long Sunday run every week or every 10 days. And the rest of the week for two or three sessions, they're doing, you know, moderate intensity training between 30 and 60 minutes. I would put one session in there where they might do something after a 10 minute warm up, for example, they might go to a track or somewhere where they can run on the grass or the flat. They might do a session which encompasses four times five minutes, hard efforts at faster than their marathon race pace. And I usually say to do this at their best current 10 kilometer pace. So they do four times five minutes, they have a minute walk or jog recovery. And so they're doing 20 minutes of very, very steady state work, which is at or near VO2 max or perhaps even slightly above it, but they're getting very short recovery periods. I'd build this off over the course of, you know, six or eight weeks. So they're perhaps doing six repetitions like that. So very tough session, both physically, physiologically and mentally, but again, training at close to that VO two max and certainly faster than race pace certainly helps a variety of physiological parameters, as well as perhaps running economy and efficiency, which is another important aspect. Yeah. That sounds like a brutal workout. Um, if we, if you're saying like. above VO2 max, like most people will think of VO2 max as like the fastest they can go. But I think what I understand is like that's aerobically speaking, the max aerobically, but if you go faster than that, then you're starting to work more anaerobic. Does that make sense? Yeah, look, the terms anaerobic and aerobic are sort of a bit of a misnomer of terminology there. But in a session that have just sort of illustrated there, the four times five minutes. At the end of probably the third or fourth repetition, you are very, very close to VO2 max. So although your first five-minute session is probably not at VO2 max, it may be around 90%. By the end of that session, your heart rate and your VO2 max have steadily increased. You've got out of that steady state sort of zone, if you like, and you will hit very close to VO2 max. Certainly, you'll be at 90, 95% of VO2 max, which again, is much higher than you'll be racing at. So the point is there it's faster than race pace and done at the current best 10 kilometer race performance. Okay. Yeah. They're good guidelines to follow. So thanks for that. Uh, you also mentioned in your paper, something called lactate threshold and, um, trying to, I guess, train to be more, I guess the lactate threshold, um, is I know better buffered or something like that. Could you explain what lactate threshold is and how that works with a recreational runner? Well, again, you could pick up three textbooks and get three different answers to what the lactate threshold is. There's ventilatory threshold, which is where ventilation suddenly exponentially increases as far as lactate. It's produced by anaerobic metabolism, the breakdown of glucose anaerobically without the presence of oxygen. And generally. If we go back to your four hour marathon run, the lactate values in a race like that for someone running four hours or even for someone running two hours, it'd be very low. There'll be two to three millimolar. Now what does that mean? Well, two to three millimolar is again very low. If you were to take something like a 2000 meter row, the values would climb to about 20 millimolar. So it doesn't matter if you don't know what a millimolar is, but there'd be tenfold higher at the end of something which is... very maximal effort for four or five minutes. Now to get back to your question there, what is lactate threshold? It is that speed or power output where the lactate suddenly, if you like, hits the roof. It just suddenly increases exponentially. So you're trundling along and typically we measure this in what we call an incremental test on the treadmill where we gradually increase the pace. So let's say for your recreational runner, we bring them in, they might be running at 10 kilometers an hour for several minutes, then 11. Then 12, and then maybe at 13 or 14 kilometers an hour, we're taking lactate from them, all of a sudden there's an increase and that's what we call the lactate threshold at the point where lactate deflects and almost exponentially increases and again, for your marathon runners, you'll be running much below that threshold. So if I understand it, there'll be every runner has a certain intensity of their running where that. lactate starts to build up, accumulate in their body. And if it's at a lower intensity, if someone's running a four hour marathon, it's relatively speaking a lower intensity. So that concentration in the, in the body doesn't necessarily build up as being removed almost as much as it's being built up. And so the levels or the concentrations remain relatively stable. Is that right? That's right. You don't need me. You're answering your own questions. I'm just trying to catch up as we're going through. That's the perfect answer. And again, you've hit a very, very important point there. The fact that the elite runner runs at a higher percentage of either their max, their heart rate, or their lactate threshold. And it's not that they don't produce lactate, as you correctly pointed out, they get rid of it. It goes back to the liver very, very quickly and is recirculated. So there are differences there again. We go back to the race within a race between the people running, and let's just make it because it's a nice mathematical thing. two hours versus four hours, higher VO two max for the guys and girls at the front, higher fraction of their VO two max or percentages that they can use higher percent of their lactate threshold that they can run at and maintain it for longer. