The Training Volume Myth: Why More Isn't Better

TDP 356 – The Training Volume Myth: Why More Isn't Better

Andrew: Welcome to the show. Today we are talking about endurance sports training, specifically covering how to train better with our running and our triathloning instead of just training more. And so this conversation will get pushed out to our tried folks and our RunDot folks. So I'm here, Andrew, host of the TriDot Podcast, and Carrie is here, host of the RunDot Podcast. How are you, Carrie?

Carrie: Doing well. We're in a heat wave here in the Midwest. So we are feeling summer like crazy, but I sort of love it. I love getting my sweat on and my run and feeling that humidity. But it's not just about me today. We have our guest, Jeff Booher, the founder and CEO of Predictive Fitness, the company behind RunDot Training, TriDot Training, and so much more. Jeff, thanks for coming back on the show.

Andrew: Are you?

Jeff: Yeah, I'm super glad to be here. It's kind of funny. I'm freezing. I'm indoor. We have air conditioning and hearing all the people come over for the World Cup talking about how great the AC is, you know, and a lot of our counterparts over in the UK, they don't have air conditioning. They're sweating inside. And so I I gotta be careful how much I I complain about the heat since we get to come into air conditioning all the time. So but excited about it. So it's gonna be hot topic.

Carrie: Ha ha Right. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah, so Jeff and I Je hot topic. Jeff and I are both in Texas, right? And so for Texas, we're just having a normal summer and everybody else is having a heat wave. So sorry everybody else that you're experiencing a Texas like summer wherever you are.

Carrie: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's it's been fun though to have summer. But we're gonna get going here. And so, like always, we're gonna start with our warm-up question, move into the main set learning from Jeff, and then we'll ask Jeff an audience question on the cooldown. Lots of good stuff, so let's get after it.

Andrew: Runners and tri athletes are often fans of all sorts of sports, and it can be quite the experience to see a top-tier sporting event live in person. For our warm-up question today, what sporting event sits at the tippy top of your bucket list to attend as a spectator? So obviously, this is something that you would like to go see but have never seen in person before. Jeff Booher, what is this answer for you?

Jeff: I don't know, I love I love sports in general. I did all the sports growing up, every everyone that was available to me that I knew about, growing up in Texas. But I think I've been to track meets before for sure, but I would love to go to the Olympics and see track the four by one hundred or four by four hundred relays. My dad took me to the Goodwill Games back in I think ninety, nineteen ninety or so, and I saw Carl Lewis run the anchor leg for the South and the Goodwill Games and it was so electric. It was incredible. I I just remember it to this day, you know, that being thirty something years ago now. But it is incredible. I'd love to go to the Olympics and see the countries, you know, in the finals of the four by one, four by four, something like that. That would be pretty cool.

Carrie: It is cool. I was fortunate enough to be a spectator while I was commentating. So I was actually talking as we were watching, but to watch the four by ones and the four by fours, it is as electric as you would possibly think. but for me I was I was thinking about this. I have kind of two on the opposite spectrum. Like I'd love to go to Wimbledon. I like tennis. And Andrew, we know that you're a big tennis guy. I would like to go over there and check that out. I think it'd be so fun. You know, you get to see all the celebs from over there and but also watch some amazing tennis. But one of the other things I would really love to do is go to the final four. Like, that seems doable, right? It's here. But I feel like the final four, we get so into it and we get invested in that little bit of time. time in March and I think I definitely have to do it with my boys. Like Ruby's gotten to travel all over with me and go to cool events. And I think the final four for the boys, they would love it. Ruby would love it too, but that's something I feel like we Charlie and I have to take them to.

Andrew: Yep, really great picks. Would love to see you do that, Carrie. And you gotta post it to Insta when you do. Jeff, your opportunity is coming, my friend. LA28. All right. It's gonna be close. It'll be close by. I I'm starting I'm starting to see like I'm seeing like social media ads like heavy for like get tickets to LA28, get tickets for this, get tickets for that. Anyway, this answer for me,

Carrie: Yeah. Yes.

Jeff: I've probably already sold out everything. Pool.

Andrew: Even as recently as a few years ago, Jeff, I think my answer here might have been go to Kona and see the Iron Man World Championships in person. Well, thanks to working for TriDot, I have now seen the Iron Man World Championships in Kona in person multiple times. So I get to move on from that. I also saw the FIFA World Cup in person here recently in Dallas. So that that was would have been a candidate for me. I saw England versus Croatia. The very first, yeah, the very first game in Dallas, 4-2 game. It was very, very good. Electric atmosphere, bonker's atmosphere. Anyway, those are things I would have said in the past, but I've gotten to see in person now. So now my answer would be fly to Paris and see Roland Guerros in person. I might have carry said Wimbledon in the past, but I got to play on Red Clay for the first time ever, fairly recently. And so now I'm like, I kind of want to see the pros on Red Clay in person. My cheaper answer here, a cheaper plane flight instead of Dallas to Paris, let's go Dallas to Miami. I would love to see a Miami Dolphin game in person in Miami. I've grown up a Miami Dolphin fan. I grew up four hours north of Miami, where I lived as a as a as a kid, and just never made it down. We just never went four hours south for a Miami Dolphin game in person. I've seen the Dolphins play at Cowboy Stadium here in Dallas whenever they come out every four years or whatever, but I've never seen them at home in Miami and would love to. So that's my answer here. Yeah, okay, Carrie, a buddy of mine that we're getting off here, but a buddy of mine, he's my age, and he floated to me via text. He's like, Hey, how about for our fortieth birthdays? We go see all four tennis majors throughout the year. So fly to Melbourne, see the Australian Open, fly to London, see Wimbledon. he yes, well expensive financially and like, man, that's four weeks out of the year. Like you're watching tennis somewhere, like, I don't know. I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can swing that. I also have a fear of flying. So yeah. I I need the I need to make more money and have more PTO to do that. But anyway, we're gonna throw this question out to you, our audience. Make sure you're part of the I am TriDot Facebook group or the RunDot Facebook group. We're gonna throw this question out there. If you're watching us on Spotify or YouTube, write in the comments below. Answer the warm up question and let us know. Of all the sporting events worldwide, what is at the top of your bucket list to go see in person?

Carrie: Remember your boss is on this call. Your boss is on this call.

Jeff: Ha ha ha.

Andrew: Jeff, the last time the three of us sat down, we took apart the biggest lie in endurance training: that more miles, more training, more volume is automatically better for an athlete. For anyone that missed that episode, go listen to it. On both the TriDot Podcast and the RunDot Podcast, it is called Training's Biggest Lie. More is better. Today we're going to take that conversation one step further because, as we learned, more isn't better. more is better isn't just one belief. I personally, and the athletes that I know, I I've seen this show up differently at every stage in an athlete's life. I have friends that are brand new to endurance sports and they believe it. I've seen experienced age groupers around the races believe this. And we know that plenty of elite L athletes also believe this. and they'd each give you a different reason why they think more training is better for them. So, Jeff, walk us through this. Why does more is better? Feel true no matter where you are in your sporting journey.

