Most cyclists think that their legs or heart are their biggest limiter. But according to today's guest, Dr. Andrew Sers, the real bottleneck is something you've probably never even trained before.
You're breathing. And the craziest part about this conversation is you can train this no problem at all sitting at home on your couch. This conversation blew my mind.
It's Dr. Andrew Cellers. Dr.
Andrew Cellers, welcome to the Roadmap Podcast. >> Yeah, it's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on.
>> You're one of the pioneers of biomarker guided training, but can you give me a little bit about your background? When did you first become interested in respiratory performance from an athletic point of view? >> Oh, this goes way back.
So, uh, I'm going to date myself here a little bit, but, um, I actually heard an, uh, an eighttrack audio cassette on yoga breathing when I was a swim coach in a northern town in British Columbia, Canada, where I was uh, paying my way through university by swim coaching in the summers. And I was head coaching a a a fairly large team in a small town up north. And one of my athletes brought me these eight cat eight track cassettes and said, "Can you tell me whether there's any validity to this?
It seems like it's a smart idea, but I I I don't know what it's worth." And at the time, I was studying physiology at university. So, I had a bit of biomechanical background, a little bit of physiology um training from university.
And I listened to these eight tracks and that the eight tracks went through this idea of they introduced nasal breathing and they introduced the idea of slow breathing during running and I was at the time a budding triathlete. I was 19 years old and it was just at the early wave of triathon. was this is back in 1990, 1989, 1990.
And I started this slow breathing running training. And initially I could only jog. I could barely go from a walk to a jog without increasing my breathing rate.
And the the whole pattern of the eight tracks was to slow your breathing down and see how fast you could get with slow breathing. And over this course of six weeks, I went from being able to run at the time six six and a half minute kilometers to just over a 4-minute kilometer pace maintaining the same slow breathing pattern. And I just thought this is the most brilliant thing I've ever heard.
I went back to the girl who brought me the tapes. I said, I have no idea how this is going to affect us in swimming where we have a we have time limited space in swimming to breathe, but let's play around with it. So we actually started doing some slow swim training with slow breathing patterns and and incorporated into our train into our training at at with the team with some really good success there too.
But the impact of my of the understanding of what was going on in my brain came years later. But that was the industry. Yes.
Where it started. It started when I was 19 years old in a little northern town in Quinnell. And it was funny because before podcasts I'll often go and ride the bike and I'll have research the guest and most times when I go ride the bike I'll end up asking a totally different set of questions than the basis of my research because it's true lived experience and I had one of these type experiences today.
I'm using timeware. You know what this is? It's the new respiratory device.
>> Yeah. So, I've been lucky enough to get one of the first units that haven't gone to the team. So, I'm using Timeware and I my phone is crudely mounted on my handlebars because they haven't integrated with Hammerhead yet.
So, I'm just using the Timeware app. Um, one of the first things that I've noticed with it is when I was eating, I'm trying to fuel at like 80 grams of carbohydrates per hour for this session. I've been doing it almost exclusively off Haribo jellies.
Haribo jellies, it turns out, are quite hypoxic in nature because when I take the haribo jellies, my breathing rate totally changes and with that my rate of perceived exertion changes. I was like, >> this is very interesting. I need to do I need to dig into this today with Dr.
Cers to see what's actually happening here. >> There's a few things that could be happening. So, just for those that don't know, the Timewear is is a shirt that you can wear that actually measures your breathing pattern and it it's actually quite good at measuring the respiratory frequency and it gives a pretty good idea of volumes of breath.
It's not it's not extremely accurate, but it's it's really good at showing patterns of breathing and and being aware of your breathing is the first step in understanding how how you can train it and how you can actually use it in uh in your in performance improvements and uh and actually adjust and we can talk about that later, but how you can adjust your breathing to improve performance. But the interesting thing about the her the herabbo I heard a podcast that you you mentioned it and we were talking about the carbs and I've been using it for years when we when we ride in Mayorca and things because it's a it's an easy snack that you can pick up at almost virtually any store and um anyway so I I've been I've been using Herabbo for years unofficially and now and now I actually always carry a small bag with me on top of my regular fuel to get me through the la usually the last hour of a long ride. So, where's the tread from your first awareness where you get these cassette tapes and you realize, okay, there might be something here >> to now when you get to interact with some of the top performers in the world?
