Alistair Brownlee in full flight! | Tina Williams/Alamy

Recently, while preparing for our conversation with two-time Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee on Mad Science Meets Real Life, I revisited a presentation that I saw a long time ago from his long-time coach Malcolm Brown.

What struck me about revisiting the presentation this time around, wasn’t that it contained some revolutionary training method or hidden physiological insight. In fact, the opposite. The further I got into it, the more I was reminded of a simple truth…

Most of the things that create elite endurance athletes aren’t particularly fancy or mysterious. In fact they’re quite simple. But even simple things can be really really difficult to execute for long enough to build a champion!

This is an important distinction because endurance sport, these days, has become fascinated with novelty. We’re constantly searching for the next breakthrough, the next training methodology, the next supplement, the next technological innovation. Yet, when you step back and actually look at, listen to, the development of athletes who have reached the very highest levels of the sport, their is a common “vibe” that emerges. You might have sensed it when listening to our podcast with Joel Filliol, coach of Olympic Champ, Simon Whitfield or our chat with Arild Tveiten, coach of another Olympic Champion - Kristian Blummenfelt, or maybe our chat with Johan Rojler, coach of another Olympic Champion - Nils van der Poel. And the vibe is this…

The athletes who become champions are rarely those who did something fancy, or discovered some ‘secret’ that nobody else knew. More often, they’re the athletes who became exceptionally good at patiently and progressively building their training volume over extraordinarily long periods of time.

This was the same vibe that I felt when I walked on deck at the Australian Institute of Sport for the very first time - a level of seriousness mixed with a reality that this is a long-term project that we’re all committed to - best settle in and get comfortable, we’re going to be here a while. And those same familiar feelings, those same lessons came up again when chatting with Alistair.

His story is not a story about an athlete who trained hard. Lots of athletes train hard. It is not simply a story about an athlete who laid down impressive workouts in Olympic years. Again, plenty of athletes lay down impressive workouts - at least sporadically. No, Alistair’s story is one of patience. It’s one of progressively building the volume over many years, while having a good time along the way. It’s one of an athlete who simply built a tremendous work capacity over many years that enabled him to do training that nobody else in the world was doing at the time. The key question. The question that you really want to answer in order to determine how Alistair became a multiple Olympic Champion, is how did he build himself into the kind of athlete who could absorb the training that he did?

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“I have a busy life and only have x amount of hours available to train each week. Surely I need to make those hours count by pushing the intensity a little more?”

At first glance, that sounds logical.

If training time is limited, shouldn’t we try to extract as much benefit as possible from every session?

The problem is that this perspective overlooks a critically important fact:

Training doesn’t occur in isolation.

Every workout is applied to a physiological organism that is already dealing with the demands of everyday life…

Work deadlines.

Financial pressures.

Relationship stress.

Poor sleep.

Travel.

Illness.

Family responsibilities.

All of these stressors influence how much training stress the body can successfully absorb and adapt to.

When we add large amounts of high-intensity training to a system that is already carrying a substantial life-stress load, the results are predictable: Recovery slows. Motivation wanes. Consistency drops. Sleep quality deteriorates. Performance plateaus. Injury and illness become more likely.

Eventually, the athlete finds themselves working harder but improving less. Anyone who has been involved in endurance sport for any period of time is familiar with these periods - you start a high-intensity block all gung-ho and you’re buoyed by quick improvement, but then the rate of improvement starts to slow, and the effort required for the improvement starts to increase. You’re gritting your teeth, struggling through one painful workout after the next, and getting less and less to show for it. Eventually, the improvement stops altogether, and you find yourself regressing despite working as hard as you possibly can. Eventually, despite your true best efforts, your body cries Uncle!

This isn’t a mental weakness, it’s a physiological reality. When it comes down to it, you’re a physiological organism, and there are biological limits to how much stress any physiological organism can tolerate!

While concepts such as “anti-fragility” and “hustle culture” have become increasingly popular, physiology still operates according to biological constraints. We are not infinitely adaptable. Every organism possesses a finite capacity to absorb stress, recover from it, and remodel itself in response.

This observation is not new.

Many decades ago, pioneering stress physiologist Hans Selye observed that when organisms are exposed to chronic stress, they tend to progress through three predictable stages: alarm, resistance and, if the stress continues long enough, exhaustion.

Importantly, while these three phases of the stress response are common to all stressors, when it comes to their duration and magnitude, not all stressors are created equal…

While many different forms of stress activate similar physiological systems, the magnitude of the response and the speed with which exhaustion occurs can vary dramatically. Some stressors can be tolerated for months or even years. Others can only be sustained for relatively short periods before performance begins to deteriorate.

This distinction has profound implications for endurance training.

In particular, it helps explain one of the most important observations in coaching:

Athletes can often tolerate surprisingly large volumes of low-intensity aerobic training for extended periods, while only a few weeks of highly intensive training can leave them stale, overreached, or overtrained.

To understand why, we need to introduce a concept that coaches have been discussing for generations - what Hans Selye called adaptation energy and what many top coaches through the years have discovered as adaptation reserves.

Adaptation Energy: Why Base Training Builds It and Sharpening Spends It

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Few athletes in endurance sport have embodied the combination of aggression, durability, and aerobic depth quite like Alistair Brownlee.

A two-time Olympic Gold Medalist (London 2012 & Rio 2016), multiple World Champion, Commonwealth Champion, and one of the defining athletes of modern triathlon, Brownlee helped redefine what was possible in short-course racing through his relentless front-foot style and extraordinary run ability. At his peak, he wasn’t just winning races - he was dictating them from the front with a level of intensity and aerobic dominance that changed the sport.

Yet, while the level of performance that Alistair brought to the world stage was a true step-change in triathlon performance, what struck me most from our conversation was how much of it came back to proven, timeless principles…

Consistency.
Repeatability.
Low-intensity volume.
And the quiet accumulation of training over many years.

At one point Alistair said:

“You don’t accumulate a lot of hours by doing a lot this week.
You accumulate a lot of hours by doing that for 200 weeks in a row.”

That line may honestly be one of the clearest descriptions of elite endurance development I’ve ever heard.

And it highlights perhaps the biggest disconnect between elite development and recreational thinking.

Most athletes still think in:

• workouts,

• weeks,

• blocks,

• or races.

Elite development happens across:

• years,

• habits,

• routines,

• and slowly building, building, building that work capacity.

“I saw my body as training to train.”

On that note, one of the most interesting themes from the conversation, and something that I think will surprise a lot of folks who think of short-course triathlon as a very speed-focused event, were the sheer weekly training volumes involved in Alistair’s training through the years - all extending the idea that elite endurance performance is less about specific isolated fitness, and more about building enormous capacity for work.

Alistair described it beautifully:

“I saw my body as training to train.”

That’s such an important distinction.

Most athletes focus on the type of training that will get them specifically fit.

Truly world-class athletes focus on becoming the type of organism capable of absorbing more of that specific training than any of their competitors when the time is right.

That means:

• building durability,

• connective tissue resilience,

• autonomic stability,

• mitochondrial density,

• movement economy,

• and the ability to tolerate load repeatedly without breaking down.

The athlete who can consistently absorb training over years almost always wins in the long run - this was Alistair’s thesis - and he proved it in the most convincing manner possible!

The power of routine

Another major theme was how much Alistair relied on routine and habit formation.

He talked about removing the need for motivation.

Removing decision fatigue.

Building weeks that were repeatable.

He described knowing exactly what every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday looked like — because the structure itself became automatic.

That’s a massively underrated piece of endurance development.

These days, many athletes constantly seek novelty:

• new workouts,

• new gadgets,

• new training systems,

• new “optimizations.”

Meanwhile, the elites quietly repeat highly sustainable weeks for years.