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So if someone's wanting to improve aerobically as a runner, okay, let's try to increase their VO two max with some training principles like you described, but let's try to train our body to. run at higher speeds where that lactate concentrations remain stable. Like we're removing as much as we're building up. And what you're saying is the, the elites can run at a really, I guess, high intensity closer to their VO2 max with sort of cycling through that lactate. Are there similar workouts? Are there similar like compared to that last workout you described with VO2 max. Should we be doing different workouts to adapt to or get used to buffering a lot more lactate? Well, you can, you can do shorter workouts. I mean, the higher the intensity and the shorter the workout, greater the lactate production. So if you want to work at a speed, which is, you know, in excess of your lactate threshold, yes, you're going to produce more lactate and your muscles will learn to buffer that more efficiently. But for your four hour marathon runner, is that important? Well, I'd say that you're better spending your time out there on your long Sunday run, learning to refuel and doing other things, which will have more likely a greater impact on performance. So if you're at the front of the race, yes, as you know, in many big city marathons, it can come down to the last kilometer in almost a sprint. But for your four hour marathon runner, that ain't the problem. They've got bigger issues than the last hundred meters usually. Yeah, that's a very good point. I guess it's requiring a bit of self-reflection for a runner to be like, okay, where is my limiting factor? Say if I am a marathon runner and I hit the wall with 12 Ks to go, Is it more of a hydration fueling issue? Is it more of that sort of stuff? Maybe I'm better spent my time and energy focusing on those limitations because I'm not at the front of the race where my legs are getting heavy and burnt up and falling to pieces because I can't buffer that lactate. Yeah. I think, I think your phrase there of, you know, self-reflection is really, really good. I mean, let's just say you've run it. I mean, have you run a marathon for example? Let's turn it. Okay. So let's make you the guinea pig here. What's the rate limit in step for you? Do you think, you know, did your legs, you're very rarely, unless you're running right at the front, oxygen delivery and oxygen uptake, isn't the problem, you know, you're not out of breath. So I predict, you know, your legs fell off at 30 K or something. It may be a fueling issue. You know, let's turn the scales around. What, what do you think limits you? I'll tell you all the mistakes I made in my first marathon. So I, uh, was injured approaching the marathon. So I didn't get my, as many long runs in as I thought. And I did one. 30 K long run and the others were like 25, 24, 21 or something like that. So ill-prepared. I was coming in after running a half marathon, really confident because I was really happy with my half marathon. I hardly drank a Harley eight. I didn't fuel or anything, but you know, you could get through that with a half marathon. Um, and so I was never had taken a gel in my life, never had taken, like, I put some in my pocket that I got in my marathon race kit. And so I'm like, yep, fantastic. I'll put those in my pocket. And had my first one at, I don't know, 20 K and tasted disgusting. Couldn't really get it down. So I threw it away. Couldn't do that. Took in some water because I'm like, let's kind of be sensible here, but yeah, my legs felt the pieces at 30 K or thereabouts probably about 28. And yeah, I was walk running for the rest and absolutely blew up. So made almost every mistake in the book. I've ran out too fast as well. Cause I was confident and you know, all the mistakes in the book. So look, that's good. And you know, if you don't mind me dissecting that. So again, you want a long run and your variety of 20 to 25 Ks, you're probably in good shape to run a half marathon, not a marathon, number one. Number two, if you've had an injury, you probably reduce your training anyway. Number three, the gels. I mean, goodness me, where to start, you never ever wear a new pair of shoes or try a nutritional or hydration strategy that you haven't practiced in training. Number four, and I don't want to keep going because obviously. No, lie it on me. Lie it on me. Well, again, you know, the gels are very, very hard to stomach. You need to practice those in training. You know, whether you need water, whether you need carbohydrate is a bigger issue there. You got to 20k and your legs fell off. That's a, that's, you know, you're halfway there. And many people say the marathon starts at 30 kilometers. So, yeah, look, there's a lot, there's a lot of things there. And again, you're pacing strategy. You've got to go off at a pace which you think is realistic to your finishing pace. It's hard for the most part to negative split. And if your listeners don't know what that is, it's where you run the second half of the marathon faster than the first half. And that's not usually recommended. It's very, very hard unless you are an elite runner or you're running in a pack. So yeah, look, you did quite a few things wrong there, which is good, but presumably you rectify them in your next race. I think the biggest, if I'd had to pick on the top two, more training volume. more long run, so that's number one. And number two, you have to practice nutrition. Nutrition is absolutely essential during a marathon. As you said, you got away with it in the half marathon, you thought you were bulletproof, you're not. You fell apart at 20 or 30K, which is where most people fall apart, absolutely. But you don't need to start your nutrition at 30K, you've got to start it earlier. So yeah, you've made a few mistakes, but you learn wisdom's a wonderful thing, so it's hindsight. And, uh, ever since that I've like, you know, gone through 350 podcast episodes and learnt along the way. So, um, yes, I, I do hope a lot of runners learn from their mistakes instead of like repeating the same things over and over again. Um, the anaerobic side of things, uh, you mentioned in your paper, this thing called like total buffering capacity or something along those lines. Is that different from like a lactate buffer? Look, you have the problem with lactate. Everyone thinks lactic acid is the culprit. And let's just make this quite clear. Lactic acid is used by the skeletal muscles. I mean, lactate is a byproduct of anaerobic metabolism, but the muscles can take it up. The liver can take it up. And via a miraculous biochemical thing called the CoriCycle, it makes lactate into glucose. It's called gluconeogenesis. And we're going to want to get two biochemicals for your audience. Let's say you've done a high intensity workout. You've produced lots of lactate. Just for example, you don't walk down properly, warm down properly. Where's the lactate go? Well, it goes back to the liver. It's shuttled back to the liver where it's stored as glycogen and can later be released as glucose. So number one, lactate isn't the enemy per se. Hydrogen ions are your problem. The associated hydrogen ion production along with lactic acid. So that's what the muscle gets better at buffering. and there's a variety of mechanisms that do that. But essentially, again, for your four-hour marathon, is it important? Probably not. If you're going to run a 