The Progress Theory
How To Compete At The World’s Highest Obstacle Course Race with Becky Neal
Hello and welcome to The Progress Theory, where we discuss scientific principles for optimising human performance. In this episode, we're joined by sports physiologist, Dr Becky Neal.
Have you ever done an obstacle course race such as Spartan or a Tough Mudder? Now think about doing one of those, but at Everest Base Camp. That's exactly what Dr Becky Neal has done. And not only that, she did it as part of a massive research study. So in this episode, we discussed her experiences in the Himalaya and also how her research is helping us understand how people function in high altitude.
In this episode, we discuss:
- 0:46 - Introduction
- 2:07 - The world’s highest OCR
- 12:28 - The freezing temperatures
- 15:47 - Racing and avoiding mountain sickness
- 26:08 - The results from the world’s highest race study
- 30:44 - What could warn us of potential mountain sickness
- 40:02 - future high altitude challenges for research
- 46:41 - Would you climb Mt Everest?
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The Science of Hybrid Training
It was originally thought that you could not effectively train for both strength and endurance at the same time because they required different adaptations which were not compatible with each other. It was claimed that ‘an interference effect’, blunted the adaptations for strength if you simultaneously trained for endurance. However, recent developments in sports which require both strength and endurance have really challenged this idea, with hybrid athletes producing impressive performances in both strength and endurance sports together. This had led scientists, coaches, and athletes to rethink what is humanly possible and suggests the interference effect is not as influential as originally thought. But what is a hybrid athlete? What is the ‘interference effect’? And how can we maximize our training to improve at the same time our strength and endurance performance? In this book, Dr Phil Price provides insight into the misconceptions surrounding strength and endurance training by distilling the past 50 years of research and drawing on the conversations he had with great scientists, coaches, and athletes on The Progress Theory podcast. This book is essential reading for hybrid athletes and coaches who are looking to understand the key training variables and their effect on the simultaneous development of strength and endurance performance.