Alistair even talked about choosing where he lived based on:

• access to trails,

• quiet cycling roads,

• swim facilities,

• and training groups.

Everything was designed to reduce friction and make consistency easier.

That’s what high-level endurance training really looks like:
not motivation…
but systems.

Why easy training must be EASY

This was probably the physiological centerpiece of the discussion.

Alistair repeatedly emphasized that the key to doing a lot of training was making the low-intensity work truly low intensity.

“The way to do a lot of training was to make the low intensity as easy as possible.”

Importantly, he didn’t initially arrive at this conclusion from physiology textbooks.

He arrived there pragmatically.

When he and his brother made the mistake of pushing the easy sessions too hard:

• he accumulated more fatigue,

• recovered less effectively,

• and couldn’t perform the quality sessions properly.

Simple.

And, as you know by now, I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes modern endurance athletes continue to make!

They drift into the gray zone:

• not easy enough to recover,

• not hard enough to stimulate major adaptation.

Alistair’s (clearly very successful) philosophy was the opposite…

Protect the quality sessions.

Accumulate as much low-intensity volume as possible.

And make the easy work easy enough that it doesn’t bring down the quality of the high-intensity work.

Later, his physiological knowledge/study explained what experience had already taught him:

• lower autonomic cost,

• better volume tolerance,

• preserved mechanical freshness,

• improved stroke volume development,

• greater repeatability.

But the practical insight came first.

The role of intensity

Now, none of this means all the training was soft.

Far from it.

The volume was enormous, but the hard work was also very hard, more than hard, very fast. In fact, Alistair’s coach, Malcolm Brown, put a lot of emphasis on pure basic speed…

Track sessions around sub-2:40/km pace.

Aggressive VO2 swim work.

Hard bike race simulations.

Incredibly highly polarized training - with a very small, tiny, percentage of threshold+ work, but that work being of an exceedingly high quality.

That’s an important nuance.

The easy work enabled (didn’t detract from) the quality work.

Intensity was not the foundation.

It was the expression layer built on top of the aerobic foundation.

That distinction matters enormously.

One of the greatest athletes ever… with almost no data

This was another fascinating aspect of the conversation.

For much of his career, Alistair barely used technology.

No HR.

Minimal power.

Almost no lactate testing.

He said something that really stuck with me:

“If recording the data today didn’t change what I did tomorrow, I stopped recording it.”

That’s an incredibly useful filter.

This isn’t anti-science.

It’s anti-noise.

And honestly, I think too many modern athletes have become trapped in the illusion that monitoring equals improvement - to the point that, going along with Alistair’s greater theme, it adds noise and decision fatigue.

We now have:

• endless metrics,

• dashboards,

• recovery scores,

• readiness scores,

• optimization algorithms.

All potentially telling us something different at any point in time.

But the fundamentals still matter most:

• accumulated low-intensity volume,

• consistency,

• sleep,

• recovery,

• durability,

• and sustainable long-term progression.

Interestingly, when asked what metrics matter most today, Alistair emphasized something very simple:

Consistency.

Not a single heroic workout.

Not one magical metric.

Consistency.

The Leeds environment

One particularly interesting part of the discussion was hearing about the Leeds training environment during that era.

Before everyone was talking about “the Norwegian method,” Leeds had quietly become one of the most successful endurance environments in the world.

And, when I think back to other high performance environments that I’ve been a part of, e.g. my time at the Australian Institute of Sport, the culture sounded remarkably familiar…

• everyone showed up,

• everyone trained consistently,

• easy sessions stayed easy,

• hard sessions were hard,

• and people accumulated years together.

That’s something I think we often overlook when analyzing elite performance.

Great environments normalize consistency.

Not hero workouts.

Living near the edge

Of course, elite performance isn’t without risk.

Alistair was very honest about the injuries he dealt with throughout his career.

One line stood out to me:

“I wanted to get to the Olympic start line 99.999% ready… and sometimes that meant going to 101% and falling off the cliff.”

That’s elite sport.

There’s always a tension between:

• maximizing adaptation,

• and exceeding recoverable load.

He openly acknowledged that many of his injuries likely came from simply pushing the load ceiling extremely high.

But what was interesting was how he approached injury management.

Rather than complete shutdowns, he increasingly focused on:

• maintaining movement,

• maintaining fitness,

• cross-training,

• and finding ways to continue adapting while injured.

Again:
training to train.

The real lesson

I think the biggest takeaway from this entire conversation is that elite endurance development is actually remarkably unglamorous.

Modern endurance culture often glorifies:

• novelty,

• complexity,

• optimization,

• hacks,

• and metrics.

But the greatest athletes in the world often succeed through something much simpler:

They build systems that allow them to consistently absorb & build training over many years.

They repeat sustainable routines.

They recover well.

They keep easy training easy.

And they avoid interruption.

Which brings us back to perhaps the most important takeaway of the entire discussion:

“You accumulate a lot of hours by doing that for 200 weeks in a row.”

That’s endurance development.

Not a single block.

Not a single season.

Not one magical workout.

But the quiet accumulation of consistent training, repeated patiently and progressively over many years.

In the last piece, I introduced the idea that while the general sequence of endurance training adaptation is relatively universal, the magnitude of response to the different phases of training can vary dramatically between athletes. In the post before it, I outlined how almost all successful endurance programs follow a similar broad structure - an early focus on aerobic development, followed by progressively more specific work as the event approaches. But, within that overall structure, athletes differ substantially in which phases they benefit from the most and how long each phase should last.

Some athletes respond strongly to sharpening and race-specific intensity. Others derive their greatest benefit from long periods of stable aerobic loading. Some improve rapidly with concentrated intensity blocks, while others seem to improve almost exclusively through long, uninterrupted periods of consistent low-intensity work. And while these differences can often feel anecdotal or intuitive from a coaching perspective, when you start looking at long-term training response data from different athletes – i.e. how much their fitness shifts in response to different training “blocks”, these patterns become remarkably obvious.

For this one, I want to wrap up this three-part series on season-planning with a nice bow by getting down to where the rubber meets the road and putting together a case-study on the way that we can use this information on athlete types to individualize the training plan.

If there’s one athlete who perfectly represents the latter category above - the athlete who simply continues improving from large amounts of aerobic work - it’s my friend and MSMRL co-host, former Ultraman World Champ, Iñaki de la Parra.

After having the privilege to work with Iñaki for more than a decade now – collecting mounds of metrics, workout files and test data, I’m left with one undeniable conclusion…

Iñaki really is a diesel engine! 🚂

Give him a long enough runway of steady aerobic work and he will just continue going from strength to strength. There’s very little drama to it. You don’t typically see the sudden breakthroughs or the dramatic “switch-on” moments that you often observe in more intensity-responsive athletes. Instead, his progress tends to unfold slowly and steadily over very long periods of time. At first the changes are subtle enough that you barely notice them from week to week. Then eventually, after months of uninterrupted work, you look back and realize the entire system has shifted upward & you’re looking at a completely different athlete!

This is the defining characteristic of what I described in the previous article as the “Slow Base Builder.” A reminder on what defines that type…

These athletes tend to tolerate high volumes of aerobic work extremely well. More importantly, they continue deriving benefit from that work long after many other athletes would have plateaued. While a more intensity-oriented athlete may begin to feel stale or flat from prolonged base periods, the slow base builder often continues adapting quietly beneath the surface. The mistake with athletes like this is rarely that they are undertrained. More often, the mistakes fall under two broad categories – cranking up the heat and trying to “fast cook” the athlete or “pulling the athlete out of the oven early” i.e. interrupting the build before the aerobic adaptations have had sufficient time to fully mature. Over the years, I’ve made both! 😊

However, this Ironman France prep has been a good reminder of the power of using the “right” pattern of preparation for this “slow base builder” athlete.

