Uncommon Strategies to Improve Triathlon Performance

0:00  So again, welcome everybody to the webinar today about uncommon strategies to increase trial and performance. There are many strategies or many methods you could have chosen here. I opted today for primarily three. One of it you could apply or one of it applies across all disciplines, but let's maybe get right into it. So the idea of this topic actually has maybe a little personal background because I actually had a thought for myself if I should pick up Triathlon again. I could Triathlon more than 20-35 years ago. And because I have so limited time to do it, and that's

0:49  my excuse why I never did it actually, pick it up again. I have so limited time to do it, I thought about okay what could I do to get the most performance gains in my very limited time. And some of the stuff is quite obvious and some of the stuff is maybe not so obvious and maybe new to you, and that's what I'm going to talk about. And I looked at, by doing so, I looked at different methodologies and different phenomenons and learnings from other sports and from elite sports,

1:22  from elite athletes and from other sports outside of Triathlon. Okay, so what we're going to talk about primarily today is the idea to work smart instead of work hard. Okay, and I use this image here because that is pretty representative. What you can see here is somebody pushing a ball compared to somebody pushing boxes. And obviously pushing a ball is much easier because it has less drag. In this case mostly friction drag, I assume. So that is part of the presentation and actually leads us to the first

1:59  discipline, which is obviously swimming. And swimming, it might sound very stupid simple, has the specificity that it takes place in the water. Okay, wow, that's great news here. However, the big difference with doing exercising or movement in the water is that the density of water, depending on different variables, is approximately 880 to 900 times higher than it is in air, or the density of air. And to put this in perspective, I always like to give support an example. If you assume you have an approximately, let's say an example, male triathlete, sorry for the females,

2:47  choosing the male example, 75 kilograms, 180 centimeters tall, sitting on this aero bike, in an okay aero position, this is based on training equipment, putting out 200 watts. This will buy him a speed of approximately 30 kilometers per hour, let's say an average. I know it's wind and road surface and up and down, but on a flat road, there's no wind, that's approximately where you would end up typically. It's 30 kilometers per hour 200 watts, if you think about it, the typical maybe long slow distance training numbers. If the centriathlete would try to do the

3:32  same, the very same speed underwater, it would be somewhere in the ballpark of, you know, 35,000, 38,000 watts. So tremendous amount of power output, right? And I choose this picture here because you can try it yourself. You can, the next holiday, go to the beach and try to stand in the waves, and you will experience how much force there is, right? How much power you can save these babies, how much force there is. You can also do it in your next swimming exercises. Just try to move

4:08  your hands through air at a certain speed and try to do the same speed of your hand moving through water. How does it feel like? Okay. Stupid, simple, and a more scientific way, if you look at what we call swimming economy, so energy demand and swimming versus speed. Now here, speed is on the x-axis, meters per second, could be time for one hundred meters whatsoever, and energy demand in O2 equivalence. So, O2 equivalent means, doesn't matter if it's aerobic and aerobic sources, or O2 equivalence on the y-axis.

4:43  And what is important to look at is that it has this very steep curve linear shape, right? So the energy demand in swimming is, has this exponential function where you swim just a little bit faster, I mean, after COVID times, you all know about exponential functions, right? So you just swim a little bit faster, and it costs you tremendously amount more of energy. I mean, you can read from the graph here, if you are at one meter per second, it's approximately, whatever, 28 milliliters of oxygen that's needed in this case here, and just going

5:18  from one to 1.2, so approximately 20 percent up, it jumps to 40 milliliters. So it is not 10 percent more, right? That would be something like 31, but it's, yeah, approximately 40 percent more. So just going a little bit faster needs a huge amount of additional energy. And the beauty of using VO2 as an energy equivalent, you could also use kJ or whatever, it makes it easier to compare to something more typical, like for example VO2 max. And this is what we're going to look at now. So the question I'm going to

5:56  look at here is, if you would want to increase swim speed, and throughout this whole webinar, I'm using Ironman distances, so full long distance triathlon as my primary example. So if we would want to swim 3.8 kilometers, which is the Ironman split, we want to swim that as an average swimmer, 80 kilograms, 180 centimeters, average swimming economy, average VLA max, how would that look like? Okay, so our baseline, so to speak, would be assuming that our example athletes, 80 kilograms, 0.5 VLA max, average swimming economy, our example athlete has a VO2 max of 55 milliliters. That would enable them to swim approximately,

6:44  to finish the swimming distance, in about one hour and 10 minutes, which you can see down here, right? Now, let's assume we train him, we increase training, intensity, training, volume, right? So we increase VO2 max in swimming, which is not entirely, but significantly different to increasing VO2 max on the running on the bike, because it uses, obviously, other muscles, right? It's primarily upper body, especially for triathletes, so it's still the same cardiovascular system, but obviously it's a different training, training different muscles, okay? Now, if you increase VO2 max by

7:22  approximately 10%, which would equal in this case VO2 max of 60.5, it buys you only five minutes minutes, and the rest. And 10% performance improvement, I mean, that's not huge, but it is quite significant, and it buys you only five minutes. Let's say we do increase another 5%, so 20% total, and because they have over 66 millimeters, okay? Then the performance gain is a bit smaller, because of the exponential shape here. It is only another four minutes. Long story short, you could get nine minutes of increased performance in the swim, you know, lower times, shorter time. You could do that, but you would need to increase your

8:15  view to max by approximately 20%, okay? And the question we should ask ourselves here is to increase swim view to max by 20%, that easily would mean maybe going from three times swim training per week to six times swim training per week. And most people don't have the swimming pool at home or reside in a hotel where they have the swimming pool. So for three hours net training time, or let's say four hours if you have three sessions additionally, for three to four hours net training time,

8:57  it is likely that you need to invest five to seven hours of total time if you drive into the pool and changing and showering and so on and so forth. So it puts in a significant amount of additional hours into your training plan, right? Total hours, time demands that you don't have to work, family, so on and so forth, which is relatively small time savings because of the drag in the water. However, swimming economy is not a fixed thing. You know, we have here, swimming economy of different athletes. So you can see the dashed line, so it's the same graph, right? Oxygen demand on the y-axis and speed on the x-axis.