10K or a 5K or anything under that, certainly you need a high muscle buffering capacity along with all the attributes that we've talked about, VO2 max, lactate threshold, high percentage of fractional utilization of your VO2 max. So again, for your three- or four-hour marathon, I wouldn't be that worried about it. I think your point earlier that you made Identify self-reflection, identify what was limiting for you or what you think is limiting and work on the weakest link. You're as strong as your weakest link. Yeah. Well said. What about this gross mechanical efficiency? Um, my understanding of that term would be like something along the lines of like running economy, like how much energy you're using at a given pace, how efficient you are using that energy. Um, what factors come into play with that? Well, it's a bit simpler than that. We measured in the lab again, and we look at the oxygen cost, how much oxygen you utilize to run at a certain pace. And let me just give you an example with some numbers in just so your audience can get an appreciation of this. If we look at someone who's running at 16 kilometers an hour, all right, that's 10 miles an hour. So it's a reasonably fast pace. If you look at the Elite Marathon runner, their oxygen cost at that is around 45 to 50 milliliters of oxygen. And again, I don't want to baffle your audience with numbers, but 40 to 50 milliliters of oxygen might well be a VO2 max value for a non-elite runner, okay, number one. Number two, if your non-elite runner is able to run at that pace, they might be using 20 or 30% more oxygen and therefore more energy, in this case more carbohydrate, to run at exactly... the same pace. So the analogy I always give in my lectures to the undergrads is, you know, I can be running along and I have a slide of myself and my wife actually in a marathon and I have a higher VO2 max than her, she's female, females generally have a lower VO2 max, etc. We can both be running at the same absolute speed, but relative to the individual, the oxygen cost, the fuel bill. whatever you want to look at is different. So there's a big difference between absolute intensity where you and I are running at the same pace or my wife and I are running at the same pace versus what it's costing the individual. That's the relative cost to you and to your physiology. And again, elite athletes can maintain a higher relative percent of anything you measure than the non-elite. goes back to like, say when I'm watching the tour de France, they always talk about like how many matches they're burning. And I would imagine that like people are burning matches quicker, running, trying to run at the same speed, but someone else can just be not burning matches as quicker than... Great analogy. Yep. I like it. You finished it from cycling, but that's, that's the same. And again, with cycling though, cycling efficiency, we look at how many liters of oxygen a cyclist has to burn to maintain so many watts. And we find that the more efficient cyclists use less oxygen at the same power output or at the same speed. So yeah, you could be in a, in a pack and you'd be using less oxygen than the person sitting next to you. Or, you know, in this case, the Peloton is probably not a good analogy because everyone drafts and it's a little bit different in cycling to running, but yeah, you get, you get the gist. Yeah. Elite runners are more efficient. And so I'm guessing like, yes, a higher VO2 max. lung capacity and those sorts of things lead to utilizing oxygen better, leading to more efficiency. But what are the factors? Cause I know in your paper, you talk about muscle fiber distribution and like muscle elasticity, like tendon elasticity and those sorts of things. Um, how important are they? Very, again, your fiber type is, is genetically determined. And if you biopsy the top runners and we've got data on a few Kenyans, but we've got data on a lot of European and American runners. And let's put this into perspective. Most of your people, if we went out and picked the first hundred people, and I'm sitting in Melbourne here, the first 100 people who we were able to get a biopsy of, they would have around 50% fast-twitch fibers. They're the ones that produce power. And you know, the ones that produce lactate, they're the slow twitch fibers. So that's normal, you know, genetics and evolution and whoever created it has said, well, you're going to be doing, you know, a few sprints, you're going to have to hunt for animals in the days where we're hunter-gatherers. And that's what, you know, that's what I've endowed you with. However, when we look at elite marathon runners, and the best example of this is Alberto Salazar, who was a 208 marathon runner many, many years ago. probably a little bit notorious now because he trained a couple of runners who were later found out to be taking EPO but not withstanding that he had 92% slow twitch fibers. Now the question is how many people would you have to biopsy and in other words what population do you need to generate an athlete that is such an outlier because they are outliers and now I've given you the marathon analogy but if you look at sprinters some of the top sprinters have the opposite, they have 80 to 90% fast twitch fibers. And my point is here that if I take someone who's got 90% slow twitch fiber, I can get them to train with Usain Bolt and get the best coach in the world. They are never, ever, ever going to be fast. Conversely, your person with 80 or 90% fast twitch fibers is never going to be a two hour marathon runner. So unfortunately, again, Genetics, if you like, sets the ceiling. Training determines how close you get to that ceiling, but your genetics for a large part is who you are. And again, let's not get too complicated here. If you were good at cross country at school, you finished near the front, you probably got a lot of slow twitch fibers. If you hated cross country, but you were the sprinter who could win the 100 meters, that's your fiber type. It doesn't change that much with training. So you pretty much know whether you're fast or slow twitch without. me sticking a needle in your leg. Yeah. Have you done any on yourself? Do you know what percentage of fast twist you are? I've had 42 muscle biopsies, which is a large number of biopsies. I'm 75% fast, which I was a 400 meter runner, sub 50 second 400 meter runner and a 152 800 meter runner. So reasonably fast. I did train for a marathon with my wife. It was purgatory. Everything in my body was telling me you're not suited to this. So yeah, um, fast Twitch would never make it to our marathon runner, even if you gave me