With Mark’s many years working as the physiologist to British Triathlon’s Olympic programme, few coaches have as much experience using the information and data generated from lab testing.
In this series, Mark will explore the process we use at ITT to identify the key areas for athletes we coach to work on and follow up with some in-depth examples of how the information is used in planning and programming.
In this first video in the series, Mark takes coached Pro and superstar assistant coach Sam Proctor into the lab at Loughborough University for his run test. In the second instalment, we will repeat the process for the bike.
If you have enjoyed this video and our coaching process is of interest to you, you can follow this link here to book a no-obligation enquiry to find out further information: https://itt.world/bookings
Huge thanks to @willmunday8843 for all his editing skills!
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#runningperformance #runtest #scientifictriathlon #fitness #fitnessgoals #fitnessjourney #garmin #running #triathlonpro #protriathlete
Hi I’m Mark Pierce intelligent Tron training today we are here at luery University again doing some lab testing with with Sam but first a little bit of background so as this is my first Vlog in a very long time thought i’ set the scene a little bit so uh I’m a triathon
Coach uh I was physiologist for British triathon for 10 years before moving into coaching so I worked through Athens and Beijing Olympics as sport scientist performance scientist then moved into coaching and coach um Lucy hall now Buckingham at London 2012 Olympics uh before moving into what I’m doing now
Which is working uh on intelligent trm training and doing more long distance and Iron Man coaching as well as still coaching a few IU athletes as well and we coach a mixture of pros and age groupers but anyway that’s enough about me let’s see what we’re going to be
Doing today so we are heading into the performance center here wherever it’s gone there it is there’s the front door uh and we’ve got Sam hello we are heading in for a um run laab test so we’ll go through that in a little bit more detail when we get in
There so here we go Sam’s gotten cracking so we’re on the second stage of the test now so we’re looking at 6 Minute stages on this starting from 11k an hour going up by 8 of a k an hour each stage uh at the end of each stage
He stops briefly has a blood sample taken from his ear and and which we measure blood lactate levels what we should see in the early stages is nice flat line so blood lactate levels aren’t going to change significantly uh he’s also got the mask on which is collecting
His expired air so we’re looking at oxygen carbon dioxide levels and from that we can calculate things like fat oxidization and carbohydrate oxidization rates at any particular intensity which we can evaluate afterwards make some decisions that will help us to inform what type of training he might do uh
Might need to do in terms of to maximize his performance in his Iron Man is 70.3 racing we’re also looking at things like running economy uh so Sam’s uh I’ve been coaching Sam for a long time but we’ve never actually been in the lab we never
Had the opportunity to be able to do it um and so we don’t really know precisely what things like running economy look like now we’ve used stride a lot so we’ll be getting stride data for from a power meter which also does incorporate things like uh running efficiency metric
And so we do get running economy from that uh but I’d also like to know what it actually is under the lab conditions and we can correlate that then with whether we might need to do more explosive weight training or resistance training as it’s the most effective uh
Way of improving things like running economy we’ll then do once he’s finished this this will take about an hour to do he have about 20 minute recovery and then he will do his max test which is a a fast ramp 10 to 15 minutes basically take him through till he literally falls
Off the treadmill that’s really part and part of it because if we only have the submax data it only gives a part of the picture now you’ve probably heard some of the stuff about BL and Feld 100 Ms per kilo V2 Max that’s all well and good
But if you’re only if blumenfeld’s a great athlete don’t get me wrong but if he’s only competing with guys who have got 80 mes per kilo V2 Max his running efficiency or his cycling efficiency must be horrific um so in my mind shouting about having a huge great V2
Max is nothing great shakes because you’re clearly missing something somewhere else the only other types of athletes I’ve tested and seen done like that generally have uh with huge v2x generally have relatively poor running economies for instance now VH Max is not going to be the limiting factor here
It’s how efficient they are and so that gives us a really good Insight then into what we would do with the training side of things now in Sam’s case I suspect running economy is not going to be too bad uh but actually what we want to try
And do excuse me is lift that capacity a lot more now does this apply is it is this only for pros no not really we’ve uh if you watched any of our Instagram stuff we’ve had quite a few of our amateur age group athletes coming through doing lab testing recently uh