9:45  So you can see that there's the dashed line, which is like the energy demand, which you can find in the literature for elite swimmers. And then you see the yellow athlete, swimmer number three, matches this relatively perfectly. And then the purple one is shifted to the left. And that's quite significant, right? If you, for example, concentrate of a VO2 of 50 milliliters, the purple swimmer only swims 1.2 meters per second, the yellow one 1.3 and the blue one 1.45. So that is a massive 25, 30 percent higher swim speed for the same energy demand. That's the same game.

10:30  35 percent more speed for the same effort, so to speak, from an energetic point of view. Quite significant. So this is the magnitude, so to speak, of changes you can expect, right? The good thing is, it is relatively easy to measure. We have the whole webinar about this, so I'm not going into all detail. I'm just going to show you briefly how it works. The, let's say, accepted or commonly used method is something which is called backward extrapolation, where you put on the mass, you put on the VO2 analyzer, for example, like the VO2 master, which is shown here more or less on the image.

11:13  You put on the mass, you put on the VO2 analyzers immediately after the effort. And this decrease in VO2, shown on the right image and represented also this red dotted line, you can then use the decrease of VO2 to understand what was the uptake in steady state, meaning during the swimming effort. And this is normally how it's done, so you don't need a flume, you don't need a snorkel or some special equipment. You can just use your normal VO2 analyzer, like you have, you know, with wipe or run testing, take it to the poolside and do this kind of analyze.

11:48  And why you should be doing it, hopefully you already showed a little bit, because, yeah, it is the main, the main drag, the main resistance you have to overcome in the swimming, and the biggest room, it offers the biggest room for a program. How a protocol looks like, just really quick, and then we really go more to the application side of it. So, if you want to do it, you would normally do three to four different distances, for example, very low speed, like training speed, race speed, and above race speed.

12:22  If you want to make it into a full, into a full metabolic profile, you would add one shorter all-out effort. And then you just need to measure the time, you could measure the heart rate, distance is given, right, because you do it in the pool most likely, you can also do it outside, they have to measure the distance with GPS. I would recommend pool, maybe because then it's more accurate with the distance, right, swimming outside in the open water with the GPS is not super accurate. You would have to take left tape before and after, and of course measure the VO2, okay.

12:54  And when you do that, you can immediately, so to speak, visualize in the software how that looks like. So, here we have three runs, so we have three efforts. Each bar is one effort, and the software shows you how much, how high is your energy demand compared to comparison group. And to make it a little bit more applicable, you can directly also change it into a speed, so you can not only see how much more energy or less energy do I need at a certain speed, but you're able to see how much faster or slower am I because of that, okay.

13:30  So, that is, that is all covered, that's all relatively easy to do, okay. And, to visualize again, and this is maybe the most important slide when it comes to the swimming part, visualize again what you should be doing in training, right, because this is what we're going to talk about today. How do we can increase performance in the most time efficient or most efficient way. So, what I'm going to show you now is how much you can increase, how much you can save of your swimming time,

14:02  based on increasing your physical condition, increasing your view of your mass, right, becoming more powerful, so to speak, metabolically stronger in the water, whereas becoming more efficient. And, if all the graphs before you didn't like, you didn't understand, whatever, not interested in them, then please look into this one, because again, this is the most maybe important one. So, what you see here on the x-axis is the change in performance, meaning performance marker, so it's a change in either economy, energy demand, swimming technique, position in the water,

14:39  an orange, or change in VO2max, okay. And on the y-axis, you see the time savings over 3.8 kilometers, 3.8 meters in minutes. Again, an example athlete, this might be different a little bit depending on your physiology, but it really explains nicely what we're looking at here, okay. So, give you an example. Here, let's look at the 10% mark. So, increasing your VO2max, as this example, by 10% buys only a time saving of approximately 3 minutes. This is because the blue curve is at 10%.

15:21  Improving your swimming technique, your position in the water by 10%, so basically meaning reducing your energy demand by 10%, buys you an improvement in performance of 6 minutes, so approximately double.

15:38  Even more drastically, look at 20%. A 20% improve in swimming economy, buys you 12 minutes in the water of time savings. And this is, I stopped there because this is where, this is typical improvements we do see, right, in differences. 10 to 20% easily, okay. To get the same 12 minutes, you would need to increase your VO2max by more than 50%. So now, how likely is that, let's say your VO2max in swimming is 50, because you go to the pool maybe two to four times per week.

16:18  How likely is it that you are able to increase it up to 75? I mean, that's approximately, looking at elite swimmers, that's approximately seven, eight to 12 sessions in the pool per week. So, double days on some days. Totally difficult, at least to say, to combine that as a triathlon training regime, right? So, again, for me, one of the most important graphs, because it directly compares the time savings you can get from working on your swimming technique, versus concentrating on intervals and improving the VO2max and higher metabolic performance and so on and so forth, okay.

17:06  The second last comment on the swimming piece is that, similar gains, if you think about a drag, it's similar to aerodynamics on the bike, right? Similar gains in swimming time can not only be made by technique, for example, I already said two, three times, position in the water is important. So, what changes our position in the water, for example? That's a vetsuit. So, if you are able to swim a vetsuit, then a vetsuit can change drastically your energy demand. What you see here is different vetsuits, and you don't need to go, you know, into great detail maybe.