the best training in the world and took me to Kenya. When they talk, when you talk about percentages, I'm maybe assuming here that like different muscles also have different percentages. Like, I know like the soleus muscle will be like primarily like a different muscle fiber type percentage speaking, compared to the gastrocnemius and those sorts of things. So when you. Talk about these percentages. Are we talking about a specific muscle or like just in general throughout the body? No, that's a really good question. I mean, there's almost two questions in one there. Firstly, we, we biopsy the quadriceps muscle. Um, and we do that for a simple reason because it's a big muscle mass. That's the muscle at the side of your leg, you know, your thigh, your vastus lateralis, and you can throw a needle in there sort of thing and, you know, you're not going to do any damage. It's hard to do the gastrocnemius, the calf muscle. Having said that. If you're a. runner running on the level on the flat, the gastrocnemius is actually more active than in running at least than the quadriceps muscle. Point number one. Point number two is if you're, let's just make this up, 50% fast and slow twitch in the legs, does that mean you're fast and 50% fast and slow twitch in the arms? Not necessarily. No. So there are differences among muscle types. There are differences among males and females. And as we said, obviously there are massive differences between. know, the sprinter fast twitch fiber profile versus the endurance slow twitch fiber profile. If someone wants to be more mechanically efficient, like they're okay, their genetics can't do much about that. If they want to become a more efficient runner to run marathons and those sorts of things, is there anything else they can do that we haven't yet discussed? That is a really good question and one I'm asked quite frequently by runners actually. We tend to self-optimise in running. What do I mean by that? If you're doing enough miles, you've probably self-optimised. In other words, you're probably running at the most economical for you. And again, I'll give you an example. If I have to run, and I don't now, but with my wife at a slower pace than I'm really used to, I'm very inefficient at that. I'm spending more time in ground contact, i.e. more time to get muscle damage and everything else. I'm not economical. So my guess is that, and swimming's analogous to this as well, if you do enough of it, you tend to, it's what we call the U-shaped curve, you tend to fall at the bottom of that U-shaped curve. Now having said that, I think running at faster paces actually translates to running more efficiently at slower paces. So the workout that I gave earlier, if you can... run those five-minute sessions and do them at a reasonable pace, 10k pace, the chances are that you will probably, by trial and error, reduce the oxygen cost of running and get more efficient. So you generally self-optimize. And just think of an example. You know, you go out and you're going to run for an hour, an hour and a half. You know, you don't set off with a bounding stride or with a cadence that you would have for a 10-kilometer training run. You've already know you're going to run for 90 minutes and you set off at appropriate pace, hopefully with an appropriate gait and appropriate biomechanics. The last thing, very long answer, but the last thing is of course, you could go, you know, to a biomechanics or a physiology lab and get someone to actually look at you, your style and your economy. But if you've watched enough runners, I can look at a runner in the street and I know without putting them on the treadmill, that's a good runner, very economical. How do we know? Again, technical. They have very little, what we call vertical oscillation of their central gravity. And I always remember my old coach saying, if you ran behind a wall, I should see your head just moving along in a straight line. I shouldn't see it bobbing up and down. And if your audience remember that, you know, the more you're going up and down, the less you're translating forward. So just think of running behind a wall. Someone else is filming you and your head should just be translating along very flat without bobbing up and down. Good advice there. And it reminds me of like a paper, um, Dr. Izzy Moore did a systematic review on cadence and looked at good experienced runners and like what their optimal cadence might be in like experimenting with different cadences. And she found like, yeah, most people soft self-optimized, they get very, very close to their optimal cadence. I think it was within a couple of percent without even like working out or calculating beforehand what their optimal cadence is. And that's because the body's very, sorry to interrupt, but the body's very sensible. It generally doesn't do anything for nothing and it generally tries to conserve energy. So what you've said is absolutely true and aware of that paper and others where they've tried to alter the stride length of runners and make them take a longer stride or more frequent stride and everything else and they're uneconomical. Then they ask them to run at their chosen pace and guess what? Lo and behold, magic. That's the most economical. Yeah. And when you talk about the head bopping up and down, like it's usually people who are like, you know, lower who dropped their cadence or they're running sort of like really low, maybe they're a recreational runner who isn't really used to running yet, hasn't got the hours in to build in that mechanical efficiency. They tend to move up and down if their cadence is quite low. So I guess it's all quite related. And they move up and down when they run or try and run fast. They're very uneconomical at trying to run fast. So again, That sort of four times, four to six times, five minute session. I, um, I gave you earlier on is a really good one because if you can run fast economically, you can certainly run slow economically or slower. I should say not slow. Yeah. I hear from some running coaches that doing strides, one of the benefits of doing strides is like you're exposing yourself to running at like quite fast speeds and may like, like I said, it's just coaches talking, um, but may translate to you running more economically. At slower speeds. Do you see any benefit in that? Absolutely. Um, you know, one of the workouts that we used to do, even when we're training for five and 10 kilometers, you know, 16 times 100 and you do your hundred stride run through, you know, a relatively fast chart, probably your five K best race pace or even faster, maybe, uh, you turn around