If we compare his response profile to some of the “fast sharpener” or mixed-profile athletes discussed in the previous article, the contrast becomes very obvious. Relative to the athlete population, Iñaki derives dramatically less benefit from late-stage Z5 sharpening work and dramatically more benefit from early low-intensity aerobic volume. In contrast, athletes like myself sit much further toward the opposite end of the spectrum - showing strong positive responses to late intensity while deriving comparatively less benefit from prolonged easy volume.

In many ways, they represent almost mirror-image athlete types.

For me-type athletes, the sharpening phase acts almost like a booster rocket. Once intensity enters the program, performance rises rapidly and visibly. These athletes often feel noticeably sharper and more competitive within a relatively short period of time. However, they also tend to be more fragile with respect to prolonged loading. Extend the build too long or carry too much fatigue into the final phase, and performance often stagnates or regresses.

Iñaki is almost the complete opposite of this.

For him, the “main engine” is the long aerobic build itself. The sharpening phase matters, but it functions much more as a final refinement of fitness that has already largely been established rather than as the primary driver of peak performance. In practical terms, this means that as long as the aerobic load remains appropriate and stable, fitness simply continues to rise.

And this pattern becomes very obvious when you look at the long-term training data…

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Scroll through X for five minutes and you’ll see everything from banded “run-specific” exercises to maximal lifting protocols, to hybrid systems promising that you can be both a powerlifter and an Ironman champion at the same time.

Most of it misses the point.

So in this episode of MAD Science Meets Real Life, we sat down with one of the best in the business - someone who has quietly worked behind the scenes with Olympic medalists, Ironman champions, and some of the most durable endurance athletes in the world - to strip things back to first principles.

And what emerged was refreshingly simple…

You Can’t Shoot a Cannon from a Canoe

One of the lines that stuck with me from my early days in strength and conditioning was:

“You can’t shoot a cannon from a canoe.”

It’s a crude metaphor—but an accurate one.

As endurance coaches and athletes, we spend the vast majority of our time trying to build a bigger engine:

• More VO₂max

• More threshold

• More watts per kilo

• More volume

But at the same time, we often neglect the structure that has to carry that engine.

And when that structure isn’t prepared?

The system breaks down.

Not always immediately. But inevitably.

The Biggest Mistake: Strength That Looks Like the Sport

One of the clearest takeaways from this conversation is that most “strength training” for endurance athletes is misguided from the start.

Instead of complementing the sport…

…it copies the sport.

Exercises that mimic pedaling.
Movements that look like running.
Endless band work reinforcing the exact same patterns already being trained for hours each week.

But as Erin put it:

The goal is not to “do more of the same”—it’s to build a supporting system around what you already do.

Or more bluntly:

Don’t exhaust the tissue that’s already exhausted.

The Real Goal: Restore → Then Strengthen

Endurance training is inherently repetitive.

And repetition, over time, creates predictable patterns:

• Tight hips

• Locked thoracic spine

• Forward head posture

• Anterior pelvic tilt

None of these are “bad” in isolation - they’re often part of being an efficient athlete.

But when you get stuck in them, they begin to limit performance.

So the job of strength training isn’t just to add load.

It’s to:

1. Restore balance

2. Return the body to neutral

3. Then strengthen that position

That order matters.

Because strengthening dysfunction just reinforces it.

Why This Matters for Performance (Not Just Injury)

A lot of athletes mentally file strength work under:

“Stuff I’ll do when I get injured.”

But that misses the bigger picture.

Movement quality is performance.

You can see it clearly in the lab:

• Two athletes with the same VO₂max

• Same aerobic engine

…but vastly different speeds.

Why?

Because one can express that engine efficiently - and the other can’t.

Tightness, poor sequencing, and compensation patterns all come at a cost.

And that cost compounds over time.

The Hidden Edge: Recovery, Not Just Strength

One of the more interesting threads in this conversation was the role of strength work as a recovery tool.

Endurance athletes live in a predominantly catabolic state:

• Breaking down tissue

• Burning through energy

• Accumulating fatigue

But well-executed strength work—especially when combined with breath work—can shift the system back toward anabolic recovery.

Even more importantly, it can help athletes transition faster from:

• Sympathetic (“fight or flight”)
  → Parasympathetic (“rest and digest”)

And that might be one of the biggest untapped performance levers in endurance sport.

Not just how hard you can train…

…but how quickly you can recover from it.

The Trap of “More”

There’s a natural temptation—especially among driven athletes—to take a good idea and push it too far.

If some strength is good… more must be better.

But as we discussed in the episode:

If strength alone determined performance, the strongest athlete would win every race.

They don’t.

At a certain point:

• More strength adds fatigue

• More muscle adds cost

• More load adds risk

And the returns diminish quickly.

The goal isn’t maximal strength.

It’s sufficient strength—applied in the right way, at the right time.

Thinking Beyond Performance

As we wrapped the conversation, things naturally drifted toward a broader question:

What is all of this actually for?

Because performance is only one phase of the journey.

And if the way we train doesn’t support:

• Long-term movement

• Posture

• Independence

• Health

…then we’re missing something important.

Endurance sport has a way of pulling us forward—literally and figuratively.

Without intentional work to counterbalance that, the long-term trajectory isn’t great.

So part of this conversation is about racing faster.

But part of it is about something bigger:

Building a body that lasts.

Listen to the Full Episode

This was one of those conversations that cuts through the noise and brings things back to what actually matters.

If you’re an endurance athlete trying to make sense of strength training—or a coach trying to apply it more effectively - we think you’ll get a lot from this one.

For a deeper dive, please check out, this one from me…

This one from Inaki…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Build a Body That’s Hard to Kill = Lifelong Strength + Endurance

If you want a body and a life where you are actually capable you need a simple system…

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6 months ago · 60 likes · 7 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

And a plethora of resources for the endurance athlete ready to get serious about their strength and mobility work can be found on Erin’s website…

https://www.ecfitstrength.com/

We started with a simple model - Mr. Middleman - and walked through how a well-sequenced year stacks adaptations: base as the main engine, intensity layered as staged boosters, fatigue carefully managed across the build, and fitness peaking exactly when it matters. Get the sequence right, and you arrive at the start line with lift-off. Get it wrong, and you end up with a series of misfires - good work, poorly timed.

But there was an important caveat at the end of that piece.

The blueprint works… for Mr. Middleman.

And most athletes aren’t Mr. Middleman.

While the general sequence we outlined—Base → Tempo → Threshold → Sharpening -is physiologically dictated by the time course of adaptation, the time spent in each phase and the benefit derived from each can vary dramatically between athletes.

This is especially the case for the latter phases. In this piece we’ll focus on the last half of the season - the Specific Prep period where we start to tailor the training to the specifics of the athlete. For the General Prep phase, the base phase, that we discussed as the early season emphasis in the last post, developing a solid work capacity is a general attribute, that all athletes will benefit from to a large degree, irrespective of the specifics of their physiology and event.

However, when we get to the latter half of the season, you’ll find that athletes respond differently to the various options - large volumes of tempo work, focused threshold training, or more intensive interval work. For this reason, identifying some of these differences between athletes can make a significant difference in how much performance improvement occurs for that athlete in the latter half of the build.

From the General Blueprint to Individual Adjustment

When I began looking at some of these differences in athlete response through a mixed-effects model, that point became even clearer…

At its core, a mixed-effects model separates what tends to work across the group from how each individual deviates from that pattern. In coaching terms, it’s the difference between the default sequence and the way a specific athlete bends that sequence.

What emerges from that isn’t a completely different plan for every athlete. It’s something much more practical…

The structure stays the same. The sequence is still there. But the weighting of that sequence - the relative importance of each phase, and the timing with which those phases arrive - shifts depending on the athlete.

