Olav Aleksander Bu
Appearances
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then two and a half at LT2 or anaerobic threshold AT.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Basically for how much lactate?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I think very often it helps to think that metabolism is basically the same. The body is the same no matter what kind of sport we do. And that's why sometimes it makes it more universally easy to understand if we think of what kind of sport we do as a function of intensity and duration. So as long as you find a sport, so let's say that you compare a sport that has a certain intensity and duration.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So let's say, for example, if it's a 200 meter or 400 meter, You could say that then you are typically in the range of, let's say, for the fastest swimmers, typically, let's say, two to four minutes, for example.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
If you take a 1500 meter runner and you look also at the lactic concentration of them, you will also find actually pretty much the same values, let's say, among also tracking field athletes that does 1500 meters or 800 meters as well. As the moment you start to go a little bit longer, then you will actually start to see that this actually is not the case anymore.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And this is also where it helps to also distinguish between lactate concentration, let's say the highest value you're looking for, and also lactate production. Because lactate production, it's even more complicated. We can't really measure lactate production. Then we need to integrate for time. So you have to do, let's say, a pre-measurement, a post-measurement.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then also, obviously, here there are, again, many weaknesses to an approach like this. But you have to...
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
derive it based let's say more on calculations than when really that you can measure it directly how high you can get in lactate concentration is also valuable because it obviously tells you something about how much you are able to buffer in your body too so again what we see coming back to the main question of how do you use lactate and then basically for the sake of where you do a profile and testing
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is where I would say that for endurance athletes like, for example, marathoners, triathletes and others, which has a very, very long duration and they don't have very much top speed, here it's actually not uncommon even to see where the second infliction points, even validated by maximum lactose steady state, that actually can even be below 2 millimoles.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah, because I think for those that are a little bit more into the details, I think also again here it's important to come back to that it's a lactate concentration. And one thing that we also do know in elite athletes is that elite athletes has a higher blood volume, larger plasma volume and other things as well. So this means basically that the- Absolute lactate could still be higher. Exactly.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So lactate production can be higher, but basically it shows up as a smaller concentration in the body. But what we distinguish between is basically at where comes the point where you are continuing at the same pace or power, but now lactate doesn't stay steady anymore.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So if you measure after same pace, same power, but after five minutes, after 10 minutes and so on, basically then you'll start to see that lactate still continues to rise. It doesn't stay stable anymore. This, I think, is probably one of the few concepts of where you can say that, okay, if you test it this way, it becomes very easy to translate.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Let's say the communication between people, because at the moment you start to talk about anaerobic threshold, this is more like, okay, how do you define it? This is 20-minute power. It's a 60-minute power. What kind of duration? What kind of protocol? And all these kind of things. But that's one.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And the second point also is that what happens because obviously when you are an endurance athlete, like a triathlete or a marathoner, for example, is that you need to have a sustainable energy supply for the duration of the event. And obviously the faster you can go off your potential for that duration, the more beneficial it is.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So that means also that your utilization, maybe come back to this a little bit because VO2max is one of the terms we're going to define.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So utilization normally, just to take that term then, or let's say partially, let's define utilization. Utilization is basically, normally you can do it as whatever you want. You can do it as a raise space, oxygen consumption at raise space versus your view to max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But very often in scientific literature, we define this as, for example, your oxygen consumption at maximum active steady state versus view to max. So for example, if it was Then it could be that your maximum is a steady state. You see the oxygen consumption there is, for example, 80% of your VO2 max. Is that what you would typically see in an elite athlete? That's low. That's low. That's low.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
For a marathoner, you would go even higher. So for a marathoner like the elite marathoners, you're talking about 94, 95% of the VO2 max. For Christian Gusto, when they do Ironmans, you're also pretty much around there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So VO2max is normally defined as the maximum oxygen your body is able to consume over a minute, a full minute. But this is also something that is debated, is less of, let's say, protocol influenced. You can still go out and do, for example, efforts out in the field and you will be able to produce higher numbers than what you would be able to do on a standard graded exercise protocol.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Normally, I would say that should be the case. But it is also where there can also be other factors also involved in it. One of the places where this is something that have quite passed me is that, for example, Formula One drivers, they sit in for almost, let's say, one and a half hour with extremely high heart rates.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So this is, I think also when you are doing this, so it could also be like jet fighters as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes, exactly. So you could say that in dogfighting, for sure, then I think you will actually be pretty much maybe same as Formula One. But I think that if you're just pushing really high G-forces in one direction, then it would maybe not be as even if it's a prolonged one. The reason for that is because I think that the G-forces, obviously, you're trying to counteract that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So you're mobilizing every bit of muscles that are in your body in order to stay exactly where you need to stay.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
forces that are preventing the blood returning to the heart could make that high heart rate really a product of tiny tiny little ineffective beats yes that's also we've done some studies on that in high g-force athletes no actually in similar because it's quite interesting to see that what happens also with the muscles so when you do work you produce a certain amount of power obviously two there are forces involved and there is velocity involved
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
These forces require a certain amount of recruitment of muscle fibers, and these muscle fibers at a certain point will actually start to cause vasoconstrictions. So they actually start squeezing off the blood supply. They normally act also as a pump. They actually help pumping blood around in the body, promoting preloading.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But the interesting thing is that we do see that where you also get in the area of anaerobic threshold is actually where you are starting to come to the point where you're squeezing off the blood flow as well in the muscles. And this happens around ballpark-ish. Obviously, there is a fairly large range, but ballpark-ish around 30% of your 1RM.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah, for sustained efforts. For short efforts, you can get very, very close. But for sustained ones, yes, I would agree. But coming back to running versus the bike, which was, let's say, the place where it started. Normally, I would say that, yes, in running, you would at least at submaximal efforts have a higher view to max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The only thing is that we see that in people that are, let's say, somewhat balanced trained, so they spend some time on the bike, they spend some time on running, then normally there are more muscles involved for a longer duration in cycling than it is in running.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Actually, when I started working with them, then it was close to a significant difference between cycling and running and even more in swimming. Higher in swimming? No, lowest in swimming, actually. And that comes also back to one other thing. One thing is also when we talk about preloading and how this also affects it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I actually were stupid enough to teach Christian and Gustav this a long time ago. And that is if they wanted to have a very high view to max, obviously, if you're trained, you will see this immediately on the breathing patterns.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But what you can do to create an artificially high view to max is that you basically, when you come pretty close to your all out effort, if you try to restrict your breathing, let's say for a short, short time there, you will create a depth and this depth will actually boost the numbers even higher.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And even there, you can even train yourself also to the point where you're not talking about marginal differences in your VO2. You can spike the numbers up to extreme numbers if you practice this a little bit. That aside, I think it's important here to remember that that's not equivalent to getting fitter.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's just a way of basically manipulating something in the body and you're cheating a protocol. And it's not your, let's say, VO2 max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
One thing I want to add here just before answering that. View to max for me in the same way as power. You can look at it in relative terms and absolute terms as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I would say that in this case here, it comes very much down to technique. But if you practice this a little bit that you can boost it above 70. What? Not a problem. Wow. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I've seen some crazy numbers. I don't even have to go into the raw data. You just see it on the screen and say, okay.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, so it would be a little bit more prolonged than that if you create an oxygen depth in your body. But one thing that I think also here is important too, because this is also one of the things that is a little bit challenging when you read a lot of research too, is that very often we take that research for granted or it's good.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
There is a lot of things around it that we don't have access to or we don't know. And also one thing that also is sometimes a challenge
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
is for people to understand also whether the technology they are using one is it good for what you really are doing here so you can get a lot of machines that can do measure some kind of oxygen uptake or ratios and other things but it doesn't mean that it necessarily is a good instrument for what you want to do and the second part of it also is that we have to understand where are we measuring
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Obviously, in this case, when we do oxygen measurement, we measure it on the exhaust and not in the muscles. And that's also an important difference here, because if we go to the point, and I think we're going to run out of time if we continue on this path here, but if basically you look at cellular or basically cell respiration, the numbers you'll see... Much higher.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No. Again, here, I think it comes down to just staying true to some principles that can guide us. The good thing with VO2max testing is that they're the generally accepted standard for doing this is a graded exercise test. And you go through that and it will produce fairly comparable numbers for most people to relate to.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Of course, the question becomes also to what extent you're able to influence this as well, because there are some practices that they want done in a very rigorous way. They even almost prescribe what you should do the days leading before and another where you just come in and they just put you through a test and then you get what you get.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
What I would normally do is I would try to create some standardized protocol from time to time. And that means not only the testing itself, but also what happens a little bit before. Without it, it becomes too invasive into people's lives, like standardizing what you do the days before and all these kind of things. I think this is impractical for most people.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
