And I Took That Personally.
1) Huberman Lab #19 - Supercharge Exercise Performance and Recovery with Cooling (1hr:23min)
2) The Runners Zone Podcast #35 w/ Kentaro Onishi (1hr:12min)
3) The Run Smarter Podcast w/ Matt Phillips - Why is it so hard to run pain free? (1hr:6min)
4) Finding Mastery w/ Dean Karnazes - Finding Magic in Misery (1hr:24min)
5) The Knowledge Project #109 w/ Angela Duckworth - Grit and Human Behaviour (1hr:3min)
1) This episode from Andrew Huberman’s podcast caught my attention for obvious reasons and did not disappoint. The science they discuss has been in the works out of Stanford for a number of years and behind the scenes many elite athletes have started to implement it in their training protocols.
Andrew opens by dropping a bomb saying that you can use specific body site cooling to ramp up performance (endurance, strength, speed) by 2-4x over relatively short training cycles.
He back tracks a bit to discuss the 3 main compartments humans use to regulate temperature highlighting the face, palms, and soles of feet as the ‘special’ third compartment due to their physiological makeup. These 3 sites all have something in common…glaborous skin. Other than a brutal name this type of skin has a special kind of vasculature which allows it to dump heat or bring in cool much faster than ‘regular’ skin.
The specialized vasculature is called “AVAs or arteriovenous anastomoses” or what he eloquently describes as “portals in the palms”. A short cut to get heat out and cold in. Fast.
The studies he cited using palmar cooling between sets, and as recovery after the workout, showed massive, statistically significant, improvements in running endurance, total strength, and even the number of reps in a given set that day. The cool thing is the water doesn’t even need to be that cold so we’re not talking about setting up an ice bath. The temperature can’t be so cold that it causes vasoconstriction, so think just slightly cooler than your body temp.
I was waiting for him to drop some sort of protocol on how to implement this, and he did loosely, but I will have to do some digging to see how this is actually going down. He suggested trialing a 10-30s cool water hand soak in the early part of the training session and progressing to 30-60s soaks later in the session. There is individual variability in both the time and temperature and thus he said run some mini experiments and see how you do.
He goes on to discuss how body heat and will power are physiologically linked and that overheating will shut down even the most driven athletes. Thus, thermoregulation can play a huge roll in human performance. You want to get your body back to baseline temperature as quick as possible after exercise but jumping into an ice bath or shower may not be the best way to do it.
Interestingly, he finished by discussing the role that stimulants like pre-workout or caffeine have on body temp. Not surprisingly they increase it - thus you may “feel” more jacked up to do your workout but there’s the potential you’re leaving reps on the table.
A pretty scientific discussion but totally worth a listen! If you’re thinking someone should make cooling gloves for runners, I had the same thought, and so did much smarter people. Waiting to see these things hit the market.
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2) The Runners Zone is always one of my favourite listens and this one kept the bar high. Kentaro is a Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Physician and scientist who’s singular goal is to cure tendonopathy. Thus, “if you have tendons or work with people with tendons, this is worth a listen!”
I’ll give a bit of a rundown but sticking with the theme of heavily scientific discussions, this is well beyond my ability to add much insight. His team believes they have found an upstream inflammatory bio-marker that is released from injured tendons. This protein is named HMGB-1. The protein is released from the injured tendon in its reduced state (think chem 20) and hangs around in this state for 3 days post-injury. It creates a regenerative environment for the tendon by recruiting the right things into the area to help healing. But the story changes quickly, after 3 days it becomes oxidized and becomes exceptionally irritating to the tendon, promoting dysfunction.
Ken and his group believe that if they can keep HMGB-1 in a reduced state that tendons, even when exposed to stressors that would otherwise cause tendonopathy, will remain healthy.
They have done their initial work with metformin to keep HMGB-1 reduced and are currently exploring 2 clinical questions:
1) Does applying a topical metformin gel in a prophylactic fashion to a healthy tendon prevent tendonopathy?