17:46  You have some vetsuits here, like the Marco Knight, going up to 22, 23% savings. This is compared to no vetsuits. This is compared to normal Speedos, okay. So, one vetsuit might save 20 to 25% over having no vetsuit, okay. And then some other ones, who are actually, by the way, the same price, or even more expensive, only save 5% or maybe 10%. So, what you see here is that, in general, yeah, vetsuit is faster, right? And most vetsuit will buy you performance gains of 5% to 10% of energy saving, but there are some

18:33  that can easily buy you 15% or 20% or even more. And it's a little bit similar to every helmet, for example, on the bike, right? There are some helmets which work better on some subjects or some athletes, but in general, if you're a good helmet, it's a good helmet on most athletes, okay. And that's similar in the vetsuits here, right? There are some vetsuits which work better in general, but some models may specifically work extremely good or never not as good on some athletes. I said before, I'm going to answer questions at the end, but I need to comment something as far as

19:17  Azoul Tann just commented here. Economy improved by simply training well doing the same stuff over and over again. I would not entirely agree on this, Faris, because if you don't have any correction from the outside, if you don't have anybody who is pointing you towards the right technique, actually the opposite could happen, right? You could just be repeating the same technical mistakes in the water and therefore it will be getting more harder and harder to actually get rid of those mistakes. We'll come to that later when we talk about running a little bit, but especially for swimming,

19:54  one takeaway is yes, you can improve by doing in general by training, right? You will improve a lot if you just keep doing, doing, doing, doing the right things. That's the idea. But if you keep doing, doing, doing, doing the wrongs, anyways, then it's most likely that you will not improve, except you're naturally talented and have, you know, have a good auto self-correction, so to speak, of the technique and position in the water. So with that, I would like to summarize on swimming, uh, four points. Learnings, takeaway messages would be because of the exponential increase of energy demand,

20:30  there's higher speeds, right? Because of the density of the water. So I'm still in the pot here a little bit, being a little bit provocative, but for, let's say, a non-elite, a non-pro athlete, trying to improve swimming time by increasing metabolic markers, the difference is not the best idea because it doesn't offer a lot of room for improvement. Therefore, again, seeing the pond a little bit, and, um, here is, if, if it would be me, I would be entirely focused on technique, technique, technique, technique, whatever it is. Um, you know, how you move your

21:11  arms to the water, especially position in the water, right? Uh, being really flat on the water and like, next down, stuff like that. This offers the biggest room for improvement. And because, you know, improving your metabolism is a side effect, a collateral of any swimming training anyway, right? You can use training technique training, you will improve, or you will keep, uh, training and training adaptations for VO2max, for example. The focus should be entirely on that. Choose equipment wisely. It's totally underrated. It's totally underrated, totally underestimated how much differences

21:47  there are. It's kind of crazy, right? Because everybody looks at different wheel options and different helmet options and three suit options and different tires to save five watts. And then swim, you can save 10 watts, 20, 30 watts, or even more just by choosing the right head suit. Uh, so something that's totally underestimated here. Uh, and in order to know how much room there is or test the equipment, I would really recommend. You don't have to do it as often as maybe you do testing, uh, on the bike or

22:19  run to change your training zones or stuff, but to understand how much room there is for improvement, to understand which vetsuit you should spend on 1000 bucks. I really can only recommend, um, getting, getting it tested once in a while to know what, what you're looking for. And with that, uh, I'm moving to the second discipline, which is a bike. And, uh, we're looking at first again, similar to swimming, start on a high level, understanding in general, uh, what factors contribute to performance on the bike and then picking

22:56  out one specifically for the step in our, which we want to talk about. And what does it take? So what is performance on the bike determined by? And I leave out things like cornering or pacing, like, you know, in a simplified way, you could say, for example, for this gentleman here of the image, it takes approximately 1400 watts per CDA because it is the relationship between the power output, how much power is produced, and how much drags that is. And the best description, leaving out rolling assistance here again, simplified,

23:30  is to, um, is to look at the CDA. So CDA's combination of course, A is for the area. So how much surface, area, frontal area is, and the CD is, is to shape the body aerodynamics wise. Um, normal ranges very low, 0.2 for track drivers lower, um, 0.2 up to 0.25 maybe more for recreational. Okay. So you can, basically, what this tells you is you can do two things. You can either increase your power or decrease your CDA, so decrease your drag. So very similar to swimming. How do we do that? Well, very, you know, much known,

24:11  we can, for example, increase our aerobic power and therefore just have a bigger engine, just be able to produce more energy aerobically. We could also, for example, lower our glycolytic power, which means that we are less relying on carbohydrates. We would have likely less, have less fast-fitch fibers. Sprint power would drop, not needed for the tribo anyway, so don't worry. We'll bring up fat combustion, therefore we would be able to ride at a higher power offer. And then on a similar topic, there's fueling, right? You need

24:45  to hydrate, you need to look at sodium, uh, and carbohydrates, using the race. And then of course, for the CDA, it's for the lower part of situations and body position or posture, hence there's the equipment that you use.

25:01  And then what I picked for today, because most of you are familiar, yeah, I need, you know, super aerodynamic equipment, and yes, I need to lower my BLMX and improve my BLMX. So, in fact, one thing that is also, I think, a little underestimated, uh, in terms of the effect it has on your performance, is carbohydrate intake. Carbohydrate intake on the bike, um, okay, is what I would say underestimated, and we would like to look at now what is the effect size of that. So, you may have heard of the term, train the gut. So, what that means is, train your body to be able to

25:39  take in more carbohydrates. And when I say take in, I'm not meaning stuff more sinks into your mouth, without puking or feeling sick. It's about really being able to take this additional carbohydrates from your GI tractors into the bloodstream, into the muscle, because this is where you need it. Okay. And the bottleneck here, or one limiting factor, is a molecule which is called glycogen, which you may have heard of. It looks like that. This funny, um, colored structure in the middle is a protein, and then you have, like, starch, so basically, carbohydrate on the outside. And when it's,

26:18  when you're loaded with glycogen, it looks like this, and when you are using the glycogen, it's smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller, smaller. Okay. So, it is quite a huge molecule. It's quite big. And because it's so big, it cannot go out of the cell. Which means it is stored in the muscle cell. And you can only use it in this very muscle cell. So, you cannot, like, on the bike, on the run, when you're, you know, you're seeing or in the men with a hammer, you're close to bulking, um, you cannot, like,

26:53  you know, you get your quadriceps is calling you a pectoralis and says, hey, I need some glycogen, can you send some down? So, this is not how it works. It cannot pass the muscle cell. Okay. So, therefore, what we are looking at inside is, we are looking at what we call the available glycogen. So, we only look at the glycogen amount, which is stored in your working muscles. And again, with triad leads, the swim is primarily covered by upper body muscles. Therefore, for the bike and the

