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Alan Couzens is one of the sharpest minds in endurance training. Alan works with everyone from first-time triathletes to world-class pros, bringing a data-driven, long-term approach to getting better.
In this conversation, we break down what actually drives endurance progress, why most athletes train too hard and improve too little, and how long it really takes to reach your potential. We also get into HRV, glycogen, metabolic testing, and why rest might be the most underrated tool in your training arsenal.
Watch on YouTube; listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Full episode breakdown:
00:00 Intro
00:30 What causes endurance improvements?
02:40 How long does it take to reach endurance potential?
06:06 What separates world-class pros from promising amateurs?
10:30 Volume of elite endurance athletes
13:00 Who does Alan work with?
14:30 What does working with Alan look like?
17:00 What is training response?
20:50 What to do when you hit a plateau
27:50 Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
29:20 How to make training dynamic
31:15 Why dynamic training is key
35:30 Why Alan doesn't like minimum effective dose thinking
35:45 Why is fitness worth pursuing?
38:40 What does it feel like to be fit?
41:00 Alan's journey into coaching
43:40 Alan's testing setup
47:15 What is metabolic testing?
50:20 Fat vs. carb burning
53:00 Zone 1 and Zone 2 training
54:30 How muscular should you be?
56:37 Alan's thoughts on Hyrox
59:50 Why Alan likes circuit training
1:01:00 How Alan writes so much
1:04:00 Alan’s new forum – MAD Crew
1:07:00 Alan’s views on AI
Check out Alan's book The Science of Maximal Athletic Development. Alan also runs the MAD Crew forum, which is an excellent resource for endurance training.
Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing — it’s the best way to support the channel!
Transcript
John
A lot of people will have had this experience of doing a workout and it feels very difficult. And then they come back a couple of days later, and somewhat miraculously, the workout feels easier.
From a physiological perspective, what is happening there? What is enabling somebody to get better when it comes to an endurance activity?
Alan
That's a big question because there's quite a lot of components to getting better at an endurance activity. And some of them are short-term components and some of them are very long-term components. The short-term components, I think, sometimes push an athlete in one direction with their training –
When you do higher intensity work you tend to see quicker improvement and that can come from a number of different things that happen over the short term. Basic things like neuromuscular things – you run fast you become better at running fast relatively quickly.
Anaerobic capacity adaptations also happen. You have improved ability to buffer lactate and things like that. Those are fairly short term adaptations.
And then you have longer term adaptations like growing a bigger heart so that it can deliver more oxygen to the muscles, which is a really important adaptation to have for an aspiring endurance athlete.
So you've got all of these layers, to getting better as an athlete. And it's very tempting when you see the short-term things improve very quickly to think that that's the right thing to be focusing on. But the things that really matter do take a very long time to maximize.
That's the downside of those adaptations and also the good side of those adaptations – there's a lot of room for improvement for most of us!
So if we're patient and we have the willingness to stick with the slower adaptations, we ultimately can see some pretty impressive changes in our physiology.
John
You mentioned these adaptations can take a very long time, especially with ones around the heart and maybe a couple of others as well. Just how long are we looking at? Just how long a game are we playing with Endurance Sports?
Alan
It's a very long game. It's a very, very long game!
I've tracked these things in developing athletes over years and we are talking about multiple years, decades even for some of these adaptations.
So things like maximizing the stroke volume of the athlete, you can see improvements in those things over 10 years or more with progressive increases in training volume.
And then you have things within the muscle like the efficiency with which the muscle is able to produce power given a certain amount of oxygen. And those are longer still. You can have athletes over multiple decades moving through from being a short distance athlete focusing on maybe 800 meter track events and gradually working their way up to 3K, 5K, all the way up to the marathon. And over that entire lifespan you'll see improvements in the economy of the athlete.
It’'s good news because most of us aren't at our peak. We can continue to improve for many years to come.
John
Which is super encouraging!
So if you look at these adaptations, one question a lot of people have is which ones are most important? Which ones really count? We've heard about economy, we've heard about the size of the heart, we've heard about some of these metabolic changes.
How do you rank and prioritize them? Which ones really make the difference when it ultimately comes to increased fitness?
Alan
I think that's sort of the million dollar question because the short term adaptations are really tempting when you want to race in the next two months or three months or four months. You have this potential where you could throw in X amount of weeks of interval work and really sharpen up what you have.
But when you do that, the trade-off is you're not improving that base that you want to improve over years and decades. So I think that's a really important question for the athlete to answer themselves. How much of this potential base improvement do I want to give up just so that I can race this 10k in 39 minutes instead of 41 minutes?
That's a really important question for the athlete and the coach to answer because we get pressure as well. An athlete has a particular goal usually for that year or for that season. They're not saying, I want to be as fast as I can in 20 years. It's one of our jobs as coaches, I think, to try to push them gradually more and more in that direction.
John
That definitely does seem to be one of the themes of your work, which is encouraging people to hold off a little bit on racing, or at least be somewhat cautious because of exactly that trade-off. It's that sharpening versus base-building trade-off.
I was hoping maybe we could go a little bit more into your personal story, Alan.
Growing up, I know you were a very good swimmer, but in your book, you say you came to this realization that maybe some of the very top athletes, the ones who would go on to become future Olympians, they were training slightly differently to you, especially during some of the peak season and some of the off season. Could tell us a little bit more about that story.
Alan
So I started swimming fairly late for swimmers in Australia at least. I was 12 when I started swimming competitively. And I was pretty well suited to it. I'm 6'5 and I've got size 15 feet. So it was the right sport for me and I progressed fairly quickly. I started out in the junior squads and pretty quickly made my way to the senior squad. And I was fortunate that just through sheer sheer luck, the squads that we had in the little country town that I had moved to were quite competitive. I had a very good coach there.
And we had a lot of national level swimmers and we were very good for the size. The town was less than 30,000 people. It was a pretty small town. And so I worked my way up and I got thrown in with these kids who had been swimming since they could walk. And that was at another level from where I was as I was just starting out. So I spent a lot of my time trying to keep up with these kids. And I was good, but I wasn't at that level. So what that meant was that a lot of my training was probably a zone above where it should have been. And it was quite different the way that I trained compared to how they were training. My attitude at the time was, if I want to be as good as them, I've just got to keep up with them. That's not the right attitude at all. The right attitude is I should have been training where I was at the fitness level that I was at and continuing to show up and developing organically.