Like when did you start to see the patterns that made you zero your research into the bread? >> Yeah. So remember, I'm old, so I have so many stories and I'll go down rabbit holes, but in this little town up north, there also happened to live the the smartest physiologist that I've ever met.
His name is Jük Feldman, and he became a mentor of mine just through happen stance. He was just a swi a brilliant Swiss physiologist who was involved with some of the original sports schools in Switzerland and moved to Cornell, this little town um to really get away from from the the the big city and the drive that was happening in Europe. and he just wanted to move to a small town and live on a lake and and raise his family and and and he ended up coaching some of the world's the some of the best Canadian cyclists of all time and he was actively involved with Ryder Hesto and Jeff Kabush who are the two winningest Canadian cyclists and um >> Jirro Datalia in 2012 2011 for a rider.
>> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff Kabush is still riding and still racing gravel races and mountain bike races around North America.
And both of them were the the two top Canadian mountain bikers at the time when he coached them. He was coaching them when they were when they were youths up through their through their development years um before they turned pro. And he was living in this little town and and we started I met him at the pool one day and he was uh just sharing crazy at the time seemed like crazy ideas at the time.
he was developing new lactate testing protocols and developed a protocol that revolutionized lactate testing. And a few years later when I went back to Quinnel and I went back to spend time with him while I was doing my medical degree so that I had some time I I used it as excuse I had we had to do a rural placement in in medicine and I said well I'd like to go up to Cornell and the med school said sure that's a great place to go as a good opportunities for rural medicine up there. I didn't tell him.
The main reason I wanted to go was to spend time with with a physiologist. He was brilliant. And so as I got there, he brought me this device which was the first respiratory training device that had come on the market from Switzerland called the Spyro Tiger which was developed by his old schoolmates.
And this is all small world stuff. And um he said, "Andrew, I don't know if this works, but can you help me figure out whether this thing works or not?" And I said, "Sure.
What does it do?" And he says, "Well, you brea rebreathe some CO2 and you and you can train your respiratory system." And I'm like, "Well, how do you balance your CO2 with it?
" And he said, "I don't know. It's got a valve in it and it does all this crazy measurements." And I said, "Well, that doesn't doesn't make any sense.
I don't understand how that could work." So, I took it into the operating room where I was working. And I hooked it up to our CO2 analyzer on our oxygen and I put on a pulse oximter.
I started using this crazy breathing device and it did exactly what it said it would do. it would manage your CO2 levels so that you would stay in a safe physiologic range. And when it went outside of those ranges, it would alarm.
And I was like, well, I don't know how it's doing. I don't know how it's doing the math behind it. But that that's why you pay a lot of money for this device is because it had has internal mechanisms that measure that balances the CO2.
And that was back in 1998 999. And so we started doing respiratory training with Eric Feldman and that was he was instrumental in incorporating respiratory training with Jeff Kabush and Ryder Hedesto when they were youths. And then it was the whole Swiss mountain biking team was using it because the device was Swiss and they were supporting the Swiss mountain biking team and that was the time where they had eight team members from Switzerland who were in the top 10 in the world.
they all happen to be doing respiratory training and then the studies started to come out and >> so just to jump in and let's try and simplify this a little bit for someone that doesn't know what we're talking about because if you're a cyclon fan in the last few years you may have heard respiration maybe from two different directions you might have heard we had the carbon rebreeder scandal with I going to say UAE jumbo and a bunch of other teams I can't remember which teams were involved in that and Then it became quite nasal breeding became quite popular I think worldwide after James Nester he was on this podcast but more famously on Joe Rogan's podcast and a bunch of others wrote the amazing book breed. >> So given there are only two data points that most listeners have heard like fill in the blank for me as to what we're actually talking about and how this can be a powerful tool for cyclists. So this comes back to some of your Felman's ideas, but the idea that the physiologic performance that you derive out of the bicycle requires a whole bunch of complex physiology to develop the power that you put into your legs.