27:23  run, we can basically simplify speaking, and this is what we're going to this webinar today, simplify, look at, um, the glycogen, you know, distributed between, between swim and bike, uh, between, uh, bike and, bike and run. So, okay. And for the sake of simplicity, it's not saying that this is the best solution. Some, some people might be better off with a different ratio, but for today, we are going to use this 460 grams as an example in the next slide. And we assume we divided approximately half-half,

28:00  220 grams on the bike and 220 grams on the run. And now some of you have recently, okay, uh, the Sebastian guy is not able to do this in the last year because 220 and 220 is not 259. This is because you need to have some security buffer, right? This, you need to have some glycogen, uh, so to speak, left in the calculation because on race day, it might differ and differ a little bit with, uh, with the, uh, carbide intake and maybe there's an inaccuracy in the estimation. So when you do what we do now,

28:34  you plan your fueling and pacing or you do look at how much, you know, how much glycogen can I utilize on the bike, how much do I need to let over for the run, you never calculate this 100%, okay? You calculate at the first place even more conservative, you would maybe calculate this 400 grams here. This is also what I did with Cameron, for example. We started conservative, we started, um, using, you know, calculating using 85% of glycogen and then from race to race we increased to 90-95% as we felt more secure,

29:05  okay? So this is why I don't come up to 100% and this you shouldn't either, okay? To start with, 220 grams on the bike, 220 grams on the run, this is what we're going to use. So what I'm saying is, glycogen is precious, we cannot refill glycogen during the race, um, so we need to look at how much of this 460 grams or 440 that we actually want to use do we spend on the bike, how much do we spend in the running shoes, okay? And that's what we're going to do now, uh, and again step by step, here is

29:42  what it does, okay? Or here is what it looks like. So we are going to look at your bike split or an example bike split. I used an example athlete again, I think CDA 0.23, uh, 75 kilograms and then, uh, 70 kilograms, you will see now, yeah, 75 kilograms, you know, to 65. Okay, let me walk you through the graph, okay? Step by step. On the x-axis, you see the bike split time, okay? 108 kilometers, bike split in minutes, so 5 hours is 300 minutes, 330 minutes is 5 and a half hours,

30:20  okay? And what we're looking at here is the bike split on the x-axis again, and how much glycogen will we have used, okay, on the y-axis? And then the different lines is for different nutritions on the bike, okay? Blue one is fueling only 40 grams, the orange one is fueling 60 grams per hour, the gray one is 80 grams per hour, and the yellow one is 100 grams per hour, okay? And what we just said in the previous slide is we want to draw the line at 220 grams. We only want to use 220 grams of the bike because we want to use the rest

31:06  on the run in order not to ball, okay? So what we can see for this athlete, this is CDA and this VO2max, and I choose that because it's kind of representative for age group athletes, right? For this athlete, if he only views 40 grams per hour, and he really wants to preserve half of his glycogen for the run because he still needs to run a marathon, then obviously, this 40 grams per hour is not doable in, you know, something less than six hours. It's just not possible,

31:43  okay?

31:46  The 60 grams fueling per hour on the bike, it becomes possible, okay? 60 grams per hour will be approximately five and a half hours for this athlete, okay? But, and then this is what we're going to use as a reference here, okay? But if the athlete would be able to not fuel 60 grams, but 80 grams per hour, so 20 grams more, he would save 12 minutes. 80 grams per hour, 20 grams more saves him 12 minutes on the bike. And if he really takes it, you know, to the edge, so to speak, to almost the maximum what we know what is

32:27  possible, with 100 grams, the athlete would save 18 minutes on the bike, okay? And to put this in perspective, this is approximately an equivalent to increasing VO2 max by 12 and a half percent, let's say somewhere between 10 and 15 percent, or in 30 watts and error savings. And think about it, the 12 or 10 to 15 percent of VO2 max improvement would require a significant amount of more and or harder training. 30 watts in error saving, assuming you already have a carbon bike and aero wheels and so on and so on, 30 watts is a lot.

33:15  At that speed especially, that's really a lot. That is either not possible or would cost you several thousand dollars to do that, okay? So that is difficult. But just by being able to eat more and take this more fuel down to the muscles, you get the same time savings. No additional training time required, no additional money spent on equipment, okay? And again, also here, there's a solution to do that. You can basically figure that out. Short videos, you can create like these, you know, event names in the

33:53  software, then give it a duration. And then there's another tweak to it, which is important when it comes to training, because we can decide what is a diet, high carbohydrate, medium carbohydrate, low carbohydrate diet, how much glycogen reserve you want to have, and how you want to fuel. And then we can basically automatically calculate what would be the power output, okay, to deplete, in this case here, 50% of the glycogen stores, right? In our case before, it would maybe better to have like 40% of whatsoever. And then you can play around with it. You can change, for example, the carb diet, right? You can say,

34:37  my general diet, not during the train, not during the range, the general diet is higher, low carbohydrates, or like here, in this case, I just fuel more during the range. And then see, in this case here, 40 grams more, in this example, 40 grams more of carbohydrate intake power buys 31 watts of additional power. No surprise, it's going to save you a lot of time and being much faster, right? So with that, let me summarize for the five. Training your gut to enable higher carbohydrate intake is

35:15  significant, has significant room for improvement, your performance. And the beauty is, it's not additional money and it's most likely not additional training time, right? The gains that you can make equal approximately real to max improve of 10 to 15% or approximately 30 watts of error gains, which is at that speed, hardly possible, especially if you already have decent equipment.

35:47  And with that, I would come to the, um, to the last, uh, to the last one, to the last discipline, which is, um, which is, uh, the, the run, obviously, right? Um, I always use this image of Patrick Lange and Cameron Gurg, even though it's a few years old, because you can really see, look at the hip angle of Patrick Lange and look at the hip angle of Cameron Gurg, when it's running, when it's sitting. Um, and this was the moment, uh, Patrick passed Cameron, um, um, on the, um, on the, um, on the, um, on the marathon.

36:25  So, on the running, we come back to a similar topic like we did in swimming, which is basically the energy demand, or what you might call a running economy. And no, that's not lame because, you know, I was lazy and didn't want to pick up another topic. I picked it because it's really underestimated. And because I've seen myself and a study I did myself back in university days, that in, in, in, in recreational athletes, you can really improve running economy easily. So running economy, it's relatively easy to measure, even a little bit easier than it is in the swim, because you don't need to do the poolside, you can do it outdoors on a treadmill.