Jeff: Well, one is to think about, we can, you know, walk through it through this conversation, but you know, it's not it's understanding understandable belief, I guess. It's not entirely false. We talked about before, like the more is better, better isn't always automatic. it it can happen sometimes, but it's always not the most efficient. Just adding more is never the most efficient way. So generally people that want to add more, they have an expectation that they want from that. Efficiency is first. And so when you're when you're working out, you know, more does prov pro produce better results, especially when you're starting from very little. And so that's one of the very first place. So my push pushback would be that better training produces more results, less injury or in less time with less injury. So that's the big thing. So the trap isn't that that more works. It's the l lesson that that people get from that. When you're a beginner, when you're first starting out, almost anything works because you're just starting you have you're you know far below your capacity. And so you add something, and so something in improves you from nothing. And so they learn that right then. So they can they conclude that more is the method. You keep adding more and you keep getting better. and then they carry that conclusion along for years after it stops being true. So they're no longer a beginner anymore. So we're just adding something to nothing and they're getting that improvement. Experienced age groupers, think about them, or if you're if you're one, think about you, you know, you have that same trap that that more is better mentality because you're looking at all the people. Who are faster than you. So you're looking at these big weeks by elites and assuming that that volume is the difference between you and them. If you just add the volume, then you're gonna be as fast as the elites are, you know? and so you kind of borrow that load from them, but they have a different body. They've been doing it longer, they have a different schedule, they have a different recovery profile, so they're able to do all these things. And that age grouper is kind of falling susceptible to the correlation effects. So there's a correlation between the higher volume of these, you know, more advanced age groupers or elites. And that's kind where the myth does the most damage, I guess, in dealing with people looking toward people ahead of them. Even the elites. Let's take the elites. they're caught in it too, because very few of them have optimized what they've had. So they've optimized maybe a little bit, but they start building up this tolerance, and everyone around them is bragging about how much they're doing. And over years, they have that huge tolerance and they start associating that that large load to what made them faster, but that's not what made them faster, sustained them. in that. And so the better thing to do is to reinvest some of the time, some of the more, and reinvest that with less training, but maybe more intense or just different training, but better. And so the per their perception or the perspective is different of every age or every stage as you age through the sport, but the trap is the same of just making that association that the more is is automatically better.

Andrew: And Jeff, that like that, you call it a trap. And it's so easy. I like I love that phrasing trap for this because no matter where you are in your sporting journey, you can see what other what other athletes are up to on something like Strava, or you know, often you listen to podcasts and you hear more experienced athletes talk about what they're doing in their training. Right. Like when I was a beginner, I would look at my training friends who were more experienced runners, more experienced triathletes. And I on Strava, I can see what their workouts are. I can see how many miles they're logging. I'm like, man, that's what I need to get to because everybody that's more experienced than me is there. And then you become an experienced runner, an experienced triathlete. And now you're not looking at other experienced triathletes, you're looking at what the pros are doing because, well, they're the professionals at this, right? So they're better than me. Or you're looking at like the elites in your own age group, right? The people winning and podiuming in your age group, and you're saying, Well, they're doing more miles than I am, so I need to be doing those many miles too. For me to get better and you get stuck in this trap of seeing what the people a little bit further along than you are doing and assuming that that means it's better.

Jeff: That's absolutely right. And you know, for me, in in think about your groups, you know, you're everyone's looking at someone else and benchmarking off of that and having that correlation effect. here's a correlation for you, though. And this is kind of to me, kind of where it ends the debate when talking with people, it's kind of a reality check. if more volume was the thing that produced high performance, then you wouldn't have any slow, high, high-volume athletes. But Everywhere you go, every training group that you're in, every club, ev everywhere, you're gonna see tons of people who are training a ton, huge volumes, but they stay slow. They're just these slow, they're methodical, they just keep doing it, but they're pounding out the high volume. So volume alone is not sufficient to improve your performance. And that's kind of where it is. It's not that more is not bad. It's just not first, it's not most optimal, and it's not the automatic path to improving your performance. And so like those athletes that are high volume, you're they're not lacking the intention, the effort, the commitment. You know, they want all those things. They want to get faster. They want to improve. They're putting in the effort, the time, the commitment, all of those things. But what they're doing is they're missing the inputs, the information to help them not just blindly associate that correlation, but it's the information that helps them know what the right training is. So how you train is far more important than how much you train.

Carrie: Hmm. But this is where I think a lot of runners get stuck because and you know, there's been times in my training where I'm stuck too or I get stuck. Once you accept that just piling on, doing more work isn't the answer, the very next argument you hear is okay, what do we do? Volume, more volume, more intensity? What is it? Do we go to the track more often? Do we do longer, long runs? So there, you know, is kind of that back and forth. So what do you what do you say to that?

Andrew: Yeah.

Jeff: Say one, you know, when people are looking, you hear the debate, you know, is it more volume? Is it is it you know harder? You know, what is it? And I think both answers are wrong. I think when someone picks a side, it's either or it's not it's not a binary thing, volume or intensity. And when someone kind of answers one, you know, to me, I I think they don't understand the question, or at least the result that you're trying to get to to answer the question. You want the performance improvement, and those are not the two choices. So if an answer you know, it feels like it should have more volume or it feels like, you know, should have more intensity, that that's the wrong question is in is seeking the wrong or it's the wrong answer is seeking the wrong question. And the reason is because the debate never settles, because that's not the answer. The reason that the bait I mean I got messed up there. Okay. So the reason that the debate never settles isn't the answer. It's that most athletes can't see the information, the intelligence that would settle it. So most platforms focus on two things. They have two levers. It's hours and intensity. How hard did I run? How much did I run? Ride, swim, whatever it is, because those are the two things that are the most easy to answer. So when those are the only two variables that we see that we focus on and fixate on, I mean there's tons of metrics that you can dig down into, but the primary ones that people center around and gravitate to are that, you know, how hard and how much. And when that's what you see, you know, that becomes what you focus on. That's what you adjust around. And that's what you want to adjust when you want to get better. So it's kind of like you've heard the saying, you know, to a hammer, everything is a nail. You know, so if everything you see is more or harder, then your solution to everything is more or harder. Yes.

Andrew: Ha. W when you're holding a hammer, when you're a human being holding a hammer, you just want to start hitting anything, right?

Jeff: That's right. So what they can't tell you, you know, those other apps are, you know, what is your training stress? And it's not just one thing. You know, training stress, and that's another thing. You look at heart rate or HRV, and it's one metric, but there's so much underneath the one metric. training stress comes in different types. It's aerobic and threshold and muscular and neural stress, and each one has its own amount of building the stress and the content of that stress, but it also clears at a different rate. So every session. you it lands on your body in a different residual training stress, so a different state of fatigue in those five different types of training stress. And if you don't have visibility to that, that's it's huge. And the in the visibility of that is only half of it. with everything that were answered, you still have to know, you know, here's the answer, here's what that residual training stress is, by stress type, but then okay, what do you do with that? Like how do you make a different decision based on all those things? So it's not just that. We see, you know, volume and intensity and we don't see these other things, but once you see there's that intelligence layer of what do you do? And that's the harder problem to solve, because you can't use what you can't see, and then you can't decide what you can't interpret. So being able to have that ability to interpret n the data, having the data and then being able to interpret that data is huge. So yeah, heart That's right, guess.