If this is a very important metric for you, like one of the key metrics you use in order to understand how have the previous period influenced you and you're looking for marginal changes, then it becomes very important also how you standardize the days before. But I would say for a normal person, I would say that I would keep a standardized protocol.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I'm not very good at the pitches. My background is from engineering and it means also that this principle have guided me quite a lot through my journey in endurance sports or in sports in general. We embarked on a journey 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, I would say now 15 years ago.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So I would come in there, let's say, at least trying to eat pretty much the same every time I go there. And that means making sure you are well-fueled as if you were going to do an important training session.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That means normally more carbohydrates, make sure you're well hydrated and obviously also that you are to the extent you can influence it or you can, you should be able to influence it, but make sure that you also had a proper sleep so you don't come in there like completely tired and things like this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is where I would say it's more important to use your experience to have enough understanding of what makes you set up for a good test the day after. So for some people, exercise is irregular and there are more time in between. Obviously, if you're going to do a little bit harder exercise the day before or anything like this, you'll come into the session and you even feel sore in the muscles.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is not ideal necessarily for the ability to mobilize. For the athletes that are well-trained, then it's completely different. Then it's more like, okay, what would I do the day before a competition or anything like this?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It doesn't have to be an elite level, but it's more like you think a little bit like, what do I want to do in order to make sure that I've gone through the different stuff and I feel ready for the day after? So on the day of the test itself, one is important timing of the day. This is important to try to keep somewhat consistent, I would say, because of the circadian rhythm.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We know that, for example, your temperature levels in your body, this fluctuates. This is maybe one of the easiest observable differences in a human, basically, as an indirect measure of the circadian rhythm, where we basically see that you have a minimum point that happens typically in the morning just before you wake up, and then you have a maximum point typically in the afternoon.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And there is, of course, plenty of research suggesting that aerobic exercises are best done normally a little bit in the afternoon when you are typically also around the highest core temperature or natural core temperature. The minimum point is easy to measure.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So for people that has to, like now it's become very popular, like in the Tour de France and other places, triathlons, you see these people, they run around with this little temperature device on their body. And it's very easy to observe if you use it 24-7. This is very easy to observe basically when your minimum point is.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The maximum point is influenced unless it can be masked by noise and other activities and other things you do. So it's a little bit harder to see where it is. But let's say you put them 12 hours apart as a guiding tool. But now I'm already getting to the point where it gets a little bit, let's say, more detailed. But I would just say, keep the timing of the day the same.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So it really doesn't matter if you do it in the afternoon or you do it in the morning, as long as you keep it consistent. Then from there, I would do a proper warm-up.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
where we started to do what I would call extreme in-depth and longitudinal studies on two of the arguably fittest athletes in the whole world. Yeah, I think that pretty much resembles it. Obviously, a large part of that also involves technology development, simply because we are at the edge of basically what we have available information, research on.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So again, here I would do a warmup much in the same way I would do a training session. So I would normally stick to a standardized warmup protocol where you start out maybe, for example, six minutes, very easy. This can even be walking. Then I would do, or basically pedaling, soft pedaling.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Then I would do six minutes with a little bit more effort, but it typically should be more something that you would be comfortable doing as your longest sessions that you do. So if you are out and you do, I say the longest sessions you do is an hour.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Obviously, if they're all out, then it would be a little bit too hard, but then you should more aim for something I could do for like, this would be an easy session for me, but I could do it for some while. You could, for some people say, this is your marathon, let's say pace or where you do more of a longer rides. And then I would do a short effort around three minutes.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That sits somewhere where at this time I wouldn't look too much on my power meter or my heart rate or anything, but more by feeling where you feel, okay, this is normally where my threshold would be. And then I would probably also do, let's say, a couple of short, short efforts that are, let's say, progressively towards VO2 max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So let's say one, two, three, maybe two to three efforts that are somewhere between 10, 15 seconds with equal rest in between. And the reason for this is that it's easy to think, oh, but don't you exhaust yourself now? before you do the view to max then? Well, no, you don't.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The little fatigue, or let's say the little fatigue that you possibly would induce with this is easily offset by other factors that will much more contribute to your view to max when you start doing this. So that means also that after I've done this one, I would just again go back to very short, easy efforts as you get a total warmup of 20 minutes, something like this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
In between there, take a toilet break or anything like this, but don't keep this rest too long because obviously now you're going to cool down again if you don't go to your VO2 max test now. So that means also like have a small sip of water, something like this, if you want to do that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Also, before you start your warmup, it can be good things if you have something carbohydrate based, you consume a little bit of that. Some people would say, ah, I don't like this because it could influence.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah. But then again, this is something I would say that maximal, yes, maximal, it won't do that very much because the closer you get to your metabolic steady state or maximal metabolic steady state and then above, basically things start to homogenize. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is a good way to open up, let's say, a little bit the door to how we, because again, we are at the edge cases where basically we have to do the research ourselves. One thing we have to consider is that when we do gas exchange measurements, for example, to understand a little bit substrate metabolism.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, we use a device which is still on all devices. There are two devices I like to use. One is the Jager Oxygen Pro with a mixing chamber, and this is important. The Parvo has a mixing chamber as well, but we have the Oxygen Jager Pro. When I've been testing in the US, for example, on elite athletes or Olympic athletes, then we have used the Parvo simply because that's the one that has been here.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Europe is more used to Jager. We don't use, maybe I shouldn't say that, we don't use the Vintu CPX, which is the successor of Jager Oxygen Pro. This is one of the devices. We use also the AEI Moxus, but this is more of a call it for specially interested people. We use also the View2Master actually quite significantly. And more and more of the testing actually have gone over to the View2Master.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that means that even in some cases, we have to develop technology to allow us to even progress the understanding of getting a more granular understanding of why things are the way they are.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We have been fortunate enough to work with them for some while. So we have the CO2 version as well. But this is where it has been in alpha mode and it requires also completely different skills than what you would normally require.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But the reason also why we do that is again, also for one of the reasons you experienced is that you see that your VO2max is maybe a little bit different when you are out and cycling and do the efforts and it's not inside the laboratory. Because also we have to remember that VO2max is on the one side, we say it's the highest oxygen consumption normally as they normalize over one minute.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That is a result of how much muscles that are involved in the work there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Let me shed some light on it because that was basically when I started working with Christian and Gustav. Where they are today is that basically there are virtually no difference between swimming, cycling, and running. Same VO2max. More or less on the three disciplines. But it has, again, to do exactly like you said.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
You can manipulate your VO2max by that you are targeting, let's say, typically shorter duration efforts. And so you start recruiting more, learn to recruit a little bit more, and also train more. Let's say fibers that you are not normally used to use so much. And this is also something that is highly plastic, much more plastic than we ever have thought it was before.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
To the point where we have leading researchers in Norway that have solely focused on VO2max. And let's say they went into schools where they've done this for decades. But where we even sat down and we looked at the data and thought something has to be wrong. And that comes actually from the period when we switched from Tokyo.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
olympics and then on to ironman and basically we saw a decline in view to max from me not unexpected but more there hasn't been doubt on this so it was actually quite nice to measure the decline how much so the decline in absolute or let's say in relative view to max and so it makes more sense for people is that christian and gusta typically the highest numbers we have had on them are very very high highest numbers ever measured in history i mean 90
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Well, Christian, we've had measurements with him actually validated. But on him, we have exceeded in absolute terms 7.7, 7.8 liters per minute in oxygen uptake. At what, 75 kilos? No, so at that time, he was around 80 kilograms. So just, let's say, around 100 milliliter per minute per kilogram in oxygen uptake. So Gustav is a little bit smaller.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So he has a little bit lower oxygen uptake than what Christian have, but he has the highest he've clocked in around, let's say 94 milliliter per minute per kilogram, something like this at the highest. But I would say that this is not beneficial for what they are doing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah. So the interesting thing there and the good thing about it is that this was something we reproduced over three months.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes and no. I would say that it's actually quite spread. It's a mixture between triathletes, cyclists, runners, track and field to even sailors, which is, let's say, on the explosive end of the domain, actually, and not endurance, but yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Well, actually, yes, it was. But this is also where one place where we resonate a lot. View to max is the single best metric we probably have for anything that is related to human health and performance. But it is also where we understand that it's a little bit more nuanced than that. I'm not talking about it as pure as a predictor for your race performance because that's a different domain.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But where you could also say that you could still be healthier with a little bit lower view to max. And now I'm not talking because about that you put yourself through some stress and other things like this. So this becomes negative longer term. View to max is a one-dimensional also unit again. We talk about something on a y-axis. Yes, we normalize it as a milliliter per minute.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So you could say that it has a second axis to it, an x-axis or time axis to it as well. But we don't say how long.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Exactly. And this means also that you can trade off some of your view to max. And I would say that the very, very best predictor is capacity. Like capacity is maybe the single best one for everything. But the problem is that testing for capacity is such a brute force endeavor that it's not practical. It is really not practical.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's why view to max is, I would say, is the single best predictor of everything measured in a practical way. But for Christian, what was really nice when we did this, this is not only actually where we measured. And I can say that we are at the edge where there are things that we don't understand. There are still things we are researching.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And like you said, introductory, I'm in the applied world. And in the applied world means basically... much more experimentation and understanding what happens here with some individuals. My sample size doesn't come from the population. It comes from the sheer amount of data that I gather on these APIs. So it's not like a single view to max test.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It is so many view to max test that there's probably no other human in history where they have been through these testing protocols over time. where we can correlate it to also a range of other metrics as well, both internally, but also external metrics.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that means that, for example, here to put this into context, the good thing is that when we do testing, I normally not only have Christian into the lab, I have also minimum of, let's say, one or two athletes as well into the lab. And our protocols are quite extensive. So this is also one thing that we already talked about, that protocols can have an influence on testing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And what you do before the protocol will have an influence on your V2max. That's exactly why we're discussing, should you warm up or should you not warm up? Yes, you should, because it will normally give you, let's say, a better result when you are warmed up. But that means also that the protocol can also then have an influence on your V2max measurements.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And we normally do the V2max measurements at the end of our test, which is, you would say, but that's normal. Yes, well, we also do that simply because it also more normally simulates what they're also going to see on racing. So normally what happens in racing is that you normally also will go closer to, let's say, complete exhaustion when you get towards the end of the race.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And this is why it's interesting to test it there. But we don't only test it once. We even repeat it. So we do two VO2 max tests just 10 minutes apart. And even this year, we did even three tests, let's say, with less or 10 minutes apart as well. Interesting thing here is that what we see is that you normally don't get your highest view to max on the first one, even though you're exhausted.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We even see that even on the second one. More interesting thing to also deserve here is that then you would think that, I say, intuitively you can say that, okay, you would maybe also then see a higher carbon dioxide production as well. You don't. That's actually lowered. That has to, let's say, call it some priming effects more in general terms.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But also what we do see is that there are some substrates as well that actually do influence on micronutrients also that actually also can help boost your VO2max as well. Such as? Long story short, beetroots obviously have been something that people have found quite interesting over a long time. Beetroots? Beetroot, yeah. So they use beetroot concentrates.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And the main thinking behind is that when you eat nitrate, which beetroot is normally rich in, and the body converts this to nitric oxide, This helps for vasodilation. So vasodilation, you can think of this almost like a plumbing in our body. We already said that from our previous conversation that basically cellular respiration is not the limitation to your view to max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So there are other things that are limiting factor. That means also that, for example, your cardiovascular system, meaning also actually your ability to transport blood around in your body is going to be important.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