37:03  You would also use different speeds. Uh, you also measure CO2 and maybe the CO2 to normalize for fat and carbohydrate combustion. Okay. Um, you would do a lactate measurement before and after each effort. And this is how it looks like. So very similar, um, to what we see before in swimming. We do have, again, the energy demand and oxygen equivalents on the, on the y-axis. And in this case, I choose minutes and seconds per mile. So if you are basing your pace on, on, on, on, um, you know, on this metric, you will be familiar.

37:40  Um, 10 minutes in this case, the, the red, the lowest speed up to approximately five and a half minutes, um, mile, um, you know, minutes, minutes per mile. So it's different measurements here. Okay. Okay. I'm first going to show you the effect it has, for example, on substrate utilization. And then we are going to look at the performance or time gains or something. Okay.

38:05  This one here shows you two different athletes. I would like you to focus on this oxygen demand, um, curve, right? So you can, you have the, the solid line, which is at the number one, and then you have the dashed line, which is at the number two. And now I have the meters per second, but I put you as a marathon finishing time. So three meters per second has a marathon time of three hours 54. Um, and then five meters per second is two hours 20. Okay. So what you're going to see is that the dashed one has a, the dashed line is lower, right?

38:40  It's a dark blue dashed one is lower. So for the same speed, again, there's a significant lower energy amount. And you can also see that the curve is much more linear, right? Because yeah, you're running in air and not in water. Right? So it's not going up this curve in your shape, like it is in swimming. And you can argue, well, you know what, Sebastian, that's pretty close, right? I mean, there's not a huge difference. It's not like in swimming, but you have seen this huge gap. Remember the graph is a purple, yellow, and blue swimmer curve.

39:12  That's different here, right? It's not that much of a difference, but don't make a mistake here. It is smaller, but then the running is much, much longer, right? You don't run for an hour. You run for several hours. So if you gain a little bit in each hour of running, it sums up to be a whole lot, whole whole marathon. Okay? And to put this in perspective, as we talked about carbohydrates, I'm now going to show you this change, so this drop in the dashed, dark blue line of like the lower energy demand is a better running economy, right?

39:45  Lower energy demand is a better running economy. How does this translate into carbohydrate needs? And this is what you see here. Very same example. If, for example, you would look at, let's say, a carbohydrate combustion rate of approximately 130 grams, right? On the right axis here, there's this carbohydrate combustion. So this is a normal, obviously not so good running economy. You would run approximately three hours, three hours, 54 minutes. So let's say four hours in a marathon. There's a carbohydrate combustion of approximately 130 grams per hour.

40:26  There's the same carbohydrate combustion, but an improved running economy is a dashed line. It is more like, you know, 3.6 meters per second, which is approximately three hours 30. So we are talking a massive 25 minutes change or improvement in marathon time in this example. Okay? And this is what we're going to look at in a more closer way. Okay? So here comes the ultimate graph, so to speak, of the running piece again. So very similar to the other ones. The exact axis has the time to complete a marathon.

41:05  Four hours marathon time to 3.1 hour. So 3.06. Okay? Time to complete the marathon. And then here you have, again, similar to the bike, you have the muscle glycogen. So remember we said, we assume in our example here today, the athlete is 460 grams. We want to use 220 on the bike, we want to use 220 on the run. So therefore, 220 grams is our matching number. Okay? And now you have three different curves. The poor running economy, which is blue. The mediocre running economy, which is that.

41:41  And the good running economy, which is green. Okay? So what you can see is that this is a poor running economy. And this is by the way, I've done this by the way, this 50 grams of carbohydrate fueling per hour. So not that high number on the bike because it's running, it's a little bit conservative. But it's about understanding the effect running economy can have. Okay? So this poor running economy, the set fueling, it's not possible to run sub-4 hours. It's a poor running economy. This is whatever, 65 or U2 max,

42:24  you know, 50 grams of carbohydrate fueling. It's a little bit longer than four hours. But if the running economy is just average, so to speak, it is already 21 minutes faster if you assume like four hours to PC the time here, right? So there's more of a possibility. So improving running economy here would already save 21 minutes. And I know it sounds tremendously a lot, but believe me, I've done it. I've seen it myself so many times. I had my own human performance net coached, you know, recreation, amateur, marathon runners, and triathlete.

43:03  So I think it is really one-to-one. You can see in the running economy, 10% improvement. You can calculate the variance in time very accurately. This is really the magnitude of improvement we are talking about. And when you are able to improve even further, right? Like a very good running economy of elite runners, that would be another almost half an hour of time savings possible. Not saying that everybody can go to this good running economy, but in general, this is the room for improvement that running economy offers you.

43:41  So, therefore, we can really summarize and see that the magnitude of performance or time improvement, time savings you can get from other economies, tremendous. It's really tremendous and it's really overlooked, very likely because many people don't measure it. And when you don't measure it, it's just not, you know, part of your world, just not conscious about that there is something that you are in the economy, and that you maybe should tackle it, right? Because you only just look at power outputs and cadences and speed and carbohydrate intake,

44:17  then, you know, running economy is maybe just not part of our training world, so to speak, part of our toolbox. And this is what I'm trying to argue here, that we should change that, because the performance improvements are much, much bigger than in many of the other metrics. Typical time savings in running economy easily is the ballpark of 15 to 20 minutes. Okay?

44:43  And therefore, I would like to summarize for the whole presentation for now. If you now look at things, swimming technique and or specific wetsuit or swimming equipment can save you, if you're allowed to use a wetsuit, can save you 10 to 15 minutes in an Ironman.

45:07  Again, if you can use swimsuits, depending where you're coming from. But this is a likely range. Of course, if that applies to you or to your athletes, you would need to know specifically and test specifically, right? Training the gut, only for the bike, easily 15 minutes. Training the gut, only for the bike, easily 15 minutes. You may also use an advantage or part of that, the spillover to the run, because you very likely might be able to take also more coverage in the runs and the effect amplifies.

