 The biggest mistake that athletes often make is not that they won't train hard enough but actually that they'll train too hard. That's a quote from my guest today, Dr. Steven Seiler, a leading endurance sports researcher, and this is our third and final video in this series, linked to the first two videos down in the description. In this video, we unpack this question of how hard is too hard when it comes to training? We touch on how many hard days you should have in a training week, which if you follow this channel, I'm sure you're familiar with by now, but then we also discuss how hard those hard days should be. Essentially, should you leave a little bit left in the tank at the end of your interval session or should you be completely spent at the end of your workout? The answer that Dr. Seiler gives might surprise you. It'd probably be good to segue to how much intensity in a training week is too much. A lot of people assume that it's a lot more than what you say it is and what the research seems to indicate it is. It depends on a number of things, obviously. It depends on your training capacity, where you are as an athlete, your age, and so forth. For me, 57 years old, training 10 hours a week, a couple days a week, hard, that's going to be enough for me. You know, when I stay healthy, I can do two hard sessions a week, maybe one of them is a regular interval session, one of them is some kind of a race, and I'll be, you know, I can do that over a period of weeks and stay healthy and feel kind of good. An elite athlete may be able to get away with three hard sessions in a week, but most of us, really good quality is probably two, and it bests three sessions a week where we can really dish it out. Then we're going to build up around that with as much as we can of additional volume that's more lower intensity, you know, extensive work. Are there symptoms that people can look for that are signs that they are messing up this training intensity distribution? They're doing too much high intensity? That's a great question. One of the things, unfortunately, is if you're constantly doing this, you may not realize it because you've kind of recalibrated. I had a guy one time send me an email and he says, you know, Dr. Seiler, my maximum heart rate is 10 beats higher now. I started doing this polarized training. I think I've been over trained for 10 years, you know, and so he had finally kind of eased up and got things right. And he says now in his hard sessions, his max heart rate was 10 beats higher. Well, that's he was in a chronic state of kind of overreaching, which should never happen. But in the daily grind, what will happen is that if you're pushing pretty good, the brakes will come on on that sympathetic nervous system and you'll feel like you can't get your heart rate up. So they can do the sub max workouts and their heart rate will be low. And that can be misleading because generally if heart rates low, you think, well, I'm in really good shape. I need to go a little harder. But the reason it's low is because their body is tired, their body is saying, hey, you know, I'm down, I'm down regulating the sympathetic nervous system. And now in the way you would feel that is if you try to go hard now, you start saying, wait a minute, I don't have that last gear. If you as an athlete are doing a big load and you're saying, wow, my resting heart rate's 10 beats lower than normal. That's not a good thing. Generally, I can pretty much tell you that if it just kind of suddenly is dropping down 10 beats lower than normal, that's not an adaptive response. That's a maladaptive response. That's a fatigue response. And we would call that a strain response. I've tried to use the three terms I've tried to use load, which is neutral stress, which is happening during the workload as you get an uncoupling between internal and external costs. And then strain, which is this downstream maladaptations where you start to get fatigued. Heart rate variability is going down. Heart rate, resting heart rate may be going up. Submaximum heart rate is either too low or too high compared to normal because both can happen, depending a little bit on what you're doing that's overloading you. So those are all examples of strain responses as well as just mood state is getting worse. You just don't feel like training. That's the canary in the coal mine often, meaning the first indicator is you see your brain is saying, I don't want to get out on the bike today. And if you're a typical athlete that's motivated, that loves to train, and your brain is saying, Oh man, I really don't want to be on the bike. You should take that pretty seriously because it's a real signal that's coming from a real something that's going on in your body. And so a lot of times we don't listen to that signal, you know, because I know, you know, I'm going to tough it out. But as a coach, I'm thinking my daughter who I coach, I know she's motivated. She's ready to train. And so if her brain is telling her, Oh, I don't really want to train today, I need to take that seriously. And so does she. So that's part of it is listening, you know, listen to the body. Yeah, you'll see some things like heart rate shifts. If we were to measure lactate, we'd also maybe see the peak lactates are down, meaning you're just not able to mobilize. And what's the recipe? Rest, recover. I think that a lot of times what I'll tell athletes too is pay close attention to how you feel on the bike. You shouldn't wake up every single morning feeling super fatigued, and you shouldn't get on the bike every single day feeling fatigued. There should be some days during the week where you feel quite good. And those are probably the days that you should do your high intensity sessions. But if you, if you just have a chronic constant, and it never goes away, lingering fatigue, that's probably an indication that you've overdone it and you need to take some rest as well. Oh, absolutely. You know, and I can recommend to the audience, there's a wonderful document and it's at a website called how to skate.se. And it was by this Swedish speed skater named Niels von der Poel. Now von der Poel, we know this, you know, we know some really good cyclists named von der Poel, but this is a speed skater in Sweden. He won the gold medal in the 5,000, 10,000 on the ice, and he did a heck of a lot of cycling training. This is a guy that was doing up to four times 30 minutes at 400 watts during threshold sessions. So good power output. But then he transferred it over to speed skating. Well, he wrote a nice kind of, we joked about it was that the non manifesto manifesto, but he was writing a kind of a report on how he trained for two years to break these world records and win the gold medals and so forth. And then he just said, I'm done. You know, I'm moving on to something else. But he, he really pushed the boundaries of understanding of load and recovery because he was training five days a week every week, five days a week, really tough. And then he was consistently taking two days off every week, two days in a row, no training, two days in a row, and sometimes three when he was really buried. Nobody, you say, well, nobody does that. Well, he broke