So the coaching task becomes one of interpretation rather than invention. We are no longer asking, “What plan should this athlete follow?” but rather, “Where does this athlete sit relative to the model, and how should the ‘prototype season’ be adjusted accordingly?”

A Very Brief Geeky Interlude… 🤓

For those curious what sits underneath this, the following analysis comes from a mixed-effects model - a statistical approach that looks at two things at once. It captures the average response across a group of athletes (what tends to work in general), while also estimating how each individual athlete deviates from that average. In practical terms, it allows you to separate the “default plan” from the way a specific athlete bends that plan - toward more base, more intensity, or different timing of both.

But, something very important that I want to emphasize:

You don’t need a mathematical model to see this.

A trained coach’s eye, given enough exposure to athletes over time, will start to recognize these patterns intuitively. You’ll notice the athlete who doesn’t come alive until the final weeks. The one who just keeps improving the longer the build goes. The one who only seems to move when tempo is introduced.

The model doesn’t create these patterns. These are (likely genetic) archetypes that have existed long before computers started to mathematically describe them! The model just makes some of these patterns easier to see…

Making the Invisible Visible

One of the challenges with the idea of different athlete ‘types’ is that, without some way of visualizing it, it can feel abstract. Since we’re looking at response to multiple training zones over multiple time lags, e.g.

• How much does zone 5 work impact the athlete’s fitness 30 days out from the race?

• How about 120 days out?

• Which is a better emphasis 60 days out - zone 5 sharpening or zone 3/4 tempo work?

In other words, there are a lot of variables in play at any one point in time. We can talk about athletes responding “more” or “less” to certain types of work at certain points within the training build, but that’s difficult to hold in your head in any structured way.

That’s where mapping and clustering some of these differences into different athlete “archetypes” comes in very handy…

Read more

The biggest breakthroughs rarely come from something new.

They come from finally understanding and applying those simple, persistent, enduring, principles.

—

In this episode of MAD Science Meets Real Life, we sit down with Joel Filliol—one of the most experienced and respected coaches in the sport - coach of the 2000 Olympic Champ - Simon Whitfield…

Simon Whitfield storms home to take gold at the Sydney Olympics - David Ashdown | Alamy

,,,,along with 3 Olympic medals, 6 World Championships, 30 WTS wins and 100 WTS podiums over the last 30 years of coaching.

But what makes Joel interesting isn’t just the consistent results.

It’s the consistency of his message.

Over decades in the sport, while trends have come and gone—threshold this, polarized that, now Zone 2 everything—his core philosophy has steadily converged toward something surprisingly simple:

Build that low-intensity base
Progressively. Over time.
And most importantly… don’t rush the process.

—

We spend a lot of this conversation unpacking where things actually go wrong for athletes.

Not in theory—but in practice.

Why intensity is still the biggest trap.
Why “easy” training is quietly getting too hard.
Why many promising athletes plateau (or disappear) despite doing all the “right” things.

And perhaps most interestingly…

Why so much of good coaching is built not on success - but on mistakes…

The sessions that went a little too far.
The moments where instinct said “pull back”… and we didn’t.
The hard lessons that shape how we think about training years later.

—

There’s also a broader theme running through this one that I think a lot of you will resonate with:

We’re living in an era of infinite information.

Every athlete now has access to everything—methods, metrics, marginal gains, the latest “secrets” from the top of the sport.

And yet…

Performance still comes back to the same fundamentals:

Consistency.
Patience.
And getting the basics right—over and over again.

—

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering:

• Am I doing too much intensity?

• Am I actually going easy enough on my easy days?

• Am I chasing the wrong things?

…this one will hit close to home.

—

As always, this is a conversation that sits right at the intersection of MAD Science and Real Life—where physiology meets practice, and where the messy reality of coaching shapes what actually works.

Enjoy.

And, for a deeper dive, please check out Joel’s excellent Substack -

Real Coaching

High performance principles from 30 years of coaching the world's best triathletes — without the noise.

By Joel Filliol

And this stellar in-depth Q & A with Joel and Inaki…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

What 30 Years of Coaching Taught Joel Filliol

Join 4,000+ athletes, coaches, and everyday winners reading my Substack, where I consistently share conversations like this, along with insights on performance, mindset, and systems for sport, family and life…

Read more

3 months ago · 59 likes · 18 comments · Iñaki de la Parra and Joel Filliol

“Putting together a good training plan is rocket science” - me

It’s a sad fact: Most athletes don’t arrive at their A-Race start line at their fitness peak.

They sign up for their race, often pay significant sums of money, put in a year or more of solid work, but rack up to the start line of the big event knowing that they aren’t where they should be. And, as such, often get beaten by athletes who have put in less total work, but are better prepared because the work was progressive and properly sequenced.

They fail because they trained chaotically, swayed by their motivation in the moment, coupled with whatever methodology happened to cross their current timeline. They might have included all of the pieces of the puzzle at various points throughout the year, but they put the right training in the wrong place. For example…

Too much intensity too early.
Too much fatigue carried too late.
Too much dispersion of the “good sessions”… that never quite add up to a great season.

And the frustrating part?

In a global sense, they know they did “the work”; they just didn’t get the timing right.

And that’s what this one will be about - setting up your season plan to ensure you get the timing right.

When it comes to the time-course of the different physiological adaptations, it helps to think of your season like a rocket…

It’s not powered only by one big (base) engine, but by a sequence of carefully timed boosters - each one designed to fire at exactly the right moment, do its job, and then get out of the way.

Get the sequence right, and you “have lift off” - arriving at race day with maximum speed and precision.

Get it wrong?

You have a bunch of random misfires that never give you the power that you need to achieve the altitude you desire, the altitude you deserve.

In the last article, we looked at this concept of “timing” and the underlying principles that govern how training actually works:

• Delayed training effects

• Residual training effects

• The idea that fitness is built not just from what you do, but when you do it

We covered all of the key theoretical concepts. But theory doesn’t win races - practical execution does. So, in this piece, we’re going to move from theory to application - to what this actually looks like when you sit down with a blank calendar and try to build a season that peaks exactly when it matters.

To do that, we’ll start with a simple model.

Not a perfect athlete. Not a special case.

Just… Mr. Middleman.

About as “middle of the road” as you can get - a middle-aged, intermediate athlete preparing for a middle-distance triathlon, with middle-of-the-road physiology and a fairly typical training response.

Why start here?

Because if you can understand how a typical season should unfold, you’ll have a reference point - a blueprint = that makes it far easier to recognize when (and how) to adjust for your own unique strengths and limitations.

We’ll get to how to adjust for some of those individual differences in the next piece.

But first, we need a baseline.

Below you’ll find that baseline - a sample season template that illustrates how training load, intensity, and timing interact across the year - how we stack adaptations, manage fatigue, and ultimately bring everything together for a peak at exactly the right moment.

Let’s begin with a brief rundown on what is included in this very busy Annual Training Plan chart….

Read more

Athletes feel amazing in February and March…
And wonder what went wrong by June.

The problem?

They mistake early-season sensations for real fitness—and start chasing more.

More volume.
More intensity.
More racing.

Until the whole thing collapses.

In this conversation, we unpack why that happens—and what to do instead.

🔑 Key Ideas

• Early “fitness” is often just fatigue + freshness illusions

• Big training camps don’t carry you through the season

• More racing = less peak performance

• Stability beats constant progression

• The best athletes aren’t just fitter - they’re more predictable

🧠 What We Get Into

• The CTL trap (and why it misleads athletes)

• Why you can’t rush adaptation

• How to actually time your peak

• When to push—and when to hold steady

• Using races as training vs performance

• Why most amateurs lose fitness after early-season camps

• The missing phase in most training plans

For a deeper dive on effective season planning, please check out…

from Alan and this one from Inaki…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Why Most Misjudge Their Progress Every Year

Every December (or January) we all slow down and many: Open a notebook. A Notion page. A Google Doc titled “Yearly Review…

Read more

6 months ago · 26 likes · 7 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

May your 2026 season be as mistake-free as possible, and have you peaking when it matters the most!

