Physiology Insights: Why One-Size-Fits-All Training Fails Triathletes

My name is Joby Gutierrez and I am from Orange County, California and I specialize in coaching iron man and half iron man triathletes. So the single biggest misconception about conventional testing is that you can apply the same principles the same results to all athletes. So looking typically a lot of testing will try to identify thresholds and thresholds influence like the the percentages that athletes will train at.

And the reason that is a big misconception because not all athletes have the same makeup to reach that threshold and understanding fiber types of athletes is going to influence what we do to change that threshold. So, the single most important change for my coaching after using INSCYD is being able to identify specifically what an athlete's VLAmax is. And since I'm specializing in coaching iron man and half iron man triathletes, knowing what their VLAmax is and in many cases bringing that down as low as possible has allowed me to improve fat oxidation, improve race pace, even at the same VO2 max numbers.

And so that has allowed me to fine-tune the training and then as they progress through training to then re-evaluate through testing where an athlete is at after 3 months of our initial start and then adjust training based on their current reality so that I can continue to modify the types of intervals, the goal of the training with the end goal of getting them to race day optimally prepared and ready to just crush the race because we've identified exactly their intensities, what their fueling is going to be like and what their race execution plan is going to be like. So it's really transformed my coaching. It's helped me to get numerous athletes to the Iron Man World Championships, to the 70.3 World Championships, podiums, personal bests, all because I have this very specific number that I'm looking at as I adjust and monitor their training.