45:37  But in general, easily 15 minutes. And then for running economy, I didn't dare to put in more. I've seen 20, 25 minutes. But 15, I've seen always. With almost every recreation of amateur triad, in marathon run, I've seen 50 minutes of improvements are possible. So if you sum that up, that is a total time saving on the Ironman of like approximately 40 minutes, conservative guess.

46:10  And it doesn't take any additional training time. Because it didn't say, oh, you need to go more times into the pool. No. You just need to change your focus from metabolic performance-based training on technique training. On the bike, it didn't say you need to train more to increase your VL to max or train different to decrease your VL to max. It just said you need to train the gut. You need to be able to take more carbohydrates. We can happily talk about what does that mean. And for running, maybe it's the same.

46:41  Right? Maybe you don't need, or most likely, you don't necessarily need to run more. You use different techniques which you can use to provide economy. It's not necessarily taking any additional of your time. So this is why it is such an interesting or competitive training strategy for mass photography here. Because you can really gain significant performance improvement without necessarily investing more time into your training. As I said, I would like to close for now, hear more about your questions and comments. I'm going to read through those.

47:18  So please bring in more. There's already a couple. Thanks for that. Okay? And then I will already start answering things.

47:32  Looking at one about how to test swimming economy, I touched on this briefly. So what you would do is you would measure VO2 and lactate before, VO2 only after, but lactate before and after, and VO2 after swimming a certain distance and a certain speed. And then you would measure, you would put on the mass, you would finalize after the swim, and see how the VO2 decreases. And then from the decrease, you can calculate what was the VO2 during the swim. And therefore, you know the energy cost, right?

48:12  You know the energy cost of that swim, from the lactate and the VO2 together, put it in the software, get the energy cost. You do that for, you know, three different efforts or more, and you get a curve like that. And yeah, basically see your swimming economy for the athletes and compare it to other athletes. Okay, so we have two questions about swimming economy, so I hopefully answered Maria's one as well. Cobus is asking the 30 watts saving on the bike per hour, which I took as a comparison, right?

48:52  So that was the comparison here to say training in more carbohydrates equals 30 watts of savings. That is, that is in total, right? So you can't say 30 watts of power, this is like your average power would need to be 30 watts higher to ride that much faster, right? Or saying you can, you can ride 30 watts more, basically, you can ride 30 watts more, throughout the whole, throughout the whole bike leg, because you can fuel more. That is what I was saying.

49:28  Jack van Eyck, excellent question. Most effective way to improve running economy? I hope for that, Jack, so thanks for that. I prepared a slide for that.

49:46  Tips, the four tips how to improve running economy. So one thing that has been very successful with some professional marathon runners, and I think it didn't really trickle down to the amateur recreational level or to the broader mass, so to speak, is including micro sprints, not all out, sub-maximal micro sprints, into your easy long slow distance running, 30 to 50 meters with a high cadence. Just speed up, can be randomly, can be planned, really, really high leg speed, high cadence, and just some sprints, some micro sprints, into the easier training.

50:24  Then some weight or gym training. This is the only thing that actually might add some additional training time, depending on how you're doing, but you might actually want to cut down other training. But if you go to the gym anyway, or for example, you do have some, you know, long bar, you know, a spot bar with your basement, whatever that can all work. But explosive weight training has shown to improve running economy. Okay. One of the most important ones, but something you really have to take easy, you step it up easy,

51:01  is plyometrics, so jumps, counter movement jumps, effective jumps, all kinds of jumps, especially counter movement. Jumping in training. And this can be easily incorporated, right? It can be easily incorporated into your normal run track. Just go out running on the wood, maybe a bench or whatever, and just use that for jumps, right? You want to start small, because you can easily hurt yourself, become injured, and then you can increase it, and it's really, really good for running economy. And then the other thing, which is all pointing towards the same mechanism, by the way, would be high intensive training.

51:37  So if you do that, I'm not saying that maybe the right thing to do as an Ironman, or depending on where you are in training and what you want to do, but high intensive training also shown to improve running economy. The training period you need to do, I put six to 12 weeks, basically because you could see some improvements already after six weeks, but it really depends. So if you just start with plyometrics, again, be very careful, it's very easy to get hurt, get injured. Then you need to start easy, low volume, not a high jump height, and then until you work your way up

52:15  to like, you know, higher heights and more repetitions, it's maybe more 12 weeks. So something in this ballpark. Um, then the goal takes the same from William, best technique to training the gut. Training the gut, also four tips. What has been shown is that you need, um, 24-7, so your normal diet needs to be high in carbohydrates for one better two weeks before the race. I mean, maybe that's throughout your normal diet, but maybe that's something that you train low and just, you know, want to train on high carboyl before

52:53  the race. So then that's something you do, but then again, it doesn't cost you any additional training time. Um, then you need to make sure that the race fueling that we use is a mix of different carbohydrate sources, so not only glucose, but different chain lengths of different kinds of mycodextrins and maybe a mix of glucose and pro-cructose, because this is the only way that you get in more than 60 grams per hour, right? That's the only way how you can transport more than 60 grams into the bloodstream.

53:25  And then, um, three and four is maybe the most important ones, which I don't know what my impression is that it's just totally underestimated. You need to try that. Try different nutrition products. That's three. And four, try to increase energy intake and training. You just simply cannot train low, train low, train low, train low all the time. You need to try that several times in race simulating intensities in maybe even race or maybe some long efforts. So you need to test first, number three, you first need to test the, um, the, uh,

54:06  the kind of product you want to use, and then you need to test it. Can you digest it in those amounts at those intensities, right? Um, and this might easily tend to be, but however, you can just integrate it into your normal train, right? You don't need anything, anything else for that.

54:29  So slides are going to be shared afterwards, uh, for everybody who stayed. Um, so Ingo is asking for running economy exercises. We, we, we touched on that. Um, ah, how old was the vetsuit comparison? The vetsuit comparison here is, uh, maybe two or three years old. Uh, I'm not 100% sure. Um, however, depending on where this question is coming from, let me tell you that some of the vetsuit testers were relatively old and some were newer. And there's no trends that you can say newer vetsuits are always better. It's even the case that

55:14  within the same brand, we see, we've seen that sometimes, within the same brand, the most expensive vetsuit vetsuit is not as good as the next lower one, which may be cost half. So we have seen vetsuit which costs, whatever, 1200 bucks, which are outperformed by vetsuit, which are 600 or something. Many questions. I'm afraid I cannot answer all of them, but I'm going to read and pick more.

