 Thanks guys, thanks for having me here this year was in LA last year. You'll hear from the funny sounding voice that I'm from New Zealand, not Australia contrary to popular belief. Best way to push my buttons is to tell what I am from Australia. … Now I've got to try and cram a lot of information into 20 minutes and kiwis and notorious for being fast speakers anyway. Just read the slides, so it'd be like subtitles through there. So, atho, it's just going to seem like an episode of Flight of the Concords for you guys. All right, so I'm going to talk to you guys about endurance sport and applying some of the ancestral health or paleo type principles to training endurance athletes. Part of the reason why I've got an interest in endurance athletes is, I guess, a similar reason as to why I was talking about corporate health last year. Within corporate health we've all got jobs and that's where we spend a vast majority of our time, that's where a lot of people are. We want to try and reach out towards a lot of the population and get them to buy in some of the ancestral health stuff. We need to go where the people are. On the sporting side of it we've got a large number of people going into endurance sport. So, if we look at the likes of cycling, cycling is being pitched as the new golf and I will say, while I'm going to talk about endurance sport, I'll refer mostly because my own spandex fetish and justifying that I am a cyclist, so I'll talk about cycling a whole lot. So, we need to look at cycling where it's referred to as the new golf. We've got triathlon which is drawing a large number of people in. All of these sports have got a very, very large number of masters athletes going into them. So, they're the 30 plus, 40 plus athletes going in. These are also the same people who are very, very concerned about their own health and a lot of the time they're going into those endurance sports as a means to do something about their health. So, that will be their initial entry point, I guess. They'll decide that they're a little bit out of shape, they need to get healthier, they need to drop some body fat or whatever and so they'll go and buy themselves a bike and they might sort of start recreationally and eventually someone will try and coax them into doing a local race and then they'll get bitten by the bug and then they're in trying to go on to the elite level. Now, I've got down the bottom a timecode there. Now, if we're going to talk about endurance sport from a physiological standpoint, we're talking about anything that lasts longer than about 40 to 60 seconds in terms of the energy systems being used. That opens up a huge range of sports that we can apply some of this endurance template work to. So, that's anything from our classic endurance sports, so things like our cycling, our running, swimming, rowing, those sorts of events, right down to maybe even some of the CrossFit Games types of events. They'll certainly exceed that timecode there. So, we're talking about a huge number of sports that people are engaging in. Now, we've got this situation at the moment where we've got a case of paleo-primal versus the mammals. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with it, mammals is middle-aged men in Lycra, of which I'm probably of one of those. And perhaps we've got competing demographics going on. So, again, we've got these people who are engaging in these sorts of sports primarily for their health. Obviously, the whole paleo-primal thing is about improving people's health first and foremost. But there's some of these perceptions and misconceptions around what paleo-primal lifestyles are versus what's actually required to be successful in some of these endurance sports. So, many of these people will believe that a paleo diet is a very, very low-carb diet, and that's incompatible with endurance sport. That it's all about just doing high-intensity intervals or getting big and buff in the gym, and that's not what endurance athletes are about. And it's not helped by the fact that we often see some of the popular magazines that go with these sports, like The Runner's World, the bicycling magazine, that do reviews on the paleo diet and say that it's not compatible with endurance sport because it's too low-carbohydrate and so on and so forth. So, perhaps when someone's just laid out $15,000 on a new bike and they go and look at the paleo diet and say, well, that doesn't really support my cycling. Therefore, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to stick with the conventional wisdom as far as the dietary side of things are concerned. So, can we do something about that? How are we marketing things? How are we broadcasting our message out to some of these sort of non-paleo, non-primal types? Are we using the psychological inference? And the psychological inference basically says that cavemen, our ancestors, were athletes in their own right. They had to be just as part of their daily survival. If we were to go and stick those athlete cavemen on a bike, in a boat, in a swimming pool, they will excel at it. Is that necessarily the case? Is that an illogical inference? Can we just mimic what they do in terms of their lifestyle and we're all suddenly elite athletes? I don't think that's the case because there is no ancestral or evolutionary precedent for the likes of cycling and rowing and those sorts of things. We're very, very novel from an evolutionary standpoint. So, should we be guided by our ancestry, that illogical inference? Or