Because it’s equally valued for them uh so all the information that we can get from this can help direct the programs the athletes we coach don’t all have a standard template of what they do and then you know this time of the year we
Do this and this time of year we do that it’s all based upon what their individual responses are and individual characteristics are we’ve got some athletes who are uh very aerobic uh do a lot of volume um and we’ve got athletes who are maybe in the same sort of level
Of performance but that type of training isn’t where their weaknesses are or where where the the sort of area that suits them so they’re doing more quality more high intensity more polarized training if you like um but not all year round so those training methodologies if
We want to come back in and retest this uh again in a few months time we might see that we’ve uh made some changes to something we’ve adapted this or we’ve adapted that now the bit that was a weakness is not such so much of a weakness anymore and we need to change
The training stimulus and that might mean we go from a polarized model to a pyramidal model or vice versa even or a high volume lowens model it just depends upon what the results show and what the athletes characteristics are at that particular moment in time and how we go
Forward with it so in a couple of weeks time we’ve got a few more athletes coming in um so some who’ve not been in before some who have been in before so it’ be interesting to see the the differences for them and uh we will be
Able to give you a bit more insight into what we’re doing then obviously Sam is one of our coached athletes and coaches then what we’re going to do after this video so another video we’re going to actually go through the results we you what the data looks like and we’ll talk
A little bit about how we’re going to use that information in his training so if you’re interested follow along supposed to say things like press the like button or the follow button or whatever it is I don’t know where they are um I’m still getting used to this
Game so do that if you want to find out what’s happening next so we’ve now gone we’re now on 15.9 K per hour or 239 marathon pace the last stage was about 248 marathon pace which was ever slightly slower than he did in Hamburg in the Iron Man
Last year and what we’ve seen sort of in that previous stage is lactate levels are now starting to just a creep up from Baseline so he’s been pretty much around one plus or minus a very small amount all the way through the last one crept
Up to 1.2 what we should see now on this next stage is that red and blue line over here starting to creep a little bit closer to each other than they have done so as you can see from the previous stages they’re all pretty much sort of
The same distance apart as everything is pretty much all under control now as the control starts to go a little bit then we’ll see those two lines close up and what we’d see from over here is with the lactate analyzers then what we’ll see from the data from that will be uh
Slightly higher increase still under control still sustainable but it is going to start to get to escalate rather rapidly now I suspect now some athletes might have quite a big gap between first and second threshold other athletes don’t my got feeling is that Sam will be a little bit closer one of those
Athletes with a less gap between first and second threshold he’s very welld developed aerobically uh but because of the the pre well his profile his preference for racing his second threshold is not as high as other athletes might be and uh and therefore whereas his first threshold is therefore that gap between
The two is a little bit less okay so we’re now 17 1/2 K an hour and we went through first threshold around 15 we’ll look at the data properly later to to get a bit of a a better feedback on it as we can see on here now see that red
Line starting to creep up much closer to the blue line and we can see the re respiratory exchange ratio is starting to increase it’s gone up from sort of in the uh8 now we’re the N we’re getting close to the end of this stage so very shortly they’re going to be taking the
Blood lactate sample and we’ll see where we’re at from that but uh I suspect we are we’re not at threshold second threshold but we’re getting closer now so we probably maybe got one possibly two more stages to go so we just finished 18 and 1 half K an hour so
Sam’s thinking yeah that’s probably it that’s around the threshold we’re going to wait and see we’re going to do process of blood lactate sample then we’re going to make him start the next one but we’re not going to go up in 08 because we’re pretty confident that
Threshold is going to be very very close to where we are point8 would just not be probably achievable or beneficial so we’re going to go up84 for the of a kilm per hour for the final St Ag and we’ll start him off on it but if the data
Comes back from the lactates uh then that suggests that yes we’re clearly over that second threshold then we’ll stop stop him if if it’s a bit dubious if we’d like to see the end and if he can make it through to the end of that that stage then we’ll go for that full