55:47  Uh, excellent question. Uh, if tempo and threshold pace, um, can also help this improving running economy compared to training really high intensity. Um, in general, yes, but it depends on what is your running economy already. So if it's already very good, um, then, um, yeah, then maybe that doesn't help. Your running economy is not so good, then yeah, also threshold, it should up, would work. Um, but in this case, you know, I would really tend to look at, again, these microintervals, micro sprints, and, uh, it's a jumping exercise. David is asking, in cycling, 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour is

56:29  becoming standard. What is the effect on lactate? More carbohydrates, higher lactate? Um, in general, yes, but it means, the question is what means higher lactate? If you have, if you have higher carbohydrate, you will see a little bit higher lactate concentrations, which is not a problem because it just means that you use more carbohydrates. I mean, that's where it's coming from. Um, and what it does also, it just solves for the issues that, you know, during long, long steady state exercise, lactate concentration actually decreasing, right? So what's happening if you just go out

57:02  and ride for several hours and don't take any carbohydrates, the reason why the fat combustion is going up, which you might have heard of from, you know, hour to hour, is that because the carbohydrate is going down, carbohydrate combustion, and therefore lactate levels decrease. So with keeping high carbohydrate intake, you can avoid that effect, fat combustion instead of the door, but you're able to burn more carbohydrates. Ah, interesting one from Scott. Would you use ground contact time, uh, and cadence and, uh, you know, vertical oscillation as efficiency metric? Well, let me put it

57:41  this way. I'm not sure if I would use it, um, as a metric to understand if my running economy improved or not, but because this is just about, you know, energy demand versus speed, but to understand where it's coming from, right? Why am I running for the increase or didn't increase? Looking at things like, yeah, for example, ground contact, drive and cadence would be beneficial, right? So this is explaining the underlying effect why, for example, why, for example, the running economy changed or didn't change, okay?

58:19  New class, running economy has improved technique, including looking at shoe choice. So shoe choice, for sure, right? That's the whole point. It decreases energy demand. So good point. I should have mentioned it. Uh, so yeah, these modern running shoes do exactly the same, have exactly the same effect. What I've shown here, right? Um, um, um, running economy, you know, um, has a huge, has a huge effect on the, on the, on the time. So you could say, simplified speaking here, the dashed line, so to speak, could be this, uh, an optimized shoe,

58:58  shoe, the slower energy demand of the dashed line could be a normal shoe. Not maybe the same effect, but the type of effect. So yeah, um, shoe choice would be, uh, would be one thing. Um, technique, well, it depends on what you define as technique. Um, running economy is not necessarily a technique. Running economy is really just the energy demand versus, versus speed. Um, that doesn't mean that your running, running technique looks super beautiful. It just means that you need this energy.

59:31  Uh, time to depletion, Paul. Yes, this is a new feature we're going to release soon. Um, ah, that was another question from you. Yeah, we have some beta testers on it currently. There's some bugs or glitches and not super nice representation, but we'll put it back soon. Um, for swim economy, lacking VO2 test equipment can hard rate and RP provide useful data, no, not really, unfortunately. Because again, it's just about the energy versus speed, how an athlete is converting energy into speed. So, um, yeah, perceived exertion is not really a substitute here.

1:00:10  Draning the gut and consuming 18 grams of carbohydrates per hour is some contrast with fat utilization. How do you resolve this conflict? Uh, actually a question. I don't actually think we should view it as a conflict. Um, fat combustion is a focus and it's, I wouldn't say a buzzword, but obviously it's nice, right? If I say, ah, I've rented my fat-based zone or I increased fat combustion. It sounds like everybody wants that. Um, you know, I can sell that, I can market that. It's easy to understand so and so forth.

1:00:47  All cool. But if it's not really about the fat combustion for se, I would say 50 or more percent, the intention behind it, I burn more fat, I save carbohydrates. Because this is a precious fuel, right? Because the glycogen stored is limited. The amount of carbohydrates you can take in is limited. So glycogen, carbohydrates, this is the precious fuel. This is the bottle. So, yes, taking more carbohydrates, as I just explained, will lead to a little bit lower fat combustion. But that's not the point, right? When I do a race, when I race and I want to be faster, I want to be faster.

1:01:27  I don't want to come to the finish line after 15 hours and say, hey, but I've burned more fat. So I would not focus on that, honestly. I would not focus on that. I would really ask myself, is it really what I'm after? Is it really more fat burning or is what I'm after carbohydrate sparing? And in most cases, it's carbohydrate sparing. And that means that I understand that carbohydrate is a bottleneck. So taking in more carbohydrate makes this bottleneck wider.

1:02:00  So I'm reading more questions. Thanks. So many great questions. Trying to cover most of them.

1:02:14  So I answered about the time to depletion thing. Consider power and drag on the bike. What about body weight? Yeah. So the question here, I've considered body power and drag on the bike. What about body weight? Losing some weight alone? Might as well some save some time, not only on the bike, but on the run. As a rule of the sum, can we say that if an athlete is 70 kilograms or 85 kilograms, you should consume more or less carbohydrate. So there's two questions here for me. One is the body weight per se. Of course,

1:02:44  if you carry less weight, especially on the run, you will be faster. But this is obviously not what I covered here in the presentation because it's somewhat known, I would say, and also it's somewhat more difficult, right? I mean, yes, going from 70 kilograms to 69 or 68, maybe no problem. Going from 85 to 70, almost impossible. The other part of the question, if there's a difference really in carbohydrate intake for 70 kilograms to 85 kilograms, well, no, not all literature supports that. I mean, it seems to be obvious or logical, but there's not good

1:03:25  data as far as I know that supports that just because you're heavy, you can take in more carbohydrate, a little bit, but not really a significant amount.