Most athletes interrupt adaptation before it has a chance to happen!

You planted the seed.

So why isn’t it growing?

Because you keep digging up the ground to add more seeds!

Training works the same way. You apply a stimulus, the body begins to adapt - and then, before that process has time to fully play out, you add more. More volume, more intensity, more stress. Not because it’s needed, but because it feels like progress should be happening faster than it is.

March is when athletes start blowing up their seasons.

The sun comes out, motivation rises, and suddenly the training that felt controlled in January begins to accelerate. Volume creeps up. Intensity sneaks in. What started as a well-thought out plan becomes an emotional reaction to good weather, good legs, and the feeling that progress should be happening faster than it is.

On the surface, it all looks like commitment. But underneath, something more subtle is happening. The athlete is no longer building toward a peak - they are chasing a feeling of improving fitness. And that shift, from patient restraint to an addiction for more, more, more is where things begin to unravel.

And this is where things start to go wrong.

Not all at once - but through a series of common mistakes that most athletes don’t even realize they’re making…

Mistake 1: The illusion of early strength

A season is a lot like the bike leg of an Ironman. The early miles feel deceptively easy. You’re fresh, you’re not that far removed from your off-season, energy is high, and the body is primed to perform. The temptation is always to press - to take advantage of that feeling and “bank fitness”

But there is no such thing as banking fitness.

Unlike a bank, when it comes to fitness, your money flows out without you consciously withdrawing it. Maybe you could think of it as a really bad bank with some of the worst fees on the planet, that causes your balance to just progressively whittle away without you doing anything wrong.

In other words, it’s important that you don’t grow your balance too quickly, but that you pace yourself so that your fitness balance is highest when you need to make the most important withdrawal.

Or returning to our “pushing too hard in the early miles of the Ironman” metaphor, a 300 watt acceleration early doesn’t give you “free distance” – putting your further up the road for the rest of the race. No, you pay that back and then some, as you lack the energy, the resources in the latter stages when it matters most. Whether talking about the Ironman race or your season…

The athletes strongest at mile 10 are rarely strongest at mile 100.

Mistake 2: Doing everything at once

Most athletes don’t derail their season with a single bad decision. Instead, they layer small, well-intentioned choices that collectively push them off course. The most common of these is increasing volume and intensity at the same time.

This typically happens gradually. A bit more volume because things are going well. A bit more intensity because the athlete is riding with a buddy and feels strong, or gets excited about the recent “reverse periodization” article they read in their favorite magazine. Neither decision seems unreasonable in isolation. But together, they create a mismatch between the rate of stress being applied and the rate of adaptation the body can sustain.

One of the first pieces of wisdom that my coaching mentor, a man with multiple Olympians in his palmares imparted…

“Never increase volume and intensity at the same time”

Read more

I’m not sure there is a more over-hyped word in the health and fitness space right now than the “L” word – Longevity. From death-deniers to gym bros it seems everyone is weighing in on what it’s going to take for you to steer clear of that guy – first name Grim, last name Reaper.

But, like information on pretty much any topic at the moment – misinformation abounds, with opinions ranging from – “You need to avoid the sun at all costs and pay me a million dollars a year for my patented supplement stack” to “You need to revert to your carnivore roots – spend all your time either in the gym lifting anything not bolted down or running around in a loin cloth outside running down wild game.” In this article, I’d like to move away from all that and first principles this thing by taking it back to the simple question…

What’s going to take you out?

People are terrible at estimating risk.

We imagine that our inability to deadlift 2x bodyweight is what does us in, in the inevitable Grizzly bear fight that we’re preparing for. We imagine that our ability to run a sub 6 minute mile is what’s going to make all the difference… in the looming Zombie apocalypse? In our brains, it’s always dramatic, cinematic endings.

Meanwhile, the processes that will really end our lives are slow, silent, and unfolding over decades.

If longevity matters to you, and especially longevity with good function and health throughout, we need to stop thinking like movie directors and start thinking like physiologists.

Because the biggest threats aren’t exciting or dramatic. They’re the cumulative result of a lifetime of low-grade abuse.

When you look at lifetime mortality in a fit, non-smoking Western human with good fitness and decent health at midlife, the picture is not dominated by rare catastrophes. It is dominated by slow biological processes: vascular disease, cancer biology, neurodegeneration, and the gradual decline in basic physical resilience that comes with aging.

So, without further ado, let’s break down what’s actually most likely to take us out so we can focus our preventative efforts on the things that actually matter…

Read more

• VO₂max.

• Lactate.

• Training paces

• Heart rate zones

We slice performance into metrics and sub-metrics and optimization frameworks. And all of that is useful. Necessary, even. But underneath all of it - beneath the physiology, beneath the psychology, beneath the training plans - there is something more fundamental:

Energy.

Not calories in the simplistic input-output way we usually consider them. Not your daily “macros”. But energy as a finite currency. A budget. An overall capacity of the athlete that can be directed well or mismanaged.

In this conversation with Aitor Viribay, we kept circling back to a deceptively simple idea: Energy is not limitless. And if that’s true, then performance becomes less about “spending more” and more about building more while allocating what you have wisely.

That’s a subtle but profound shift.

Aitor works at the absolute highest levels of endurance sport — Tour de France riders, ultra-distance athletes, competitors operating at the edge of what human metabolism can sustain. It would have been easy for this conversation to revolve entirely around fueling protocols and carbohydrate oxidation rates for these athletes. And yes, we discussed those 😊

But what struck me most was how often we drifted into bigger, almost philosophical, territory.

Debt.
Capacity.
Adaptation.
Uncertainty.

At one point, Aitor used a financial analogy that I think will resonate far beyond sport. You can drive the Lamborghini without having the money. But that’s called debt. And eventually, the bank shows up with the bill.

The body works the same way.

You can overspend training load.
You can overspend psychological stress.
You can overspend social comparison and external validation.
You can even overspend carbohydrate intake without the mitochondrial capacity to use it.

For a while, it might look impressive. But eventually, the bill arrives.

One of the most important themes in this discussion was the order of operations.

Modern culture wants hacks. It wants fueling strategies before it wants fitness. It wants 120 grams per hour before it wants 10 years of aerobic base. It wants metabolic flexibility through food restriction rather than through movement.

But, as Aitor points out…

“mitochondria don’t grow because you eat avocados". They grow because you move. Because you stress the system. Because you created demand and then recovered from it.

Capacity first. Resources second.

That hierarchy matters.

Fueling is powerful. In the right context, it’s performance-defining. But fueling without capacity is noise. Or worse — it’s additional stress layered onto a system that already lacks adaptability.

We also explored something that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in sport science: the energetic cost of modern life.

The brain is expensive. Uncertainty is expensive. Social comparison is expensive.

When you’re arguing with your spouse, worrying about contracts, refreshing social media, or trying to live inside the gap between expectations and capacity, that energy isn’t free. It doesn’t exist in a separate psychological silo. It shows up in the physiology. In the tolerance to training. In recovery. In decision-making under fatigue.

The highest performance environments don’t just add more inputs. They remove noise. They reduce uncertainty. They conserve energy for what matters.

That may be one of the most transferable lessons from the Tour de France to everyday life.

We closed on metabolic flexibility — a term that is often misunderstood.

Metabolic Flexibility is not about restriction. It’s about building range & using the right substrate at the right time.

It’s the ability to flow between substrates depending on the demands placed upon you. To burn predominantly fat at low intensities and shift decisively into carbohydrate when the moment calls for it. To be metabolically calm when nothing is required and explosively responsive when everything is.

That adaptability is not built through dogma. It’s built through exposure. Through intelligent intensity distribution. Through respecting the energy budget.