Carrie: Not having to guess. Not having to get not guess your way through a workout, you have the data.

Jeff: Right. And then even a lot of athletes over time will have a perception or I feel and that and they develop a sense of themselves and that's okay to a point, but when you're developing the sense throughout a career, if you never have that context, you you're never developing a sense that's informed and contextual. And all these things are different. So that even that sense your perception of self is flawed because it's so subjective and you're never able to tie this stuff down. But I know that heart rate and heart rate variability, for example, they feel like they should reveal what this is. But your heart rate and your HRV are just shadows of what actually happened. They're not the thing it the they're not the thing itself. So

Andrew: Well. And a lot of people right now, Jeff, are like that's like a big thing right now. Like it feels so advanced to brag about how, my this this sensor or that sensor are giving me this HRV score. I'm monitoring my HRV, the pros are monitoring their HRV. It feels like this advanced metric that is next level, and it's just a small slice of the pie.

Jeff: Well it's not even a slice. It doesn't even it can't quantify the slice. It says something happened, but I don't know what. Take for example, just a quick analogy. So the next morning or after a workout, whenever you're measuring it, your HRV is low or your heart rate is high. So did that tell you that the workout you just did was too hard? Or did it tell you the workout you did three days ago you haven't recovered from? Or did it tell you it was really a hot day yesterday, or are you coming down with an illness? Or is your chronic training load from the past six weeks too much?

Andrew: Well.

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Jeff: So you're carrying it like it doesn't tell you any of that stuff. Right. Any number of things. Yeah, or you're worried about work, and a different kind of stress, you know, relationship, any of those things. So heart rate and HRV can't tell you any of any of that. So it can tell you something is off, but not what and not what to do about it. And so that's what fit logic was built to see. That's the engine behind tri dot and run dot. That's what we've been doing for 25 years. So it's able to allow athletes to get those inputs.

Andrew: Or did you just not sleep very well last night?

Carrie: Yeah. Right. Right.

Jeff: And the ones that have the inputs and are able to do that right, they're gonna get three to five times more improvement than athletes who just double their training volume. So we've done that study internally where you see athletes to just double their volume versus those that actually do the right training are managing each of those different types of stress types, the fatigue, measuring it proactively, reactively, being able to see how it dissipates and giving them the right amount of the right training at the right time. So that that gap between those two, that three and a half, you know, three to five times as more or more improvement, that's the price that people are paying who are arguing about is it more or is it harder? Is it more volume or more intensity? The price they're paying is all of that improvement that they could have gotten if they focused on the right things or had that intelligence layer to fill in those gaps.

Andrew: Yeah, Jeff, before I was training with Tri Dot, I was a triathlete, I think for three or four years, just doing local sprints and Olympics. And I would get off work and I would do whatever felt good to me. Do I feel like running today? Do I feel like swimming today? And just as long as I was getting a little bit of all three in the week, I'd feel like I was doing my job. But that the only as we're talking about like intensity versus volume, the only thing that I knew to change in my training was like how far I was going, right? Because I had this vague understanding that I shouldn't just get up like head out the door and go for a five mile run every day. But I, first of all, I did every run as hard as I could. Right. And so like some days I would get off work and I would, okay, today I'm gonna run 5K. And I'm gonna do as hard of a 5K as I can. 21 minutes, 22 minutes, 2230, whatever it was. I'm gonna go all out for a 5K. And the next day I would, okay, I'm gonna run eight miles today. And I'm gonna go all out for eight miles. And that might be You know, two minutes per mile slower, but e either way, I was trying to end every workout exhausted. I was trying to go as hard as I could in every workout and the so I wasn't you know changing intensity at all. No matter what, it was all an all-out effort every single day, which feels insane now to say. But the only thing I knew how to change was the volume, right? I'm signed up for a half marathon, let me start running longer. I'm I signed up for an Iron Man, let me start doing everything longer. and you kinda you kind of get stuck. It becomes very one-dimensional in your training and you don't get all that faster doing that.

Jeff: Yeah, you know the funny thing about that, I I've learned actually just through looking at medicine and how titration and when you're taking different quantities a doctor prescribes something to you, you take a certain amount of dose and like you are increasing your dose of training stress by increasing your mileage. But what's actually happening where you're not seeing and where you get the plateaus and the overuse and the injuries is because when you go out and run three miles fresh, you're running three miles and having three miles of stress, just keeping it simple, not all the different stress types. You go out and run again and say, I'm gonna go four miles. You're not just adding another mile. You're running four miles, but you're doing it with a residual stress from the three miles. So when you ran the three miles, you had no residual stress. Now you have a compilation of four miles, but the stress from the three. Then you go run five miles. Now you have a little half of the stress from the three miles, you know, 60% of the stress from the four miles, and then you're adding another mile. So it keeps compounding more and more, but you don't see that. You don't see that residual fatigue, this breaking dunk.

Andrew: Yeah. The three weeks later, why does my knee hurt? And why am I tired? And why am I hungry?

Jeff: Yes, right. Yeah. So being able to quantify all of that, not just the work that you're doing now, but what are you carrying into that by stress type and being able to get and then it's a hot day and so now I'm doing the same mileage and pace, but it's ninety five degrees. You know, so it's it can get you hurt. It's a recipe for disaster for sure.

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I wanna go into something a little bit different. So you always we're talking about the goal is better and not just more. I want to ask you a little bit about the 80-20 rule. And you know, to be honest, when I was training as a pro, like if you look at my training, it probably is kind of like an 80-20 rule where 80% is easy, 20% is hard or race specific. but I want to hear your thoughts on that because a lot of people build plans like that, 80%, 20%, because they've heard that rule. but what do you, what do you think about it?

Jeff: Well, I think it and it's is popular. There's the people call it polarized training. And so r really, you know, looking at some intense and some hard and I and it do I d think it deserves some credit. because it's is an attempt to say, Okay, not it it's not all the same. It's more than just more only. There there's some Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. Sure. We can't do what Andrew did and do one hundred percent hard all the time.

Andrew: one hundred and zero.

Jeff: So it's good, but it's you know, adopting that, trying to make it better instead of just more is a great thing. I think that's good. It recognizes that how you distribute the intensity matters. So that's good. That's a great, great instinct there. and that's why it's spread. And it's simple. It you know, when you think of e everyone anywhere can learn a rule and you just kind of try to generally grossly apply the rule, it's easy. But there's a specificity that needs to happen because everyone's different. Everyone's body's different, their training environment.

Carrie: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, we need that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You mean we're not supposed to do two twenty minus our age? We're not supposed to do that anymore for our rate?