world records with it. But the key was his coach said that double, you know, that double rest day, he could pretty much throw anything at him and he would recover in two days full, full stop, you know, two full recovery days. So it just shows you the power of a rest day. And if you're really buried, you know, then take the weekend off, take two days off. Don't be afraid of that. It's not like your mitochondria is going to disappear, your heart, all these adaptations are going to fall apart. That's not going to happen. But what will happen is that you get a reset. The autonomic nervous system will have a wonderful response to a two day recovery if you really are buried, you know, and you really need it. I'm not saying everybody needs to start resting two days a week. I'm just saying that full rest days really make a big difference fast. But we don't use them very we're scared to death of rest days. And we shouldn't be you don't need to be scared of them. You're not going to suddenly fall apart. You're not going to suddenly lose your fitness. And people say, Oh, no, I feel terrible after a rest day. You know, I can never do a good workout after a rest day. Well, that's baloney. You just need the right warm up. You just need, you need to know how to warm up. You need to transition out of that rest day with an appropriate warm up and slowly turn on the systems again. But then you can be good to go. I think it's just it's a mindset issue that people just somehow have taught themselves that you got to be tough and you got to, you know, but rest days are they really are a good reset for the and I think the most typical kind of the first thing that starts falling apart if you're overdoing it will be that the autonomic nervous system is kind of out of balance. Ideally, I want that autonomic nervous system to be such that when I'm in the parasympathetic mode, that rest and recover mode, I'm just chill low heart rate, low intensity, low lactate, just able to really do a substantial power output at and it's not costing me anything. And then I still want to be able to go from there and just turn it on when I've got to and boom, I'm hitting those big five minute powers and my peak lactates are high and I can rock. That's this amplitude that I want in my athlete when they're fresh and they're in a good balance, they're fit and they can mobilize. Well, what happens when they're fatigued is this, that resting heart rate, you know, the low level stuff is feeling harder, they've lost the last gear and now that whole amplitude has shrunk. That is what we're trying to avoid and usually that's kind of the first thing that starts going bad is this autonomic nervous system amplitude and that's that's kind of our mobilization machinery, right? How do we tap into the fitness that we have tap into the adaptations that we've generated? How do we, how does we get the system to turn on all of those cellular adaptations? And if the cellular adaptations are there, but the system is fatigued, then it doesn't happen. So the overload symptomology is often at the systemic level. The athlete's saying, yeah, I'm fit, but I'm just tired. So the local peripheral adaptations are there, but the system is overloaded. This gets into something that I wanted to ask you about high-intensity intervals. There's a notion among some endurance athletes that you shouldn't go 100% on a training day. 100% should be saved for race day. So for example, if you've got a four-by-four-minute session, you should feel like maybe you had another interval left in you. And then there are some athletes that if they've got a high-intensity day, they're going to be completely smoked by their last interval. There's no way they could do another interval. Where on the spectrum do you fall on that? I fall more on that first side of the spectrum, which is to say, look, I'm trying to induce adaptations, but it's got to be sustainable because I'm going to be training hundreds of times this year. And racing is racing and training is training. And it's consistent with what we see is that the best athletes in the world just aren't going all the way into the cellar very often in training. They do want to have an extra gear. A guy named David Martin, who used to work a lot with the Australian national team and the Oracle Green Edge team back in the day, he said exactly the same thing as he found that the athletes would tend to be in that mental state where they'd say, I want to know I've got another gear. I don't want to use that gear very often in training because I'm going to go there and racing. If I go there in training, then I don't, then I, I'm kind of mentally, I don't have another place to go. So that was, he found that that was quite important psychologically for these, these top performers. You know, what's the difference between totally bearing yourself and having a really good workout? Well, it's, it's a lot of times it's just digging into your anaerobic reserves, right? You're just your peak, peak lactates are higher. You're poisoning your body just a little more to get all everything out. But in terms of stimulating stroke volume in terms of stimulating high oxidative flux at the cellular level in the muscles, all of that is, is already happening. But that, that last two or three percent, all that represents is just eating into your mobilization, your fight or flight response, your peak lactate and so forth. A lot of people use the matchbook reference. I only got so many matches for a certain race. And if I do too many, too many efforts, I've burnt my matches. I think you could probably make that same analogy for a whole season. Oh, absolutely. If you burn too many matches over the course of the season, there just comes a point where your body's happy enough. I think that's really important is this idea of pacing. You know, we always talk about pacing in a time trial, pacing a race. You got to pace the season as well. And so good athletes are very, they're cool customers when it comes to pacing the season and playing their cards and when they're going to go hard and when they're going to hold back. Caddell Evans, there was a story of him. They were at a training camp and these young guys were talking amongst themselves and they're saying, you know, Caddell, we're doing these, I mean, he doesn't seem to be pushing very hard up these hills and these hill efforts. And he's the champion, man. He's one of the two of the friends. What's going on here? And so he's, well, I'm not going to ask him. You ask him. No, I'm not going to ask him, you know, because, and then finally one of the guys, I'll ask him. And so, you know, hey, Caddell, what's up with that? You don't seem to push these, these interval sessions really hard. And he said, no, mate, you know, it's a long season and we're in February and I got to be at my best in July. So, you know, I've got to pace myself. He's essentially pacing himself over weeks and months towards a peak in July and the Tour de France. Thanks for watching. If you want to step up your own training, then I have online training plans linked in the description below. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe, and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.