Speaker 2
What did you keep saying it? Performance is the best indicator of performance.
Speaker 1
Yeah, the best predictor of performance is performance itself. Yeah. So, you know, there you are here a cyclist. You took some time off in the fall, you trained diligently over the winter. You've been progressively increasing the volume, frequency, intensity of your training all spring long. And you keep working at it, you keep working at it. And finally, you're reaching a point where things aren't going up anymore. Well, you know, there's either one of two things to do at that point. It's either change your training, no, focus on some other aspect, or it's time to go racing, right? Because, you know, you're not necessarily going to make any further progress by just keeping, you know, beating your head against the wall. But also, you know, don't stop beating your head against the wall if you're still improving just because of some, you know, aerobic decoupling says I should.
Speaker 2
So, I think several times we've talked about how, you know, there's different ways of training to get the same sort of responses. And then this fits well with, it's the last week I spoke with Michael Joiner. So, I'm going to put it up in a few days' times about the sort of the history of endurance training. And one of the things he talked about, which fits perfectly with this, was, you know, you talk about sometimes this concept of all roads lead to Rome. So, can you end up the same sort of athlete by doing different types of training? And he had the great comment because he said in the Tokyo Olympics, it was like all roads lead to Tokyo because in the 5,000 meters, you know, the first, second, and third were all within a meter of each other, and they had totally different training. So, one was like manual as long, slow distance, one was intervals twice a day, one was a combination, whatever. So, I guess that fits what we're talking about, right? We don't have to sort of obsess about, ah, I need to be doing this. And then even the thing he said about racing, he said even the people that did long, slow distance, people said, oh, well, that's all you need to do. And he said, no, they actually would race once a week or once it would be a couple weeks. So, they are getting that high intensity
Speaker 1
training. Yeah, you know, I'll credit my wife at this point, you know, her argument back when she was racing was that, you know, there is no such thing as the perfect training plan. You know, you keep it, yeah, Jimmy Buffett style, keep it between the navigational beacons, right? Within broad parameters, within broad strokes, you know, make sure what you're doing is appropriate and reasonable. And then the outcome, how successful you become ends up hinging a lot more upon, well, how much talent you have, how much motivation you have, you know, the environment you're in, the, you know, support you have, etc. And not, oh, well, you know, I, I, you know, went and got a laboratory-based test so that I could train right at or below my, or right above my LT1 because, you know, so and so says this is the optimal way of doing so. Yeah. It's, ah, and again, I mean, you think about the literature, the scientific literature and how much people want to hang their hats on, you know, single studies, small ends, when really science isn't good for answering a lot of these questions or at least or especially on the individual level. I mean, what we do know, what do we know about training? Well, we can, we can describe in great detail the effects of training, you know, down to, you know, what genes are being switched on or switched off. But when comes time to prescribing a training program, really what we have are only the big principles, specificity, overload, right? Reversibility, etc.