Jeff: No, no, no. Yeah. It's like you can get an average anything, the average height, you know, how many people are actually the average height? Almost everyone is a little taller, a little shorter than that. And you know, it's so much more complex when we're training here. But where it came from, I mean there's been the 80-20 rule, you know, forever, but specifically there was a research done probably twelve years ago, maybe a little bit more than that, where the researchers observed elite endurance athletes across several different sports, across country, running, cycling, a bunch of different ones. And they realized that those elites tended to train at about an 80-20 split on average. So 80% easier, 20% harder. So and then that became kind of just, you know, broad. Everyone started doing that. But the problem was that that was a description. It was descriptive research. It was here's what they did. The intent the elites tended to do this. It was a correlation. It wasn't the causation. It wasn't this is what the elites did to become elite. It was just what they did after they were elite. And so it was never intended to test like how do these elites become fast? and it was never intended to be a recommendation either. That's just how it was applied. so that eighty twenty was never you know, never prescription. It was just a description that filled a void. People wanted to know. People are hungry, athletes are hungry, like tell just tell me what the thing is. I remember going through USAT you know, twenty something years ago. Coach training. I'm telling me what the answer is. What do I do? Like what do I prescribe? Why is this right? Like give me the answers and you're hungry. And so someone gives you something. And in a void where you don't have the visibility to the actual metrics that where you can calculate the outcome, you just latch on to principles or theories or stuff. And so that's what it was. It was in a in a in a world where athletes were hungry for something to organize around. And in the absence of anything better, a description became the prescription, you know, like almost overnight. So people start doing that. So, what it can't tell you, so say, okay, it's good, there should be a mix and a some diversity and the amount of intensity that you do. That mix is important. But it doesn't say on that 20% how much of that 20% is zone four or zone five or zone six. Those are big differences. If you put all 20% in zone six or all in zone four, that's completely different recipes there. I think another thing is the different stress. each is a very different stress with a different recovery profile. I think how long each effort is. is twenty percent all on one day? Does that all go to your hard day? You know, or is it spread out through the week? So what does that look like in your weekly pattern? how often can you repeat that? How much can your body absorb? How you know fast do you recover? How old are you? So eighty twenty applied to older people, younger people. what are you training for? Is it a you full IronMan, a marathon, or is it a local five K? What are you training for? So it's not a fixed ratio. All of that is very different and the mix is very different depending on what you're doing. So, and when you look at that same ratio, it describes completely different training. depends on d is depending on who's doing that. So, another eighty-twenty, if you look at that for someone who's training six hours a week, is very different than someone training eighteen or twenty hours a week. It's not at all the same ratio. It's not even it's not even close. Shouldn't be the same thing. So it's a basically it's a description of what elites did, and that's not a plan for you. 8020 isn't more. but it isn't quite better either. It's kind of maybe a step in that direction. So I think the he initial impulse is right, but it doesn't have the intelligence to finish the job. So it raises exactly the right question, but it just can't answer it. You know, so if not a fixed ratio, then what? You're kinda left there stuck.

Carrie: Yeah, it's kind of like a good base or like a jumping off if you're like trying to think of what you need to do. That I do think we have to remember that rest is very important when we are stressing our body. So like that is a good thing, but I like all the different variables that you threw out there. Like we kind of forget that. Like if somebody's really putting in big mileage, you they have to think about it differently than someone that isn't, or age and all of the different things. So it's not to say it's wrong, but it's not

Jeff: Yeah, I

Andrew: Jeff, I've been at the races with athletes that as we're talking about try dot training and what tried out does, and I kind of describe like what the training design is like and how it builds you for certain races and events. I've literally had athletes look at me and say, it sounds kinda like 80 twenty. And I'm like, No, no. I can see why you're thinking that way, because lot like you just said, there is some the impulse behind 80 twenty is correct. It just the rest of it is wrong. The it doesn't have the intelligence to finish the job. Is I think the way you said it, right? So if 8020 isn't a ratio that we can all copy, then then what is it? And I know your answer is that like real training gets built in a specific order and it runs almost backwards from how the rest of us plan. and so that this might be like the most important kind of few minutes of the episode. So to take your time, Karen and I will shut up. how should training actually be built if we can't just copy a ratio? How does how does volume fit into all of this?

Jeff: Yeah, I think so so we'll walk through this kind of methodically, but it it starts with the mindset around training and how you think about volume and and your training. You know, just just to say the eighty twenty is right, the vol the the intensity mix matters. That's a good first step, but that doesn't mean that's how you do it. But it but it's just a step in that direction. I say let's start with the mistake that almost every athlete makes when you start your training. You begin with you begin with the volume. And then you decide on how many hours can I fit into my life? How much training can I do? And that's the second thing. Then how do I fill the hours? I got 15 hours a week or whatever. So how do I fill that? So your available training time isn't the target or the goal to be achieved. It's the constraint. And so it's like a budget when you're buying a car. Your objective is not to spend all of your budget. It's a it's to get the most that you can out of what you have to spend. You want the pr the car, the quality, the gas mounter, whatever you're going for, that's the intent. You're Your fitness, your performance is the out outcome. So you're not your goal is not to spend as much time as possible. and so you start with that, say, here's how much I can spit my spend in my life. That's the ceiling, not the goal. All right. So that's the first mindset of I'm not here to spend all the time that I have. So when you walk through the training and you're looking at the building, it like you said, it's the opposite direction from that. So adaptation is what's first. So what does your you know, your event demand? kind of and where are you? What are your limiters right now as an athlete training for something and what does that what does that demand? So then secondly is here's the adaptations that I need given where I am and what I'm training for requires. Next is the intensity. All the intensities are better or worse than others at driving and adaptation. So a specific You know, imposed stress is gonna have a specific response to that. And so your intensities are gonna drive those specific adaptations. Then you look at the durations, like how long do I hold that intensity? And so when you're planning your, you know, how much is my interval, how much is my you know, this this session or that session of quality work. And so you're looking at the intensity and then how long do you hold that intensity? And that's what your body understands. It doesn't know how far you went, doesn't know all these other things. It knows here's how hard I worked, and here's how long I held that intensity for. So that's the crux, that's the meat, the very core of your training. After that, then there's a frequency. So okay, great. Given that amount of training stress and the dissipation of that, the residual training stress from that workout, how often can I repeat that? So if I do the workout, I improve, I recover, then how often can I do this? And it's different for the different training stress times and the volume. And you as an athlete, your recovery rate, your age, all those things matter on how you're able to do that. So that harder intensity work it demands more recovery times. and so you can't repeat it as much. Lower intensity, you can clear further and you can do more of it. And that's where we get, you know, the average 80%. You can do a lot more of the lighter training because you can recover from it quicker and do more. and so after those four are done, the adaptation, the intensity, then the duration, then the frequency, then the volume is what comes out of that. That's the leftover. That's just the product, that's the byproduct of all of those decisions that came before. It's the sum of the training that your design calls for. So it's not the start, it's the end. The volume is the output, not the input. So if you think about that,

Andrew: And Jeff, I'll tell you, every time we've been podcasting together for six years now. Every time I hear you talk about this, whether it's on a podcast or behind the scenes to some coaches at an event or an expo or something, I always think to myself, I am so glad I have TriDot doing this for me. I'm so glad that that the FitLogic intelligence engine is behind the scenes ordering my training based off of all these principles and that I don't have to figure this out on my own. every time I get off work I wanna go do a workout.