because you were not doing it for a speed or anything particular like that. You. just hit the line again and go back. And you do a mile of those, 1600 meters of those. And again, when you start to get tired, that's where economy or efficiency usually falls down. And that's a really interesting concept. And we can talk about that if you want, but there's a recent paper that's come out by Andy Jones looking at the elite marathon runners. And generally at 30 to 40 or 30 to 35K, your economy and efficiency changes from the first 5K. And those runners who can maintain their economy and efficiency throughout the marathon are, you know, the general, the guys who can run two hours and the females who can run two 15, or should we say two 10 now, I'm not too, not too sure about that record, but we won't go there. All right. Maybe first time we touch on that one. If we're back to muscle type and like the percentages, if someone is 50, uh, and then they start training for a marathon. The. Would you suspect that slow, slow Twitch type to become more like, I don't know, bigger or more economical or are the muscle fibers adapting and you know, you're taking advantage of that muscle type compared to the others. Again, good question. And yes, you can train if you like some of the faster fibers to take on the biochemical properties of a slow Twitch fiber now I gave you a very simple. Analogy earlier and I said there were only two fiber types slow twitch and fast twitch Actually, there are two types of fast twitch fibers and I didn't want to get too complicated as you know I can tell you know what you're talking about here There are fast twitch a and fast twitch B fibers the fast twitch B fibers. You can't change They're your fast explosive ones But your fast twitch area as you pointed out if you start training along Slow distance and for a marathon they will take on the characteristics. So if you like It's a very good question. You can actually bolster, if you like artificially, the percentage of slow twitch fibers that you've got. So yes, you can train them by doing that. And the best example of that was when I trained for a marathon with my wife. You know, my speed just disappeared. I mean, all my fast twitch fibers, you know, felt like there were slow twitch fibers all of a sudden. So you can do that. Now, if you look under a microscope, the actual staining of the muscle fibers doesn't change, but you actually take on some of the biochemical properties a slow twitch fiber. So yeah, you can, you can kid you muscles if you like a little bit. Gotcha. Um, heated question and probably one you get quite often. Yeah. Pro runners running technique compared to a recreational marathoner running technique, is there a difference in like cadence foot strike, you know, how high they kicking up their heels throughout their swing? Like, what are we talking about in terms of technique? Well, by technique, let's take it back to sort of the biomechanics of it. And if you look at the best marathon runners in the world, whether the male or female, they're certainly from East Africa and they do have different leg proportions. They have a longer femur, which is, you know, if you like the hip bone, that's much longer compared to their total leg length than normally white Caucasian runners. So that's one advantage. The other advantage, and you did touch on it earlier, is what we call stored elastic energy in the tendons. They tend to have very stiff tendons. You think, well, this isn't good, but it is because the tendons then actually rebound a lot more than if they're not. And one of the, we're gonna go slightly off-tact here, but trust me, we'll come back full circle to your question. One of my big no-nos is all this stuff about stretching. You know, stretching will increase your performance. It'll help your running economy, blah, blah. Firstly, the studies don't show that. My only take on stretching is if you haven't got the range of motion. that you want to have for your particular sport, then stretching will bring you up to that. But hypermobility, too much mobility won't do it. It'll probably make you more injured, to be honest. So back to your question, the Kenyans aren't big on the stretching. They have very stiff tendons. They have very different mechanical properties of their bones and tendons. Does that make them more efficient? Yes, probably, almost definitely. The other thing that makes them more efficient is, they don't run on perfect tracks and... you know, nice concrete roads that are flat and everything else. They run over cross country. The terrain in East Africa and some of the African states is just ridiculous. They're running at an altitude as well, which is another factor. So all these factors, if you like, come together in a constellation to make them more efficient. Their genetics, their fast rich fiber composition, altitude training, the fact that they're running over different terrains, et cetera, et cetera. So there are, there are a myriad of factors. Like you said earlier, there's generally not one thing that is rate limiting for performance. So there's a whole variety of things here, which make an elite athlete. And certainly mechanics and technique is one of them. Is, is tendon stiffness, um, on the same spectrum as like muscle fiber percentages. Like if someone is quite high in their fast twitch muscle fibers, do they also have stiff tendons to produce that explosive like trait? That's a really good question. I've. Absolutely have no idea. That's a, that's a very good question. I'm thinking of studies that might've been done in that area. Look, there's the, the first thing is we don't know that much about the, the elite successful marathon runners. Firstly, they're East African and you know, taking biopsies and things isn't usually in their repertoire. And secondly, it's, it's hard to study these guys, the elite athletes, you know, generally don't want blood muscle biopsies. laboratory tests and everything else. You know, Andy Jones at Exeter, a friend and colleague, was unique when he got a group of runners. This was the Nike Sub2 project from East Africa and basically isolated Kipchoge and a couple of others and said, look, these are the ones. And I might add there that Kipchoge did not have the highest VO2 max. What he had, which Andy Jones pointed out, was what they call physiological and mental resilience. He always thought he could run a Sub2. I'm not a psychologist, so please don't ask me any psychology questions, but you have to have that belief. Having the physiology is one thing. And I can tell you while I was in South Africa, I tested athletes who