And so my approach to that is all of the systems that are required to improve performance can be separated. So you have a cardiac system, you have a respiratory system, you have a muscular system, you have a neurologic system, you have a psychologic system, you have a metabolic system. All of those systems contribute at some level to the absolute peak performance that you want, whether it's in a time trial or a road race or or wherever.
And any one of those factors can be a strength or a limitation to performance. So you imagine someone who has just broken their leg, they have a clear limitation in their muscular scalidal area. They can't ride a bike.
And as they recover from that broken leg, they will slowly develop their leg strength back. They will develop the bone strength will knit over the next six weeks. And they will slowly develop the leg strength again that they lost in not being able to train for 6 weeks.
And that's a perfect example of a muscle sceal limitation that is really obvious to anybody who can see it. But the same limitation could happen in somebody who doesn't have the genetic factors of having really strong muscular scalidal system and you can develop that in cyclist develop that in a number of different ways either with slow cadence or hill climbing or or gym work and they can overcome that muscular scalidal limitation. Likewise you can have a cardiac limitation or a metabolic limitation.
The inability to burn sugars fast enough to create the energy. And my theory and and it's been proven a number of times, you can also have a respiratory limitation. The respiratory is one of the key factors in driving oxygen from the lungs to the muscles where you need it.
And you need to have the ability to pull oxygen out of the environment, out of the air, push it into the blood through the lungs, and then have it pumped by a really efficient cardiac system to the muscles where it can be pulled out of the blood into the muscles. You need a really good metabolic system then to make use of that oxygen to create the energy and the drive to be able to ride your bike really fast. >> Yeah, that was a great explanation.
But without the But without the >> to just jump in on that and ask one qualifying question on it, >> how would we baseline our respiratory rate now as a you know a lay person non access to you know the world tour laboratories >> to figure out if it's a if it's a roadblock for us that's worth tackling >> without testing equipment. It's not super easy. It's it it's a little bit intuitive and it takes a little it takes a little bit of self-control, but it it's the ability to actually count and assess how you're breathing at any given intensity.
So, everybody will breathe slower when they're at rest, and everybody will breathe faster as the harder the higher intensity you go. And that is for two reasons. One that everybody knows about is is to pull in more oxygen to supply the muscles with oxygen to burn as a fuel as a as a as a assistance to the fuel burning of sugars and fats to create energy in the metabolic process.
But the main reason you breathe faster with higher intensity exercise is to blow off CO2, which is a byproduct of metabolism. So the harder you work, the more CO2 you produce, the harder you have to breathe to blow it off. Okay.
I didn't know that. >> Yeah. And and no, and most people who aren't in physiology, aren't in medicine, don't understand that the ma major driving force for you to breathe is CO2.
That's why when you hold your breath, if you have a pulse oximter on, which measures how much oxygen's in your blood, you can hold your breath for as long as you want. Your oxygen saturation won't drop, but you will have a desperate desire to breathe. And it's not because your oxygen level is dropping.
It's because your CO2 levels climbing. And is that the tingly feeling you experience? I've gone on some of these uh Wimhof courses and you'll do rounds of deep breathing and then on the final round you'll do a long breath hold and maybe the fourth or fifth time doing this you start to get a little bit better through repetition at these breath holes >> and you can get to a point where you start to get this very tingling sensation and your extremities get very cold.
Is that CO2 buildup? >> Uh no no yes and no. So for those for the for the numerous athletes you have that have followed Wimhof, the physiology behind the over breathing is you're blowing off CO2.
So you're taking your normal baseline which is at rest and at most physiologic levels your CO2 is extreme is very tightly controlled. is controlled between 35 and 45 millimeters of mercury biochemically because anything outside of that range is physiologically maladaptive and causes problems in multiple systems. It causes problems in the heart system, the vascular system and and in the brain.
So when you blow off CO2 more than your normal level, you become hypocapnic, low CO2 levels, and it allows you to hold your breath for much, much longer before the CO2 reaches a level that becomes uncomfortable. And when you blow it off, your body does a lot of things to try and save the your vital organs. So it it changes your vasculature and that's the tingling you end up feeling is the changes in vasculature that are happening because of the changing CO2 levels.