1:03:39  Ah, all this running economy, this sounds like if they would increase VLMX. Excellent question, sham. I was always waiting for it. Yes, because I stated that you want to do plyometrics and late training and so on and so forth. Not necessarily though. Yes, HIIT training, as I mentioned, can be difficult, but the rest of it, um, micro sprints, 30 meters is so short, you're not doing a lot of, um, you know, lactate production. Bait and gym training could be potentially increasing VLMX training, but depending on how you do it with GASM, plyometrics is the same, right? So if you go to the gym and do plyometrics,

1:04:21  if you try to do, let's say 15 repetitions in 20 seconds or 25 repetitions in 35 seconds, so many repetitions in a short amount of time, very likely that you produce a lot of lactate and you have a good chance to increase your VLMX. If you micro dose it and have like a good recovery in between, um, and it's so short that the energetic point of view, you're using primarily creating phosphate, you will not see necessarily any effect on VLMX.

1:05:05  Uh, excellent question from Paul. It goes to, uh, in cycling and running performance, in fact, there's by glycogen levels that become low, but not completely depleted during an event of training. In other words, can some cells become depleted while other cells still have glycogen to use? Yes, but this is not then as low as the output? No. So what happens is muscle cells that become glycogen depleted get less recruited. So usually then the muscle shifts to the ones that have more glycogen.

1:05:38  Okay, David's question about VLMX, I think I answered. There's a small evidence that a small amount of protein before a workout helps starting a recovery, which you advise that as well. Um, depends on the protein and depends on the level of workout, I'd say. But in general, yes, protein helps with recovery. Um, it's about how fast does it get into the system after the training. So therefore, um, you can take it before the training. However, if the training is six hours long, there's no point. Um, let's say, take it depending on how easy it is to digest, takes the protein, uh, 60 to 30 minutes

1:06:18  before the end of the training. So if you're one hour training, then you can take it just before. If you have five hours on the bike, take it half an hour before, um, before the end of the training. Uh, that's actually what we did in professional cycling in the training camps. We would hand out, um, little protein doses, uh, in training camps, um, half an hour, 45 minutes before the end of the training. So, oh man, there's more questions coming in.

1:06:50  Pizza on the bike, that's a good idea, you know, thanks. Um, Better liquid or salt, carbohydrates? Well, you can put your pizza in the blender, that's not problem. Um, whatever you like.

1:07:05  Um,

1:07:13  Yeah, I'm looking for some that I can still answer because it's also getting, um, getting late. Um, I'm looking for some of the questions. Um, do expensive running shoes really make better running economy? Well, I'm not sure about the price, but there is something, um, this is that shoes that saves energy. Can you measure running economy with metrics from a power meter? Uh, doesn't look like it. Uh, in our data, we don't see any power meters that can measure running economy. And latest peer reboot papers support that. Um, there's papers that on purpose manipulated running economy.

1:07:51  So energy demand would be higher and running power meters are not able to fetch that. So I would doubt that a running power meter can fetch running economy based on everything I know. So, um, Concerning recovery during weight training, do you have experience in using muscle oxygen sensors and identifying good recovery? Um, I have experience with muscle oxygen sensors. I'm not sure it's appropriate, um, measurement and weight training to, um, to really judge on the recovery. Um, because at least from what we talked about here, we looked at the recovery from an energetic point of view because we wanted, because we said, okay,

1:08:35  we want the weight training slash power metrics to be primarily, uh, based on creatine phosphate and not using glycolysis, therefore not being a good trigger to attempt VLA max. Um, and now the issue is that oxygenation in the muscle is only indirectly related to using glycolysis. So, um, I mean, it could be a hindsight, uh, hindsight here, but probably it's a bit over the top because you just need to, you know, you would just need to have good recovery in between the repetitions. Um, yeah, if you want to monitor that, you could use muscle oxygenation as a, as an indicator, but

1:09:15  I don't think it's really necessary. We'll just have to wait long enough, so to speak.

1:09:29  Okay. Ah, last one maybe from Simon is asking when consuming fructose to my knowledge, produces lactate at the gut and lactate inhibited lipid lipid lipid lipid lipid policies. So fat combustion. Um, so in training, would it make sense to consume more glucose and to keep the mix for racing? Um, well, no, I would say, uh, first, um, you know, fat combustion in the gut is not of our interest. We only care about fat and carbon combustion in the working muscles because again, this is better than the glycogen is stored and this is where the work is done.

1:10:07  Um, furthermore, um, you need to know and you need to be sure, you need to also be self-confident, as it's called self-confident, also a psychological factor. You need to be self-confident about the nutrition that you have. Okay. And therefore you need to test it. And especially fructose, which cannot, you know, can be hard on the gut, you need to test it in training. And there's no other way around it. And so, yeah, that's, you know, maybe your fat combustion in training is in a little bit lower. Okay. So what? Let it be.

1:10:39  The performance gains from training is a gut totally outperforms this effect. Okay. The performance gains from training is a good amount of weight. Okay. Let's see if I have one of them more.

1:11:02  Uh, so Gerald is asking how much carbon do you lose in the half distance or long distance swimming? Um, if you don't have to subtract, subtract that from the stores. Um, well, not really. Um, if you use your legs a lot, then you would subtract a little bit, but especially in triathlon, the most of the work is done in the upper body. Um, and yeah, glycogen doesn't leave the muscle cell. So for the bike and the run, the only interest that in the microgene stored in the legs or primarily, um, there. So this is what

1:11:39  you therefore would like to focus on. You could factor in a little bit from the swim, but then, yeah, if you take a gel before the swim, then, you know, from a practical point of view, it equals our feature. Okay. Okay. So I hope I answered most of your questions. That was great. Thanks for asking so many questions. If there are more questions, please don't hesitate to send them. Um, if you have more questions, especially about how to measure things or how to apply things, you may also book an appointment with somebody of us, um, to, you know, to go through the technology or

1:12:18  source of methodology, how to do things. Um, don't hesitate, um, to do that. Um, yeah. Thanks for attending. Everybody have a good evening, good afternoon, good rest of the day. Looking forward to see you in the next webinar and, uh, yeah, have a good time. Take care. Cheers.