But I didn't do that and as a result, my training was less consistent than theirs. I was sick a lot, I was injured. And when you have these breaks in your training, the gap only widens, right? Because they're showing up and they're getting fitter and fitter and fitter. So it was kind of this fork in the road where I just got a front row seat to see how these future Olympians were actually training and how it was a little bit different from what I was doing.
And the main thing that they were doing was being consistent with their training. Through that, we had swimmers going onto the national team. We had Olympic medalists. We had an Australian record holder coming from my squad.
It was interesting and frustrating and I guess educational. It was a big part of what led me in the direction of becoming a coach and trying to help people to take the right path.
John
Let's try and drill down into some of the specifics in terms of volume, because I don't feel like a lot of people truly appreciate the volume needed to succeed at a sport like swimming or at any endurance sport really.
How much endurance volume does somebody need to be doing on a yearly basis if they want to get to a truly competitive level? And what's the typical buildup in that volume from say, year one or two when they start training as an early teenager or even younger to when they're fully maturing into some of their peak performance?
Alan
I I think to be at the top of any endurance sport, certainly if we're talking about distance swimming and those sorts of events where they're eight minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes duration, the training volume is a central element to that. There's no way around that really.
When I started working at the Australian Institute of Sport that was one of the first things that I was blown away by. We had this guy Alexander Popov who was the world record holder at the time in the 100 freestyle and he was a sprint swimmer. He's training for events that last 21 seconds to 48 seconds at the time.
And when I arrived there, I see Popov training and it's, you know, eight in the morning and okay, he's coming for his morning session. Then I go off and I do some things with the coaches and I come back at midday to have lunch with the coaches and Popov's back there and he's doing another session. And then I come back in the afternoon and he's doing another session.
So here's a guy whose event was lasting less than a minute and and he's training 100k a week some of these weeks which is just a phenomenal amount of amount of volume in the pool you know so I think that was a big wake-up call on on just what that next level of training volume is about and you know certainly as I got more into triathlon and I started dealing with Ironman triathletes as well that that lesson was pushed home even more so I would say a thousand hours – that's what I have in my head for a serious endurance athlete.
For the most part, I haven't seen too many top endurance athletes who are really at the top of their game who are training much less than a thousand hours a year.
John
1000 hours. Wow. So just short of three hours a day for reference. So you hinted at your current career as a triathlete coach. So maybe share a little bit about what kinds of athletes you're coaching today. What range of people are you coaching on a day to day weekly basis?
Alan
It's changed a lot over the years. I started out and I was working primarily with sort of novice athletes, people who were looking to do their first triathlon, their first kind of sprint triathlon, getting up off the couch and looking to get in shape. And that kind of progressed a little bit towards helping top amateurs often with the goal of qualifying for Kona which is a massive goal for lot of triathletes out there to qualify for the world championships. And that progressed to working with more elites. So I spent a lot of time, I spent a good amount of years focused on working with pros, sort of just only a handful of athletes at a time.
And now that's kind of come full circle to where I'm back to working with a lot of age groupers and kind of a combination of first timers and more serious amateurs who looking to qualify for Kona.
John (16:41.349)
So I do want to circle back to the coaching journey and really connect the dots between where you went from your amateur swimming career to your eventual coaching. But let's kind of start at the end.
Let’s imagine you have a new client, somebody who's coming in, maybe, you know, they're in their first or second year of endurance training, they know that they want to do this on a regular basis. What does it look like to come into your coaching setup?
What are some of those initial steps in terms of what are you testing for? How are you advising them in that initial setup? What does that look like?
Alan (17:20.366)
I think the first and most important thing is to get a really good sense of the athlete's life. To get a sense of how much time they have available to train, how much time they have available to recover. To get a sense of how much stress they have in their life and what kind of competing forces there are going to be on the training adaptation. So I think those are really important things to...
you know, to have very honest conversations about when you first take on an athlete so that you're both very clear on what the athlete can offer in terms of right now in terms of how much time and energy they can invest in the program and what they expect to get from that, you know, what their goals are because
Having those two things line up, I think, is the most important thing to having a good coaching relationship with anybody. When they don't line up, that's when things start to go south pretty quick.
John (18:22.587)
Okay, amazing. So you're looking at stresses outside of training. So imagine you're looking at work stresses, you're looking at family stresses as well, and you're probably looking at the total amount of time that they're able or willing to commit. that, or how would you think more broadly about that framework? Is it something along those lines?
Alan (18:42.67)
Yeah, definitely. I think often times when you ask somebody, okay, how many hours a week do you have available to train? You'll get a knee-jerk response. You know, I've got 16 hours, 20 hours that I can train.
And then when you start to actually have the conversation of, what slots are available? How does this work? You know, what, when do you go to bed? When do you wake up? You know, where, how long does it take you to get ready in the morning before you're able to go training? And, and you start to sort of have these conversations.
you get a much better sense of the reality of the athlete's life. I think those conversations are really enlightening for them as well because in sport there's a tendency to sort of feel like we can will our way through it.
I'm just going to be determined to train 20 hours a week irrespective of what my boss says or my wife says or anyone says. that just doesn't work in the real world. So I think it's really important to get a sense of what the real world is for that athlete and what's realistic for them.
John (19:55.621)
Amazing, amazing. this one thing that you talk about often is this idea of training response or the fact that you have to be able to respond to your training. Maybe could you elaborate on that a little bit more? What does it mean to respond to a training stimulus? How do you think about that overall?
Alan (20:19.352)
Yeah, so kind of going back to what we were talking about with, you know, the volume that you need for a given level of performance, I think a lot of athletes sort of have this assumption in their head that if I do this amount of volume, I'll get this result.
And there's not a lot of thought given to that sort of missing step of, I'll get that result if I'm able to recover well and my body is able to do all of the things that it needs to do to get stronger and to grow. So, you know, I think that's the missing link in the way that a lot of athletes look at training. sort of...
You know, they'll not get great sleep one night and they'll get up anyway at 5am because that's what's on their schedule and they'll, you know, resolve to do the three hours of training that are on the plan for that day and they won't really think about the fact that their body's not in a great spot to absorb that training and to get better from that training. So I think it's something that's...