should we be guided by the sport science when it comes to training these athletes? And hopefully I'll show you which way we'll go. When we look at the goals of endurance training and I'll just split it out into two camps because there does seem to be two different approaches at the moment. Three main goals is to improve your economy. Now, your economy is the oxygen cost of your movement. So the idea for an endurance athlete would be to move as rapidly as they can at the lowest possible oxygen cost so that they've got a good economy. We talk about their fuel efficiency. So from a fuel efficiency standpoint, you want to be burning a higher amount of fat in your fuel mix. We know that our glycogen stores are relatively limited and we can chew through them in a very rapid pace when we're engaging in some of these sports. The more heavily we can rely on the fat side of things, the longer we can go. And there's a degree of robustness required. So when you are someone who's built to walk on two legs and stand upright, suddenly cramping yourself into a rowboat or on a bike puts a whole lot of strain on the body that it's not designed to take. So we need a degree of robustness in order to cope with that. When we look at a couple of the approaches there, so the popular or conventional approach for economy, so decreasing our oxygen cost, most people will train at their anaerobic threshold or their lactate threshold. So these are the classic cyclists who step out the door and they just ride on the limit right from the get-go. So they're pushing themselves as hard as they can at their high sustainable pace. Our paleo-primal approach, we seem to have emphasised the high-intensity interval training side of things. So that is to go out and work within short bursts and we will talk about the overlap if we work in these short bursts of high-intensity intervals. We actually gain some of the benefits that we might have done if we'd engaged in chronic cardio. From the fuel efficiency side of things, conventional approach is very much based around a high-carbohydrate diet, so trying to maximise our glycogen stores if we can supercompensate them, top them up as high as we can, then we can last a little bit longer without our sport. The paleo-primal approach tends to be at the lower carbohydrate end of the scale. And as far as dealing with robustness, most endurance athletes will tend to emphasise the stretching component, the flexibility component, overdoing any sort of strength work and within the paleo-primal fields. We probably tend to err on the side of the strengthening of the stretching side of things. So what's been our contemporary research focus for the last few years? Very interesting that lots of different approaches coming out. With regard to addressing the economy, there's an approach called polarised training and I'll go through each one of these individually. Fuel efficiency, we're starting to look at this method called train low-race high. And robustness, we're starting to talk more and more about building strength before applying power within endurance sports. So we look at the polarised training first. So polarised training is very much based around training at either end of an intensity scale and cutting that middle ground out. So that classic chronic cardio, sitting at your highest aerobic pace, we're trying to cut that out as much as we can. So we're either training at a very, very high, so these are a classic high-intensity interval approach, or training at a very, very low intensity overall. It's interesting when you go through the research papers to see which side of that scale the bias lies on. Now, if you read within the paleo-primal circles, you would read probably predominantly about the high-intensity interval training side of things. But when you look at it from a research standpoint and looking at elite athletes, we can see that the vast majority of the volume is concentrated towards the low-intensity end of the scale. So right across the board, across different modes, so skiers, cyclists, runners, rowers, very, very low intensity volumes make up the bulk of their training overall. There's a saying within cycling circles that every rider's a race. So novice and recreational athletes tend to perceive elite athletes as people who train on the limit all the time, for the most part. They might know that they have the odd recovery day here and there, but perceive that when they go out and train, they train hard. And so when these novice and recreational athletes try and mimic those people, they try and do exactly the same. And often they will skip the recovery days or the easy days in order to focus on what they think is going to give them the biggest payback. And so every ride, run, swim becomes a race. And you classically see this with, you know, two cyclists next to each other, two guys and a rowing machine and a gym. They'll just try and beat each other up all the way through. And they're always constantly pushing themselves up towards that anaerobic threshold. Again, when we go through the research and have a look at it, it's interesting that the Olympics is just about to finish. When we look at Olympic endurance events, even though they compete at those very, very high intensities, the bulk of their training is done well below lactate threshold intensity. And possibly up to about 80% of that training overall is done well below that lactate threshold intensity. So it's all kind of sitting there within the research when