And in that particular example where you over breathe dramatically and then hold your breath, you've gone from the very very low CO2 levels by over breathing it off to very very high CO2s by doing a very long breathold. So you've gone from vasoc constricting that happens with low CO2 to vaso dilation that happens which is increasing blood vessel and increasing blood flow to the extremities. And that's the tingling you're getting is going from from vasoc constriction to vasoddilation and increasing blood flow to the periphery.
>> And as kind of a sidebar how is Wimhof how's he received in the academic community? >> Uh I think it depends on who on who you're talking to. I mean, he he's taken advantage of the the dramatic um the dramatic importance of breathing and making and made it fun and interesting and and dynamic and interesting.
So, I mean he's he's using real physiologic things. He doesn't he never talks about physi I mean in any of his things he doesn't talk about physiology. He just talks about the effects of breathing.
And so for me as a as someone who loves academics, I love the fact that he's got people thinking about their breathing. And so you can't argue with the fact that he that his he has effects and it causes effects. He doesn't talk about the why the physiology is there.
And I love the fact that I understand the physiology behind what he's doing to explain why people have these out of body experiences. >> I even got a kick out of listening to that. I'm like, I'm never going to do the Wimhof app with the same framing again.
I'm going to have a different understanding now next time I go back to it. It's a cool app by the way as well. >> Yeah.
And that's why I thought they um it's interesting you talk about the the book Breathe and then the other one that that sort of companion book that is also worth a read is is the oxygen advantage actually Patrick Mckon. >> Yeah. But the brilliant book, but it really should have been called the CO2 advantage, the carbon dioxide advantage, because all of the all of the the entire book is about this understanding of what happens to your body with higher levels of CO2 and and the the physiologic benefits of higher levels of CO2 if you can tolerate it.
And what and this is what we talk about when we talk about other ways of using your breathing to control carbon dioxide levels to improve performance. So you developed a respirator a respirator muscle trainer with Luke Wei. >> Yes.
>> What is that? >> So it's called a breathe way better. Uh Luke Way as a as a was originally an athlete that I helped out was a exterra athlete who came to Colona to coach with us and uh we started a a team called Balance Point Racing many years ago and he came to coach with that team and was looking for something else to contribute to the world.
And uh so he was kind enough to invite me to the initial conversations about how we could uh incorporate some of our coaching ideas into something more than just an online coaching business. And so he has a there's three of us that co-founded the company. There's Luke who's the coach and and ideas guy.
There's me, the physiologist who helped sort of package it and and help understand the physiology behind it. And there's an engineer named name named Alex who uh is brilliant and helped us develop the actual device to allow us to breathe and rebreathe CO2 in a balanced way that allows us to maintain normal physiologic pH. So you can do the over breathing like you do with Wimhof without actually running into problems with low CO2 levels.
>> Okay. And you can do >> slow breathing with the the big challenge with respiratory training is you can only do it for long enough that you don't screw up your physiology. >> But if you rebreathe some CO2, you can balance your physiology.
And now you can actually train your breathing for as long and hard as you want without actually negatively affecting your physiology and without having to drive the body to levels that would be really hard to mimic a race without riding really really hard. >> Road man. Whether you're a weekend warrior or a world tour rider, the right tools can make all the difference.
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com. I'm going to put that in the description down below. Yeah, I was going to say because if you can compartmentalize it and separate it into the like you were saying like the constituent parts, you can work just the breath like I assume I can simulate the effect on my respiratory system of a threshold session but while watching Netflix I'm not moving at all from the couch.
>> Absolutely. And if your if your limitation is breathing which which it turns out that many athletes have a limitation in their brain they just don't know it. They they can now train that at, like you say, at a threshold intensity without having to kill their legs or kill their cardiac system.
So that they can actually go do a 6-h hour ride the next day without actually having had any leg limitation or any cardiac limitation and actually get the benefits of those on the long easy ride with an easier breathing pattern. And I actually read the I think I was uh hearing one of your podcasts about your one of your favorite workouts is these four minute intervals that are up hill intervals >> four minutes of 20 seconds on 10 seconds off. >> Yeah.