It's really a really important question to continue to ask the athlete and for the athlete to ask themselves is the training making you better? And unfortunately in endurance sports a lot of times we don't look at that. You know we don't really we don't really answer that question. We're not testing frequently enough. We're not not getting a sense of you know well we trained an extra 200 hours this year but our fitness is actually worse.
Was that a smart move to do that 200 hours? Probably not.
John (21:59.301)
Okay, well, let's dive into exactly that question. So how do you know if your training is getting better? How do you know if you're getting better at endurance?
Alan (22:09.71)
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of different metrics that you can look at. Some of them are more detailed, some of them are more simple and easier for the athlete to keep track of. I use a combination of all of the above. I'm obviously a big fan of getting the athlete into the lab to test.
kind of geek out on all of the available data from something like a progressive lactate test with metabolic data. You get a lot of great information from that. I'm a big fan of athletes doing those tests every three months or so.
But independent of that, simple things like just having a regular aerobic benchmark. So you might say, I want you to do 10 minutes and I don't want your heart rate to go over 130. And I'm going to monitor what your average power is from week to week over that test.
So, you know, a combination there of simple field measures coupled with, coupled with lactate tests as well. And, you know, when you, you plot those things against the training load, you start to see some interesting relationships. Like, you might see that when you reach a particular load with that athlete, these aerobic tests stop improving, you know. So, you're sort of wasting your time going above and beyond that, that training load. And...
that often leads into conversations of why is this the case? How is your life at this point in time? Are you sleeping well when we're trying to push up to this sort of training volume? Are we pushing the limits in terms of bumping up against other life stresses? And I think...
Alan (23:59.992)
I think when you monitor those things, those relationships between the load and getting fitter, you start to get a sense of what's right for that athlete.
John (24:06.941)
Mm.
John (24:11.261)
Okay, all right. Okay, so you mentioned this idea of results starting to taper off. So you mentioned this aerobic benchmark test that's maybe going at a specific heart rate and seeing whether your pace or your power is starting to improve at that relatively low intensity heart rate. Is that the correct framing? Okay. So one thing that a lot of people would think is that if my results are tapering off, maybe I just need to add a little bit more intensity or maybe I need to try a different training zone.
Maybe I've done enough zone one, zone two, maybe it's time to add threshold work in order to try and make a push through that barrier. What do you think of that strategy? Is that an appropriate response to that kind of tapering off?
Alan (24:54.286)
I think sometimes it can be. That's the approach of thinking back to where a lot of this sort of aerobic benchmarking comes from. There was a guy by the name of Phil Maffetone. He worked with lot of triathletes back in the day. He worked with Mark Allen, who was six-time world champion.
And he would do these aerobic tests, these simple aerobic tests on a regular basis where he'd have Mark go out to the track and run with his...
Heart rate under 150 at the fastest power under 155 I think it was for mark at the time At the fastest pace that he could you know mark would get down to 520 per mile at this pace so he's pretty pretty impressive aerobic engine behind Mark Allen but one of the things that that Phil was looking for was When these aerobic numbers started to plateau It was a good indication that it was time to move on to the anaerobic phase of training
know which which would be those sharpening sessions that you're talking about. So I think there is a place for that you know and certainly when an athlete's training at fairly high volumes at a serious level you do start to see that this plateau in the ability to lift the aerobic numbers after a while and and you know at that time it's it can be time to move into some
some more anaerobic training but that's got a very limited shelf life you you might do six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks sort of thing and that's about all you've got out of that anaerobic training before you've to rest up so you know I think yeah ultimately when the numbers start to plateau all roads lead to rest eventually sort of thing
John (26:33.969)
Mm.
John (26:54.555)
Yeah, and one thing you've mentioned is the importance of an off season or taking some time off. Maybe explain a little bit about that. Why is an off season so important for a lot of athletes?
Alan (27:07.574)
Yeah, that's something that a lot of athletes, I think, leave a lot of potential improvement on the table by not taking a proper off season. And we see it in those things that we're talking about when you start to look at the athlete's training response and...
and how much improvement they're getting, especially towards the end of a season, when they don't take that off season, they don't improve to the same degree. So you see these patterns where, you know, maybe we do a 600-hour year and the athlete reaches a certain level, and then we do a 700-hour year, and because they're getting tired towards the end, they don't really improve much beyond that level. And then 800-hour year, you know, and...
trend sort of continues and when you start to take a proper offseason that those negative sort of trends break so you start to see the improvement go up with the training load you know so I think when when an athlete comes to me and they're sort of like I've been I've been doing more and I've been you know really pushing my training to the next level but I'm not getting better one of the first questions I asked them is when was your last offseason you know you and they'll
They'll often say, you know, it was at the start of the year and then you look at it on training peaks and, you know, they're two hours down from their normal training load for that off season and, you know, it's just not enough of an unload for the, to really sort of replenish everything that you lose over the course of a really tough training build.
John (28:46.865)
Yeah. Do you have a sense for the physiology there? So what exactly is being replenished or restored during an off season? What's going on there?
Alan (28:56.524)
Yeah, so you get a lot of sort of central fatigue, neuromuscular fatigue that builds up, know, just plain old tiredness. And, you know, when we take that to the extreme, you see things like chronic fatigue syndrome. So it's that sort of nervous system fatigue that kind of builds up in the athlete over time if they don't have these periods where they really...
really unload everything and just replenish that. It's not always completely related to training stress either. If you have an athlete who has a really stressful year and even though they dialed the training load down, they can still show the same sort of nervous system fatigue and it can progress to chronic fatigue.
Just through life stress being another being another kind of stimulus that's that's continually sucking up that those adaptation reserves, you know, so I think it's it's something that It's it's really important especially for type a type athletes to recognize the importance of Being able to just shut everything down
and rest for a given period of the year.
John (30:25.885)
And is that kind of rest something you recommend just once a year or even more frequently? How do you think of rest overall during the course of a season?
Alan (30:37.174)
Yeah, I definitely like at least one, you know, four to six week block every year where we just shut everything down and the athlete, you know, does stuff that they want to do, but isn't really training. They're just moving. So I think that extended block is really important. But then beyond that, you know, sometimes, especially when you get late in the season, you might see like the HRV is kind of, kind of
flattening out and is dropping a little bit with the increase in load.
John (31:11.383)
And just to stop you, what is HRV, Alan? How would you define that?