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Jeff: Absolutely. And I think that's another, like we were talking about the apps before, they focus on two easy metrics. Those are the easy levers to pull, volume and how hard you work, you know, intensity. All of these other things happen to happen to make it more efficient. That is the physiology that's happening inside your body. It has to happen. There's no options. It's not a opinion or a method. That's what's happening in your body. The adaptations needed, the intensity, the duration, and then how often can you do them? So filling hours for the sake of filling hours doesn't make you fitter. It just makes you tired. If you think of it like and I and I know we talked about this before, a little an analogy of a salesperson, you know, thinking that, hey, I'm gonna produce more revenue for my sales, so I'm just gonna call a bunch more people. Well, if if you're not doing the job right, calling more people is not what's gonna produce it. It's better prospecting, better questions, better closing of each of those call. More c more calls only pays off if you're multiplying a lot of good calls. So that's the result. And so you have to have the better, all of those little pieces, that's the prospecting, the questions, the closing. All of that is the intensity, the duration, the frequency, all of those decisions made better. Now then you can add more. So after that, you can have more volume. You know, there's diminishing returns and other considerations, but that's when the more comes into place. And so that's where it earns its place. So once your training is designed right, adding it to extend those results, thinking through the injury risks and the diminishing returns, all those are important to consider. But it could be the right thing. So more on top of good training design. that could take a good athlete even further. But more on top of bad resign, bad design or no design, when it's just kind of just a bunch of training, go out as hard as I can every day, then that's just you know, extend your exposure to injury. Absolutely. And so this is like it's about doing the right training right. So the order of operations, like you mentioned, it's like that seems overwhelming, and it is, and that's what the technology can do. And so that's exactly what FitLogic was designed for. That's the intelligence engine behind TriDot and RunDot.

Andrew: The Andrew method.

Carrie: Yeah. Mm.

Jeff: so that it's not about the most. It's about doing the right training right, designed right, in the right amounts. And bless you.

Carrie: You know, one thing that I love about RunDot and FitLogic though, or and RunDot and TriDot, sorry, is that we do have personal coaches too that can go along with the platform. And I think for me, like as an athlete that always had an a coach in my ear, and like I'm telling you, anytime a coach would say to me, Hey champ, like right then and there I was gonna have a day. I was gonna have a good day.

Andrew: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Jeff: Yeah.

Carrie: So, you know, no, champ. It had to be champ, not Bud, not Sweetie, none of that. mean, if they wanted to fire me up and tick me off, they could say those sweetie or whatever. They none of my coaches none of my coaches said that. But they would say, Hey, Champ, like, I love I love the platform. I love that we have technology to give us all of our data, but I also love the fact that you guys have seen the value in having a coach.

Andrew: Hey buddy. Hey. Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Jeff: Ha ha.

Carrie: And some people really need that human factor. And so that's the one thing that I think is really special about this platform is that we have people that can be in our ear cheering us on along with getting all the information behind it. I want to do a quick reset though, because if some of you are listening, you might need to just get caught back up or you know, we wanna just make sure you're following along with us. So Let's just make sure you got this. Instead of starting with how many hours can I train? How many miles can I train and filling them up? Jeff, you are sort of flipping this. You start with what are we trying to adapt? You pick the intensities that drive it, then how long, how often, and whatever that adds up to is your volume. Volume is the last thing you find out, not the first thing you decide. So to break that down a little bit, it's not necessarily hours and miles, it's what?

Jeff: It's doing the right training right, designing it right. Just like you said. Like where are you? Where do you need to go? What intensities get me there? And then how long can I do each one? And then how often can I do each one? And then let the let the volume end up where it's at. And you know, the topping constraint is just what can I fit in my life. So that's a constraint, not a goal to be achieved. And if I can do it with less time, then super. Great. You bought a car for less than, you know, you had budget for. Super.

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. But this is where it trips people up. I mean, you know, I was kind of a mileage junkie gal. I hit a hundred miles one time and I was like, my gosh, this is why I'm a pro. This is why Adidas is peeing paying me so much. So when you train that way, hours and miles, you know, when do you get over the fear of I'm losing fitness because it's not all about the number of hours or miles that I hit each week?

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff: I think it getting over the fear depends on where you've come from. So if you came from that mindset or you're coached by that mindset, then there is that feel because you start associating making some false associations of what fitness is, what performance is. And so that's a real, it's emotional, it's not rational, but I understand it completely. So I think that a lot of athletes, but athletes who have come up in in you know the try dot world, the run dot world where They're looking at the actual workload and they're having these things done. They have a greater sense and they would fear not doing these things. They would fear doing too much and not having the system to give them just the right training at just the right time for them. So I think there's a lot of athletes also who have tied their sense of themselves, their seriousness as an athlete to the size of their training week or their big volume. And so that's like their identity. That's their measure of commitment. That's a proxy for. You know, I'm giving my effort, you know, Adidas is paying me. Man, if I'm not training, you know, running at least this much, I'm not, you know, I'm not earning my contract. And so there's that that association. And that's what you see. It kind of comes back to olden days where if that's the data that you have to look at, like we talk about, we've said before, that what gets measured or what does it say? you get more of what you measure. So you can't measure something that you can't see. So if you're not seeing these other stats, the only ones that you see are mileage and volume and stuff. And so you start building that around what you focus, you know. to a hammer everything's a nail. So you start looking to do those things. And so when the volume drops, if that's what you've focused on for years or decades, then it feels like a loss. It feels like I'm not doing the same volume. And you're associating that. But underneath, I think there's a confusion that's worth calling out. And that's the piece that we didn't get to on our last the biggest myth, the podcast that we did a month or so ago. And that is that fitness and performance ability are not the same thing. A lot of people use them interchangeably. I didn't have the fitness going into this race. And they and they're thinking performance ability. So fitness specifically is your ability to sustain a high training load. It's just the being able to handle it. My fitness supports this much work to be done. That's disassociated from your actual performance ability. There's a lot of people with that load that can't perform as good as other people. You know, but it's not a matter of the load. Performance ability is the ability to perform your best effort at speed under load for a sustained amount of time, depending on the event. So those are two separate things. They're related and they impact each other, but they move independently. So you can carry less training load and hold the same performance ability. Like you see that all the time athletes training a higher volume and lower volume and the lower volume they have greater performance than the one at the higher volume. So it's not about who carries the highest training load. carrying less can actually produce better performance ability. And it not can, it does, if you're doing it the training right. So when you but when you first come, if you come from a mindset or a you know emotional context of associating that high value with commitment and all these other things, it feels like when I cut my volume, I'm losing my fitness. I'm not doing as much. And so it you have to be conscious of that. But losing fitness and losing performance ability are not the same thing. So which one do you want? I mean which one do you know you care about the performance ability. That's the one that your race counts on. It it's not just a mail it in who trained the most, you know, who has the biggest training volume leading up to the races, who can perform the best on race day. So

Andrew: Jeff, can I say this? I feel like w like what you're d talking about those two different things, right? Fitness versus performance ability, it's not as obvious in endurance sports that those are different things. But if you look at a sport like soccer, football, right, World Cup's happening right now. Or if you look at a carries loves basketball, if you look at basketball, in a sport like that, the difference is a lot more evident because you literally have what is your fitness. How long can these players physically run on the pitch on the field on the court? And you also have performance, which is like their skills. How good are they at shooting? How good are they at dribbling the ball? How good are they at the technical aspects of the sport? And you can have a team that is technically better. Their performance ability is better, but if, you know, i i if they wear out in the fourth quarter or the second half because they're not fit enough, they could get beat by an inferior team. Right. And so in a sport like that, the difference between technical ability and fitness is very apparent. That that difference is still there in endurance of sports, it just manifests in a different way, I would argue.

