12/04/08
You're so hormonal! Explaining a bit about The Method...
In a recent discussion on the USAT Coaches Yahoo! newsgroup, the subject of The Method's focus on Hormonal Balance in your training was addressed. Here are some excerpts to better explain why The Method addresses aspects of training and recovery that are often overlooked by most triathlon training approaches today.
Category: Training
Posted by: Vinnie
Dear J,
In the recent example comparing "eating sugar" to "eating meat," the example was provided not to suggest what is or is not "eating wise."
Instead, the example wa provided to illustrate how a simple choice (in this case a dietary one) can lead to a sudden shift in hormonal balance. Intake of raw sugar with no other modifying food stuff will lead to the familiar "insulin spike." Over the longterm, we can provoke pancreatic exaustion and end up diabetic. This is just one example of
Offsetting this choice against "eating meat" was simply to illustrate how two seemingly trivial choices each lead to a very different effect, both immediate and longterm (if the choice and negative circumstance are sustained consistently). The example could just as well have been "get a good night's sleep" or "get a bad night's sleep."
The point is not to limit our understanding of "hormonal balance" to adrenal, pancreatic or any one specific hormone in the body. The point is to illustrate that simple choices in life, including nutrition, stress exposure, sleep levels, and other factors including training stimulus lead to immediate and longterm shifts in hormonal equilibrium.
To correct something you indicated: Yes, most definitely will your nutritional choices in life dramatically impact your "hormone balance." That is exactly what a diabetic experiences. As well, your levels of sleep influence hormones directly associated with appetite, resulting in increased appetite with sleep deprivation, and the inverse with satisfactory levels of sleep. In a recent study, Swedish scientists found that stress alone - all other factors such as diet, activity levels and sleep levels - can provoke diabetes in adult males. Diabetes is simply one example of a disease with its roots in "hormonal imbalance."
Health is not a black and white -- it is a sliding scale. What we call "syndrome", or "symptoms" can be termed "disease" by the next expert. The perspective becomes concensus over time. Our training approach and the words we use to draw attention to it, and to explain it, are intended to raise eyebrows and draw attention to this one very important, highly overlooked aspect of training. How you train DOES impact the hormonal equilibrium in your body. This in turn impacts health and performance both immediately and over the long term.
Compare a weight lifter working on building up his body: We see an anabolic effect , a "building up" of his body from the specific stimuli to which he subjects himself. Witness then the winner of the running race across Australia: Averaging sub-three hour marathon pace for the distance on roughly two marathons a day, he looks like the closest human equivalent to a gazelle. His choice of training/activity "stimuli" provoke a profoundly catabolic response -- a "stripping down" of the body.
These effects are provoked by the training/actvity stimulus. They are transmitted and enacted via our endocrine system.
As triathletes we face challenges in that we engage in a highly catabolic activity (long duration endurance sports performed at high aerobic intensities) while trying to maintain or increase power, strength, speed and basic skills, all trainable factors we want to build up within the context of the catabolic effects of volume and intensity. How our health and lifestyle choices come into this balance becomes a personal choice.
The Method is structured so that as coaches, we are forced to pay more attention and take a whole new PERSPECTIVE on training, namely away from quantitative fixation and away from "zone training" or "power training." This frees the athlete AND the coach to better understand the human body as a complex collection of various "systems" all interacting to not only the training you subject it to, but also the circumstances under which this takes place: Sleep, nutrition, stress, family, other lifestyle choices, etc.
In a study done some years ago (name escapes me), it was found that the "ideal" regime of sleep, nutrition, stress-free environment, mental stimulation, emotional harmony, proper training methods and so on provided training results equal to and exceeding those achieved by a control group given performance enhancing drugs.
This in a nutshell is what "proper training" tailored to the individual's circumstances is about: Optimizing their performance in the broader context of personal happiness, legal and ethical training practices, and broader life objectives. "Hormonal balance" is not some fringe concept on the perimeter of this way of viewing and understanding the human body -- it is central to it, whether you "understand" this or not.
Everything we do, ingest, even think provokes a hormonal response -- it is a matter of degrees, is all. "The Method" as we call it takes this into account. When we teach my coaches how to build a training plan, we do not emphasize our attention on the "aerobic zones" or "power outputs" that the workout achieves. These are simply expressions of the training effects, more markers of what proper a proper training session and well structured schedule causes as a side-effect than an end in and of itself.