For example, one of the reasons why when you then use some supplements like that are highly enriched in nitrate, so you get a nitric oxide boost, is that this was actually, it's almost like plumbing. You're opening up the plumbing and it allows your blood to circulate faster throughout your body. This is hard to reproduce in elite athletes.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Like in amateur athletes, we normally see that this has a positive effect.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Let's say something like that and then take that with a grain of salt.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Now, would it be anything that increases nitric oxide? So that's the thing, because one thing that we don't see is we don't see these effects in elites, for example. And this is obviously one of the benefits when we do more longitudinal studies with such, let's say, granularity and in-depth measurements we do.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
There is a couple of definitions of this already, which is I have to say that it's bad when you have good terminologies, but they start to get diluted. But the original definition of FTP by the authors, I think, was Andy Kogan. And that was that basically it's, you first actually have to do a five minute all out effort. And then basically there's a short pause in between there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And one of the things we see there is that when they use beetroot concentrate, nitrates are considered an ergogenic aid. When you do all these measurements, you leave out the guesswork and we see, well, over all the testing we do, we have not seen a real effect, at least not on VO2max. Maybe other places, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on VO2max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Because they're already optimized in that regard. Probably, or maybe there are other limiting factors instead. We were approached by a company that is called Plasmaid and they actually focus more on the other part of it. They say the catalysts that actually help because you have to convert nitrate into nitric oxide and there's a cost to this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So what they did instead is that they made from pine bark extracts instead, they made adaptogen or they extract an adaptogen that helps catalyze this process. And the interesting thing with this at Uptick Gen is that, again, now we are a place we can just look at the observations and repeated observations over time, and we can't necessarily explain 100% yet, so it becomes more speculations.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But from those, what we can only speculate or hypothesize is that what happens here when they use this plasma, it is that I remember when we got this first presented, I was thinking like, okay, we've tested nitric oxide or nitrate. It really didn't give any help. So why should this really give a help or basically give any, make a difference?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The interesting thing is that Christian and Gustav were quite positive. So they said, okay, fine, we're going to use this. We're just going to test it. We had a bunch of them laying around there and they said, okay, let's try it. I said, okay, fine. Gustav was the first one to say immediately that he felt it did something with his respiration. Also, it's a little bit the placebo as well of it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Like, okay, how much of this is placebo? How much of this is real? Like you get something new and say, oh, looking for something in your body. And Christian also, but he observed a little bit like a different effect to him. He felt more like he normally felt quicker ready for the next effort using this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But I would say that these record measurements that we did came in the tail of when we started using this. And that was a little bit of shock because what we also saw at the same time was that the efficiency, so the biochemical efficiency in the body also went down. The interesting thing was the RQ was heavily on the CO2 side was slightly reduced. heavily increased.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Tell folks what RQ is and what the reduction would imply. At the end, normally you would say that for a VO2 max test to be valid, one of the criteria is that you shouldn't meet 1.1 in RQ.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes. In elite athletes, this is sometimes hard. in the best trained elite athletes, bringing them to 1.1 during the test can actually be quite challenging. So if you have a short warm-up protocol, they are not well warmed up and all these kind of things, then you would easily be able to exceed this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But if you do it more in a simulation like we did, or you have longer protocols before, you normally see that this is a little bit suppressed. So let's say that Christian normally on a view-to-max test, or let's say at the end of the view-to-max effort, he would basically click in at, let's say, 105%. Then after we started using these supplements, we could see suddenly not 103 or 102.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We basically dropped it by 10 points. So basically to 0.95 instead. Preserving the VO2. No. The CO2 was basically not as much changed. So the VO2 was increasing. Yes. So VO2 went up quite a bit. The good thing here is that now I have two other athletes obviously in the lab at the same time. So I have one athlete that comes in before Christian.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So I already do dynamic calibration of the machines before. We also have a lung simulator just because we are working with edge cases. So we need to independently validate the machines as well. So this means basically we have a large gas tank with a reference gas beyond what is used for just the calibration.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then you go to a 20 minute all out effort. And then you subtract 5% from that to find your FTP. So typically it would be your 20 minute all out minus 5%. And the reason for that is to try to get a ballparkish idea of what your, let's say, sustainable power output is possible to do over an hour. But as we have learned over the years,
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But we have a separate system where basically we have a lung simulator where we feed in, for example, six liters of oxygen, six liters of CO2. And we know this is the exact amount in the bottle, gravimetrically calibrated. And then if we don't get this out of the machine, then there's something wrong with the machine independently of the calibration.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But the good thing here is that despite this, first added in, numbers are where you expect them to be based on the training we did before. Christian comes in, you start to see some numbers that are crazy and you start, did I do something wrong here in the calibration process or anything like this?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But then also when you validate it afterwards as well, you basically know this is, the numbers are good. And then this we did then over, this was in December, January and February over nine tests more or less. We saw a little bit over time that actually VO2 max started to come down a little bit because what this indicated also was that his biochemical efficiency was not optimal either.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
What that means again is that if you look at basically his oxygen consumption versus his power, so the power, power was higher as well, but the ratio was not the same as it was before. VO2 had gone up much more than the power enough.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes, efficiency going down. And this was then efficiency going down. Well, can we somehow get an understanding of this? And this is, of course, on this test, they actually are using a temperature pill. So we put a pill up their ass. And also the same time, we have multiple of core sensors around in the body to also measure the temperature of the body as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And where we basically see the same thing. We basically see an increased heat production for the same power output, basically indicating the same. You can basically think of that the reason why you have gas exchanges because we call this indirect calorimetry.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Well, actually not more glucose because since the RQ here is basically also now in favor, you actually are able to oxidize more fats.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is a rabbit hole I would like to go down into. We'll delve gently.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Because also the difficulty with this is that if you just look up purely the RQ of where basically the threshold sits as well for elite athletes or for any athlete that you have in the laboratory.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
From some literature, you would just say, okay, if you have an RQ, let's say around talking about thresholds, you'll find several places in research literature where they basically just use an RQ of 0.96 as a proxy for your anaerobic threshold, for example. But this is something that you also see is different.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
If you basically take an athlete in a training for short course or basically for sprinting, you will basically see that then basically you will have an RQ that is higher than 0.96. If you go to extreme endurance athletes, this actually gets closer to 0.94, 93, 92 even.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So the implication of this is that if you then measure the lactate threshold, you will actually come into a zone already at 0.92, 0.93, where you actually are starting just as a function of time now, you will get a higher lactate concentration in your body.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And if you take that lactate concentration now and you calculate the volume of lactate that is available in your body, you'll actually see that the volume of lactate now becomes a significant contributor to actually your energy production.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
is that one, we figure out that this is not as accurate always because there are a couple of other things in there. And also, unfortunately, there have become different ways to doing it. Like some people, they just do a warmup and then they do a 20 minute all out and then they subtract 5% and that's already different.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes, so plasma volume, but this is a good thing. We have our own machine for measuring carbon monoxide rebreather. So we do regularly also testing of basically their blood volume, plasma volume, and hemoglobin mass as well when we do this testing as well. And of course, you want to know also something about the water content in the body as well. There are different ways.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The gold standard is probably double-labeled water, and we've done this as well. But the point is that to give you an example, You can easily, at 0.92, 0.93, go from, let's say, if you consider normal lactate levels, or let's say, if we then take it into volumes, it would mean that the energy contribution from lactate could be, for example, 5.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But if you just stay long enough there, basically, you would say that, okay, if these were the levels, you're talking about now 13, 14% energy contribution from lactate.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And the problem with this is that all the tables we have today, which basically look as a ratio where you use RQ to say something about the ratio between carbohydrates and fats, we normally say that, well, this is good up to an RAR of one, but above one, we don't do it anymore because exactly lactate and other things becomes a too large contributor to it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So this already tells us that we have to be also cautious when we look at RQ and just go crudely into a table and just say, okay, this is your fat metabolism. This is your carbohydrate metabolism because it is- Do you feel we can do that safely up to one? No. Not even? No, no, no, no. Not even.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I would say that for elite athletes, if you're an endurance athlete, I would already start being skeptical around in the low 90s. Okay.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's a longer time since I basically really paid a lot of attention to that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, because here it also gets a little bit more complicated simply because one of the things we do, because we also do isotope tracing also of substrates as well. We've used quite a lot of carbon-13 or 13-carbon over the last years.