Jeff: I think completely. I think that's exactly right. So you're then you know that was pretty skills focused, but I think it's even when you think of running economy, if the more economic runner that's spending less energy for every step, they don't have to work as hard, they don't have to carry the same training load because they're not having to expend as much energy to get the same amount of work done. So there's efficiency in the way you run, your run mechanics. The same thing happens with your training design. There's efficiency in your training design. If it's more, you don't require as much if you're doing it more efficiently. So the difference between you know you have workload and you have volume. And so when you're looking at workload, FitLogic measures that with normalized training load. So that's driven by intensity duration of frequencies. Not volume focused. and so a leaner week at the right intensities can carry the same total training stress but that then than a harder week that has higher volume. And so you're actually doing less time, less work, but the workload may be higher because you're doing more intensities or more of the right intensities. And so the workload may not be coming down even if your volume is coming down. So focusing on the right metric, that normalized training road, normalized training load for your whole week. So less time doesn't always mean less work. And just because the volume changes doesn't mean the workload changed. So I think of another analogy kind of like I mentioned buying the car before, but it is say let's take it to running. If you're gonna buy a pair of shoes and one store has them for a hundred dollars and another store has the same running shoes for two hundred dollars, where are you gonna go buy your shoes? You'd never go to the store that for two hundred dollars, right? Because your outcome, you want the shoe. You know what I mean? And but sometimes when people think about their training, I say you can go get this amount of, you know, your marathon time is gonna be X.

Carrie: Cheaper.

Andrew: eBay. eBay.

Jeff: You can train, you know, 15 hours a week or 10 hours a week. Which do you want to do? And you have athletes 15 hours a week. Like, why would you do less? It's gonna be less wear and tear on your body, less time away from other things. So that training load, think of the training load is what you spend and performance ability is what you're buying. And so stop you know measuring what it costs you, measuring your volume, and start measuring what it bought you. So you want the outcome. So what is the efficient, most efficient way to use your time to get to the best outcome? and then not be focusing on what it costs you your training volume.

Andrew: Yeah. Jeff, I I've met a lot of different athletes at the races, especially when I travel for TriDot or RunDot, and I've heard a lot of different things that people say about training. When you are at a tent labeled TriDot or RunDot at an event, people just come by and they want to tell you what they think about training. So let me play the skeptic for just a second because this is literally one I've heard before under the tent at races. A coach or an athlete hears all of this. They hear what we do, what we think. How we approach training, and they say this is just a very sophisticated rationalization for training less. And they kind of they kind of dismiss it a as that. It's permission to be lazy dressed up in data. What do you say to a person that kind of thinks that way about what we're saying here?

Jeff: probably tell them to go listen to this podcast. I just can't. But I think that's an is an excellent question. And I want just to like pause here for a second and think of the significance, given the examples that we've just talked about, of what that mentality, what that question is asking. That question is asking to justify that mentality, to justify paying less for something. Why would we justify paying $100 for a pair of shoes instead of $200? I think it's the other way around. You need to justify and prove to me that I need to train more and it's gonna perform I'm gonna it's gonna result in better performance ability. You have to justify paying more. You have to justify training more. You don't have to justify training less. That's the whole objective is to train less, to get more out of my that's what efficiency is. So the whole mentality, it's either one is Do they have a vested interest, they're coaching and they believe in high volume or something they don't want to change. There's something or it's just inherited. Maybe it's not a conscious decision. It's just what they came up with. That was a culture that they lived in and they hear all around them. And so they just subconsciously believe it. They say that almost 90% of everything that we believe, we were never taught. We just absorbed it subconsciously by observing, hearing things, and you just assume things to be true and when you never question them. So but if you think of that question, literally people are saying you need to justify. spending less on this, risking more, sacrificing more. Why it's the other way around. So, you know, if we're looking, you know, more mathematically at it, you know, it's not about doing less workload. We're not saying, hey, do less work. We're just saying the volume. And so you walk through all of those different things and look at, hey, the workload's after actually going up. You know, they're actually doing more work. They're working harder. They're working smarter. They're doing all the things. They're putting more into training design. You know, the other alternative is, hey, let's be in less efficient, not do the right amount of work. and be more a little haphazard with that and not measure the metrics. So, you know, on our side is all of that. Is all that being able to say, you just 'cause something's less time doesn't mean it's less work. And so address it that way.

Carrie: Right. I think that was what got me there. Work harder. I mean, as a as somebody that wanted to not only I did like to win my workouts to be honest. And I but I just told my daughter, it's not about winning the workouts, about it winning the races. But I think working harder is key, Jeff, because that's where you're gonna hook people too, is that you can work harder with doing less.

Jeff: Yeah. Yep. And there are times to work harder. There are big workouts that you need to go and race it. Do it. Kill it. You know, big long workouts, hard workouts. There are big weeks. They're all of that. But that's just not what comes first. And that's what you have to justify. Why am I spending why am I inducing this much extra injury risk or this much time? Or this you justify why you do the extra, why you do the more. And if you do it purposefully, that's great. But then you gotta remember on the other side of that is smarter, more conservative, more restrained, more disciplined training on the other side. Inefficiency I say in inefficiency isn't dedication, it's just inefficiency. Yeah.

Carrie: Yes. And that's so hard as an athlete when you just want to be so disciplined. You want to do everything that everyone has ever written about and better. But I look at a lot of the BYU athletes that are current or pro and they have always taken their Sundays off. That is just how they do it. You know, that is in their religious beliefs. Yeah, yeah. but they don't, they will not run on one on their Sundays. And then they take their mission trips and they do not run. on those mission trips and they come back and they're fine. They ha it takes time, but they and so like everyone is different, right? And everyone can figure out what works the best for them. But I just I like how you're saying this today. And I think you're explaining it in a way that is understandable for everyone. But we can still work very hard. We just don't have to do it forever. We don't have to just run three hundred miles a week just to say you did.

Jeff: What you're doing, make it can. That's right. I think of Eric Liddell in Cherry's Fire, you know, doing a race on Sunday.

Andrew: I can't.

Carrie: Doom Doom Doom Doom Doom.

Jeff: Yeah.

Andrew: Nice carry. Nice carry. So Jeff, you were talking there for a little about making your training more efficient. And I I I gotta be honest, like and I think most athletes are probably this way. Like when you get into running or you get into triathlon, I didn't consider how efficient or inefficient my training was when I was just doing like sprints, Olympics, five Ks, ten Ks. I I didn't start questioning that until I started signing up for a half marathon.

Carrie: Thank you.