Alan (31:15.756)
Yeah, so heart rate variability is something that I like to track with all of the athletes that I work with.
It's basically as it says, know, when our heart's beating at say 60 beats a minute, we sort of in our head think it's beating every second, but in a healthy heart and a healthy nervous system, there's actually gaps. So maybe the first beat is 1.2 seconds, the next one 0.8, you know, and it kind of moves around in a healthy system. And when it doesn't move around, this variability is lower and that's a good sign that your nervous system is under
and fatigue. So that's something that I like to track with all the athletes that I work with and you know that that's a good indicator of what's going on with that nervous system and just how tired it is and if it's if you reach a point where it's tired over a long period of time then taking a two-week break where you just shut everything down and you know just try and relax and recover as much as possible I think is a really good plan.
John (32:17.949)
Great, great. Okay, well, let's, in that case, let's dive a little bit further into HRV. So first of all, a lot of people will be somewhat familiar with this, you know, from your Aura device or your Whoop device, or I think a lot of smartwatches, your Garmin, your Apple Watch, do calculate some kind of HRV value. Is that the kind of HRV value that you're talking about, Alan? Would that be sufficient for your purposes?
Alan (32:46.476)
Yeah, this is a huge question because HRV means so many different things depending on what device you're using and depending on how it's analyzing those things. I would say that a lot of wrist-based devices like watches and whoop and finger-based devices even like Ura
They don't have sufficient accuracy for me to be confident to pick up all of those minor fluctuations in HRV. So like we were talking about with the interval between beats may change from 1.2 to 0.8 seconds, right? So we need something with a good amount of sensitivity to pick that up. And in my opinion, based on what I've seen, I don't think a lot of the consumer wearables have that kind of precision.
So I advise all the athletes that I work with to use a heart rate strap for their HRV tests. And you know there are number of apps that compare with a heart rate strap that you can do just as a morning test, you know a one or two minute test. You wear the strap, the strap communicates with the app and it gives you an HRV number when you wake up in the morning.
John (34:05.245)
Amazing, And practically speaking, so somebody comes back, they've worn their chest strap, they have a good HRV value. What exactly do you do for the next day's training if the HRV is low or if it's medium or if it's very high? How exactly does the training dynamically adjust based on that?
Alan (34:27.948)
Yes, I think I don't think I don't have enough confidence in HRV alone for it to be something that I would look at independently and not want to get other factors from the athlete, you know, before determining what to do for training for that day. So HRV is just one component that I look at and, you know, other things that I'd like to know would be resting heart rate, you know, that adds another dimension in there that gives you a little bit more information if you see
you see the HRV is very high and the resting heart rate is very low then that can actually indicate that the athletes quite tired you know because their their parasympathetic system is quite strong but
they're resting hard, rest really low, so they're not really, they're not fired up, they're not really ready for a hard training session, you know, so even just adding that extra dimension in really adds something and then when you throw in subjective measures as well, you know, when you just ask the athlete, how tired are you right now on a one to 10 scale, you know, and...
life stress have you been under over the last week on a 1 to 10 scale you know all of those additional components really add a lot of add a lot of color and a lot of context to to the HRV number.
John (35:47.333)
Yeah, okay, okay. So I guess what we're really talking about here, we're talking about a dynamic way of training. We're talking about measuring these physiological variables and then adjusting your training based on this feedback, based on whether you're ready to train. Another approach is simply to have a program and to follow that program exactly as laid out. And that's probably the approach that more people are familiar with. So I'm curious, Alan.
How much of an improvement do you think people can have by moving to this dynamic form of training? Just how important do you think this is?
Alan (36:23.79)
Honestly, I think it's massive. What you're describing where the coach comes up with a periodized plan and everything's completely mapped out for the year, the month, the week, is how I initially was coaching athletes before HIV really was on the scene.
And you know everything was very much, we obviously had recovery in there but it was just a fixed recovery. You know we'd do standard three week on one week off that kind of thing.
And when I did make the shift to a more dynamic approach like you said, I noticed a lot of things changed. The rates of injuries with the athletes that I was working with went way down. You know, just overuse injuries. Just completely a huge shift in that sort of thing. The incidence of illness really, really went down. You know, these things...
even beyond the metrics it was just very very obvious that something had changed quite markedly in the rates of these things in the athletes that I was working with. So I think from a consistency standpoint when you move to more of a dynamic approach
you probably underestimate just what an effect it'll have because it's those little bad decisions that really, really create a big problem in the training. It's those days when you go out that you probably shouldn't have gone out, but it's on the schedule so you do it anyway. And those are the days that something goes a little bit wrong and it starts to get the overuse injury in the works or...
Alan (38:09.966)
or you push a little bit too hard and you get sick and then you ditch training. So I think it's really big. And a lot of research has been done particularly on the HRV guided side of things and the improvements in fitness markers as well just go through the roof. So the fins have been doing these studies on HRV guided training and comparing.
you know how it compares in in via2max improvement versus regular sort of block periodization and and the changes are pretty large you know we're talking about like six percent changes in via2max in the HIV guided group compared to compared to the traditional group so it's yeah i think it's massive quite honestly i think any athlete who's serious about improving should be taking a dynamic approach with their training
John (39:05.917)
Okay, interesting. And I think one of the challenges here, if you're feeling tired and you feel like you need to take an extra rest day, one of the mental struggles, people feel like they need to make up the volume. They think I've taken a rest day today, I need to do a little bit more tomorrow and the next couple of days. What do you think of that kind of thinking? Is that the wrong way to be thinking about your training overall?
Alan (39:32.204)
Yeah, I think your training plan should be looking to come up with something that's in tune with your body. you're trying to predict what your body's going to be ready for when you say, I've got this session planned. This is what I think my body can handle and be ready for the next session.
But I think a lot of coaches and lot of athletes look at it the other way and we're just going to force our body to somehow adapt to whatever load our brain comes up with. it's not only the wrong approach, it's an impossible approach, right? Because the body can only adapt to the rate that it can adapt.
So yeah, I think that that's what leads to a lot of athletes getting frustrated and breaking. They get injured, they get sick, their body just can't handle the rate that their brain tells them that it wants to do. So I think that the sooner that an athlete can be okay with that and can realize that, the quicker they're gonna be able to improve.
