Project Vertical: Overcoming Mental and Physical Challenges

Exploring the journey of scaling Ben Nevis to accumulate a vertical marathon in Project Vertical, focusing on the mental and physical demands faced by the participants. The chapter emphasizes the significance of mindset in conquering obstacles and the importance of raising awareness for men's mental health through their documented experiences.

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Episode notes

Hello and welcome to The Progress Theory where we discuss how to implement scientific principles to optimise human performance. On today’s episode we have S&C coach and performance nutritionist at Omnia Performance, Jonny Pain.

Training as a generalist or hybrid training has become very popular in recent years. More people don’t want to just train for a specific sport; they want to be good at multiple sports, to be really strong yet also have the ability to run a marathon. Jonny has been coaching athletes training multiple disciplines for the last 15 years and has recently set up Omnia Performance where he provides coaching and programming for the concurrent development of strength and endurance. In this episode, we discuss the true meaning of hybrid training, how training for strength and endurance can co-exist, and how to structure your training week to ensure peak performance and maximum recovery.

In this episode, we discuss:

2:22 - An introduction to Jonny Pain and Omnia Performance
6:40 - The History of Omnia Performance
10:41 - Working with Alex Viada
12:48 - The growth of Hybrid Training
23:16 - Hybrid training for big challenges like the Celtman
26:40 - consolidation of stressors over a microcycle
32:13 - understand non-training stressors for programming
36:28- How Omnia Performance Auto-regulate their programming
40:42 - How to contact Omnia Performance
42:16 - Jonny’s experience with Project Vertical

Final Thoughts

Thank you to Jonny for coming onto The Progress Theory and talking about his work with Omnia Performance and his ideas around hybrid training. Hybrid training is getting more popular as people are starting to see that with an appropriate training programme we don’t necessarily have to be excellent in only one training domain.

I just wanted to provide some final thoughts on key areas which really stood out to me.

Firstly, I enjoyed hearing his ideas around what a hybrid athlete is. To me, it seemed like his definition of a hybrid athlete wasn’t necessarily someone that was great at everything. It’s borne out of an understanding that developing multiple qualities is essential to enhance the training you're trying to specialise in. IT seems counterintuitive to only train in one domain as having a base layer of multiple physical qualities actually improves performance in your speciality.

Secondly, I like his auto-regulated microcycle approach to programming. When juggling so many variables it is essential to know how the athlete is feeling very regularly. This type of training needs a very close working relationship between coach and athlete as it is hard to predict in advance how the athlete is going to react to so many stressors. So how can you programme that far ahead? You need a rough guide in your head of the direction you want to go and the training needed to get there, but how you get there has to be heavily auto-regulated based on the athlete

Anyways I hope you enjoyed this episode and it has sparked some ideas on what challenge you will take on. Could you train strength and ultra endurance concurrently? I think, with the right coaching and programming, you’ll be surprised what you can achieve. But first, check out Omnia Performance, all the links from the show are below.

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