in the laboratory should have been Olympic champions. They weren't. So there's something other than the engine, you know, you've got to have a very, very good psychological mindset to, to survive and be an elite athlete. Super interesting. All right. So, um, I guess if we're looking at. Your elites, okay, they have a very high percentage of slow muscle fibres. They're very like, their tendons are quite stiff. So like when they hit the ground and when they, you know, take off, um, push off the ground, there's very little movement and there's very little like, you know, excess movement, you could say, um, they're being very efficient as possible. What about foot strike? What about pronation? What about like knee bend, posture, all that sort of stuff? Do we have any? characteristics that might help a recreational runner to be like, Oh, let me try to run like more of the elites. I guess, is there any differences that you can see from the pros to the recreational runners? Look, you know, if we talk generically here, you know, the, the elite runners at the front of the pack are smaller, lighter, everything's, you know, if you're like, five star and better. I think it's probably dangerous. I mean, I'll give you a direct answer. I think it's dangerous to try and imitate anyone's style because the mechanics, the bone, the tendons, the fiber type is so different. And again, we talked about it earlier. I think your recreational runner will tend to self-optimize. I'd be reluctant to impose someone's technique on them. Now, what you did open there is a can of worms in that one thing that we haven't discussed. is the issue of shoes. And these new shoes are amazing. And I'm not gonna give a brand name, but you know the shoes that I'm talking about, which give a three or even 4% reduction in energy costs. Now 4% is enormous. And again, will it transform your four hour marathon runner into a 330 marathon runner? Probably not. But for the people at the front of the pack, it's an enormous... energy cost saving and it does, you know, we've seen the marathon record just tumble, you know, the guys are running two, you know, almost on a daily basis now, which is just absolutely ridiculous. So shoes are a big factor that can actually alter economy and efficiency. And then the question is, well, should every athlete have the same pair of shoes? And it comes down to physiology or, you know, is sports science pushing the boundaries? And that's a good thing when we have innovations in technology, but shoes, shoes are very, very important. So don't forget that you can actually have a saving in oxygen costs by just running a different pair of shoes. My understanding with a lot of those types of shoes is like the. Techno the phone technology plays a big role because it returns a lot of energy. Like, you're not wasting as you hit the ground, as you absorb load from hitting the ground and then produce that or convert that into energy, that that's a lot more. efficient compared to your standards, you returns a lot more energy to the runner. Um, but then you have the carbon fiber plated piece inside it, which kind of would act like a lever, like as your heel strikes the ground, you're sort of creating that leverage to launch you forward. Are you under the same understanding or? No, that's, that's a pretty good summary. I mean, the carbon fiber plates of course is, is almost like your stiff tendon. Um, so you're replicating what we've talked. that the Canyon runners probably have genetically endowed anyway. So no, your answers, I can't really add to that. That's a summation of the shoes. And look, the studies have been done and it's not just one or two studies. There's now a very big body of evidence to suggest that, you know, you can save two, three, maybe even as much as 4% just by the factors that you've said that. So that's a big technological innovation. Again. Will your four hour marathon runner who is, let's be honest, going to be more heavy than someone who's running two hours generally, will they benefit as much? Possibly not. Is it rate limits and get back to your question about, you know, yourself, self study or what you called it earlier? No, just buying a new pair of shoes. Isn't probably as good as putting in your training, learning your proper nutrition, doing your speed work and everything else. Speaking of the training, um, have you come across What are the major differences that separate like the recreational run out training for a marathon compared to the elites that train for a marathon? Obviously speeds will be a lot different, but do you see any characteristic differences in like volume or intensity distribution or those sort of characteristics? Massive, massive, massive. You know, your professional athletes are training a couple of times a day. They're training two to three hours. Um, they're training. of 150 to maybe even 200 kilometers a week for certain phases of their training. The four-hour marathon runner never should attempt to get close to that and neither would they. So yes, there are differences. The question of training intensity and that is very, very interesting as well. And there was a study done many years ago actually when I was in South Africa looking at the differences between black and white male marathon runners and the percentage of time black marathon runners spent at running at 85 or 90% of VO2 max was much greater as a percentage of their total training volume than the white runners. And of course the black runners, you know, in those days and now just dominate. So they do a lot more volume, number one, and I guess, you know, partly because they're doing a lot more volume, they're going to do a lot more at that volume at high intensity. So that's the difference. You know, again, a four hour recreational runner. needs to spend time on their legs. They really do need to, you know, establish the mitochondria, get their running economy better, practice their nutrition, all these sort of things. So I would say for the, for the recreational athlete, you know, runner listening into this, you know, your volume is very, very important. Yes, your speed work and everything else is, is if you like the icing on the cake, but you've got to bake the cake first. Do you subscribe to? like a 80, 20 intensity distribution where like 80% being really low intensity, 20% higher intensities. Look, it's a, it's a good, I guess, rule of thumb and guy, but it does depend on the phase that you're in of your training preparation. You know, if you think you're going to run a marathon in, let's just pick one, you know, six months time, the training distribution in