John (40:42.885)
Awesome, awesome. Okay, so the context here, so we're almost thinking about a maximal recoverable volume here, right? And it's almost like these markers are pushing us down so that we're below our limit. I guess the other side of this would be the minimum effective dose or the smallest amount that you can be doing to make an improvement. How do you think about that side of the equation in terms of
what's a minimum that somebody can be doing to keep on improving their fitness.
Alan (41:17.432)
I don't think there is any continually improving the fitness unless you're doing more than what you've been doing over a chronic period of time, you know. So what tends to happen when people start talking about minimum effective dose is the intensity increases, right? So we're back to that initial conversation that we had of the short-term gains versus these long-term gains. And initially it can look great. You you're like, I was training 10 hours a week.
But I've gone for this minimum effective dose approach. Now I'm down to six hours a week, but I'm doing some high intensity intervals. And for a while, you know, everything's going great. You're training less, you're improving more. You've got this quick boost in fitness. But of course, those short term adaptations plateau, you know, and you don't see continued improvement taking that approach. So yeah, it's a...
I guess a sad truth of endurance sports that the only real way for consistent long-term improvement is to continue to do more.
John (42:22.493)
So we're talking about a years long, decades long journey here, maybe even a lifetime journey. Why is improved fitness even worth pursuing?
Alan (42:43.51)
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I guess that's an individual values sort of question. For me personally, the thought of not being functional when I get older is a very, is a strong motivator for me. know, the thought of, the thought of, I've always, I've got this vision in my head, right, of when I'm like 80,
and I'm touring the Grand Canyon and I'm on the tour bus and we drive along the road and we look out over the Grand Canyon and the thought of not having the physical ability to get out of that bus and hike down to where I want to be, that just, that's not acceptable for me. So that's kind of my marker of...
I need that level of fitness even as I get older into my 60s and 70s. Of course, it doesn't work if you don't keep that up through your life. If you really let yourself go in your 40s and 50s, it's a whole lot harder to get back to that level of fitness in your 60s, 70s and 80s. So that's how I personally look at it.
I want to be fit, want to be functional through my entire life and it's something that's really important to me.
John (44:12.189)
100%, 100%. So it's about maintaining those capabilities basically throughout your entire life. Yeah, and in terms of those drop-offs in the 40s and 50s, think a lot of the listeners, a lot of people listening will have seen those VO2 max charts that just appear to plummet, especially as you get into those latter decades of life. Let's drill down a little bit more into this fitness idea though.
What do think people under appreciate about the feeling of increasing their VO2 max? Or, know, a lot of people listening, they're gonna have, they're gonna be somewhere in the middle. They're gonna be somewhere in the middle in terms of the VO2 max. Maybe some people are even on the lower end.
How would you convince those people that it's worth it to have increased fitness? Like what is the feeling of being fit? What does that feel like?
Alan (45:07.79)
Yeah, think it's that feeling of something that Gordo has said to me that really stuck with me. Gordo Byrne, who I'm sure most of your listeners will be familiar with, we're all sort of in the same circle here. He said to me, as you get older, your world gets smaller.
And that's something that I think about a lot because it's very true for me even at this point. When I was training really seriously it was nothing for me to go and ride 200k to...
the next county, next state, whatever the case might be. And as I'm a little less fit than what I was back then, these rides are smaller. my world, I still ride in nice places. I still enjoy it and everything, but it doesn't have that same sort of epic feeling of adventure to it. And you play that out and you take that to the extreme of somebody who has a VIA2 max of...
25 or something and their world is very very small, know, they can't do very much without getting very tired so You know, I think I think that's That's for me the feeling of just being able to do whatever you want You know, if someone says hey, we're going on a hike. We're going on a six-hour hike Are you up for it? And we're going to this beautiful place It would suck to say I just don't have the fitness for that, you know that would
that would not be cool, you know? And then obviously you've got things like being able to run after kids when you're older, you know, in your 50s and 60s. You don't want to be limited. You don't want your world to be so small that you can't do those things anymore. So I think that's the feeling of fitness, just having a big world and not feeling limited in any way, shape or form.
John (47:09.957)
Yeah. Big world and not feeling limited. I think that's very beautifully put. Okay, Alan, let's return to this theme of your coaching career and how Alan became Alan. I think you're very well known for this scientific approach and I want to understand a little bit more about how it happened. So let's go back to your initial coaching days and I believe you started coaching in Sydney. Was that your first primary coaching position?
Alan (47:40.45)
Yeah, so I guess my first kind of part-time position was working with the squad that I was a part of. So when I was doing my sports science degree in Sydney, I'd go home for vacation, for kind of summer break and those sorts of things. And as you know, in Australia, they're quite generous with their holidays. So that was sort of a three-month period under some...
some circumstances so during that time I would coach as an assistant coach with the guy who coached me and you know I think that was my first kind of realization that I really enjoy this this is kind of fun to have some sort of input on you know helping these swimmers get better so that was
John (48:28.945)
Okay. And yes, it's Alan. give us a sense for that, for that initial coaching, what kind of tools were available to you at that time? Or like, how were you practicing the craft of coaching?
Alan (48:40.768)
Yeah, so that was sort of the fun part, I guess, for me was, you know, the coach that I had was a very sort of old school coach who wasn't, you know, he wasn't...
kind of a sports science based coach by any stretch of the imagination and I was doing this sports science degree so I had all of these sort of things that I was learning you know like conconi tests where you're plotting the relationship between pace and heart rate for swimmers you know and so when I came back we would do these various sort of sports sciencey things with the swimmers and you know I had I borrowed a sports tester the Polar Sports Tester from back in the
day from the university and so we had these young kids you know who were just you know 12, 13, 14 year old swimmers and we were doing all these relatively high-tech for the time tests with them so you know I think that was that was a fun thing for me and it was sort of a shift in my coaches perspective as well of you know how swim training could be.
John (49:50.087)
interesting. even back in the early days, you were still focusing on a lot of testing. So even though the tools might be different from what you use today, you still had a lot of that initial mindset. Yeah.
Alan (50:02.102)
Yeah, think so. think I've always been sort of, know, like math was my favorite subject in school and I've always been just kind of a numbers guy. the thought of solving the puzzle and working out why some swimmers were faster than others, you know, and looking at it from a biomechanics perspective, looking at it from a physiology perspective, I think that's always been something that interested me.