Rather, The Method looks at training from the perspective of "what did the human body experience yesterday? Earlier today? What does that mean we can subject it to now, knowing where we want to end up tomorrow?" How do we balance the contradictory demands on the human body that our sport requires?
Our answer: Rest one system while another works. Downplay emphasis on the aerobic "zones" (which are of questionable scientific validity in any case) and focus instead on structuring your training sessions around working effectively each day with a specific focus on one of the "systems" we label: Strength, Speed, Skill, Endurance, Tolerance. Ensure that the catabolic effects from the previous day's or earlier session are mitigated by the nature of the current session, and above all avoid exacerbating the negative consequences of the prior session by assigning poorly thought out session on top of it.
An example: "Coach, I feel tired today. I didn't sleep so well, and the long ride really knocked me back a bit after a stressy day at work. I feel good to go, just a little flat."
A typical coaching response might be: "OK Joe, take it easy and just go for 60-90 flat and easy on the bike." (Or run, or what have you.)
A Method coach would say: "Joe, avoid starches for a bit. Knock back a big steak or some extra tofu. Get a solid night's sleep. And today, head out and do those short one-minute power intervals on the bike. Keep your rest at a minute, as always, so that you don't jack up your aerobic system into "catabolic" mode. But work the interval all out against extreme high resistance, so that your cadence is at 40 to 45. This will give you a strength kick, a bit of an "anabolic" effect to mitigate what you are telling me."
And so it goes at ironguides. We don't worry about the power output of such a set because it is IRRELEVANT. Power is simply a marker of the work achieved and not the goal of the session. The goal of the session is to give what you have, to counter the catabolic effects of the endurance work, and to be satisfied with the best effort on the day. A qualitative approach will generate confidence and consistency - a quantitative approach will foster doubt and uncertainty, leading to a downward spiral of obsessive detail orientation about numbers that are by and large irrelevant as training goals (though useful as benchmark indicators under the right emotional and psychological conditions -- namely, an objective perspective).
We don't ask our typical athlete to obsess over data and numbers because by and large, most triathletes have an already "Type A" disposition and the very last thing they need in terms of advancing in sport, breaking plateaus or achieving more fulfillment in life is a set of instructions, a leisure pursuit, a paid product that encourages them to indulge patterns of thinking and behaviour which only bring them more of the same.
To move forward in terms of approach and thinking, as well as in the world of physical training, you have to challenge limits and preconcptions. The Method takes this into account. We emphasize repetition in conjunction with the above message and that you read in my other email response because it encourages the athlete to TUNE OUT THE NOISE. The effects of sleep deprivation, poor diet, flighty personality, work stress, general uneasiness about life circumstances will come to reveal themselves, little by little, as the athlete engages themselves more fully with each repetition of their carefully thought out plan.
It is then up to the coach's innate understanding of human nature and his responsibility to his athlete to guide that person through the cycles of training each week, and to monitor what works, what isn't, and how to tweak the basic structure to that athlete's needs during the current phase of training. We do not follow "standard" periodization formats and we emphasize instead on constant progression in one or the other skill or system, throughout the year, with appropriate emphasis and de-emphasis based on seasonality, race goals and the athlete's particular needs.
What we find is that this "smoothing out" of lifestyle, life routine, focus and emotions frees up time and energy. A sense of vitality appears to restore itself to our athletes that arrive "burned out" or coming from "over-volume" or "one note Charlie" drone-based training. A properly structured training does impact hormone balances immediately, but at degrees different from the ones you have in mind. Everything is relative, and everything is taking place on a scale, a spectrum of degrees -- adrenal exhaustion is but one type of severe imbalance, and by no means represents the sole "imbalance" we speak about.
Coach Vinnie is a diabetic himself. One of the more interesting observations he made in his own training he wrote a blog about here: Taper and Insulin. This is just one example of a dramatic and drastic hormonal shift that takes place in the body when we wind our bodies down during a taper: Over the course of ten days, Vinnie needed to inject 3x the normal amount of insulin into his body as the effects of exercise diminished. In a healthy adult, this translates to "my pancreas is working three times as hard when I reduce my training during my taper. I am secreting 3x as much insulin into my system during this time."