Like a toata style effort. >> Yeah. Yeah.
And you you could imitate that again breathing. And one of the one of the benefits of doing those really highintensity interval sessions is the fact that it drives your breathing. But when your breathing gives out, you won't be able to push as hard on the legs.
And so now your performance will drop off because your breathing can't keep up. But you can train the breathing for 6 weeks and actually do better in that training session because your respiratory system is no longer the limitation. >> We've seen a move in the world tour to nasal patches that open your airways.
>> Yeah. >> Do we differentiate breeding between nasal breeding and mouth breeding or what's going on between those two or is it just collectively we're calling it breeding? No, there's a there's a number of benefits to nasal breathing.
The the the least obvious, but one that's not talked about that most most is that fact that there's there are sensors in your nasal patches that actually help incorporate diaphragmatic breathing. So, as air flows through your nasal passages, you actually stimulate the opposite hemiaphragm. So, if you breathe in through your right nostril, you'll actually stimulate the left hemi diaphragm.
in breathing through the right, it stimulates the opposite one. So there is better diaphragmatic involvement with nasal breathing than mouth breathing. And that's probably the biggest effect of the nasal patches.
It just opens up airways and allows a bigger space for air to get in. And some of these athletes are breathing such massive volumes that it's actually a their mouths aren't big enough to move the air. So the opening up the nasal passages actually and it also bronco dilates some of those air some of the smaller airways.
So the number of benefits to nasal breathing and those patches help just make a little bit more space for air to move through. >> Yeah, I've had a broken nose since I was a kid playing football and like I had it fixed but I don't think the surgeon a very good job fixing it. I find the patches really change my level of breath like >> significantly.
And what you can what you can do if you have access to a to a device I'm also involved with a Canadian company called V2 Master which which allows for us to measure tidal volumes and respiratory frequency as well as oxygen consumption in real time. And you can actually put put a mask on and you can actually see someone's tidal volumes change the volume that they breathe with each breath. You can actually see them change when they start incorporating nasal breathing into into their breathing patterns.
Here's one for you. You can uh dispel this as some idol gossip or based in science. I've heard whispers.
I'll call them words around the campfire. If you look at Yumbbo Visma's infection rate this year, it's gone up relative to previous years with the nasal breathing strips and apparently shaving their nostril hair to get even more in. And I was wondering like is nostril hair like a natural filtration and now there's more bacteria getting in.
>> Absolutely is. It absolutely is. So, so I won't comment on whether on whether shaving nasal hair will increase your risk for infection, but but it is absolutely nasal hair is absolutely a filter and it's a filter for viruses and it it's covered in mucus to pick up little bits of debris.
So, it filters dust, it filters smoke, it filters viruses, it filters bacteria. So, yeah, don't get rid of your nasal hair. Yeah.
My uncle with good bushy nasal hair will be happy to hear that never been sick in his life. >> Yeah. No, it the the nasal passages are are very complicated inside and so um they're they're covered in mucus, but they're also cover they have um a very thin layer of cells that are rich in blood flow and so it actually warms and smooths the air flow as you breathe in.
So, um, one of the breathing patterns that we teach to improve performance is is to slow the breathing down and use less frequency. So, slower breathing but bigger volumes. And if you do that through your nose, that that air flow is much smoother and causes less irritation.
So when when listeners of yours are riding really hard and they lose their their control of their breathing, which everybody does at maximum intensity, everybody loses control. They go from a rhythmic breathing pattern to a dysfunctional hyper breathing pattern. And that irritation mo a lot of people will feel afterwards after the their workout or their race is done.
They feel this kind of ground glass feeling in their lungs where it just feels irritated. And that's the turbulence of air flow that people get. And when >> if you've ridden in the veladrome, you'll experience that a lot.
I think we call >> anybody who's ridden anybody who's gone all out in any effort at some point has felt that feeling of being, oh my god, I can I can't move enough air anymore and it's causes irritation. And that's what is diagnosed as exercise induced asthma in people who it happens at a lower intensity. And exercise induced asthma really is just a dysfunctional breathing patterns.