Jeff: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: half Iron Man. And honestly, that's when I found tried out because I recognized after I did my first half Iron Man, I recognized like, man, like this is a lot to do this thing properly. It was a lot of training, a lot of hours on the race course. You want to go, you want it to go well, you want to do the best you can. And I realized after my first half Iron Man, I can't do this well on my own. I need to be coached by something smarter than me. And I found tried out, started training with it, loved it. and that's when you start realizing this is such a more efficient way to train. And I always, when I was just doing like short course stuff on my own, I always just thought like, like a training plan, having a coach, ha having a training design, like that's for people more advanced than me. That's for people better than me. I don't really need that. Now, where I sit now, I wish I had had that all along. I wish I had been training more efficiently when I was just doing 5K's, 10K's sprint triathlons. So let's talk about that that word efficiency for a second, because I think I think everybody should have the most efficient training plan that they can have, right? Because chasing volume costs something. and I think there's kind of two different bills here: what it costs your training and what it costs your life. The thing that attracted me to Tri Dot is that I could train less hours and it would cost my life less time to train for these crazy sports. there's kind of a version of this.

Carrie: You mean you could sleep a little bit more? You could s actually get an hour extra sleep? nice. You could actually coach Little League rather than showing up and just be in your sweaty lycra? Do people still call it lycra? Spandex? Haha Okay.

Andrew: You can sleep more. I can hang out with my wife. I can hang out with my family more. What? Yes, please. Yes, please. Yeah, exactly right. Right. It yeah, we sure do. We sure do. We love our lyra. And Carrie, that's making its way in the running with the with the split shorts, right? You guys just don't call it lycra. but it's the same thing. we started it. Triathletes, we started it. but Jeff, if I if I go do like a Saturday group ride, right, and that's like in and There's the same thing in run culture, right? You do a group, a group run out of a run shop or something. like the workout on a day like that isn't really the point, right? The work, the workout, the point of going to one of those things is to be social and to be with other people. So to talk about those two factors of like what the real cost of doing more training is and this idea that some sessions aren't chosen for a particular audience.

Jeff: Yeah, I think I think you're right. You touched on a lot of things there. I think they're all great. One is when you when you look at the cost. No, no, it was good. made me think of several different things as you're going through there. I want to make sure I hit them all. One is, you know, that that cost of inefficiency, it it ex it I'll say accelerates, but it gets more the further you get into the sport. So if you're when you're young and training for a five K or sprint triathlon, being inefficient doesn't cost you that much. Because you got a lot more time, it's not taking an exorbitant time already. You're young, even if you're training wrong, you're gonna recover fast. You're probably body composition is a lot better than it is when you're 60 or something like that. But the further you get, when you start doing the 70.3 or half marathon, full marathon, well now the stakes go up. Now you're pushing on the limits of what you can do within your life. As you get older, you're not recovering as fast. Doing the wrong thing costs you more. You may not be able to continue it. Maybe you know, longer races, you say, I can't do this distance of a race anymore. Because either I get hurt too much or it takes too much time, being more efficient allows you to do. It's a gateway to keep doing that or doing it more often. I remember when I was coming up 15 years ago doing Iron Man, there's a lot of guys that they could only do it. They, you know, talk with their family and say, hey, I'll do this every other year. Because they were spending so much time, it was so exhaustive. I was able to do it more often because I was doing it on a on a better budget and performing better and improving. So I think the stakes go up and that inefficiency, you see it more the further you get into the sport, whether it's age or performance level. or kids or you know other things that are demanding on your time. But I think there's really two costs of it. The first cost is the training itself, your performance ability. If you train less, if you're not just training more inefficiently, you're gonna that time that time savings that you could have achieved could go to better recovery, which means sharper hard sessions. You're doing the right work instead of more of the wrong work. And you just get a better return on all of that time. I think the second biggest cost is on your life. It's the dinner that you skip, the mornings that you weren't present for your kids, the, you know, having a long middle of the day, sacrificing your career, the projects you're working on. And it's great if that's your commitment and that's your choice, but doing it out of inefficiency is not good. You know, so when all of those other things in your life are taking your best hours, then they're not free to put toward all of those other things in life. They're the hours that you spend in inefficiency are not free hours. They came from something else. And a lot of times people don't connect it to what they actually gave up, you know, and ad adding that up. We talked about Andrew Hall, you know, and his time savings at the elite level. If you added all that together in one year, it's three months worth of eight-hour workdays that he spends training less than his counterparts that he's beating. That's it's huge. So the cost on your right on the rest of your life is enormous. And I see there's the subtler cost, and you mentioned kind of going out on a group ride. There are rides where you go out in the point or you're at the pool or a run and it's just social and that's part of the fix. And that's fine if that's you know your intentional purpose for that that effort. But a lot of times you'll go do that session and maybe the session is chosen for the audience, not for adaptation. You know, it's the long ride because you want props, you want to post and put it on Strava or somewhere like everyone's gonna say, Yeah, great job. You know, it's the high high mileage week that you're gonna summarize and say, look what I did, and you post it, or the Saturday ride or run where you wanna push to the front and you just wanna be up there. And it was supposed to be an easy day, you know, and none of that means that any of those things are wrong because there is a time to do that big week or that long run or but to push to the front. You know, so that's not the question whether it's right or wrong. It's why was that session chosen or why did you perform like you did during that session? You know, training to be seen. Is not the same as training to be faster. If you think of you know performative and performance are not the same thing. Training for praise and training for performance are not the same thing. So a lot of ways to think about it, but basically the one question or the one thing to think about when you go into a session is who is this for? What is this for? Is this for my performance improvement, or is there another factor around that I'm substituting that's driving a behavior that may not be best for my performance?

Carrie: I think I know the title of this podcast, Andrew. Training to be seen isn't training to be faster. I mean, let's all let's all just listen to that for a second and say that over and over again.

Andrew: Talk to me, Carrie. Yeah, it's good. It's Yeah, we're gonna take a moment of silence. Everybody just wrestle with that for sixty seconds. I'm kidding.

Carrie: you mean my Strava run today didn't doesn't like I I can't get any kudos there because I won the segment. Okay, okay. It's okay.

Andrew: I'll give you kudos. I'll give you kudos. Jeff, Jeff, we're getting close to time today and we've covered a lot, right? From why the volume versus intensity debate is the wrong fight in the first place. you kind of talked to us about the order training should actually be built in. And I've kind of given my two cents that I like that TriDot does it for me. I don't have to do it myself. you've talked to us about why the hours some athletes are scared to give up were never the hours making us fast in the first place. So From all of these points, a lot of meat to today's episode. If a listener takes one thing away from this conversation, what is like the number one top single idea you would want lodged in their brain as they plan their next week and execute their training?

Jeff: Okay. one thing. So that's kind of challenging. Let me let start. I'm gonna I'll narrow it down to one thing. But I'd say to s maybe to summarize a little bit. So it's never about how much. That was never the question. It's always been about how well. So most athletes are answering the w wrong question, you know, in in their training life. It's just more. better is isn't just a step that you need to do before more. It's the whole better is the whole ball game. That's it. Better before more, better beats more.

Andrew: One thing. It's like a warm up question.

Carrie: Yes. Yeah.