2) Does applying the same gel to an injured degenerative tendon stop the tendon from further degenerating?
We will wait and see what the results are but if this works as described then there may be a lot fewer tendons to treat in clinic.
A few of my favourite quotes from the discussion are:
“clinical efficiency is secondary to providing optimal care”
“just addressing physical ailments is third-class, you have to address the vulnerability of the human. Being able to accommodate vulnerability [weakness, frustration] is as important as offering your expertise in treating someone based on knowledge of mechanics, structure, etc.”
They get deep for a bit and I love it. Sweet discussion on where the future of tendon injury management may be heading!
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3) I liked the question posed in the title of this pod and chose to listen in on the discussion with Matt, a S&C Coach who primarily works with distance runners. Matt opens up with a pretty thought provoking statement - running injuries have not come down over the last 20 years. With all the new research and in-depth conversation around reducing running related injuries nothing has changed. Surely people are not stupid and are trying to do what they’re told but something is not hitting home. The majority of their discussion revolves around exploring the why.
Could it be that some big shoe companies still advertise that 70% of runners get hurt because of improper footwear…
Could it be that runners no longer have trust in the advice of therapists…
A 2014 study aimed to uncover some beliefs on why runners are getting injured - What do recreational runners think about risk factors for running injuries? A descriptive study of their beliefs and opinions. The answers they got were: "not stretching," "excess of training," "not warming up," "lack of strength," and "wearing the wrong shoes.”
Some of those hold some water while others likely do not. Most runners know that if they train excessively above their adaptation zone they may get hurt and yet so many still do. Most runners know that there is a certain amount of lower extremity strength required to run and yet many don’t take the time to add in strength training for one reason or another.
Shockingly runners average 3 injuries every 20 weeks. The definition of injury that was used may be quite inclusive but the point being that the number of injuries runners are suffering from is way too high.
Could it be that the running community, a tight knit group of individuals there to support each other, connected by apps like Strava, are actually driving each other to continually run further and faster than each other. Constantly trying to do more than they know they should. Skip off days. Run through niggles. All to get the affirming feedback from their peers.
I love Strava, in some ways it’s more enjoyable to me than IG, but the potential of it to be a negative influence rather than a supportive community is certainly there. Rather than striving to continually improve yourself it is easy to pit yourself against your peers.
The concept of easy runs shows up again here but they frame it in a different way. The 70-80% of weekly mileage being easy remained a consistent message of the recent past but Matt suggested that if you are someone consistently seeking a challenge while you run - you should challenge yourself to hold back and hit those easy targets and to post those easy runs and take pride in them.
Could it be that runners still believe themselves as cars and therapists as mechanics. The idea that they can come into the clinic, lie on a bed, and have their “tire” changed in a session only to get right back out there likely leads to a high incidence of recurring injuries in the population. This may play a roll in a previous point of not trusting therapists anymore; why would you if you keep getting hurt.
Rather than think of ourselves as operators we should strive to be facilitators, instructors, and teachers with operator as one of many titles… not the sole identity.
“Humans are complex as opposed to complicated. Fixing a car is complicated, but with a manual anyone can do it. There is no manual to fix a human, you can’t just change the tire and say good to go. The situation is always complex.”
Greg Lehman (cited on the pod) had this to say about working with runners
“As a therapist I work with different runners not different running injuries.”
Running is Rehab - A Greg Lehman blog on utilizing running as your rehab for a running related injury. It’s an uncomplicated approach to taking control of your injury and returning to running. Greg, in my opinion, tends to downplay the effect of structural dysfunction in injury but the bones of the blog are useful.
This pod left me with more questions than answers which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ll end it on this quote which I particularly liked:
Some runners are scared to poke the bear and need to do it more often while others are too keen to smack the bear in the face and should back off a bit. The goldilocks principle needs to be followed to allow adaptation with out injury.