the first two to three months will be very different to the last two to three months, you know, you'll be established in a a large aerobic base, you'll be getting in as much volume as you can. You'll be then hopefully doing a little bit more and I don't like the term speed work, but if you like threshold work, whatever you want to call it, steady state work, and you know, eventually you'll be doing a taper and a little bit more of intensity in that last week or two. So that will differ depending on the phase of training. And you know, we call these macro cycles, micro cycles and everything else, but we can overcomplicate things. I think sometimes as well, I think. One of the, you know, I talked to a lot of coaches and one of the things is, you know, we've got these trainings and we've got that lactate threshold. We've got this, that, and the other, and, you know, keep it simple. Sometimes it's, it's probably a good, a good piece of advice. Yep. Well said. You also wrote another paper about like, it's called the molecular athlete. And you had a kind of like a chart talking about all these different types of, um, areas of focus that leads to. athletes winning medals in this paper in particular. You did talk about the resilience piece, like the mental fortitude, resilience, mindset type of thing, which makes sense why that's on there now that you've talked about that. One area of focus on those hallmarks was the gut microbiome. What do you have to say about that? Cause I found that one probably the most intriguing out of all the ones in that graph. All right. Well, that's interesting. I mean, and your readers, you know, can look at that paper. It's freely available on PubMed and I'm happy to give you a link or do whatever. So I'll put it in the show notes of the podcast for people to get the great stuff. Yeah. It's a little bit technical, but I think there's some nice, there's some nice drawings in there and figures which people can hopefully digest. Yeah. The gut microbiome. Look, this was such a trendy thing, you know, in the last decade, whether it was in medicine or whether it was an athletic performance. What do we know about the gut microbiome and athletes? What we do know is that athletes have a more biodiverse gut microbiome. They have more bacteria. They have more healthy producing bacteria. So just by training alone, you can alter the microbiome. That's the, if you like, population of bacteria that we've got in the gut. Is there a link between, you know, performance and the gut microbiome? No, we don't have those studies. I suspect there might be, but there are so many differences in the gut microbe between males and females, old and young, and different cultures. So I think that's a little bit of a red herring there. But yes, the gut microbiome is an interesting one as far as the athlete's concerned. And as I said, what we do know is that there's certainly more biodiversity in people who are undertaking physical activity. And let's be honest about this. There is no gut microbiome on Elite. athletes by any stretch. There's a couple of papers on rugby players and team sports athletes, but there is by no means enough data to conclude conclusively that ex-microbiome results in a better performance or a worse performance. Having said that, just very quickly to add, there is evidence that what we call gut microbiosis, dysbiosis, an unhealthy gut does predispose you to some metabolic conditions. So yes, the gut microbiome is very, very important. It's shaped by so many things that I've just, you know, pointed out that I think it's very tenuous to draw conclusions at the moment to say that X gut microbiome profile results in an athletic performance or a better one. Yeah, I think that's very, very shaky ground. What's your understanding of if you say that exercise alone can aid and help the microbiome? What's happening physiologically there? Like how are we determining that or how are we, how, how has that effect taken place? Well, generally the athlete eats a greater variety of food. They eat more food, they eat more fiber. Fiber produces what we call short chain fatty acids. These are very health providing, or if you like health stimulating, there's a number of those butyrates, probably the main one that people have heard of or may have heard of, uh, and the other thing is. that as far as the gut microbiome, there's now a lot of, and this is where I'm trying to bring it around to your audience and your question is, there's a lot of probiotics now on the market where athletes have said, here, take this, take that, this, that, and the other. Is the evidence there that these can alter the gut microbiome and therefore alter the host environment, in other words, whole body? Yes, there's some, it's not compelling. And again, a good healthy balanced diet and food and fiber is, probably what I would recommend anyway. So I'm not a big one for, uh, trying to enhance the gut microbe by anything other than a good diet and a healthy lifestyle, which of course should. Incorporate exercise, whether you're training for a marathon or not. Yeah. Sleep and your chronotype was another one. Can you just briefly touch on that? Why is that so important for people for elite athletes or, you know, those determining winning medals and that sort of stuff? I think sleep is one of the most underestimated things. We've spoken probably, it's good you brought it up, but we've probably spoken 90% of the discussion so far on training and recovery is part of training and people generally don't think about that. You finished your training and that's it. I've trained today. Well, actually, no. Most of the adaptations as a crew, certainly in skeletal muscle, happen post exercise. And one of the important things, and we've touched on it, and I am coming to your sleep question, is the nutrition post exercise and post exercise recovery nutrition. Sleep is absolutely essential. We'll come into the chronotype, but again, show me an athlete who, if they're training twice a day, isn't taking a nap in the afternoon, show me an athlete who isn't getting, you know, eight to 10 hours of rest or recovery a day. I think we really underestimate sleep, you know. We wrote a paper on this not long ago. There was a sleep epidemic in certainly in North America where people are just not getting enough sleep. Now, if you're an athlete, you're already adding to the physiological stress of a normal day anyway. So, you should be looking at this thinking, well, I do need more sleep. Chronotype is an interesting one. And again, I'll give you the analogy between my wife and I. My wife gets up at six o'clock in