you go and pull it out. What about applying this to non-elites? Does it still hold up? Well, if we look at some of the papers, they're starting to question whether or not this current interval training phase is well suited to non-elites. So the takeaway from that is that if you're an endurance athlete, you should be looking at probably no less in about three quarters of a training overall with only about 10% to 15% at their top end. And that's not very much. So when you consider that as a non-elite athlete, you might only have five or six hours up your sleeve for the week. 10% of that isn't going to be very much in terms of your overall interval work. So you need to make it count. Now in terms of that, what's considered very low intensity, I've heard one cycling coach refer to it as guilt-producingly easy. And it's a very, very difficult thing to get your head around it. I spent pretty much most of my summer trying to do this training. And it's very, very hard to sit up on the bike and just turn the pedals over without getting sucked into racing, without going, the legs feel fine today, I'm going to race, I've got the wind behind me, I'm going to race. You've got to try and switch off from that. It's a lot harder to train to the low intensity at that very, very low intensity than it is to go out and do your interval work. It is if you do go and do that. Your training tends to look something like that. So... Train low, race high. What we're looking at is manipulating our glycogen stores to try and improve our fuel efficiency. Now there's been quite a few different approaches to doing this, so classically we've used the long slow distance training so that's go out for three, four hours at a time at a relatively low pace. There's things called twice daily training where you'll do a session in the morning, two or three hours off, and within that two or three hours you barely eat anything, and then you'll go out and do another session a little bit later on. You can do your faster training and we've looked at the high fat diets. When you look at the common ground across all of those is they all induce a low glycogen state within the person. And that low glycogen state tends to increase the cellular signal. So as far as training adaptation goes what we're trying to do is get our gene expression, we get our protein synthesis and we get our training adaptation. Most people think training training adaptation they don't understand or they don't know the middle ground in between. Or they think about it in terms of gross anatomical or physiological things so things like my legs are getting stronger my lungs are getting more efficient my heart's getting more efficient they don't tend to think about it from a cellular level. One of the key areas that's been looked at is the AMPK signal. AMPK signals the energy status of each one of your individual cells. When you're engaging in low engaging in endurance training with a low glycogen state that's going to send a pretty strong signal that the energy status is quite low and that sort of ramps up that training adaptation. Interestingly carbohydrate consumed before during training decreases that AMPK activation. And so the common approach of carboloading before you go out for training or making sure you've got your gels and drinks on the bike or you run or whatever it looks like that approach that's of common wisdom that we have actually switches off the AMPK signal and ends up blunting our adaptation. So what we're looking at now is encouraging people to go out in almost of an empty fuel tank state. So they're going out with their fuel light on. And again that's quite difficult for athletes to do because you go out and your legs feel like concrete. And so because every rides a race, every runs a race every time you go out you want to set a PB or a PR it's a very very difficult mindset to get into because you do go out and you feel flat as a pancake some days. But maybe within that your training going out and being pretty flat and staying at that low end is exactly what you need in order to increase your adaptation. So again if we go through some of the research around it looks like this that ramping up our carbohydrate drinks and those sorts of things actually blunts that training stimulus and limits our adaptation. There's a saying that I use with some of the people that I work with that training is not racing. And so that some of the things that we do while we're training is not about mimicking the race and you can equally apply that I guess to some of the things that we do within the field of weightlifting, non-endurance events as well. If you want to hit a PR with a certain lift you don't go in and just stack all the plates on every single session. You have to deconstruct some of those things work on the different elements and then bolt it back together again and we do that within endurance works and again some of the things that we do within training won't necessarily lend themselves to racing at the time. I'll finish up with the strength before power side of things. Endurance athletes typically are afraid of the gym they won't go near them cyclists in particular because they're so afraid of putting on weight and muscle mass and think it'll count against them. And there's numerous benefits to that but one of the things that they tend to be most afraid of is that they'll lose flexibility. A lot of these guys struggle to kind of sit themselves on bikes particularly the middle aged guys they're coming in