And ultimately, through humility.

Managing your energy is managing your life.

That’s true whether you’re racing the Tour de France or simply trying to show up well for your family and your work.

We hope that the conversation with Aitor strikes you in the same profound way that it did us, and hopefully leads to you examining your own energy in more depth…

• What are you currently working with?

• Does your current nutrition reflect that?

• Where are your current “energy leaks”

• How can you build more energy in your life?

If you’d like to go even deeper into the concepts of energy budgets, fueling limits, capacity building, and the psychology of performance mentioned in the podcast, please check out ‘s interview with Aitor below…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

You Don’t Have a Nutrition Problem: You Have an Energy Problem

Endurance nutrition has a conceptual problem…

Read more

5 months ago · 19 likes · 4 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

Ample Movement 🚶
Healthy Nutrition 👨‍🍳
Low-Stress Living 🧘

Remove one… and the whole structure begins to fail.

You can’t out-diet a lack of movement.
You can’t power your body on low-octane fuel.
You can’t efficiently burn fat with chaotic stress hormones.

For foundational health, you need all three.

Metabolic Health Is About Flexibility, not Fitness

One of the most persistent misconceptions I see - both in athletes and in otherwise health-conscious individuals - is the belief that metabolic health is synonymous with body composition or aerobic fitness. In reality, metabolic health runs much deeper than either. It reflects how effectively the body regulates fuel supply, storage, and utilization across ever-changing energy demands…

At its core, metabolic health is about whether the body can supply the right fuel, at the right time, in the right amount, without instability or excessive hormonal cost.

In athletes with strong metabolic health, we typically see stable energy levels throughout the day, smooth transitions between intensities during training, and predictable recovery patterns. In contrast, metabolically fragile athletes often experience energy crashes, strong dependence on carbohydrate intake, inconsistent recovery, and difficulty sustaining training loads despite appearing outwardly “fit”.

And, make no mistake about it, good aerobic fitness coupled with very poor metabolic fitness and health is not uncommon…

There are many athletes out there with impressive VO2max numbers, with top-level threshold output, with single digit body-fat levels, who are in absolutely awful metabolic shape. I see it in the lab all the time…

One key way that we can assess metabolic fitness is to look at what fuel the athlete is burning at rest (and low-intensity efforts) – a very simple way to do this is to hook the athlete up to a metabolic cart, have them lie down, take a nap if they like 😊, and record their fuel burn while in a completely rested state.

And, when we do this, we often get some surprises…

Athletes who put up really strong values on the VO2max test, often put up really abysmal values in the resting metabolic test, i.e. it is not uncommon to see athletes with VO2max values of 60ml/kg/min or more who are dependent on getting 60% of their resting energy requirements from carbohydrate!

These are typically the type of athlete who gets their impressive fitness from excessive intensity rather than volume – always reinforcing one particular energy system – glycolysis.

They are the type of athlete who (often because of this training bias) overeats carbohydrate – both within and away from training…

Read more

This Substack isn’t about hacks, workouts of the week, or chasing the latest fad. It’s about proven long-term athletic development - staying healthy, capable, and improving for decades, not just seasons.

Everything I write here is guided by a small set of principles I’ve arrived at over the past 30 years working as an exercise physiologist and coach with athletes ranging from “off the couch” to world champions.

Rather than starting chronologically, this post will point you to the pieces that best explain how I think - and why the rest of the archive looks the way it does.

The core principles behind everything here

At a high level:

• Movement is medicine, to be taken over the lifespan

• Training works when the right dose is applied at the right time

• The right dose is highly individual and shaped by life stress

• Consistency beats heroics

• Aerobic volume is the foundation; intensity is a tool

• Robust athletes are built through variety, strength, recovery, and restraint

If those ideas resonate, you’ll feel at home here.

1. Why living an athletic life matters (beyond performance)

These pieces explain why I view athletic training not as a phase of life, but as a lifelong practice tied to health, resilience, and identity.

• Chapter 1: The Importance of Living an Athletic Life
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-1-athletic-development-through

• Your Whole Day is a Workout, and These are Your Zones
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/your-whole-day-is-a-workout-and-these

• A Day in the Life of Perfect Health

  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/a-day-in-the-life-of-perfect-health

2. First principles of training (the backbone)

Most disagreements about training come from arguing individual protocols without understanding universal principles.

• First, Principles – The Key Ingredients in Any Successful Training Plan
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-2-first-principles

• The Foundation of Fitness – Building a Strong Base
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-4-the-foundation-of-fitness

3. Individual response: why the same plan doesn’t work for everyone

One of the biggest mistakes in endurance sport is assuming the “right” plan works for everyone.

• How Do Athletes Differ in Training Response?
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-9-are-you-responding-to-your

• Rise Stronger – A Comprehensive Guide
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/rise-stronger-a-comprehensive-guide

4. Metrics, HRV, and readiness (how to interpret signals)

Data is useful - but only if you know how to interpret it correctly.

• Weekly Planning to Maximize Readiness
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/weekly-planning-to-maximize-readiness

• Understanding HRV on the Next Level
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/taking-your-understanding-of-hrv

5. Consistency, restraint, and why people stall

Most athletes don’t fail because of physiology or genetics - they fail because of impatience.

• It’s Time to Get Real About the Work Required
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/its-time-to-get-real-about-the-work

• The Importance of Knowing - and Sticking - to Your Training Zones
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-knowing-and-sticking

• Commitment
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/commitment

6. Longevity: where this all leads

Zooming out beyond performance to what really matters…

• Getting Real About Longevity: What’s actually going to take you out?

  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/getting-real-about-longevity-whats

• Relationships Between Ageing and Training
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-1-athletic-development-through

• Recovery, Lifestyle & Stress Management
  https://alancouzens.substack.com/p/chapter-24-case-studies-of-athletic

How to use this archive going forward

You don’t need to read everything.

But if you understand the ideas above, you’ll be able to place new posts - and your own training decisions - in context.

When you’re unsure where to go next, ask yourself:

• Am I sticking to the universal, proven principles?

• Am I misreading signals?

• Am I trying to rush something that takes time?

Chances are, the answer already exists somewhere here.

Want to go deeper - or share the journey?

If you’re looking for a place to apply these ideas, ask questions, and share the ups and downs of training over the long term, that’s exactly what the MADcrew forum is for.

It’s a small, thoughtful community of athletes who care about:

• Long-term development over quick wins

• Health and performance co-existing

• Doing the work, consistently, without noise

Many of the ideas in this Substack are discussed, debated, and refined there - often with real-world context from athletes at different stages of their journey.

You can learn more about the forum here:
👉 https://forum.madcrew.app

If Substack is where the ideas are laid out, the forum is where they’re lived.

Final note

This Substack isn’t a collection of tips.

It’s a long-form argument for a particular way of thinking about athletic development - shaped by decades of applied work, real athletes, and a strong bias toward health and longevity.

Start with the pieces above. The rest will follow naturally.

Let’s walk this long-term athletic journey together 🙏

If you spend any amount of time in the modern health and performance space, it’s easy to believe that longevity is hiding inside the next supplement stack, wearable metric, or cold plunge protocol.

The noise is loud.
The solutions are often complicated.
And increasingly… they miss the point.

In this episode of Mad Science Meets Real Life, we sat down with orthopedic surgeon, endurance athlete, and longevity thinker Dr. Howard Luks to talk about what actually moves the needle when it comes to staying athletic, healthy, and functional across an entire lifespan.

What emerged from the conversation wasn’t a new hack or a novel protocol. In fact, it was almost the opposite.

Longevity, performance durability, and long-term health appear to come back to a small set of remarkably simple — but surprisingly neglected — principles.

Movement.
Metabolic health.
Consistency.
Purpose.
Connection.