John (50:26.161)
Okay, and then, so obviously your testing setup looks different today though. You've got all of the metabolic cart set up, you've got all of the lactate set up. What do you think were some of the key breakthroughs and evolutions in terms of developing your current testing setup?
Alan (50:48.202)
Yeah, I think, So we, we, my first sort of exposure, I guess, to metabolic testing was when I, when I was working at the Institute of Sport and...
John (51:02.877)
I'm sorry, Alan, maybe let's just define that again, the metabolic testing.
Alan (51:05.846)
Sorry, yeah. So the Australian Institute of Sport is this, I guess it's sort of like a university almost for athletes who are aspiring Olympians and who are looking to represent Australia in various ways. And it's a live-in situation. So you have all of the best athletes in Australia.
coming together and living in the dorms and training together and they have access to a bunch of different sort of sports science support, know, the very best in the country, testing facilities and nutrition support and they have a mess hall with, you know, all of the nutrition is very planned out for each athlete. it's a really, you know, was a really sort of...
elite high-performance environment and I think that had a big bearing on me as a coach and you know really I think convinced me to go into coaching more and you know the high-performance side of things but yeah so my first exposure to I guess the scientific side of coaching was definitely there and we would have they had a metabolic cart and back in the day you know working with the swimmers
obviously a metabolic cart is this big piece of equipment that isn't really conducive to swimming with it. So we'd put it on a trolley and just walk it up and down the side of the pool while we're doing metabolic testing for the swimmers. So that was my first job, I guess, of working there was just being the trolley operator for the metabolic cart.
John (52:47.217)
Right. And metabolic cart, is the thing with the big blue mask, right? That's what a lot of the listeners are gonna be familiar with. Okay. Yeah.
Alan (52:54.38)
Yeah, exactly. With the mouthpiece and the big tube that comes out to the side. it's tough to swim with. It's not easy to work your arms around all of the tubing and stuff that was coming out of the car. yeah, was my first exposure to that. And that was primarily more interested in via to max metrics while swimming and things like that. And then...
When I started working with Gordo Byrne who set up a sports science facility here in Boulder, he got a metal block card as well and because I was working a lot more with Ironman athletes at that time, I started to become really interested in fuel usage like fat and carbohydrate usage during different intensities and things like that. So that was a big, I guess a big progression in terms of
the way that I use testing with the athletes that I work with and you know I think even now you know metabolic carts are still they're not a cheap piece of equipment and they're not easy to find but for athletes who are serious being able to you know somewhat regularly test on a metabolic cart is a you know really useful thing for their training.
John (54:13.885)
Okay, okay. And I think a lot of people will have heard of this term VO2 max, but I know that's not the only thing you're looking at when you're running a metabolic cart. You also mentioned looking at fuel usage, but maybe break down, you know, more of those specific metrics in terms of what you're trying to gather from this metabolic testing.
Alan (54:36.994)
Yeah, I mean, I guess the primary use of a metabolic cart still in a lot of labs is the VO2 max test. So that's basically measuring how much oxygen your muscles can take up at a maximal effort. And that's still a number that gets thrown out a lot as a marker of sort of aerobic power in athletes.
So that was initially, I guess, what metabolic carts were sort of built for, for the most part. But another thing that they do really well is because they're measuring oxygen and oxygen usage in carbon dioxide production...
you can work out based on the ratio between those two things what fuel is being burned within the body at any given time. So whether fat is being burned or whether carbohydrate is being burned and because carbohydrate is such a limited fuel source within the body, maximizing that fat usage is something that is really important in the training.
And it's something that when you have access to a metabolic heart, you can see improve over time. know, an athlete will start with a certain number for their fat oxidation, and then you do a lot of base training with them, and then you take them back to the lab, and then you see that the fat oxidation has gone up. You know, so I think that's definitely a key metric that I like to track and, you know, something that is pretty well correlated to...
John (56:17.413)
Okay, okay. So, okay, so you often see people increase or improve this fat oxidation. And I know one thing you've talked about a lot is this idea of glycogen depletion or being ready to train from a glycogen perspective. Could you maybe elaborate on that from a fuel usage standpoint?
Alan (56:39.82)
Yeah, so in terms of glycogen stores, athletes typically have, depending on the level of athletes, somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 kilocalories stored within their muscles and within their liver. So they've got that fixed amount of energy when they're at full capacity to deal with.
when you take into consideration the fact that an Ironman is like a 9-10,000 kilocalorie proposition that that becomes a problem right because I've got you know two to four thousand kilocalories on board and I want to do nine to ten thousand kilocalories so so that the the shortfall has to come from somewhere and some of it comes from the fact that we're drinking sports drinks and stuff during that during the Ironman
but a large chunk of it comes from fat. the fat stores within the body obviously are significantly larger than the glycogen stores. So a big part of becoming both a good long distance athlete and also a good part of being able to back up hard training is to...
develop the ability to use fats to fuel your low intensity efforts and to fuel your day to day living. you know when a lot of athletes and even a lot of very good short course athletes who have very lousy fat burning abilities
they're losing, they're leaking this glycogen through the day, right? So when they get up and walk to the mailbox, what should be an activity that's fueled by fat, they're using some of their precious glycogen for the walk to the mailbox. And that's not good, right? Because if they use the glycogen there, they don't have it for that extra rep of the hard work that they wanna do in their training.
Alan (58:50.336)
So I think from a metabolic perspective, that's a really key aim, or it should be a key aim for everyone, is to develop the ability to fuel your low intensity efforts and your day-to-day living primarily through fat.
John (59:07.005)
Okay, okay. And let's broaden on this idea of metabolic health. So this is a term that maybe some people will have heard, but they don't really know what it means. So could you elaborate on what it means to be metabolically healthy? And how can somebody know their metabolic health?
Alan (59:32.13)
Yeah, so a lot of it has to do with what we're talking about in terms of sort of, you know, using sugar when you shouldn't be using sugar, when you're walking to the mailbox and, you know, doing sort of activities that you should be able to feel from fat because every time you do that and every time that your blood sugar starts to swing, you're taxing your insulin system, right? And so...