Jeff: So it doesn't start with your training log in that. It starts in your head. And so that's where I I really think I'd land the ship is that you have to change your thinking before you can change your training. You have to change your training before you can change your results. And so that changes your thinking, change your training, change your results. So how you train is far more important than how much you train. But it it comes from a mental mindset, an emotional, mental and emotional place for a lot of people. And it's being able to understand that and then that affects all of your decisions going forward.

Andrew: Yeah, and Jeff, there's some athletes that you know, they want the five-minute version of something and they kind of get it and they take a reward for it, they move on. Some people listen to the 60-minute podcast episode and kind of get the learning and then move on. some people want to wrestle with these topics a little bit more, right? There's a lot to training design and a lot to intensity versus volume and the concepts we talked about today. If someone is listening today and they just want to get their eyes on more information around this topic and learn more from you. past what we could fit in a 60 minute podcast, what resources do you have that you can suggest them to check out?

Jeff: A couple things. One is go back to the other episode that we did a month ago with you guys. I think there's a lot of complimentary information that we shared there, so that's great. There's a full breakdown article on fitlogic.tech website. we could probably link maybe in the in the notes here. We can link a link to that. additionally on Instagram, if you can follow me there at at underscore Jeff Buher. and I cover training intelligence. This topic, a bunch of related topics just all the time. Sometimes you hear it and it is this download on a podcast. And then you kind of forget about it. And so I think the constant reminders kind of pulling it back up, pulling it back up, just like you know, it's that consistency, just like your training. There's a consistency of changing things in your mind and the way that you think and feel about things that takes that repetitive nature and letting it sink in process on it. So I think that's really important. So this is what I've spent, you know, 20 plus 25 years of my life building FitLogic to do. It's that engine behind try dot and run dot. And it's not the most training you can, you know, do it's training done right, designed well in the right amounts. And you don't have to train more to get better. You can train better. You know, to train better, if you train better, you need less. And so that's what it's all about. Keep doing it.

Carrie: All right, Jeff. Are you ready for the cooldown question?

Jeff: I don't know that I'll ever be ready, but let's go.

Carrie: Okay, well this one comes from Tyler, Texas. Is that close to you?

Andrew: Ha ha ha.

Jeff: It's not too far away, a couple of hours. Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. Two hours.

Carrie: Okay. not too bad. Okay. Well, Coach Gina Rimel says, When can we expect some new swim sessions? As a team swimmer in my junior days, the current swim workouts I get sometimes feel a little boring. No offense, she says. And Jeff, do you think we're gonna see some new swim workouts? How about for the runners? Are we gonna see some new run workouts? What do you think?

Andrew: And I and Jeff, I do want to jump in. You and I both know Gina from Tyler. I've met Gina at the races. she's an amazing coach. she's a tri-dot pool school, she's on deck at TriDot pool school teaching swimmers how to swim. So I know that Gina isn't asking this question out of out of hate for TriDot. It's out of love for TriDot. and Jeff, I what I want to interject here, I have heard this comment three times in my seven years as a TriDotter. I've heard three different athletes. In all of my years, the hundreds of athletes I've met, three of them have said, Yeah, I wish there was just a little bit more variety to the swim workouts. And all three times, Jeff, it was an athlete like Gina who had a swim team background. So they were they're used to being in the pool with a coach on deck. They're in the pool probably three to five times a week, right? That is their sport of choice from juniors through middle school through high school. so I I've heard that three times, Jeff, always from a team swimmer. I've always felt as an amateur swimmer that there's plenty of variety in the workouts and I get plenty of spice as it is. I I've got all the variety I can handle and all the intervals I can handle in my swim program. but Jeff, for the Gina's out there who are really good swimmers, really experienced swimmers, anything? Any new workouts coming to the app?

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Jeff: Yeah, I'll share a little bit about this on the swim side, but then expand it also to some of the stuff that we're working on you know across all of the different disciplines, biking and running as well. But in TriDot, that has the swims, obviously RunDot doesn't, there are more than twenty-two million different swim sessions that you could get because we're so specific. And what we talked about before, your training comes from what adaptation do I need, what intensity needs to drive that, and how What is the duration of that? And then how often can I do it? And then all of those sessions are built up in the same way, the intervals. So there's there's a ton out there, a subset of those, you know, at any different performance level. I'll you know, that covers every performance level. When you get to the top, like Gina, great swimmer, great background, is somewhat narrower than that. but I think this is very contextual, like you mentioned. If she comes from an environment where she's, you know, in the pool that often and they're all different. You know, coming up, especially in school, there's so much social and variety and different kind of stimulus. If that's what you're used to, then that's what you can crave. I think there's another side of the population though that you add that much variety and it's overwhelming. Like everything's different. I just I want to figure it out. No nothing's the same and I'm confused. And so we get that feedback in a lot of different areas in the app of you have a broader, you know, broader different population that you need to cater to both and what's

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, that would be me. Yeah.

Jeff: you know, exciting and stimulating to one is is overwhelming and anxiety ridden for another. to that point though, we are, there's several things that we're doing that that's really cool. that one is adding the ability to have alternate workouts. And so if you do have a workout and you say, I don't want to do that workout, you can flip to another couple workouts that are different, either different versions of that workout or slightly different, but they have the same intensity, primary intensity, they have the same structure, it's an interval, it's a this or it's that. So it's similar and it's gonna drive the same adaptation, but it may not be the exact same workout. And so that's gonna be really cool. So we're working on that. And another feature in there where the coaches can actually, I mean they can make up any workout. They can already supervise and override the whole system any way that they want, but it's gonna make it a lot easier for them. Like literally they're just speaking to the workout. They're saying, you know, Coach Gina here, I have my, you know, Sam, my athlete, I want to increase this, do this, add this, and it just does it. It just creates those sessions and then creates the associated training stress associated with that residual training stress and all the different metrics that need to be done. And so it's just like infinitely malleable for those different athletes. And so at that point, you know, it's an infinite number of sessions that we have. But the key thing is that we come back.

Andrew: A and a coach a coach, Jeff, could do that for a run workout as well, right? For our run daughters listening. Yeah.

Jeff: Correct. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. And then we've done most on the running and cycling side. So that's where it's a lot better and easier to do. And so a lot more variety there, being able to create that. And there's a lot of variety. I've seen a lot of apps that have we have fifteen hundred workouts. I'm like, man, we have you know twenty two million, or we have just thousands and thousands of just cycling workouts, you know, and to extend it there. But that's important and that allows us, you know, we've always had coaches, we've never not had coaches. on the platform since we started and I think the first you know paying customers were twenty two thousand nine, two thousand ten, twenty ten. And being able to be around that coach athlete relationship and provide things for athletes for coaches to be able to focus on the things that they need to focus on and have that ability to adjust and hyper personalize the workouts. Something Carrie said very early in this episode was, you know, you look to the technology to do certain things, but The coach saying, Hey champ, you know, there's different things and letting the coach be the coach, the human, the person, and letting the technology get that right adaptation and the right frequency and the right duration, and let that technology handle that piece allows coaches and that 85% of the athletes that don't hire a coach, 90% and 90 something percent in running, have that hyper personalization from the technology, but then also equipping coaches to do their thing and work with athletes that that really wanna work with the human being.