If you have a basic understanding of the insulin cycle in the human body, you will understand immediately what this means. Increased insulin levels when we go to sleep at night interfere with the production of melatonin. This interferes with the secretion of Human Growth Hormone, which interferes with our ability to rejuvenate and recover day to day. A simple way of seeing first hand the effect of this is to go back to the initial example cited at the beginning of this letter:
And so too with your training choices and structure of training.
Our training choices do impact our hormonal responses. These are the hormonal shifts we refer to when we speak about mitigating "hormonal balance" through training structure. The shifts happen, they are real, they impact performance. The hormonal shifts that happen due to training can be modified, controlled, directed and purposely induced. That is all a body builder is doing in bulking up. That is all an ultra runner is doing in trimming down. Our body adapts to what we give it, and it does so in the language of the endocrine system. As a triathlete, we face contradictory demands on our bodies due to the need to combine power and speed with endurance, particularly at the longer distances. These tugs in different directions can impact our equilibrium in ways that increase uneasiness, fatigue, alertness, and so on -- in other words, simply the STRUCTURE of the training, and not the VOLUME nor the amount of INTENSITY in the training can dramatically impact the results of the training.
The Method aims to "get the mix right." You can assign the identical sessions and training volume and intensity in a given week to two identical athletes, and all factors being equal, you will get two complete different sets of results simply because THE MIX is poorly balanced and a lopsided training structure has shifted an athlete into a poor recovery pattern. Get the mix right, and the day-to-day recovery is improved. All this leads to better training, better health, and better performance -- purely by focusing on "getting the mix right."
So The Method takes this "hormonal balancing" into account, constantly. But that is just one factor of training. It rarely comes up in client discussions, but believe me, when it does it takes on the form of "better sex life", "more energy", "I shave more often." Anecdotal - yes. But having lived it myself, having done my own share of research and having witnessed the results of changing my training protocol on the athletes I work with, over time I have come to place more and more reliance on this ahead of other interpretations of training and response to training.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to clarify what it is we do, how we differetiate our thinking from the norm, why we are fully confident that it is worthwhile to do so, and that we will persist in this. I see nothing to lead me to think what I have described is not useful, highly relevant, and extremely effective.
Kind regards,
--
Marc Becker, Head Coach
ironguides.net
* * * Your best is our business. * * *
In the recent example comparing "eating sugar" to "eating meat," the example was provided not to suggest what is or is not "eating wise."
Instead, the example wa provided to illustrate how a simple choice (in this case a dietary one) can lead to a sudden shift in hormonal balance. Intake of raw sugar with no other modifying food stuff will lead to the familiar "insulin spike." Over the longterm, we can provoke pancreatic exaustion and end up diabetic. This is just one example of
Offsetting this choice against "eating meat" was simply to illustrate how two seemingly trivial choices each lead to a very different effect, both immediate and longterm (if the choice and negative circumstance are sustained consistently). The example could just as well have been "get a good night's sleep" or "get a bad night's sleep."
The point is not to limit our understanding of "hormonal balance" to adrenal, pancreatic or any one specific hormone in the body. The point is to illustrate that simple choices in life, including nutrition, stress exposure, sleep levels, and other factors including training stimulus lead to immediate and longterm shifts in hormonal equilibrium.
To correct something you indicated: Yes, most definitely will your nutritional choices in life dramatically impact your "hormone balance." That is exactly what a diabetic experiences. As well, your levels of sleep influence hormones directly associated with appetite, resulting in increased appetite with sleep deprivation, and the inverse with satisfactory levels of sleep. In a recent study, Swedish scientists found that stress alone - all other factors such as diet, activity levels and sleep levels - can provoke diabetes in adult males. Diabetes is simply one example of a disease with its roots in "hormonal imbalance."
Health is not a black and white -- it is a sliding scale. What we call "syndrome", or "symptoms" can be termed "disease" by the next expert. The perspective becomes concensus over time. Our training approach and the words we use to draw attention to it, and to explain it, are intended to raise eyebrows and draw attention to this one very important, highly overlooked aspect of training. How you train DOES impact the hormonal equilibrium in your body. This in turn impacts health and performance both immediately and over the long term.
Compare a weight lifter working on building up his body: We see an anabolic effect , a "building up" of his body from the specific stimuli to which he subjects himself. Witness then the winner of the running race across Australia: Averaging sub-three hour marathon pace for the distance on roughly two marathons a day, he looks like the closest human equivalent to a gazelle. His choice of training/activity "stimuli" provoke a profoundly catabolic response -- a "stripping down" of the body.