One of the most powerful themes Howard explores is the idea that many of the musculoskeletal problems we typically label as “wear and tear” are, in reality, reflections of deeper metabolic and lifestyle dysfunction. Joint pain, tendon pain, declining physical capacity, and even vulnerability to injury are often less about structural breakdown and more about the biological environment in which our tissues exist.

For athletes, this reframing is important.

It challenges the deeply ingrained belief that high performance and long-term health are competing goals. Instead, it suggests that when training is approached correctly - with appropriate intensity distribution, adequate recovery, and long-term consistency - performance and longevity are not opposing forces, but mutually reinforcing ones.

Another key idea we explore is the shift that occurs as athletes age. Early in our athletic journeys, success is often measured by peak numbers: faster splits, higher power outputs, larger VO₂max values. But over time, the real markers of athletic success become the ability to continue showing up, to maintain metabolic flexibility, and to preserve functional capacity decade after decade.

In short:

The goal quietly evolves from maximizing performance…
to sustaining capability.

Howard also speaks candidly about something rarely addressed in training conversations - the psychological and social dimensions of healthspan. Movement is not just a physiological stimulus; it is often a stabilizing force for mental health, identity, and purpose. The athletes who remain active for life rarely view training as preparation for a single race or season. They build lives where movement is integrated into their daily existence.

They don’t just train.

They live athletically.

In a world increasingly drawn toward optimization through gadgets, protocols, and edge-case interventions, this conversation is a reminder that the highest-leverage actions are often the most foundational ones…

Move regularly.
Eat in a way that supports metabolic health.
Sleep enough to recover.
Cultivate meaningful relationships.
And maintain a reason to keep showing up.

Simple does not mean easy.
But it does mean effective.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did recording it.

To dive in deeper, be sure to check out ‘s interview with Dr. Luks…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Fitness Decade to Decade: What Works, What Doesn’t, and How to Train for Longevity

He’s not training for a race. He’s training for his 80s…

Read more

a year ago · 33 likes · 2 comments · Iñaki de la Parra and Howard Luks MD

Along with his substack…

Built to Move, Born to Heal: Notes on Midlife Fitness

A physician /longevity author's take on midlife health, movement, and resilience. I write about fitness, longevity, mindset, and the quiet cost of stillness. Sometimes, it is orthopedic and always focused on living stronger—on purpose.

By Howard Luks MD

And, finally, for more real-world wisdom, be sure to check out Howard’s great book - Longevity… simplified

https://www.amazon.com/Longevity-Simplified-Healthier-Shouldnt-Complicated/dp/B0B2BWSWHH/ref=sr_1_1

But are athletes actually getting better because of it?

In this episode of Mad Science Meets Real Life, we sit down with -founder of HRV4Training, coach, researcher, and long-time skeptic of simplistic wearable “scores” - to strip HRV back to what it really is: a window into your stress response, not a command to train harder or easier.

We dig into:

• Why morning HRV beats overnight HRV if you care about training decisions

• Why high HRV can be a warning sign, not a green light

• Why you can feel great on low HRV days — and still be digging a hole

• Why HRV is better at predicting training response than training performance

• And why trends matter far more than any single number

Then we take a sharp turn into metabolism - where Marco & I compare notes on athletes showing very poor fat burning, despite years of endurance training (Spoiler: us!)

For Marco, that discovery triggered a year-long experiment:

• Can fat oxidation actually be trained?

• Do you need keto to do it?

• How much do genetics vs diet really matter?

• And how do you improve fat burning without killing glycolytic power?

The answer, unsurprisingly, isn’t extremes — but metabolic flexibility, small dietary shifts, and smarter fueling aligned with the work you’re doing.

If you’re an endurance athlete who:

• Tracks HRV but isn’t sure how to use it

• Feels confused when the data doesn’t match how you feel

• Bonks more than you think you should

• Or wants performance gains without going full biohacker

…this conversation will likely change how you think about both recovery and fueling.

🎧 Listen in, and bring your assumptions with you - they may not survive the episode.

For more detail on some of the points that we cover in the chat, be sure to check out this one from

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Forget Readiness Scores: Real Coaching, Data and Self-Awareness

We live in a time where athletes know everything: except themselves…

Read more

7 months ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · Iñaki de la Parra and Marco Altini

And this one from me…

Thanks for tuning in 🙏

It’s that time of year again—athletes are building their plans for 2026. Calendars fill up quickly: big races, aggressive build phases, and ambitious goals that feel exciting right now, but quietly assume the body will adapt on our preferred timeline.

Many will gently push to the back of their minds that truthful old saying…

“We overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.”

Well, I’ve got some good news for you, if you do it right, it’s not going to take a decade, but it is going to take multiple years of sensibly aggressive loading.

What do I mean by sensibly aggressive?

The biggest area where folks go wrong with their Annual Plans is listening to the “common wisdom” and shooting for WAY too aggressive load ramp rates. In terms of pure volume this would be things like the ridiculous “10% per week” rule. You don’t need to be a mathematician to see where this goes. Played out over months, these rules imply absurd outcomes - athletes progressing from “off the couch” to elite-level training loads in under half a year. That’s not aggressive. That’s fantasy. Or, in terms of Chronic Training Load, the often touted and similarly ridiculous 5-10 CTL per week ramp rates. Yeah, over the long-term, that’s just not happening!

So, what is realistic?

Read more

In this wide ranging conversation with my co-host , we unpack why strength training isn’t just about performance, but about survival - of your season, your body, and ultimately your athletic life.

We dig into the oft-misunderstood balance between anabolism and catabolism, why endurance athletes quietly spend most of the year tearing themselves down, and why failing to deliberately rebuild muscle is one of the biggest long-term mistakes athletes can make!

You’ll hear why the off-season is not the best time to diet, why chasing relative VO₂max can sabotage durability, and why the gym routines most endurance athletes follow look suspiciously like the worst possible match for their sport. We contrast traditional strength-athlete thinking with what endurance athletes actually need: aerobic muscle, durability, connective-tissue resilience, and long-term work capacity.

The episode also lays out a clear, practical framework for strength periodization across the year — from prehab and aerobic strength, through max strength, to race-specific muscular endurance - with real examples of sessions that have been used successfully for elite Ironman and long-course athletes over many years.

If you’ve ever:

• Felt fit but fallen apart late in races

• Plateaued despite “doing all the work”

• Lost weight, only to lose robustness with it

• Or wondered why injuries keep repeating season after season

…this conversation will probably make you rethink how you approach strength training entirely.

Muscle moves things. Over a barbell. Over a marathon. And over a lifetime.
This episode is all about making sure you don’t lose it.

Contents…

00:00–03:00 — Why Strength Matters More Than You Think
Alan and Iñaki frame the conversation: strength not as a performance add-on, but as a foundation for long-term health and durability in endurance athletes.

alan-couzenss-studio-7vvvv_msmr…

03:00–08:30 — Anabolism vs Catabolism in Endurance Sport
Why endurance training pushes athletes into chronic catabolism, how aging accelerates this process, and why rebuilding muscle each year is non-negotiable.

08:30–13:30 — The Off-Season Weight-Loss Trap
Why cutting calories while lifting sabotages anabolism, and why “getting lean in winter” often backfires later in the season.

13:30–18:30 — Thinking in Multi-Year Cycles (Not Seasons)
How repeated catabolic seasons compound into injury, burnout, and stalled progress — and why elite development requires a 4–5 year lens.

18:30–22:30 — Absolute vs Relative VO₂max
Why chasing watts/kg or ml·kg⁻¹·min⁻¹ can shrink the engine, and why absolute aerobic capacity matters more than most athletes realize.

22:30–27:30 — Why Most Gym Work Doesn’t Transfer
The mismatch between typical “strength training” and endurance needs, and the importance of building aerobic muscle rather than anaerobic bulk.