When we look at things like type 2 diabetes, big cause of that is the fact that the pancreas just gets tired after a while because you keep taxing it when you walk to the mailbox and you know you really shouldn't be doing that. You know so I think getting a sense of you know what you're burning when you're just doing your regular day-to-day activity is really useful and
things like continuous glucose monitors have been really really insightful i think for a lot of people to get a get a better sense of that because they can see what's happening with their with their blood sugar you know and obviously if you're if you're using carbohydrates you'll see your blood sugar move all over the place and if you're able to primarily use fat for your your day-to-day activities then you'll get a much more stable blood glucose profile so i think that's a
That's a useful one, obviously, in addition to the metabolic testing.
John (01:01:00.509)
Okay, sounds good, sounds good. Okay, so I wanna cover just a couple more training topics and then we'll go into the Allen research process, because I think that's something that'd be very good to understand as well. But just on the training side, so one thing that you've talked about quite a lot is easy training and in particular zone one and zone two training. So a lot of people will have heard of zone two. I think zone one is a newer concept for a lot of people.
So Alan, you tell us what is zone one training and why is zone one one of the most beneficial zones?
Alan (01:01:39.564)
So when we do a lactate test with an athlete, and that's obviously something that I like to track and something that think more athletes should track because contrary to a metabolic card, a lactate tester is a pretty cheap piece of equipment that most athletes could have access to if they wanted to. When we do a progressive test, we see a particular pattern. what we see is initially the lactate
level stays flat, right? So the the power that the athlete is putting out or the pace that they're putting out is increasing, but their lactate stays a straight line. And then when we reach a certain point, which we call the aerobic threshold, we'll start to see that the lactate will start to tick up and will start to increase with with increases in pace and power. And where that point occurs,
is, in my way of thinking, the marker between zone one and zone two. So you're right, I'm definitely a big fan of doing the majority of the work before that point occurs, while the lactate is still at its flat levels sort of thing.
John (01:02:57.13)
Okay, okay. Okay, let's talk about muscles. This is an area we haven't covered yet.
Are you a, how muscular do you think people should become? Is this a goal worth pursuing?
Alan (01:03:17.39)
I think the most important question, more than how muscular they can become, is how aerobically healthy is the muscle that you have? something that kind of centers around a lot of what we've been talking about with metabolic regulation and...
just overall aerobic health is we want to have a lot of mitochondria within the muscles that we have because mitochondria is the the energy house of the cell right so it's responsible for taking in any excess energy that we might have within our body whether it's increased increased blood glucose you know whether it's increased fat whatever the source of energy is and burning that.
You know, so one kind of key to metabolic health is having a whole lot of mitochondria to deal with, you know, any excess energy that we might have within the body. And this mitochondria lives primarily in slow twitch muscle fibers. Now, slow twitch muscle fibers tend to be smaller than fast twitch muscle fibers. And for this reason, you know, if you want to get as big as you possibly can,
most of your training in the gym is going to be very fast twitch, right? Because those muscle fibers are bigger and have the potential to become bigger. The only downside is those muscles don't have a lot of mitochondria. So I think it's really important when looking at muscle and looking at the development of muscle and even looking at strength training as a whole to have some kind of thought in the back of your mind of
not only what's going on in terms of how big my muscles are getting but how aerobically functional is the muscle that I'm building.
John (01:05:19.677)
Okay. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's fascinating. I think this is, this is one of the lessons I've been learning in my own training. So, you know, like, like one of the, one of my big interests at the moment is the sport of high rocks. Are you familiar with Hyrox Alan? Yeah.
Alan (01:05:34.028)
Yeah, mean vaguely. I've done a Hyrox competition or anything, but yeah, vaguely.
John (01:05:38.201)
Yeah, so it's a new one of these multi-sport disciplines. It's roughly an hour long, hour and a half long event. And it's got a combination of running and strength stations. So, you know, the strength stations are going to be roughly four minutes each. So you got like a sled push, a sled pull, you're doing a ski, you're doing some warbles. And I think my initial training approach was just trying to get as strong as possible. So I was doing a lot of, you know, low rep work with deadlift, bench and squats.
But I think that might've been a mistake for exactly the reason you said, which is maybe I was training the wrong types of muscle fibers, especially since we're looking at a four minute duration event, not a 10 second duration event. Yeah, so I'm curious if you would agree with that framing. Like, is there a time duration component here? Like how should we think about the time duration in terms of the needs of our sport?
Alan (01:06:39.052)
Yeah, I think, like, obviously I think about things in terms of swimming because that's sort of my background. You know, and if we look at athletes who've been successful with kind of a more sort of strength-based approach, really we're only looking at 50-meter swimmers. So once we start to get up to the 100, it's pretty rare to see an athlete who takes a real
strength and power approach with their training, sort of low volume, know, low volume, high intensity power sort of work. It's pretty rare to see them perform as well. So I think in terms of time duration, you know, for 50 we're talking about sort of 20 to 25 seconds. Once you start to get much beyond that, you really need...
you need a strong aerobic system, know, and again that was kind of what Popov taught me, I guess, and working with his coach Gennady Turetsky. You know, so I think for the sort of what you're talking about there where you've got these stations and it's not just a one-off sort of 20-second effort, you know, you've got these four-minute stations that are interspersed, if you have too much anaerobic power and anaerobic capacity and not enough aerobic capacity,
then you wind up with a whole lot of lactate after the first station and you don't have the mitochondria to process that lactate. So, you know, I think for that kind of event...
the aerobic system is going to be pretty important just in terms of not being completely gassed after the first station. I think about like American gladiators, mean Australian gladiators as well and you'd see sometimes the contestants, you'd get like this big sort of bodybuilder dude, know, and you'd think...
he looks he looks the party looks like he's going to completely crush this and you know they get to that they get to the last event which is that you know two minutes or whatever have gone through the obstacles and and they're just completely gassed off after the first you know 10 seconds or 20 seconds you know and i i think about that a lot it was it was the little little guys who were
you know, of endurance competitors who tended to do better in those sort of mixed mode activities I think.
John (01:09:04.989)
Yeah, it's fascinating. It's fascinating. Yeah, and I think you've talked a little bit about strength training on the Mad Crew Forum as well. And from what I understand, you're a big fan of circuit based training or this kind of anti glycolytic type of training. Could you maybe explain a little bit more about your overall strength training philosophy, especially for people who are more interested in these endurance type efforts?