These effects are provoked by the training/actvity stimulus. They are transmitted and enacted via our endocrine system.
As triathletes we face challenges in that we engage in a highly catabolic activity (long duration endurance sports performed at high aerobic intensities) while trying to maintain or increase power, strength, speed and basic skills, all trainable factors we want to build up within the context of the catabolic effects of volume and intensity. How our health and lifestyle choices come into this balance becomes a personal choice.
The Method is structured so that as coaches, we are forced to pay more attention and take a whole new PERSPECTIVE on training, namely away from quantitative fixation and away from "zone training" or "power training." This frees the athlete AND the coach to better understand the human body as a complex collection of various "systems" all interacting to not only the training you subject it to, but also the circumstances under which this takes place: Sleep, nutrition, stress, family, other lifestyle choices, etc.
In a study done some years ago (name escapes me), it was found that the "ideal" regime of sleep, nutrition, stress-free environment, mental stimulation, emotional harmony, proper training methods and so on provided training results equal to and exceeding those achieved by a control group given performance enhancing drugs.
This in a nutshell is what "proper training" tailored to the individual's circumstances is about: Optimizing their performance in the broader context of personal happiness, legal and ethical training practices, and broader life objectives. "Hormonal balance" is not some fringe concept on the perimeter of this way of viewing and understanding the human body -- it is central to it, whether you "understand" this or not.
Everything we do, ingest, even think provokes a hormonal response -- it is a matter of degrees, is all. "The Method" as we call it takes this into account. When we teach my coaches how to build a training plan, we do not emphasize our attention on the "aerobic zones" or "power outputs" that the workout achieves. These are simply expressions of the training effects, more markers of what proper a proper training session and well structured schedule causes as a side-effect than an end in and of itself.
Rather, The Method looks at training from the perspective of "what did the human body experience yesterday? Earlier today? What does that mean we can subject it to now, knowing where we want to end up tomorrow?" How do we balance the contradictory demands on the human body that our sport requires?
Our answer: Rest one system while another works. Downplay emphasis on the aerobic "zones" (which are of questionable scientific validity in any case) and focus instead on structuring your training sessions around working effectively each day with a specific focus on one of the "systems" we label: Strength, Speed, Skill, Endurance, Tolerance. Ensure that the catabolic effects from the previous day's or earlier session are mitigated by the nature of the current session, and above all avoid exacerbating the negative consequences of the prior session by assigning poorly thought out session on top of it.
An example: "Coach, I feel tired today. I didn't sleep so well, and the long ride really knocked me back a bit after a stressy day at work. I feel good to go, just a little flat."
A typical coaching response might be: "OK Joe, take it easy and just go for 60-90 flat and easy on the bike." (Or run, or what have you.)
A Method coach would say: "Joe, avoid starches for a bit. Knock back a big steak or some extra tofu. Get a solid night's sleep. And today, head out and do those short one-minute power intervals on the bike. Keep your rest at a minute, as always, so that you don't jack up your aerobic system into "catabolic" mode. But work the interval all out against extreme high resistance, so that your cadence is at 40 to 45. This will give you a strength kick, a bit of an "anabolic" effect to mitigate what you are telling me."
And so it goes at ironguides. We don't worry about the power output of such a set because it is IRRELEVANT. Power is simply a marker of the work achieved and not the goal of the session. The goal of the session is to give what you have, to counter the catabolic effects of the endurance work, and to be satisfied with the best effort on the day. A qualitative approach will generate confidence and consistency - a quantitative approach will foster doubt and uncertainty, leading to a downward spiral of obsessive detail orientation about numbers that are by and large irrelevant as training goals (though useful as benchmark indicators under the right emotional and psychological conditions -- namely, an objective perspective).
We don't ask our typical athlete to obsess over data and numbers because by and large, most triathletes have an already "Type A" disposition and the very last thing they need in terms of advancing in sport, breaking plateaus or achieving more fulfillment in life is a set of instructions, a leisure pursuit, a paid product that encourages them to indulge patterns of thinking and behaviour which only bring them more of the same.