There's almost nobody that has an actual problem with their lungs. They have a problem with breathing. And if they just slow their breathing down and control breathing through their nose, they would eliminate the symptoms of the irritation and tightness that happens with asthma.
>> So I would say almost no athletes that I know are currently siloing and focusing on respiratory training separate to their actual training. If someone is to listening to the podcast right now is to buy into this and they're to start protocols, which we'll get on to in a little bit, what sort of gains can an athlete realistically expect across, you know, the key metrics that cyclists love like >> V2 max improvements, threshold improvements, sprint improvements, or, you know, endurance improvements. Everybody that we've everybody that we've ever all of our all of our team members use breathing training in their p we we we didn't we didn't train anybody who didn't use respiratory training.
So we have this cohort of people that that we train for years that have really good breathing patterns and and have bigger volumes and and the respiratory system is no longer a limitation to their performance. So the only way there's lots of studies that now coming out the mo the most recent one is um Thomas Kowalsski published in out of Poland did a bunch of research in short track speed skaters, cross country skiers, swimmers all of them have shown improvement in performance and it depends on how on what your performance level is. The most interesting one we saw this year was um from France was Sir Richie was using our device for 48 weeks.
So he did a one-year study and he was using pro cyclists. So they're at the top of their game. They they improved their breathing dynamics by 8 to 9%.
So their tidal volume, their their biggest breath that they could take, they improved it by 10%. So they went from an enormous lung volumes of 6 and 1 half 7 L up to 7.7 L.
And when you take somebody who's an adult training at a high level, you think there's no way we're going to improve their respiratory system. They actually improve the volumes. They improve their ability to move that air, but the the fascinating thing is they improved their FTP by 6%.
>> That's huge for a pro level. >> And so and that was that was on average. And he had he had 20 athletes in this in this cohort.
So when you say no one's using breathing training, there aren't people using it. They're just not telling anybody that they're using it. So there were at least 10 at the tour that were using our device >> that had shown a 6% improvement in their FTP in the 48 weeks leading up to the tour to France.
>> Se is one of them. I know it. He just looks like he's nose breathing on climbs.
>> I I So it's funny because cuz I actually don't know who they are because it they're not coached by us. They're coached by this brilliant French guy who unfortunately doesn't speak English and and my French is a I haven't spoke in French since high school. So I don't I don't speak enough French.
So I'm having to read through his study and he's he's openly published his results without the name with the names redacted. >> But the study I mean so >> so what sort of protocols were these guys doing? >> My answer would be six to 10%.
>> Okay. You got my my attention. What sort of protocols are these guys uh doing for this?
>> Yeah. Well and he published the protocol. So he over 48 weeks he actually did he he addressed all the different areas of respiratory management.
So the first six weeks was learning how to breathe, how to incorporate your diaphragm, how to slow breathe using nasal breathing, how to in how to incorporate um different patterns at different intensities. That was the first six weeks. The second six weeks, he he added a higher level with some coordination training.
So a little bit higher respiratory frequency work. Then he added some resistance training to the next six weeks. Then he added another version of it into the time trial mode in in arrow position.
And so every six weeks he was ad he was developing the program to adapt to the athletes that he was training till he actually developed athletes that could take big big breaths and move really really fast when they needed to under controlled circumstances and incorporate as much nasal breathing as he could. And that in a 40-year period gave them six to eight% of improvements in their FTP. >> And is there other biomarkers that are affected by it?
Is it a like noticeable impacts on stuff like heart rate variability? >> Heart rate variability is dramatically impacted by your breathing patterns. This is a fascinating thing about everybody.
Everybody thinks they know what heart rate variability is, but they don't understand that if they actually slow their breathing down, their heart rate variability will go up. And that's because as you take a breath in, you're pulling blood into the chest cavity. And that increases Venus return back to the heart and causes the heart to stretch more.
And the the increased stretch of the heart allows the heart to actually contract stronger because the bigger the stretch, the stronger the heart can contract and then it doesn't need to take the next beat as big. So there's more variability between beats in the heart because of slow breathing. So the best way to improve your heart variability is to slow your breathing down.