with tight backs and tight hips and those sorts of things so they're worried if they do more strength training get all muscle bound they won't be able to do their sport particularly well. They're worried that they'll lose their cardiovascular adaptation and so any time that they spend off the bike, off the trails out of the boat is time that's not actually making them go faster. But again does the research support that? No because we can go through and we can see that a well constructed strength training programme will improve your flexibility as much as static stretching if not better. So you can kind of kill two birds with one stone if we look at the cardiovascular side of it at an actual metabolic and molecular level there's really not a lot of difference between the adaptations that you would get from a strength training programme suited to endurance athletes and actually time on the bike. So for the minimum amount of time that they're going to spend in the gym they're not going to lose a lot of adaptation overall. So how do we bolt all of these things together? So it looks like low intensity training and technical mastery dominates. Now when you're looking at improving your technique and improving your skills you're better off doing it while you're under low load in that low intensity side of things. Again within the cycling field that I'm involved in we see lots of guys come in and they just want to ride fast, they buy the fast wheels, they get the fast kit but they don't know how to handle the bike and you stick them in a middle of a large bunch in their reliability both to themselves and to 50 other riders around them. So use that low intensity work to hone your technical side of things. It's very beneficial and the high intensity training is very deliberate so you go out with one or two sessions in mind per week and you go out and you really nail it and it's right at that top end. And we try and do this against a backdrop of training in a lowered glycogen state. Let's not say that you would race in that state you would not go on the start line with your fuel tank empty. It'd be fully topped up so that's that race high but during training you can train down that low end of the glycogen scale. We've seen this before and we've been exposed to it for a few years now and I can see Mark standing up the back so he'll recognise this slide. We've been promoting this for a wee while within the Paleo Primal Circle so this is from Mark's Daily Apple so building our base around that slow movement side of things, adding in the lift heavy things, adding the strength work and then topping it off with our high intensity work overall. So when we look at the sport science side of things and come back and answer this question to the athletes, yes we can and we can do it from the standpoint that the sport science where it's currently heading is it's heading towards us it's heading towards the field that we've known about for the last of two or three years and we've been starting to apply amongst ourselves but we're not doing it from a standpoint of just a nice little story that says cavemen were fit therefore they're going to be fit on the bike we're well supported by the science. That's me done. So would you also recommend going into a high intensity interval training with a glycogen depleted state? You can do generally it will depend on how big that session is going to be. If it's a very intensive short duration session you could get away with it. So what we're not saying is that you spend all of your time in a low glycogen state we're not advocating low carbohydrate diet. You can be low glycogen but still be having a high carbohydrate diet overall. So that high intensity interval training session yep you'll do it. It's 20 to 40 minutes in length overall that's not going to put a major drain on your tank. You wouldn't go out and do a 90 minutes interval training session and at a low glycogen state it would be too much stress. But you can do it. That's it. Another question? What's your view of doing the training in the low glycogen state no carbs but then on the race day adding back some carbohydrate or carboloning the day before just for the race? It's relatively easy to do. One of the problems that's starting to come through is that when you're on a relatively low carbohydrate diet overall when I talk about that in a paleo-primal context if you were to spend most of your time with that sort of diet and then suddenly turn up on the start line and start packing away the gels and the sports drinks there is a degree of gastrointestinal distress that will go with that because the fructose loading within some of those gels and drinks is very very high your body is suddenly not used to it. So there is, you may have to train yourself to handle some of those and particularly they talk about ultramarathoners ultra endurance athletes having to train their gut to handle that fructose loading again but there's not really too much of a problem with doing it through starches and glucose and those sorts of fuels. What do you actually recommend then for the race day? For race day ramp up your starches so within 24-48 hours out from race day really lift your starches up probably drop your fat take down to maximise that reloading race day you can come up with glucose solutions and glucose based gels bananas dates all those sorts of easy fuels but you'd go through periods where you'd trial those within your training you wouldn't try something new on the start line