To move forward in terms of approach and thinking, as well as in the world of physical training, you have to challenge limits and preconcptions. The Method takes this into account. We emphasize repetition in conjunction with the above message and that you read in my other email response because it encourages the athlete to TUNE OUT THE NOISE. The effects of sleep deprivation, poor diet, flighty personality, work stress, general uneasiness about life circumstances will come to reveal themselves, little by little, as the athlete engages themselves more fully with each repetition of their carefully thought out plan.
It is then up to the coach's innate understanding of human nature and his responsibility to his athlete to guide that person through the cycles of training each week, and to monitor what works, what isn't, and how to tweak the basic structure to that athlete's needs during the current phase of training. We do not follow "standard" periodization formats and we emphasize instead on constant progression in one or the other skill or system, throughout the year, with appropriate emphasis and de-emphasis based on seasonality, race goals and the athlete's particular needs.
What we find is that this "smoothing out" of lifestyle, life routine, focus and emotions frees up time and energy. A sense of vitality appears to restore itself to our athletes that arrive "burned out" or coming from "over-volume" or "one note Charlie" drone-based training. A properly structured training does impact hormone balances immediately, but at degrees different from the ones you have in mind. Everything is relative, and everything is taking place on a scale, a spectrum of degrees -- adrenal exhaustion is but one type of severe imbalance, and by no means represents the sole "imbalance" we speak about.
Coach Vinnie is a diabetic himself. One of the more interesting observations he made in his own training he wrote a blog about here: Taper and Insulin. This is just one example of a dramatic and drastic hormonal shift that takes place in the body when we wind our bodies down during a taper: Over the course of ten days, Vinnie needed to inject 3x the normal amount of insulin into his body as the effects of exercise diminished. In a healthy adult, this translates to "my pancreas is working three times as hard when I reduce my training during my taper. I am secreting 3x as much insulin into my system during this time."
If you have a basic understanding of the insulin cycle in the human body, you will understand immediately what this means. Increased insulin levels when we go to sleep at night interfere with the production of melatonin. This interferes with the secretion of Human Growth Hormone, which interferes with our ability to rejuvenate and recover day to day. A simple way of seeing first hand the effect of this is to go back to the initial example cited at the beginning of this letter:
- Try eating half a cup of raw sugar two hours after dinner but thirty minutes before bed one evening. Take note of how you feel the next day!
- The next day, try eating a small protein shake two hours after a similar dinner and half an hour before bed. Just plain protein, nothing "extra." Then take note how you feel the next day (all other factors such as stress levels, pre-sleep light exposure, bedtime and so on being equal).
And so too with your training choices and structure of training.
Our training choices do impact our hormonal responses. These are the hormonal shifts we refer to when we speak about mitigating "hormonal balance" through training structure. The shifts happen, they are real, they impact performance. The hormonal shifts that happen due to training can be modified, controlled, directed and purposely induced. That is all a body builder is doing in bulking up. That is all an ultra runner is doing in trimming down. Our body adapts to what we give it, and it does so in the language of the endocrine system. As a triathlete, we face contradictory demands on our bodies due to the need to combine power and speed with endurance, particularly at the longer distances. These tugs in different directions can impact our equilibrium in ways that increase uneasiness, fatigue, alertness, and so on -- in other words, simply the STRUCTURE of the training, and not the VOLUME nor the amount of INTENSITY in the training can dramatically impact the results of the training.
The Method aims to "get the mix right." You can assign the identical sessions and training volume and intensity in a given week to two identical athletes, and all factors being equal, you will get two complete different sets of results simply because THE MIX is poorly balanced and a lopsided training structure has shifted an athlete into a poor recovery pattern. Get the mix right, and the day-to-day recovery is improved. All this leads to better training, better health, and better performance -- purely by focusing on "getting the mix right."
So The Method takes this "hormonal balancing" into account, constantly. But that is just one factor of training. It rarely comes up in client discussions, but believe me, when it does it takes on the form of "better sex life", "more energy", "I shave more often." Anecdotal - yes. But having lived it myself, having done my own share of research and having witnessed the results of changing my training protocol on the athletes I work with, over time I have come to place more and more reliance on this ahead of other interpretations of training and response to training.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to clarify what it is we do, how we differetiate our thinking from the norm, why we are fully confident that it is worthwhile to do so, and that we will persist in this. I see nothing to lead me to think what I have described is not useful, highly relevant, and extremely effective.
Kind regards,
--
Marc Becker, Head Coach
ironguides.net
* * * Your best is our business. * * *