>> Yeah. I had Marco Alini on the podcast who's written some of the, you know, big papers on heart rate variability and >> he kind of went really deep on breathing and in particular the wristbased devices that are so popular >> on heart rate variability and how he thinks it's just a super bad way to measure it. that it needs to be a conscious moment we're measuring heart rate variability so we can control that breath because it has such a profound impact on the result.
>> It's interesting it it he's totally right. I I don't disagree with him at all. the the benefit of the of the wrist devices.
And I was actually talking to a non-athlete friend um just on the weekend uh who's an ICU doctor and he's been tracking he has terrible sleep cuz he's up in the middle of the night taking care of patients who are sick and for that and he does a week at a time of these horrible nights where he's taking care of patients all day, all night for seven days straight. And so for that whole week, his his sleep patterns are a disaster. He maybe sleeps two or three hours a night and then has a nap in the day to try and be functional because he's got to still function.
>> But he he's been tracking his heart rate variability because his watch tracks it. >> And >> while he while and he's right about what happens if you actually want a specific number to watch the trend is fascinating for this guy. His heart rate variability has dropped through the week and his sleep scores are atrocious as well obviously, but his heart rate variability tracks his sleep almost almost exactly the same.
And his heart rate variability slowly recovers for the week after, gets to some normal level two or 3 weeks after his bad week of work and then he's back at work again. And so you can you can actually track his fatigue and his cardiac fatigue from these terrible nights of sleep. What do Ajouralia, Stage Slayer, Mads Patterson, and half the professional pelaton have in common?
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com, that's nomio, and check out this gamechanging supplement. Details are in the episode show notes or description down below. Do you think we're at like I'm thinking back when I got my first power meter was probably 2007 2008 and almost nobody had a power meter then.
You know I've told this story a million times in the podcast of how expensive it was and you know telling my bank that it was a car to go to university and blowing the whole budget on a a power meter. Do you think respiration, respiratory analysis, this whole field will become as popular as the power meter has become? And where are we in that life cycle?
>> Yeah, as soon as we make it, it's just like I would actually compare it more to a heart rate monitor where no, nobody wore a heart rate monitor because it's impossible to measure heart rate. You had to have six leads and it was all wires and stuff. But as soon as Polar came out with a strap that you could put around and you could actually accurately measure your heart rate, everyone's like, I should probably know what my heart rate is when I'm running.
Now every I mean, nobody does. Nobody rides a bike or runs without a heart rate monitor. They don't know how to use it.
They and and most people don't use their heart rate. They just have it. They collect the data, but they don't actually use it.
And u 20 years ago we had a strap that incorporated breathing patterns as well as it was called a um before time wear it was called a bio harness. Um it was a New Zealand company and we use that and because we were interested in how people breathe and so as soon as it as soon as the heart rate straps start incorporating breathing patterns into it and there are a number that are doing that now. Timeware is is one of those companies.
Um, but there's a number of companies doing it and I it's it's it's not rocket science to measure how how big the chest is moving and how fat how often it's moving. So, you can get the breathing patterns very quickly and there are three or four companies um that are doing that now. And I I so I think everybody will be looking at their breathing patterns in a few years because it'll just be part of what their heart rate straps show them.
Um, and I think very similar to heart rate, there'll be a small number of people that use that data to direct their training and and accurately use it or I think AI is going to help as well, but people are going to start seeing that there are changes that happen beneficially by by adapting the training to what they see on their screen. Yeah. And >> it's like they do with wattage, they should be doing it with I think people should be doing it more with heart rate and with breathing because that's the physiologic change versus what the your power output is.
On a on a good day, if you can ride 300 watts, you'll have a different heart rate than you than you will on a bad day. And those are two different physiologic effects. So the training needs to adapt to how your body is responding to it.
Not by >> it takes us a little bit of time even to catch up on the vocabulary on it because we're so used to, you know, LT1, LT2 that now to move to VT1, VT2, there's a new understanding and new vocabulary and new conversations that have to happen. And maybe like the carbohydrate movement has had in the last few years since Sam I impi's fuel for the work required paper. It's been this slow movement towards actually fueling the demands of the work.