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And we added that as a tracer to glucose and fructose, for example, to look at how much of the exogenous carbohydrates, to use a more common term, how much of the carbohydrates that you ingest that you're able to utilize. Because obviously you have your own glycogen and your own fatty acids. Yeah. And then you won't understand how much confidence.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And this is also where exactly when you look at even view to max, this starts also to become where you understand that in our context, this is a little bit of less valuable purely. Because if you took Christian, for example, or Gustav, and you test it just before race, So you did exactly the protocol we just talked about. You did the stepped up warmup, a short effort just to make your body ready.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Then you did a graded exercise test to view to max. Okay, fine. You went out, you did your racing. And then basically at the moment you come over the finish line, you test this again, or even half an hour afterwards. It would matter a little bit, but not that much. You will basically see the race pace is actually now coming to the point where it's extremely close.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Like your utilization from the beginning of the race to the end of the race have completely changed. Sorry, you're saying fuel utilization? Yes. Not only your fuel utilization, but also actually would also imply fuel utilization, but also your threshold sits now so much closer to, yeah, yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And also for Christian and Gustav, when they do Ironman racing, this is getting, let's say, in those domains. We can't push it all the way because it has some implications.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, the thing is that what will happen here is that this will actually come down. So your VO2 max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is the interesting thing because this is the difference. The consequence of aiming for Ironman is that you want to have minimal decline in this. Yes, and you need a lower VO2 max. Because it has to do with priority and training. You can't prioritize having a high one-minute power or five-minute power simply because it's too far away from specificity of what you really need there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So if you start building good sessions where you basically are looking to increase your one-minute power or five-minute power, that's obviously going to have a cost for the whole week that you are doing of training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
7?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is also quite interesting because one of the main differences I would say that differs them, call them as, or compared to the specialists in the sports is actually not their metabolism. If you look at their view to max on running, cycling, and swimming, you will actually see that they are equally or higher than their peers in those sports. But their efficiency is not the same.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This comes probably most down to the fact that they have to do three different sports. You don't get the same time of just pure stimulus, mechanical stimulus from doing something and optimizing it because you have to change. And it also has some priorities also as well. In running, you could say you don't want to compromise on your leg stiffness at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
In cycling, this is a little bit more beneficial to do this, for example. So here you have to strike a balance between the three, which makes it very complex. But in swimming, they are higher than the highest view to max that are measured on elite swimmers in the world. But the difference is also I had the bronze medalist.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It is so poor. It is so poor. It's actually funny. I think we talked about this last time. I had one of the best swimmers in the world. in the flume and tested him. And he's a big guy, 195, 100 kilograms, close to 100 kilograms, muscles all over. And then Christian into the flume at the same, basically same velocity. I don't remember exactly what his velocity is now, but basically this big guy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And the flume is an endless pool? Yes. It's a stationary swimming pool? The difference here is that endless pool, very often people think of this as a counter current where there's a lot of turbulence. Here we are talking about something which is
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Maybe more importantly to that point is that as long as you do something consistently, so you keep the same protocol, you could say, okay, this one thing is the original thinking and that went into devising this kind of protocol. But I would say more importantly is rather to stay true to the principle of how you do it. So as long as you do it the same way each time, this is more important.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The thing here is that when you look at these two guys now swimming... So you put them at the same speed. Same speed. Okay. The elite swimmer, he is even retired. First of all, Christian, eight kilograms. This guy, close to 100 kilograms. And that's not because of fat. He is lean.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
He's utilizing 25% less oxygen than Christian. In an absolute term.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah, so this then touches upon one of my favorite areas, and that's biofeedback. In cycling, we have extremely good tools for biofeedback today. You have a power meter and you have a GPS. So just these two combined, for example.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes, like we talked about last time when you were out riding 200 watts constant, and basically you see you're getting faster. So you have this direct biofeedback because as long as you ride enough, you will basically start to get a very good feeling for when you sit at a certain power and you start doing different things. Suddenly you creep up like half a kilometer power or one.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
For a person, when they start cycling or they cycle a little bit, for them, it doesn't become interesting enough yet because there are other things that is basically more challenging for them to master. But for people that do a lot of biking like yourself,
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's where you exactly start to pay attention to those, let's say even half a kilometer per hour, maybe even you're getting below that as well, where you start to really pay attention to this. And then over time, simply because wind and other factors makes a difference too. Running, this is also a place where we have really good biofeedback tools.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
You have your watch, you're running, and you can have a look at it. And now we have also really good power meters in running as well. How does that work? So most of these, there are some of these power meters in running today that requires an insole. So you put basically an insole inside and it measures the forces.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Inside your shoe. And then you have other ones that are more motion capture devices. So they basically, you rather input your body weight. And since when you're touching on the ground with one foot, you're basically carrying your whole weight there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So as long as you have a good enough motion capture device that are capable of capture the three-dimensional accelerations, you can then basically also say something, well, you know the force because you basically have to carry your weight.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No. So the motion captures today, they become so small. They're basically a small device that you attach to a shoe and they are when we validate these. Are these commercially available products? Yes. Both of these? Yes. If you go to a laboratory and you basically test this, you will basically see that. So we have been for a long time in working together with Stride.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I started working with them when they were in beta stage and we've gone through there, but they are so accurate today that when you measure on an athlete.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So critical power is something that you normally more extract from that you do multiple all-out efforts. And then you apply reverse extrapolation to this to basically figure out what is your critical power. So it's a more of a little bit more advanced mathematical approach to it. Typically, you would say that there are different concepts to this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I think this has to do with a lot with tradition and also that even when power meters were introduced, it's easy to look back and say like, why didn't we have this before? Or even how power, there's so much information we can extract from a single power meter today, which is, I say, beyond people's comprehension.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Still, we only use the power number that is there and we use it even in a one-dimensional context, FTP, for example, or critical power. The amount of information you can get out of this is crazy because we are not going to talk about this today. We still kind of use normalized power and other... No. We never use it? No. We only go by raw numbers. I only work by raw numbers all the time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So I don't condense it down to a single metric. I use only raw numbers. But the implication here is that even when you look at studies that are looking at gross efficiency, for example, in the old days or even today, one thing you consider is a net mechanical power. So the interface between basically looking at your gross efficiency is where you take VO2... And we're already there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Most people understand that, okay, you have a difference between net oxygen consumption and gross oxygen consumption. You would ideally like to have the net oxygen consumption. There are other things there, but in cycling, actually also what we only consider there is the net mechanical power. You don't consider the gross mechanical power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
on your biochemical efficiency, you should not look at the net mechanical power. You should look at the gross mechanical power. But that's even before we start to get into vectors, power vectors, force vectors, and other things, even in a three-dimensional plane as you do cycling, because this is something we can extract from the power meters today.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is maybe one of the reasons for why it is not as widely adopted in running as it is in cycling, because it is still debated what really is running power. How do you really quantify it? And this is something that I even discussed with the team at Stride.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So when we are having our regular calls and we are diving into the topic, even we also sometime have our different opinions on how this really should be looked at. Because if you want to translate this into running, then you have to look at only at the propulsive power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The power numbers there? Yeah. No, commercially available, this has its limitations because since you do motion capture, you need to do a little bit of filtering. You can't take out because it's going to be so much noise. Exactly. Because as you said, you have so many degrees of freedom.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
If you're going to output all the vectors that basically you were able to measure with strain gauge-based power meters on a bike today, people wouldn't be able to utilize. That's why you condense it down to a single number that is there for most people.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I personally have to say that I like the critical power approach a little bit better. And what is it trying to approximate? So critical power is basically where you try to divide something into two zones.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yes. So what you can do, and this is validated. So if you, for example, run on a track, a track which has force plates, or you run on specialized treadmills that has force plates integrated in them, you will basically see that the curves are the same.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So this is the way, this is the external validation of the device is good, both in terms of that it captures the force curves, but also here when you have motion capture devices, you can also capture the footpath as well. So this is something we can visualize in 3D today after the event when you are doing running.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We can see what happened there, fresh, fatigued, throughout the race, when it's technical and all the things. But I think the reason why this is not as widely adopted is because in science, this is still debated on how do we really capture and quantify mechanical power for running.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Stride have taken a smart approach to this to make it commercially viable, and that is that they output it as a metabolic power. So if you actually went on a treadmill and you went running and you looked at it versus your oxygen consumption, you will basically see that this matches perfectly with cycling. That's without having a bicycle near you at all.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So you could say, well, this is what you expect. So when you're at a certain power, then this would have a certain metabolic cost. I don't like it because I don't like modeled numbers. I want to have raw numbers.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So in my case, I'm extracting the net and the gross mechanical power or the positive and the negative mechanical power because these are the components I want to have because I have view to master. I have metabolic devices. I don't need a metabolic equivalent. I want to have the raw because I'm using as an interface to gauge the difference.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Like for example, on a Formula One car, what really matters in the end there, how fast can you go around the track for the full event?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
with a certain amount of fuel because there is a limitation to how much fuel you can have in your car that's the true input and the true output your engine output in this country is actually secondary it's easy to think oh we won't have the biggest engine but big engine without efficiency is still bad the engine it becomes more of a
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