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4) Dean Karnazes…where to start! Legend in the ultra world, NYT best selling author, rated as one of the most fit and influential (separate categories) people on the planet. I have not read his work so I wasn’t sure what he would be like but the Finding Mastery pod brought it all out, in a really deep way. Not the “farrrr out, raddddd” kind of way, but a in a true self-exploration style. In some ways it felt like a coming of age story being narrated live, which ironically enough is what Dean describes his first book as. It was a cool listen about what running 100s of miles takes and gives all at once.
They hardly touch on any of Dean’s personal accomplishments other than a brief shout out to his new book “A runners high” and instead the discussion flows through drive, pain, purpose, discomfort, motivation, meaning, human nature, the human condition and ego.
Dean describes running as a laboratory for thinking and feeling:
“I don’t think that mastery is something you ever achieve. I think it’s a pursuit that you constantly, constantly move toward…It’s a journey. It’s not an end in itself.”
Dean has a personal connection to cliches suggesting early in the conversation that his Father was obsessed with them and then ironically uses them numerous times throughout the discussion. Some of my faves are:
salvation in suffering
magic in misery
motion stirs emotion
There’s no way for me to share in writing the raw vulnerability that shone through in this talk so I encourage you all, when the time is right, to let this conversation draw you in and see what you take out. Michael Gervais will guide you on a journey.
Dean believes we need a shift in the paradigm of comfort (not surprising from an elite ultra athlete), but I get it - “ The only way that any of us are going to grow is by putting ourselves in situations where we feel very uncomfortable.”
In the words of Kanye, what doesn’t kill you, can only make you stronger.
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5) This one was recommended to me by a buddy and I trust that if he tells me to listen to something it is always worth my time. I have listened to The Knowledge Project before (which is a favourite of his) but didn’t know who Angela was although I did know of her book GRIT.
It was a really engaging discussion on behaviour. Although grit was referenced, the conversation spanned much deeper and broader observations.
They start by exploring the question - what determines what a person will do at any given moment? In other words, their behaviour. Is it the person or the situation? With no surprise, it is a mixed % of both, but with very compelling data on both sides of the argument. Apparently this is still a pretty heated conversation between the two sides.
Angela dives into the professional athlete and discusses characteristics that may allow a select few out of an elite pool to become the great. The perpetual mindset of being an underdog long past the time when that was relevant seems to be a common trait…she uses Jordan as an example.
Angela discusses that 99% of people are just trying to get to a threshold of success. If the grade for an A is 90%, how many are putting in the effort to get 99%. We only try up to the point where marginal gains drop off to nothing. She suggests the athletes that hit GOAT status have no exit for diminishing marginal gains of achievement. The bar is always higher. Satisficing is a description of the 99%.
I’ll be the first to say I didn’t even know satisficing was a word. I actually thought she said satisfying but nope, Satisficing is a decision-making strategy that aims for a satisfactory or adequate result, rather than the optimal solution.
They go on to discuss self-efficacy and confidence as it relates to ones ability to control behaviour. When you are challenged appropriately and come out successfully, these experiences build self-efficacy and confidence. The ability to take negative feedback comes from a history of mastery or success experiences - in other words you’ve been encouraged enough to be a little vulnerable. They carry this concept further into answering the question of why people quit.
There are 2 paths out: the person begins to lack confidence in the idea that they can achieve the desired outcome OR the outcome has nothing left for them. The value of the goal changes or so does their belief that they can achieve it.
They discuss the 10,000 hour “rule” for mastering a skill. I guess this is not a magic # as it has been marketed but instead came from a single study of German musicians. The highest performing group did, on average, ~10,000hrs of practice, while the next expert group did ~5000hrs, and there was a further group at ~2500 hrs. However, the QUALITY of practice was deemed to be more important - the lesser groups had lower quality of practice and were less successful at implementing ‘deliberate practice.’
They touch on passion and on that note I’ll leave you with this:
Do what is play for you, yet work for others.
Thanks for reading!