Now to the point where >> people don't realize that sometimes they're inhibiting their performance because they just keep pushing more and more carbohydrates. Like I'm talking to guys who are doing 200 grams of carbohydrates per hour. And then I talked to uh physiologist for uh tutor poder and he explained it to me with a lovely analogy.
It's like when you're coming off the toll boot and there's like 14 toll boots and they all merge into two lanes of traffic. It's like there's a backlog. And that's exactly what happens when we go too heavy on carbohydrate.
>> Absolutely. >> Intake. And I think it's a lot of this stuff just needs time to play out and us to have those conversations for it to become into common usage and parallels.
>> Absolutely. I I I totally I totally agree and and companies like Timeware make are making it more accessible and as soon as they make it affordable and easy to use is exactly our our whole argument from the beginning and that's why our the device that we use to help people train is is quite inexpensive. because it's it really is a partly a teaching tool and partly a training tool, but the idea was to make it affordable enough that anybody can use it to to help adapt and help understand their breathing so that they can incorporate it into their into their regular lives and not take not take hours and hours and hours do to do what they will benefit them in the short term but also in in the long term because breathing health is a big part of this too and and helping helping people breathe better is the the physiologic effects of longevity.
There's a ton of studies that come out this like this year talking about V2 as being the best predictor for longevity. A sub study of that showed that the ventilation how you breathe was had even a greater prediction of longevity which is which is a fascinating. So how much you can breathe the total volume of breath that you can move and that's comes down to two things.
how big your respiratory system is and how fast you can move it, the coordination of it. >> Because I often wonder what those V2 recommendations give like, oh, the higher your V2, the longer you're going to live. But like I'm even think about myself.
Like you can game that V2 system super easy because it's so it's so predicated on body weight. Like I'm a much healthier person at 80 kilograms than I am at 68 kg. My V2 max looks very very different at 68 kg and 80 kg.
>> Yeah. Most people most scientists will not use a weight based V2. They'll use an they'll use an absolute >> totally.
Yeah. Makes >> sense. They just use as mills of oxygen per minute and they'll they'll remove the kilograms from it.
So most of those studies are being published not per kilogram but they're just doing it total volume. But you're right, your your V2 if you're healthy at 80 kilogram healthier at 80 kilograms than you were at 68. Your V2 is likely higher >> total.
>> Yeah. >> Yeah. But you would you would have you would have had a more impressive number if you developed by your kilograms when you were lighter.
But your abs but your absolute V2 would be better if you stayed healthy. And you can wattage, you know, like I could probably put out more wattage now than ever. But what's per kilogram?
A very different equation. Yeah, I was. Yeah.
Yeah. I And and I think we were talking just before the podcast about I I had the opportunity to ride with Sven TU the other day who's a big boy. I mean, he's I mean, he's famous for sitting on the front of a Pelaton for 200k and just pulling it along at 400 watt.
I mean, the guy is absolutely incredible. But we were climbing up a hill and I mean, he he's he hasn't lost a lot. I mean, he's lost a lot compared to his pro days, but he is an unbelievable physiologic beast to be able to ride up the hills that we were riding up.
We were riding up gravel climbs at 20%. And it took everything I my power to keep my wheels on the ground. And he was just pedaling beside me like it was and he must have been doing 500 watts.
>> That's what you get when you tow your dog on a trailer all over the country going to bike races for half a decade. >> Yeah. A big dog, too.
It wasn't It wasn't a little dog. And there's there's no places in BC where there's flat roads. It's all mountains around here.
>> Andrew, I know you're a super busy in demand guy. So, I really do appreciate your time and just shedding some light on this, which I think is a fascinating area. And I think, you know, if you're up for it, we'll we'll go on part two and part three on this in the weeks and months to come because I think it's there's a tailwind behind this breeding respiratory area at the moment.
And I think it's just going to, you know, I think the like these conversations are important to just start chipping away at the layers and getting deeper and deeper and more nuanced each time. >> Absolute pleasure.