device to measure let's say you look at the power and you look at how efficiently are you able to translate this fuel out into speed over let's say the event or velocity for me having access to the net mechanical power and gross mechanical power and then you have the metabolic devices this allow me to on the one side look at when we change something in running so let's say you change for example your shoes
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's a crossover simplification, but you distinguish between, let's say, a non-severe and a severe state, or basically where you are, again, also in the same way as FTP, trying to figure out what is the power you are capable of staying at for a prolonged time and basically where you go into a territory where small changes has a huge consequence on the duration that you're capable of holding it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
or you change your training, you can now have a much more granular understanding of, am I influencing the biomechanical part of the training, or is it the biochemical part of the training? But in order to do so, you have to have that interface that distinguishes between gross mechanical power and net mechanical power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And the interface between gross mechanical power and net mechanical power is only there. Let's say work efficiency. How efficiently are you working, but not metabolizing or moving? Because in the end, you have to take this power and be able to output into velocity.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The interesting thing is that when you are getting close to VO2 max, then it's getting close to a one-to-one match, actually. But at submaximal, it doesn't. a sub-maximal you would normally see in running simply because it's a weight-bearing sport.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
In running and cycling at maximal effort, so basically at VO2 max, pretty much the same, yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that's because probably there is a lot of anaerobic contribution in there as well that basically supplies that gap that you're observing there too.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So the thing here is for Christian Gustav obviously being, or we're trying to keep executive training as balanced as possible between the three sports, there you will normally see at maximal efforts that actually that the power also is pretty much the same. The mechanical power is pretty much at the view to max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But as you go submaximal effort, then that's where you start to observe the big differences. Because in cycling, you would see that as you go down in intensity, basically because it's a weight-bearing sport, going from 15 to 16 kilometers per hour, or let's say 17, 18, 19, 20, and so on. Basically what you see, but this is also observable exactly from a metabolic cart as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that is when you go at, let's say, a low intensity, you will see that your oxygen consumption also is higher at a perceived lower intensity in running than it is in cycling, because cycling is not weight-bearing. So it's easy to go down to a very low intensity, still keep a normal cadence, because you can keep a cadence of 80, 90, for example, and it feels comfortable.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It feels comfortable and easy in this kind of But going down to those cadences of running is impractical because it means walking. You're not running anymore, so you're walking. So the modality is changing more in running. What kind of muscles are involved are changing more in running than it does in cycling.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Coming back to the question, original question of why isn't this more utilized in running, it is gradually getting more and more attention there, more and more people using it. I think what is still to be determined is to agree on a common standard for what number should be outputted.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
In racing, I would say that training, we use also many more sensors, and then we limit it a little bit more in racing simply because it's not practical to do it there. But I would say that this is also a very interesting topic because then they touch a little bit more on psychology, but we'll come back to that another time. But in racing, obviously, first and foremost, Ironman racing is so long.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's so long. And with all this practice, you shouldn't be slave to the numbers for sure, because you can have suddenly your hero day where you just are able to go faster than what you normally do. So you need to listen to your body. So I would maybe say that RPE is the most important one in some senses.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
RPE is also a place where you can also talk about one dimension, two dimensions, because RPE is normally... Let's say if you take Kipchoge when he did a two-hour marathon, sub-two-hour marathon. If you put him on a treadmill and you did a normal step test on him and you asked him when he was at 21 kilometers per hour and you asked him, how does this feel?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
He would say, for the sake of the discussion, we say that seven is a round threshold or anaerobic threshold. If you relate it to FTP, something you would be able to hold for around an hour for well-trained athletes. Or what you would test for when you did a 20-millimeter protocol and then you subtract the 5% to extrapolate it to that.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
If you asked him at 21 kilometer per hour, okay, how do you feel here? And he gives you an RPE score. He would maybe say, ah, this feels like a six when he has a 21 kilometer power, actually slightly above. If you ask him at the end of a marathon, how do you feel? And he's still running the same pace. He would say probably 10.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Again, this depends a little bit on how you test FTP, but I would say that how maybe FTP have been used over the last, or let's say a little bit more deviated from how the authors originally devised it, I would say that it actually is not too different. And normally you would say that critical or functional threshold power would lie slightly lower in power output than critical power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is a nine to a 10 because we forget again, there's another dimension and that is a duration. Let's say the fatigue component that comes in there. That's why it also helps sometimes to ask, I would say that when I asked Christian Gustav at least.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But that brings us back a little bit also to exactly utilization as well. Because one of the things that you would probably not be able to do, you won't be able to get yourself up to a maximum heart rate at the end of a race even. So your max heart rate, you could say in many ways, are limited at this time.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But this is also when you then say, okay, but how on earth is it possible to ride at 4.5 liters when you have a five liter view to max? This is the key, obviously, in endurance sport. You want to increase this robustness. So when you are finding this optimum of between of where should my view to max is, This is what happens with specificity.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
If you're tuning this down, exactly where you start and where you end becomes far less. And there's a whole range of implications to this because it comes down to, so why is this important? Couldn't you just have a higher view to max coming into the race and just have a higher view to max? Well, the problem with that is that the heart also is a muscle and and it's not very efficient muscle.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So even the heart has energy. It's not an insignificant, it's actually a significant energy consumption as well. And if you have a heart that actually is trained for something different than what you really need, it means basically also your heart is going to use energy more inefficiently. How much lactate does the heart generate? Probably you are better suited to answering this
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I probably read it sometime, but I've never done any research on that. I looked more at, let's say, when we broke down the body into components, it's more like where I looked at it basically as energy consumption.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then that's also why the heart obviously uses lactate also as a fuel source simply because it is probably full of... I've never done a muscle biopsy of the heart itself. It would be interesting just to see what's the ratio between type 1 and type 2 fibers there, but I would almost imagine this is probably one of the muscles where you are as close as possible to... Just a pure type 1.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And this also comes down to Mikael's constant, where you also look at the affinity for different substrate, also for different muscles as well. And where lactate has the highest affinity for most of these muscles as well, especially like the heart.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But if you're going to bring this back up, a lot of the research, when you do applied research like we do, a lot of the times we can't actually use a lot of the research that is there to base our decisions on.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I don't know if we talked about monocarbon dioxide transporters last time or not, but one of the things that is there is that this is also a place where if you want to understand something... you can go in and you can do a concentration measurement. The problem very often with research is that we get a partial view of something, but it's only partial and it's not a complete view.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that means that, for example, most of the time for us to understand what really works and doesn't work, we have to work with just raw numbers. We talk about calorimetry, so we want to understand what kind of substrates are being utilized here and how it is.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
One thing that we basically see when we're using isotope traces and we start to dig into this, and we can also talk about actually maybe creating lactate as an artificial fuel.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So in the same way that you take glucose and you create supplements based on fructose and glucose, and you use this as a fuel source or ketones or beta-hydroxybutyrate, then basically lactate actually is very interesting in that context. simply because it is extremely energy efficient. And that is in the end limitation for elite athletes. How difficult to deliver orally?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But again, it depends very much on, let's say, also in critical power there are today, I don't know how many different definitions there are of critical power and how you should do the protocol there. But it means that normally critical power, if you look at it from a metabolic perspective, it sits somewhere between your maximum lactate steady state, or call it anaerobic threshold, and VO2 max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I assume it's delivered in a salt? This is actually something we started discussing. The interesting thing of it is in a salt is that it could also then in that sense has a little bit the same effect as bicarbonate.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The reason for that, I've been very fortunate over the last decade to be involved in a lot of edge case researches. Plenty that we are years away before this will be published. Not necessarily because we don't want to publish in it, but there just remains work to be done to understand it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
For example, again, this is also a place where we have some indications now, but where some of my colleagues, they have actually also tested on larger population, but Gustav's highest view to max actually is done under bicarbonate. utilization. Not Christian, but Gustav. How? How was it administered? So the way it was administered is that there's a company in Sweden called Morten.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
What they did, this is actually something that is going to be studied now also in actually in health, in medical settings as well, because it actually has some quite interesting applications there too. How this was administered is basically that it is packed in a hydrogel and this allows you to
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Using the same mechanism, you basically pack the agents into a vehicle to deliver it where you need it more efficiently. So this means that we can go to concentrations that are significant.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So typically more close to... view to steady state or so on, but that's introducing another term that it just doesn't bring clarity.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So this is a place, again, where obviously the sample size is still limited. Sure. But in him, in a world-class elite athlete. So the interesting thing there is that here we have two different cases. And that's, for example, I have some athletes that have almost twice as high lactate concentration in the blood when they're using.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is why I said we are opening a can of- The proverbial can of lactate buffered worms. Yes, exactly. Exactly. We also have them to remember because then we have to come back to the technology. Where do we measure? And what is this called again? So this brand is called Morton. Morton, as in Morton salt. It's written M-O-R-T-E and Morton. People go crazy over the gels and everything during races.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
They have a
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
gel that is actually based on the same principle so we open up that box as well but basically christian gustav sits comfortably not eating 160 grams of carbohydrates per hour and basically this is then quantified using isotope traces as well so they don't only eat it and it starts packing up in the stomach they utilize it yeah i'm going to save time to talk about nutrition because i want to ask you about that so this is a commercially available product athletes are using it so do you have a sense of why some people find like gustav seems to find huge benefit from it sounds like christian does not