Stage and then give him a bit of a rest before he starts his max test I’m probably not going to be too popular with that uh last statement to be fair so uh he was expecting to get to this stage I think so sometimes you just got
Got to push a little bit more if the data looks good if the testing looks good Fitness looks good recovery’s come well from his Camp maybe he’s in a little bit better shape than he thought he was but thresold isn’t an easy Pace but it’s not a super hard position Pace
Either turns out Sam was right all along athletes no so we did we did the lactate came back it’s clearly broken it’s clearly gone through the roof um and we are now over second threshold on that space so we don’t need to continue the
Test on to try and kill him so we want to save a little bit for the max test and we know we’ve got the information that we’re going to need uh from the submax test now so can have a bit of a breather uh a little bit of a refuel and
Get ready for hell so we’ve now started the max test and uh running at constant speed so he’s going to sit at 16k an hour and the gradient is going to increase every minute by 1% uh until he falls off the back wow maybe not falls
Off the back but uh has move his hands down stop because he can’t keep up with it so we’re clearly only looking for one thing from this which is the maximum aerobic capacity he got so V2 backs so we can then set where the ceiling to performances and then from the submax
Test we’ve got the bits the layers that fill in in beneath that what we can see from the submax test so far is that actually first threshold is pretty robust and welld developed second threshold if you wanted to race middle at middle distance or standard distance
Even would not be sufficient to to race super quick whereas uh the first threshold is he’s not far off his Hamburg shape from last year where he ran 240 low 240s I think 245 for for the marathon um so we’re probably not in dissimilar shape to that um but if
You’ve only got the ceiling if you only look at V2 Max isn’t going to tell you a great deal you only look at thresholds it gives you a bit more information but it still only tells you a bit of the story you don’t get the whole picture
And you can’t use the information to to make good decisions about your training and or what types of training you’re going to need to do in the future to to maximize your performance so in theory we can look at the data we get from this we can look at things like the running
Economy we can look at data he uses from his stride to see how robust he is over long durations because uh and we can use this to calculate what sort of time we can expect him to run now if we just look at where the threshold is it
Doesn’t tell you what the the robustness is the fatigue resistance if you like so in theory he might be able to run X for whatever distance but we need to know and the lab won’t tell us this um because we don’t test to to exhaustion um we can we need that robustness from
The training data we need the sort of um the the the factors that we have for that to be able to calculate how much drop off there is likely to be from the straight performance to a my man performance for instance or from a 5k performance to a to a marathon
Performance all of these sorts of things mean that when we go to race and then we try not to get too many surprises we know what performance we know what power he can hold um and with best will in the world long distance and middle distance racing is
It’s not about going with the race I don’t subscribe to this Theory you’ve got to be in it to win it if you go out at Paces that or powers that you cannot sustain funnily enough you’re going to die so for me as coach understanding what athletes capable of we go to races
Knowing that this should be possible now it can go wrong um and it can be compromised by a bunch of other things weather the conditions the nutrition strategy goes perap or um you know you lose bottles you lose nutrition or for some reason it doesn’t settle on you
Very well but we shouldn’t suddenly find out oh wow so and so’s gone 10 minutes faster than they ever gone before because it can’t happen U because we know the the data in the training and we know the performances that they’re capable of uh that for me gives a lot of the athletes
Confidence that what they’re doing is achievable so they can go to a race with a plan knowing that that is possible they might have to adapt they might have to be a bit flexible during it but it is possible St go up again now really ni% now really good work good Stuff this is where it counts now really want to get everything out don’t leave anything the time keep driving good work go we’re nearly there there we go boom about 9 minutes I think he lasted good Job there we go that is the Run testing from the lab D so we he now he’s now off for a little twim and we’ll be back on Wednesday it’s now Monday uh back on Wednesday for his bike test which follows pretty similar routine uh so the test Protocols are not dramatically
Different we’re going to do a couple of little uh extra things around it but um we’ll have a look at that on Wednesday
1 Comment
Mark is a great coach, can highly recommend!