the morning. She's what we call a a lark rather than an owl. She's trained by the time, you know, done her hour run or whatever gym session she does, by the time my alarm goes sort of thing. I cannot train in the morning for love or money. You couldn't drag me out of bed in the morning to train. I train in the evenings or afternoon. I seem to be a later chronotype. Can you alter your chronotype? Well, the best or worst example of that is, you know, when you fly and you get jet lag and you certainly... you know, you've messed your whole chronobiology up there. Can you alter your chronotype? Possibly by, you know, kidding your body and starting to train in the mornings. If your marathon's in the morning, you can slowly alter that. But again, there are certain things, and I'm not a sleep expert, that you can do to make this transition, you know, easier. One of the biggest factors which predicts performance in chronobiology is the time between waking and training or competition. So, so long as that time is several hours, you're probably, you know, okay. But if you're gonna run a marathon, and you know, my wife's just come back from New York where the marathon was on there. If you're one of the, if you're like runners who's gonna run four, five, six hours, you're up at four o'clock in the morning, three hours before you even start the race. So again, as per your nutrition, you should be on that sleep zone a long while. rather than just the night before. So chronobiology is a very interesting aspect that we know is tied to health. We know shift workers, for example, live less and are more prone to obesity, diabetes, as far as chronobiology and athletic performance, it's an area that we're just starting to scratch the surface off line. I think it's a really interesting one. Yeah. I am five weeks out from a high rocks event, which is just like a lot of heavy workouts as well as running. And. requires a lot of like brutal workouts, but to your point, I'm like, okay, let me do my hard workout. Then straight after that, it's like recovery, recovery. Let's like, you know, get good protein. Let's get good sleep. Let's get good. Everything else just trying to really, you know, maximize the, that window between workouts. Um, and a good point on sleep. I just finished the, um, starting five. Documentary series on, on basketball runners and on basketball is, and they had LeBron James talking about how much he sleeps. And he does two hour naps per day every single day. And that's like crazy to think about. I've seen that, the Netflix series. It's very good. There are a couple of things which he does, which probably don't work. You know, this cold water, this cold water immersion and ice therapy, we know now that post exercise that probably hinders some of the things. But, you know, he's so genetically gifted, he could probably stand on his head and still recover. But the point there is that, you know, I found out an intriguing example of someone who at 39 is playing in the NBA. and who absolutely looks after his body like it's a temple. Absolutely. One quick thing on there, you talked about chronotype and chronobiology and training. We know from the meta-analysis, and again, you probably know this data as well, that if you do strength training in the morning versus the afternoon, the gains for the people who do strength training in the afternoons are greater, even with the workouts matched, than when they do it in the morning. So we know in strength training, at least that you're better to do your workouts later on in the day that mainly because of the hormonal milieu, you know, cortisol, growth hormone and various other factors. But I think the evidence is quite compelling that training later on in the day versus earlier on the day results in greater muscle hypertrophy and strength gain. So there's some evidence for that as far as endurance, it's not clear cut. Right. Great tip there. I haven't actually heard of that once. That's great. As we're finishing up, if a recreational runner wants to improve their marathon times, wants to, you know, do all their, the best they can cover all these areas, is there anything we haven't yet discussed that you think might be beneficial for them? Let me make, let me do a shopping list. Train more, train intelligently. More is not always better. Practice. In training, what you want to do in a race, particularly the nutrition, I'd say a sports nutritionist, you know, you've experimented with your gels, you know what happens now, you probably should be taking in, you know, 50 if you can 40, 50, 60 grams of carbohydrate in the last couple of hours. If you're a two hour marathon runner, you should start your strategies earlier. I think again, you know, keeping it simple, we can overcomplicate things here. Let's not forget the joy of running and just the accomplishment of actually running a marathon and finishing a marathon. That's a great achievement in itself and makes you one of a very small percentage of the world population. So, don't lose the enjoyment factor and set realistic goals, I think. Some people, I want to break four, I want to break three, I want to do this. If it happens, it happens and you can do things in training which... prepare you and give you a better chance of doing that. But you know, the sky doesn't fall down if you don't do that. And just remember that, you know, anyone who runs a marathon, you know, in my world is, uh, has done something which most, most individuals haven't done. So already they're a winner. Yep. Very good checklist to finish off with. And I want to thank you for first of all, like all the publications and all the time and effort you put into helping runners and athletes of alike and coming onto this podcast and sharing all of your knowledge. It's been great. We've covered so many topics and it's been extremely useful. So thanks for coming on and sharing. You're welcome. Look, thanks for having me. And again, we've done sort of exercise physiology, one-on-one undergraduate in an hour. So, uh, you've guided the questions well, and hopefully your listeners have gained something out of this. Thanks very much. If you are looking for more resources to run smarter, or you'd like to jump on a free 20 minute injury chat with me, then click on the resources link in the show notes there, you'll find a link to schedule a call. plus free resources like my very popular Injury Prevention Five Day Course. You'll also find the Run Smarter book and ways you can access my ever growing treasure trove of running research papers. Thanks once again for joining me and well done on prioritizing your running wisdom.