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Well, I wouldn't say that Christian doesn't, but it depends a little bit on, let's say, the setting we are using it in as well. And triathlon is inherently complex in the sense that you have three sports that you put together and with varying intensity, all the things that are happening there, which makes it a little bit more complicated.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then there also is some benefits, but can also potentially be disadvantages with it. But the benefits that also comes with it is it actually also increases your plasma volume fairly instantaneously as well. You're pulling fluid into the plasma.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But early studies that have done on this, which will be published on this, basically shows that there's a positive effect of using bicarbonate now or using, for example, the molten product. We have studies now on larger population done by some of our colleagues, which indicates this. Then on top of that, what I would say is that we don't fully understand why it is like this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's one interesting hypothesis I presented to the research group. Because on the one side, what we think is that, okay, this increases the buffering capacity. So we think, okay, if it increases the buffering capacity, then you can basically do more. Then you can go more anaerobic or more into anaerobic or glycolytic resources.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Because one thing that we are fairly sure about is that you're never going to run out of glycogen, really. You come to a certain level and the body will rather start to sense that it's really, really low. And that's why you shut down. You don't shut down because you basically depleted every gram of glycogen in your body. That's one. And then there are other preserving mechanisms.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
By the way, that's easy to verify with a muscle biopsy at failure, right? No. The problem with that is that even in muscle biopsies, you will see that if you basically do sampling just across one muscle, it's so heterogenic. If you wanted to do it, you would need to biopsy multiple times, multiple sites simultaneously.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Or even make somebody radioactive and start to do nuclear measurement measurements on people. It's so impractical to really study that you have to go more by, again, coming back to, for example, first order principles. For example... Looking at gross efficiency and then calculating as basically how much subsidy you're using basically is already involving inaccuracies to it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's why you just have to sometimes just say, okay, we are going to look at oxygen consumption versus, let's say, mechanical power output. And then you just say, we don't care about whether that's RQ correlates to this value. You just have to have the raw values.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Back to the bicarbonate, what we can observe, for example, is that when we do blood gas analysis, so when the athletes are exercising, basically a longer protocol, we are taking blood samples to look at pH level in the body. And what is interesting to see there, even for Christian, he does not have a doubling in his lactic concentration.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So Christian have almost unchanged lactic concentration in his blood. At what level of exertion? Whatever, even all out. Any given power? Any given power. Or any given VO2, yeah, okay. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I think for the sake of simplicity, sometimes it helps to refer to, like say, one condensed number. So you use, for example, you can say critical pace, for example, in running and swimming. And the way of testing it is not too different to what you would do in cycling.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But the interesting thing here is that the interesting thing here, this is easy to think now that when an athlete has double the lactic concentration in the blood, then it has to be double the contribution from the glycolysis. We have to remember we measure in the blood. This is a concentration metric and the state can be completely different other places in the body.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
One can be MCT transporters, for sure. One can be, but I doubt it to be significant.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's hard to imagine that's 2x difference, right? And the reason why I doubt that to be significant is because if I look at purely the biochemical efficiency, first order principle looking at oxygen versus power output, cross mechanical power output, this is so close that it can't explain it alone. One other difference that is there
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And which is maybe larger, but I don't know, maybe are closer related to this is, for example, exactly plasma and blood volume. Because the blood volume and plasma volume in Christian and Gustav is beyond significant in difference. Why? They're not that different in weight, are they? 80 kilograms versus... But still, it is borderline where the word significant doesn't do the difference.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
One of the places where we don't have any definitive answers, it is just different. But then you can say, well, wouldn't that have had implications on, for example, a VO2 max? And stroke volume, cardiac output. Yeah. Well, actually, that's the interesting thing, because if you talk about stroke volume, I would agree. Yes, there is a massive difference.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Again, significant doesn't really do it justice. We would talk about massive differences in stroke volume, but not in cardiac output. What's the max heart rate of each? Christian, ballpark is around 180, maybe 170, 180. I would say 178, something like this. Gustav, around 200.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But one thing that actually happens in the process is that you actually have access to more granular information and you are dumping down information a little bit when you call it FTP or you call it critical power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So this is one, but also more interesting here as well, is that a Christian has a much larger also hemoglobin mass than what Gustav have. One thing we also have to remember is that if we create a performance stream more or less, and we put view to max on the top of this one, where all these different factors are contributing, let's say, contributing factor to your view to max in the end.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's why we say the view to max is the holy grail or such a good metric, because if there's something broken somewhere in the system, it trickles up. It trickles up, yeah. But it doesn't mean that if something is broken here, that that's a good metric, even though we could say that it has been used in research and other things.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So probably one of the most plausible explanations for why there are such big differences in Christian and Gustav in terms of, let's say, where the biggest differences comes from more is that Gustav has to circulate his blood much quicker than what Christian does. Not relatively speaking, but in absolute.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So the absolute circulation of blood cardiac output has to be at least the same for Gustav, maybe actually a little bit higher than what it is for Christian. But Christian compensates in other ways.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that's also an interesting thing then, basically, when we talk about all these different things, whether it's MCT or other things that are in the body, is that there are so many mechanisms in the body that we see that when you come closer and closer to elite level, other systems have to start to compensate for you to take the next step.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
In people that are not well-trained, then you can basically do whatever it is, and the body will just prioritize to develop what is the easiest to develop. But at the elite level, it seems like more like now it starts to be like a really hard priority, and that's even before we start discussing epigenetics.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Because more importantly, I would say, is that when you present a critical power number only or an FTP number only, you have taken two-dimensional information and made it one-dimensional, meaning that you only look at the y-axis and you take away the information that is quite critical, I would say, and that is how long are you able to sustain something.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, we don't. We don't use it. Have you experimented with it in training? No. One of the reasons why we don't do it is because I believe at the moment you start manipulating what is not manipulated. Like already when you're using exogenous, for example, bicarb, bicarb hydrates for that sake, or anything like this, you can already say, okay, well, this already also has an effect.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But I would say that the problem when you try to go in and you try to acutely, let's say, do something in the body, It means basically that you're trying to target one part of one system of the body and you don't consider the other ones to be important.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
What I more believe in is that, for example, if you talk about heat, for example, and heat tolerance, if you have more of a natural approach to this and you build this into your protocols, this means basically that, let's say, whatever is in the body, that is there in order to help increase your heat tolerance have to adopt to this. So for example, pain is something that is trainable.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And there are many mechanisms that are involved with this. Using, for example, supplements to try to lower the pain, for example, or the perceived pain of something. I think this is a place where... talking about, for example, performance-enhancing drugs.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's interesting to see that despite post-big doping scandals that were in cycling, everybody thought that, okay, now 2D France will become slower. It did, short period, and suddenly it just became faster, became faster, became faster. I don't think this is because people are doping more now than what they did before.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
There are probably some cases where people still do doping or they are really like venturing into the gray area. But obviously we have found techniques and other things that are more powerful than using performance enhancing drugs to get to this level.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So, for example, for critical power testing, I would say, again, also when you first do critical power testing, it's more interesting to know
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Let's say how fast or how far are you able to get over one minute, for example, five minute and 15 minute, and then actually see what happens in the next time you do it for the one minute, the five minute and 15 minute, because this is actually quite crucial to understand also the balance or what's happening with the different balances in the body.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
There are also a couple of other interesting topics here as well. But I think, yeah, nutrition, obviously. Fuel in, speed out in order. It's crucial. And it doesn't help if you try to do something with your VO2 max and other things if you're running out of fuel. It doesn't help to install a larger engine in a car. If you're running out of gas. If your tank is, yeah, exactly.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I think one of the biggest differences is exactly like you point out. The attention to nutrition today in the world tour, for example, is in a completely different level than what it was a long time ago. I know also over the last five years, this have also made like a big, big change as well, like because it's large teams.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So they're even trying to devise tools and methods and other things that allows them to scale this a little bit more. The benefit I have working with a couple of athletes is that we can go on a completely different level than what they can do again.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So we can even use metabolic measurements, even out in the field to do measurements, basically just to see what is happening and become extremely detailed on what we do. Even looking at basically post-exercise, even what's happening there, or pre-meals, post-meals, what even happens with your resting metabolic rate, because even this changes throughout the day.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And to keep up the consistency over time, you need to fuel accordingly. Coming back to the question, and that is that I think one, nutrition, yes, this is probably one of the main contributors. Of the two, this is the main contributor to why they are racing faster today than what they did five, 10 years ago.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Further, I would say that the watts per kilogram, this is a place where I feel that we will see a change again. I think actually that the weight of athletes will start to go up again.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But the reason for why we start to see this going there is because if we look at trying to understand why did we end up with the training programs we have done and so on, obviously, it's a very empirical approach to it, practical approach, which very often is extremely good when it just gets enough time to evolve.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But at the same time, also what haven't happened is that we have adopted training strategies intact with the availability of information, technologies, and all things that helps us do better fueling. Because one thing we also do know is that in order for any growth to take place in the body, you need obviously oxygen.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We already talked about that, but we use oxygen as a proxy to understand metabolism. And metabolism, again, is also a function of growth. When you do training over time, you're obviously trying to signal to your body you need more muscles to be more efficient in one or the other way.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Also FTP, most people think of this as a 20 minute power. So it's even a little bit more condensed or even simpler information. But as we will probably come back to is when you're training, there are two things that normally can happen. One is that you increase your general capacity, meaning that both power and capacity, one or two are increased.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And if you now start to limit or you put a cap on fueling in order to drive down your weight, this will also start to impair most likely ideal growth
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is actually one of the interesting things because if you talk about watts per kilogram, Christian actually is watts per kilogram have gone up with increasing his weight. You said he's 80 kilos? 80 kilograms, yeah. And his FTP is? If I'm going to convert it to FTP, it would be probably in the range of 400 and... Yeah, if I did him on a 20-minute test, probably...