27:30–32:00 — Prehab Before Rehab
Why injury prevention must come before performance work, and how daily mobility and stability work protects training capacity.

32:00–36:30 — Prep Phase: Building the Foundation
What the early-season prep phase should look like, how long it lasts, and why most athletes rush through it too quickly.

36:30–41:30 — Aerobic Strength: The Missing Middle
Detailed discussion of aerobic strength sessions, including long circuits, continuous movement, and heart-rate–controlled lifting.

41:30–46:00 — Bodyweight & Dumbbell Circuits Explained
Walkthrough of key aerobic strength workouts (lunges, push-ups, rows, step-ups), why the loads feel “too light,” and why they work.

46:00–49:30 — Max Strength: Benefits and Risks
When max strength fits, what it’s really for (economy, neuromuscular recruitment), and why it’s the riskiest phase to get wrong.

49:30–53:30 — Muscular Endurance & Race Specificity
How strength transitions into race-specific durability, over-gearing, hill work, and why gym work still matters late in the season.

53:30–57:30 — Gaining Muscle Takes Time (Years, Not Weeks)
Why meaningful lean mass gains require long timelines, proper fueling, and restraint — especially for athletes over 40.

57:30–1:01:00 — Weight vs Fat: A Crucial Distinction
Why “lighter” isn’t always better, how muscle protects health and performance, and why endurance athletes fear weight unnecessarily.

1:01:00–1:04:30 — Final Takeaways
Strength as a lifetime investment, simple sessions done consistently, and the reminder that muscle is the foundation everything else is built on.

To dive in deeper, please check out…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Build a Body That’s Hard to Kill = Lifelong Strength + Endurance

If you want a body and a life where you are actually capable you need a simple system…

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6 months ago · 35 likes · 6 comments · Iñaki de la Parra

from and…

from moi.

Thanks, as always, for tuning in!

Endurance athletes often think of strength training as something optional - a supplement to the “real” work of swim, bike, and run. But, the physiological reality is the opposite: muscle moves things. Whether that “thing” is a barbell in the gym or your body over the course of an Ironman, it is the muscle that makes it happen.

For example, if you are a cyclist whose goal is to one day push a 53-12 gear at 90 rpm over a full 40k Time-Trial, the first and foremost requirement is that you have the strength to push a 53-12 gear - period! The next would be that you have the muscular endurance to push the 53-12 gear over 40km. Then the final stage would be that you have the aerobic fitness to push that gear at 90 rpm (without being limited by acidosis) over the course of the race. But it all starts with strength! If all you ever do in training is push a 39-15 (a much easier gear), you will simply never develop the muscle required to push the larger gear. In this sense, everything begins with strength.

In the words of physiologist Georg Neumann…

“For endurance sports, the development of aerobic strength-endurance is a performance reserve, for only this guarantees an increase in forward propulsion.”

That is, at a fundamental, mechanical level, it takes a certain amount of muscle to generate the force required to overcome a given resistance – whether pulling your body through the water, or generating the torque to push a given gear on the bike, or generating the required power to move your body mass x amount of meters per stride. Fundamentally…

“If you don’t have enough muscle to produce the power required to do what you want to do, you’re just not going to be able to do it.”

Of course, as endurance athletes, our real challenge becomes doing that thing repeatedly over very long durations, and for this, the quality of the muscle matters – the amount of mitochondria that we have per unit of muscle so that we can generate the energy aerobically, the ability of those mitochondria to make use of free fatty acids, so that we don’t prematurely deplete glycogen etc. – we’ll come to the importance of maintaining the aerobic quality of your muscle in a bit. But, at the root level, it all begins with having sufficiently large & strong muscle fibers that can overcome competitive levels of resistance.

What makes this fact especially important for endurance athletes, and something that really needs to be understood, is that our training tends to be chronically catabolic. High-volume aerobic work tears down tissues, consumes not just dietary energy but also structural components of the body, and, over the years, can gradually erode the very musculature needed to stay healthy and competitive! Plainly…

“Your typical serious endurance athlete spends a lot of the year in a catabolic state where the body is focused on using what it has to create energy. If this isn’t balanced out with regular time in an anabolic state, over time the athlete loses that muscle reserve needed to become better.”

This is why a well-timed anabolic phase - where we consciously focus on building the tissue back up - is such an important and all-too-often neglected part of every year.

Yet, many endurance athletes short-change this - year after year, making the mistake of coming out of the off-season believing it’s the perfect time to lose weight. They feel guilty after Christmas indulgences and resolve to do the standard New Years’ Resolution thing - cutting calories while increasing their gym intensity - a perfect recipe for blocking the very anabolic adaptations they assume they’re chasing. As my good buddy, puts it…

“If you’re still putting the work in the gym but not eating enough, there will not be any anabolism!”

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This is, without question, one of the deepest and most open conversations ever recorded with the coach who built the “Norwegian Method” from the ground up.

What We Cover

• The origin story - 2010 to Bermuda 2018
How a tiny country with barely a dozen junior triathletes created a pipeline that produced Blumenfelt, Iden, Stornes, and Solveig. Arild explains the early camps, the unknown teenagers he first met, and the eight-year runway that led to the Bermuda breakout.

• High volume, very low intensity - the real foundation
Why the Norwegians were doing huge aerobic volumes at intensities so low they were laughed at. The importance of 1.0 mmol training. And why running 5:30/km (and slower!) is not just allowed, but essential.

• Threshold - what it really means
Arild breaks down LT1 vs LT2 and why their “threshold” is dramatically lower than what most endurance athletes think. We talk about:
– true LT1 around 0.8–1.0 mmol
– LT2 around ~2.3–2.7 mmol
– why 4 mmol is basically a random historical artifact
– why most athletes’ “easy” is too hard and their “threshold” is way too hard

• Consistency vs intensity
Why amateurs burn themselves out with 10hrs of “kind of hard” instead of 20hrs of “properly easy.”
How the Norwegian model builds durability and repeatability.
How to think in terms of energy budgeting, not time budgeting.

• Talent development vs talent selection
This is maybe the biggest philosophical difference. Arild explains why:
– Norway didn’t cut kids early
– They developed personality traits, not race times
– Swimming, running, and triathlon often filter talent out, not develop it
– Why giving athletes the time and space to properly develop is the real superpower

• Building an environment where athletes can succeed for 20 years
How Kristian, Gustav, and Casper have stayed healthy and motivated for so long.
How Arild handled motivation, mental load, team dynamics, and letting athletes mature without pressure.
The importance of fun, group culture, and truly knowing the person behind the athlete.

• The mistakes — and what Arild would do differently
Including a great story about over-training the day after the Bermuda podium sweep.
And how they learned to taper less, not more.

• What other sports can learn — including swimming
Arild’s new role with Norwegian Swimming and why he believes the same principles apply:
– keep the aerobic work simple
– stop trying to make every session “interesting”
– avoid early specialization traps
– build technical mastery without losing the base

Who This Episode Is For

• Coaches who want a deeper understanding of the physiology (not the Instagram version) behind the Norwegian method.

• Serious age-groupers who struggle with consistency or always train “a little too hard.”

• Anyone curious about how a small nation engineered one of the most successful endurance systems on earth.

Core Message

High performance is not built on magic intervals or proprietary protocols — it’s built on:
patience, volume, group culture, consistency, and years of truly easy training.

This episode lays out exactly how that system was built.

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For more on Arild & the Norwegian approach, please check out ‘s great post here…

Iñaki’s de la Parra Substack

Why Norway Wins: The Real Principles Behind Arild Tveiten’s Revolution

This comes from a rare and unusually personal interview Arild Tveiten shared with me. I’m grateful for his honesty and generosity, and I hope these insights help you on your own path…

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7 months ago · 55 likes · 8 comments · Iñaki de la Parra