Alan (01:09:28.92)
Yeah, think it again goes back to that, you know, having a lot of aerobic function in the muscle that we build. So one of the key things that I like to do is to monitor heart rates as athletes are doing their strength work and, you know, apply the same kind of caps and same kind of zones that we use in the endurance training to try to keep them within.
within the aerobic training zone while they're doing strength work and that means not resting very much, you know, it means doing large muscle activities and moving pretty well between exercises, doing things like circuits and supersets and things that don't have you sitting resting for very long periods of time, you know.
Going back to our muscle fiber discussion, what that does is it puts more of the emphasis on developing those slow twitch fibers because we're not giving the athlete a lot of time to rest and replenish, know, creatine phosphate and get rid of the lactate that they build during anaerobic work. So it really biases the work much more towards developing those muscle fibers that have the potential to have a lot of mitochondria in them.
John (01:10:44.413)
Perfect, perfect. Okay, let's talk a little bit about your writing and then also this Mad Crew Forum. So a lot of people listening will be familiar with you from Twitter. I think it's fair to say you were prolific on Twitter and very well loved as well in terms of your very pithy and very wise endurance sayings. So why did you make the decision to leave Twitter or to...
Take a break from Twitter.
Alan (01:11:17.998)
think it changed a lot for me. When I joined Twitter like 2009 or something, initially it was very much a case of I would follow people that I respected in the endurance world. You'd get scientists that you'd never met before that you were familiar with their work who would just show up and...
you know obviously athletes were you'd get to chat with athletes you wouldn't have a chance to otherwise you know and that's what old Twitter was to me and then really only the last couple of years I think it it just changed like I don't know if I don't know if it was an algorithm thing where I'm just not seeing those people anymore I don't know if they're not there anymore or if they're just not posting as much anymore
But all of my algorithm, all of my timeline was just starting to be like political stuff and stuff that I wasn't interested in, you know, I didn't sign up for this sort of thing. you know, I think I got to the point where it felt like it was becoming manipulative, like it felt like the algorithm was doing things that weren't there to serve me, that were there to serve someone else sort of thing. And yeah, so I'm like, I don't really...
enjoying this like I used to enjoy it and it really got me thinking again going back to Gordo you know Gordo had this forum when I first got got interested in Ironman triathlon you know way back like in the early 90s I think it was and it was just a community of know triathletes who were all training and talking about their training and and supporting each other and
you know, just asking questions and getting to know each other. And I thought that was just a really cool experience. And that was, you know, to be someone who was new to that sort of thing and to have access to a bunch of people who had a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge in that particular niche was, it was huge. You know, I...
Alan (01:13:30.966)
was a very, very high value thing for me. And I thought it would be really cool to bring that old school forum back to life. So yeah, I just set up a forum for folks who are interested in endurance sports and health and fitness in general. And it's been fantastic. We've got great community together. And I think...
everyone's just really really nice. You know like I've been on other forums where it's just everyone's arguing with each other all the time and stuff and everyone's trying it turns into this you know ego contest and it's not like that at all we've just got a really really good group of people together and it turned into everything that I could possibly want it to be.
John (01:14:21.661)
Perfect, perfect. Yeah, so this is a very positive place to be learning about Endurance Sports. It's a very supportive group. I've been part of the Mad Crew Forum for at least six months as well. I know there's a pinned comment on your Twitter where people can find out more about this forum. What is your ultimate goal for the forum? Are you happy with it in its current form, Alan? Or what's your ideal end state for this?
Alan (01:14:52.248)
Yeah, I think I'm happy in its current form. I think the weird thing about forums and something that I've learned since setting this up is there's a lot of lurkers and not as many posters. And that's cool. I understand people's reluctance to...
to kind of, you know, to be open and to come out of the shadows. But I guess my hope is that more of the lurkers will turn into posters and we'll even increase the number of sort of active participants on there. But I'm committed to keeping this rolling. know, I think one of the things that technology enables us to do is...
to scale more. And I think in sports and in coaching, that's something that we're seeing. There's the opportunity to reach more people. But at the same time, I think it's always going to be important to have humans in the loop and to have that humanity there and to have people talking about real life issues.
you know, of bouncing ideas off of each other of, you know, how do you fit the training in when you've got three kids or whatever the case may be. So that's, I guess, what I see the role of the forum as, you know, even as technology improves and training plans improve and, you know, we develop the ability to reach more people more easily.
It's going to be this hub of where these people can come together and can talk to each other and support each other
John (01:16:37.019)
Amazing. And Alan, you are a prolific writer. You're very active on the forum. Again, you are very active on Twitter as well. You've also put out a lot of material on your blog and then also on this book that you've been working. What is your production process for writing so much? Is this a daily habit for you? How do you get so much writing done?
Alan (01:17:00.686)
Yeah, think my process is pure chaos, if I'm going to be honest with you. I just, you know, like I'll have an idea while I'm running or riding my bike and then I'll stop and I'll send an email to myself, this is an idea of something that I should probably write about. you know, all these little ideas then kind of turn into themes and I try and weave them together into some kind of...
some kind of coherent article or blog post or chapter. But yeah, I think that's just sort how my brain works. I'll just come up with random ideas at generally the least opportune time and have to try to remember them and expand upon them when it suits.
John (01:17:50.567)
So good. Okay, Alan, final question. What is capturing your attention right now or what's at the frontier of your current learning?
Alan (01:18:04.427)
Yeah.
pretty obsessed with AI, I have to say. Yeah, I'm pretty obsessed with the way that it's going. know, I think some is going to be very good and some things are going to be very bad, from in our particular domain, think that the use of large language models is going to...
serve as kind of a bridge for a lot of people to to start to become more familiar with data and to become more familiar with with just the whole process of modeling performance and I guess that's what I'm what I'm pretty excited about you know just developing these kind of bridges between people versus what were previously really geeky things like neural networks and various different types of performance models and helping them to have access to that and to understand those things. think that's going to be really cool.
John (01:19:20.253)
Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, Alan, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. Your work has been hugely inspirational to me. Your book, The Science of Maximal Athletic Development. Wait, did I say that right? Yeah, The Science of Maximal Athletic Development. It's been the very best book that I've read on endurance training and has really had a profound impact on how I think about all of these things. So I'm very grateful for your work. I'm very grateful for what you're continuing to put out. And it's been an absolute pleasure having this conversation.
Alan (01:19:53.55)
I appreciate so much, John. With Twitter, one of the good things that comes out is getting to meet people like yourself. And I hope that we continue to keep this dialogue going in the future. It's been great.
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