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Let's say for the sake of simplicity, 420 for something like this, probably if we tuned him, if that was how we did testing and we started to standardize that, maybe even higher. I don't know. It's really hard to say because we don't do FTP testing.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Well, that's where aerodynamics come in and we are able to lower the numbers because obviously staying at 360, 370 will have a quite big impact also on energy utilization and heat production as well. And for example, coming also back to the question of basically using supplements to try to mitigate pain or lower your temperature, we also know that this is not necessarily good.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But really also here's a question as I thought of that one, probably we're not going to continue on that path now, but using, for example... supplements to try to lower your temperature. I think this is where it's important to ask yourself first order principle, where does that heat come from? The heat comes from basically mechanical power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is the wonder of the body. One thing that happens, obviously, if you start to use a lot of carbide, so you go to 160 grams, We even cropped in at the highest numbers. We have measured it's in excess of 240 grams per hour of carbohydrate utilization.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The other thing that happens there is that at some point we are all time limited and this is where we need to pivot. So we need to pivot or as a prioritize what is more important for us. Is it the more explosive or speed or is it more endurance? And then it becomes more interesting for how you guide the training to understand what's happening between this different power or pace and durations.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's a part of it. Normally they would consume around, I would say around minimum of 1.4 liters, but say around two, a little bit more than two liters per hour.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
0.64.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But also absorption here, because this is also where it's interesting or important to go back to also a little bit like, what is this research? Who is this research done on as well?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Seems like most things in our body is actually extremely trainable. That also comes back to the nutrition part as well, where exactly also the training programs we have today have not seen the same change as nutrition strategies have done over the last years as well. So that means also that the power numbers that was output maybe 5, 10, 20 years ago
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I'm not so sure if that's the limitation we're going to see. Especially late in races.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So again, this is a place where Morton, they made actually their gels to be as neutral as possible. And because it is formed as a hydrogel, it actually encapsulates the sugar inside a hydrogel, meaning that the perception of sweetness is much lower than for any other gels out there. You will still perceive it as slightly sweet, but it's much, much less.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, so there are two different products because Morten has the bicarb product, which actually also is encapsulated in hydrogel, but actually with carbohydrates. But then they have the dedicated fueling products, which basically consist of a drink mix, which Christian and Gustav are mainly using, but they also have gels as well. So it's more practical, obviously, to have a gel.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
This is a two-component, or actually a three-component mixture. You have the hydrogel, which is basically in a dry format in a sachet, and then you have the bicarb tablets, and then you basically take water. So you add water to this. First you add water to the hydrogel mix, and then basically you are forming the hydrogel.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Probably in the same way today that we say something we just say, call, and now in the world of chat GPT and everything, we just call something AI. Basically, an extremely broad term that try to encompass more or less the exact same thing that we already talked about. Basically, let's say the difference between where
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then you take the bicarb and you mix it into the hydrogel, and in this way, you whip it around, and then basically this way you are able to bring it into the stomach and actually able to deliver it without it actually causing any problems. I can't say actually too much in detail what kind of concentration we are on at the moment.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I will come back to this a little bit later because this is probably things that we will publish. But to put it this way, 19 grams of bicarb, for example, that would be like a standard dosage. You can go to 22 grams of bicarb as pure and you can take this. And this doesn't require very much training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
What's the ratio? It's a little bit of a time since basically we went through details of the, let's say, looking at the balances between this, but let's say it's a 40-60. So it's basically high fructose corn syrup. Yeah. The genius part of it is actually not the carbohydrates itself. It's the packaging mechanism.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That's the difference. So if you were consuming 60 grams per hour, spare the money and buy orange juice or even put honey inside and drink it. Where it differs itself is when you are really starting to push the limit of the concentration. But you can even train yourself today. This is something we know.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
You can even take honey today and you can mix it and you can train yourself to go to higher values than what have previously been published, like pure normal products.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, this is something that was also done research on, but we ended up in the end, pure glucose and fructose. And it actually has to do with actually how oxygen is being prioritized in the body, because we have to consider two things here.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's easy to think that while you're only raising at 80% of your VO2 max or 70 or 90, whatever percentage it is of your VO2 max, but that's a little bit of a short circuit because what we have to think of is that this oxygen, more oxygen is going to contribute to more heat as well. So it's not like...
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
can just go whatever I'm rising at a solo percentage of a view to mix so I can go whatever and do and in beginning because it always will accumulate towards the end of your race that means already from the beginning it's critical how you pace and your efficiency as well because every inefficiency you have either is biochemical or anything like this it will basically end up towards the end of the race so this means also that at the moment you start putting any other substrates
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
or nutrients into your mixture that the body have to prioritize somehow in the system. That means also that there are going to be less oxygen available for pure propulsion. And in the end, it's the pure propulsion that really sets the winner apart from the rest of the people there. So you basically want to peel away absolutely everything that doesn't contribute to forward propulsion.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Use every milliliter, every mole of oxygen purely for that purpose and nothing else. Because oxygen is one of the limitations. We talk about different kinds of substrates and these kind of things, which is still also a place where we don't know. We are actually doing quite some interesting research on different kinds of substrates from glucose, fructose.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
something is steady and where it goes over to unsteady or basically for where you can hold something for a longer duration and where it goes to shorter duration it's a misconception to think that anaerobic threshold means basically when you become anaerobic because that's not the case yeah it's a continuum of course it's not a switch yeah yeah
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Have you looked at BHP, beta-hydroxybutyrate? Yes. So we looked at BHP as well. And one of the things, if you purely look at the stoichiometry, there are interesting things here. But the problem is that we cannot only do stoichiometry. We actually need to know the enthalpy. And we also need to know the Gibbs free energy that is available and ideally even the entropy.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
No, because the practical limitation of this is that when you do racing, if you think of this more first order principle again. So if you do racing, and this was actually one of my first questions, because we have been working together with one of the leading brands, or arguably the leading one, they are situated here in the US.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But one of the limitations that you have to look at is basically when you are racing, this has a certain fuel demand. So there's a certain amount of fuel that needs to go through the system there. And that means that in the context when we talk about glucose and fructose, we are looking at basically trying to replace as much as possible.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We said, okay, glucose, fructose, or basically carbohydrate seems to be a very, very oxygen efficient fuel source when you do movement. But that means also that in order not to run out of this, we are trying to replace as much as possible of this to be able to race faster. Because if you said, this is the fuel source I have available in my body, I'm going to race this fast.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Obviously, I cannot go faster than this. So certain power number, certain duration will deplete this energy source or basically bring me close to depletion of that source. So that means, okay, instead of then switching to other sources, or you're basically always using other sources as well, but trying to get more from that source means basically you have to replace more of the power.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So more of the power now, we have to create an environment where more power can come from the same source. Let's say you were originally around at 80 grams or 90 grams, let's say 80 grams for simplicity. So 80 grams of carbohydrates, and you have a biochemical efficiency of 20%, for example, that means basically you're getting out, or if you say 4.2, let's say you could get basically a one gram
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
would be then the equivalent of let's say one joule per second or one watt more or less like this so you could get from that one so if you double this from 80 to 160 now that means basically now you can get double the amount of what's coming from carbohydrates here the problem with ketones is that the strategy is not to basically fuel the amount you are using in a race you don't fuel with ketones in the same way like if you go to 70 80 or even 100 milliliters of ketone consumption in an hour
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
you're going to have so high levels of ketones in your body that you will start to feel almost like you are getting diabetic. There's a feeling of bonking almost. So the thing that is there is more like it's inducing a state in the body rather than you're actually fueling, using it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Because in order to fuel, so they said your idea was that you're going to replace what you're losing from your body because that's driving your body also out of homeostasis as well. you are going to try to keep homeostasis as much as possible or try to keep the state of the body as unchanged as possible. That would mean that you would need to ingest so large amount of ketones during a race.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Christian won. Gustav came seventh, eighth, seventh place, yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
One, we thought it was possible to get back on the podium. And I would say even after disappointing wrestles, I would say that we are more convinced today that it's possible to go back than we were. But there are other reasons for that, coming back to that. Sorry, meaning in Los Angeles, you're saying? In Paris, yeah, even there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So if we then look also back to there, Christian already had in training put out far better performances than what he was capable of getting out on race day. I would say that there are two things that looking back at, let's say the process leading into Paris, that for me explains most of this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And one part of it is one of the differences leading from Rio, leading into Tokyo, was that we took a massive...
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
shift in how we did intensity control and again now we talk about intensity control that doesn't mean necessarily about talking about just threshold anything like this means exactly like pinpointing different intensities and working on them in order to optimize the human body and then how we find this one thing that we did actually we got maybe a little bit too complacent the last year and that is basically we've done so much that it's more like okay we had more projects so it's also one place you just think that okay you are getting really good at controlling the intensity and these kind of things
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So again, obviously, because this is a more, but if we then, let's say, bring it over more to lactates as a tool for trying to figure out where this is. And again, this opens up a whole new world of definitions.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So we stress it a little bit. The key that really made a difference between Rio to Tokyo, we became sloppy at.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah, from Rio to Tokyo, that was the massive shift going from unknown to basically Olympic champion to basically where we, the last year, I would say in particular, let's say the two last year, were much more sloppy on simply because you think that, okay, after you've done intensity control for so long time, you would think that you have such a good calibrated body for this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
We made the same error actually already in 2017 to 2018, where 2016 to 17, we saw massive improvements in performance. From 17 to 18, we have done so much measurement. We lacked it and other things like this. Just thinking, okay, they must have a good feeling for this, really good calibrated. To a couple of months, we saw that, okay, this doesn't work. We have to go back to the practice.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The same error we did the last year going into Paris. Purely in terms of performance, Christian basically put out performances that was far exceeding what he did on the run in Paris. In Paris, he lacked around four minutes per kilometer over the 10K. That was the difference between the first place and the 12th place. Sorry, say that again. Sorry, four seconds. Okay. Four seconds per kilometer.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah. So yeah, so four seconds per kilometer.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah, around there. But one of the differences that also were between Tokyo and Paris was that Christian actually sat, when he came out of the water, Christian's swimming have never been his forte. That's been the worst discipline for him. And the Seine actually made, this was also, we are in an arena where we would see even bigger differences.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So the poor swimmers in Paris, some of them even didn't finish.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It's the current in the water. There was a massive current in the water, basically to the extent that if you said it was still water, most of the triathletes basically set 400-meter world records swimming the first 400 meters.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But to try to answer it simply, I would say that typically anaerobic threshold when you use lactate, and let's say that you use, for example, gold standards or maximum lactate steady state, this will normally sit below the critical power of FTP.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
The only problem is that you have to turn back up. And then the problem also with this, because this is in a river, you can normally say that if this were basically a place where you just knew you had laminar flow, so you had laminar flow and it was homogenous all over the place, then you could say that really it wouldn't make that much of a difference or should not.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
A little bit it would do, simply because the swim in distance is the same, but the duration becomes slightly longer. And if it's a slightly longer duration, you open up a little bit more of a gap. The challenging part with Paris and the Seine was also that flow is not, especially in the Seine, not homogenous.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It is highly heterogeneous, meaning basically if you look at the swimmers there and you see that they basically come around the first boy and they are aiming for the boy next to them, suddenly people go in a large parabola because they underestimate actually how much more up current they have to basically point in order to get around.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then after that as well, when they get closer, because there are two bridges that went across the river as well, and around this one, you would normally think that the current is actually slower next to the pillars that are into the water. The fastest swimmers are suddenly in the front there.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
suddenly became second or even down into the group simply because the people that went a couple of meters, two meters further to the right there, swam suddenly past them. The fastest swimmers suddenly looked almost like they came, had good speed, and suddenly standing still almost, where they had to deviate out from the pillar. So it becomes a far more tactical race.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
How far did he come out in the water after the leader in swimming? I don't remember. That was quite significant. To be honest, the only thing I remember from that is that he came out, I think, let's say of that long, because also what happens here, instead of that you get a pack that is swimming, it gets a long, long line instead.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that's also challenging in this context as well, because you get a completely stretched out field instead of that people come more like in patches out of the water. I think Christian came out from the last guy in the first group. He was, I think, 17, 20 seconds behind him. But out on the bike, he became, I think, 40 seconds down from the lead group.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
One of the differences that we already anticipated from the first year to the second year also was that one thing that I think people got a little bit shocked over the first year, so that was basically during the test event, was how quickly in that course the groups behind...
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
basically catched up with the lead groups on the bike this one thing we knew that basically the people that obviously were in the first group they would benefit everything from basically going a little bit harder and maybe even starting devising strategies where they even got domestics like this is an individual race but people actually starting getting domestics and sacrifice people in the races from a nation perspective to be able to keep up let's say a different racing strategy because they're allowed to draft in triathlon now yeah so in short course triathlon you can draft
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
there you can draft. This is the difference between that and long course like Ironman racing. What did this mean for Christian? It meant for Christian that basically in Paris versus Tokyo, he had to pedal 30% harder for three-fifths of the race in order to just come back in the group. And you don't get 30% for free for basically 25 kilometers.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah. Also, what's important here is that when we say anaerobic threshold is that when we talk about the differences here, the differences here depend a little bit on what kind of athlete you are, whether you are a high power athlete or endurance athlete. So if you're a high power athlete, typically you'll see that there are larger differences between this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
30% extra power for 25 kilometers, that has a massive cost. So even though We could say that his fitness have increased beyond what it was before, which made her confident that if this had been a pure time trial, in let's say where you had like a normal swimming conditions, this kind of thing, he would be faster than what he was in Tokyo.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But because this is a place where obviously the dynamics is completely different, that extra fitness- 30%. I mean, I'm surprised he could even do that. Yeah. That has an implication when you get out on the run. Because obviously here, this is not a time like where you go all out on a bike. What was his 10K time? 30 high something, I think. Let's say around 30 minutes.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I have to go back and check sometime now. Had a little bit different place. Still so fast. Good Lord. Yeah.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So with all the data we collect, one of the things that I would be able to discover quicker with AI is that his utilization went up too high in the month leading into the Olympics. Utilization.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So meaning basically where you are trading away a little bit on your anaerobic capacity and power, or let's say at least anaerobic power, maybe not capacity, you don't want to trade that away, but let's say anaerobic power. in order to increase your aerobic power slightly more. So let's say off your view to max, you're able to raise sustainably an even higher percentage of your view to max.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So that means also substitute utilization would normally then be improved as well. Whether that would make a difference, to be honest, I don't know because of how the race played out. That's one. Where AI really makes a difference is that, for me, we have used AI for some while. We started developing our own systems, I think this must have been back in 2020.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And that is that with all the data, because of all the in-depth research we have done, We obviously have a lot of data and interesting findings where we can build AI systems that allows us to take new data that comes into the systems in real time and help us highlight what is important, what is not important.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Like if there are things that we need to prioritize more, or I can even put attention to this. So AI for me is also where I think research, just purely in terms of longevity, in terms of human health, everything will really supercharge us to a completely different level.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Researchers and other people that I work with today, and one of the main limitations when they come in and they basically see the work we do is they say, okay, the research we do is insane. It has a depth to it that basically is unmatched.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So the percentage difference between this will be larger. Our endurance athletes, it would be smaller, but you could basically call this minute differences. We are talking percent differences. It's not like These are going to be 10% apart in terms of power, anything like this. We talk about percentages from a couple of percents to maybe five, worst case, maybe 10. Okay.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But it's not because they don't have necessarily the competence in a group or anything like this to do it, but it's just the sheer amount of work that is required in order to utilize it or even use it in a study in itself. And when you have AI, like a lot of work that actually is done in research today is still manual work. There are plotting that is still done manual.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
There are measurements that are still done manual. But where instrumentation and AI really can change this to the point where I'm not talking about One study can be done with maybe one more instrument or something like this, but where you can use a multitude of extra of instruments and be able to dig into the data on completely different levels than what you could do before.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
AI will not replace the decision-making, but it will help us in terms of information.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
You can also imagine here, AI, how we train it is that for a normal person, I don't have a PhD in mathematics. I don't have a PhD in machine learning. But the good thing is that we can basically take... You're using large language models to do this? No, we have built an agentic system. So large language models is basically the interface for us.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So I would use that, for example, like I would say that I want to look at data in a certain way. So I'm using more the LLM or NLP to inform which agents that should be utilized in order to understand or to dig into the data. So I still have to produce the question. I still have to produce the question. AI for me is basically just an autonomous system.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I know this is a big debate on how intelligent these systems are, but one of the best cases is that because I work so much in edge cases, so there was a study that just came out now and people say, oh, it seems like AI has the possibility came out of Stanford, I think it was, and it was quite a lot of research involved in it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And they say that AI has the possibility to seemingly to produce quite a lot of novel ideas on par with humanity. But where I would say that, well, it depends on what kind of perspective you look at it. And also where I would say that if it doesn't have data that has been trained on for this, the best thing it can try to do is interpolate between data it already have access to.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
That means edge cases or basically cases where you are in the, let's say in the domain where you need to extrapolate, they greatly suffer. This you can see again and again and again. But the good thing is that you empower a group of people or even a single human with PhD level capabilities in mathematics, in biology, physics, all these kind of things.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So you use the NLP, you ask a question, and basically it can target this kind of data. Like even programming is a limitation for many people today. They are able maybe to formulate great questions, but they don't have the capability or the resources available to really put or execute and look into it.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But when you have AI, suddenly now you can, without necessarily skills in programming or other things, you're able to formulate a question and you can ask the questions into the data.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And these different agents can now suddenly employ extreme level competence from multi-domains by the hands of a single user into the data and give you insight back that otherwise would be impossible, even for large research teams.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then lactate threshold, just adding more definitions.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
I think that, okay, first to answer it a little bit more high level, I think that today Norway have been a superpower in winter sports. A lot of the reasons has been because of the technology research and other things that have gone into, for example, purely optimization of skis.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So lactate threshold, I would say the lactate threshold has probably more of a result of limitations in the measurement method, because we know that lactate is something you produce all the time, even when you are sleeping. So The difference here is more where you're looking at where you find a first infliction point on a lactate curve when you do less an increase in intensity.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
You could come to the Olympics, you can be a better trained athlete, but you won't win simply because the way the technology makes a difference on the skis, for example. I think AI will be, or I'm convinced AI and the systems we are building now will have the same implication on purely human performance and training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Meaning that if you basically don't employ AI at some point, you will be at such a deficiency. So you have great people. What is important for me to say here, coaches are very often extremely advanced, almost super intelligent in the space of exactly making people fitter.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
They are maybe not or not even closely remote to the understanding of everything we have talked about today in terms of even knowing exactly the definition of such a widely common expression or terminology like FTP, but still they produce some excellent athletes because they have observational skills and developed an intuition of what works and not works through a lot of experience, empathy and so on, that they are brilliant athletes.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But AI is not conflict to them, rather, again, a superpower where they can employ their level of understanding into much better questions. into what is happening here with my athlete. So it shouldn't change the way you do coaching, but it increases the precision of what you do in the coaching. And the biggest change thus in performance will come through even better consistency in the training.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Not that single workout that is so much more brilliant, but purely in the consistency of the training and adaptations you do to the training programs.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Yeah, being able to be far more proactive than what I am today. I still, even though I would consider myself as one of the leading persons on using technology and also in applied research when it comes to elite performance, I can still say that I am only able to utilize in the daily life a fraction of the data that we are collecting. Then you can say, well, why do you collect all the other data?
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Well, very often it becomes insight. You come back, you learn something from it that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
But being able to be proactive and make adjustments, individual adjustments, much more proactively will be one of the biggest differences. And this doesn't only apply to elites. This applies even to amateurs or normal people.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So one thing that is maybe easy to get wrong here is that it looks like when you do increasing, so if you start low enough power or low enough pace, it looks like, oh, there is no increase in lactate production. The problem is the way we measure. We don't measure lactate in the muscle. We measure in the bloodstream and for it to basically be reflected on the instrument.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
There needs to be a large enough lactate production in the muscles where you're not able necessarily to metabolize the lactate immediately. And it starts to get transported out into the bloodstream and it starts to reflect also as an increase in lactate there. So the difference is also is that depending on protocol, this will change.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So that's also a little bit of the challenges when you also start to mix something external with something internal as well.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
It depends, again, how you're going to utilize it. If you are going to use it for actively, let's say, controlling the intensity outdoors, for example, using a lactate meter, then I would say it really doesn't matter.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Exactly, because the thing here is that here you're looking for more, not necessarily, here also it's important just for me to say initially that when you find, for example, a lactate concentration of LT1 and LT2, for example, or basically AT and LT, for example, or AT, LT2, but we basically say lactate 10.2 and lactate 10.1, so the first one and the second one.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
And then when you do this, it's also a misconception to think that your LT2 is always a constant value because this will be influenced by many factors. We measure a concentration in the blood and the blood is influenced by hydration and all things like this.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
So for example, if you have a change in hematocrit, we won't come into that, but you can easily from the beginning of the session towards the end of the session see changes in hematocrit of more than 10%. As you get dehydrated. Yes. So this will already influence the lactic concentration, but to use it as a guiding principle, it really doesn't matter how long your steps are.
The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Basically, what you're looking for is to find a concentration value, and then you go out into the field and you're trying to figure out where this is. You basically said, okay, if you figured this out to be for an endurance LSA, for sake of simplicity, we say one millimole and two and a half millimole. So one millimole at the lactic threshold or LT1.