The Peter Attia Drive
#331 ‒ Optimizing endurance performance: metrics, nutrition, lactate, and more insights from elite performers | Olav Aleksander Bu (Pt. 2)
Mon, 13 Jan 2025
View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Olav Aleksander Bu is an internationally renowned sports scientist acclaimed for his coaching prowess with elite athletes spanning a diverse range of sports disciplines. In this episode, Olav returns to dive deeper into his groundbreaking work as an endurance coach, exercise scientist, engineer, and physiologist. The discussion explores his data-driven approach to coaching, unpacking key performance metrics like functional threshold power, VO2 max, and lactate threshold, while emphasizing the importance of consistent testing protocols. Olav shares insights on how training methodologies differ across sports, the impact of nutrition on endurance performance, and the evolving strategies for carbohydrate metabolism in fueling athletes for races. Olav concludes with a discussion on the use of artificial intelligence for optimizing training insights and performance. We discuss: Olav’s unique, engineering-driven approach to endurance coaching [2:45]; Definitions and applications of key performance metrics: FTP, power, anaerobic threshold, and lactate threshold [4:45]; Lactate threshold: factors affecting lactate threshold, testing protocols, and how elite athletes' efficiency affects their performance and lactate profiles [14:15] VO2 max: definition, testing, factors affecting its accuracy, and methods for optimizing oxygen utilization in elite athletes [22:15]; Testing VO2 max: common mistakes and key factors to consider—preparation, warm-up, timing, and more [34:00]; VO2 max testing continued: measuring instruments, testing protocols, and advanced insights gained from elite athletes [41:45]; The influence of supplements like beetroot concentrate and adaptogens on VO2 max and performance [49:45]; How respiratory quotient (RQ) reflects metabolic shifts during exercise, the challenges in measuring and interpreting RQ in elite athletes, and the physiological adaptations needed for prolonged endurance events [53:30]; Triathlon training: the challenge of maintaining elite performance across triathlon distances, metabolic efficiency, and swimming challenges [1:03:15]; How reducing drag in swimming could revolutionize performance and the role of biofeedback tools in optimizing efficiency across various endurance sports [1:07:00]; How endurance athletes prioritize effort regulation using RPE, heart rate, and power output, and the role of lactate in cardiac and athletic efficiency [1:20:00]; Lactate’s role as a fuel, buffering methods to combat lactic acidosis, and the variability in athlete response to bicarbonate supplementation [1:25:45]; The physiological mechanisms behind differences in performance between two elite athletes: lactate transport, cardiovascular efficiency, and compensatory systems [1:33:00]; Comparing interventions like acetaminophen to enhance performance in high-heat conditions versus natural adaptations to heat [1:37:15]; Advancements in nutrition science, changes in cyclist body composition, and the impact of fueling strategies on athletic performance and growth [1:39:30]; Optimizing endurance performance with utilization of carbohydrates, and the potential role of ketones [1:48:00]; Insights gained from elite performers in the 2020 and 2024 Olympics [1:58:30]; The use of artificial intelligence to optimizing training insights and performance [2:06:30]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube
Chapter 1: What unique approach does Olav take in endurance coaching?
Hey everyone, welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen.
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If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of a subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Olav Alexander Bu.
Olav was a guest in March of 2024, and at the time of that conversation, I realized we hadn't got through the majority of what I wanted to speak about, so it was inevitable that I would have him back. Olav is an endurance coach, exercise scientist, engineer, and physiologist.
He is the head of performance for Norway Triathlon and is best known for coaching two of the world's top triathletes, Christian Blumenfeld and Gustav Iden. In this episode, we review his work and his approach to coaching and the way that he relies very heavily on data.
We talk about and define various performance metrics like FTP, functional threshold power, critical power, anaerobic threshold, lactate threshold, VO2 max, and the importance of consistent protocols when testing these performance metrics and how they can vary depending on an athlete's training.
We discuss differences in training methodologies across sports and how different sports and activities influence power, pace, and endurance. We look at the significance of nutrition in endurance sports, how athletes train to properly fuel themselves for races, and why this is so different from what has been done historically. In fact, we really got into this difference in carbohydrate metabolism.
Just like the first time Olav and I spoke, this is a discussion that can be quite complex at some points. We do get a little bit into the weeds, but the truth of it is because of the nature of what we're talking about, it's very difficult to talk about these things meaningfully and superficially. Patience is always appreciated and the rewards are always there if you're able to stick with it.
So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Olav Alexander-Boo. Ola, thank you very much for coming to Austin on your way. I guess you're on your way to Arizona. Yes, on my way to Flagstaff. So also thank you very much for having me again. Yeah. Well, as I mentioned last time we spoke, I had a lot of notes. We got through, I think, one eighth of them.
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Chapter 2: What are the key performance metrics in endurance sports?
Maybe just for the person who didn't catch that episode, can you give the one minute version of what you do and why you're certainly one of the few people that would be poised to talk about what we're going to talk about today?
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.
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.
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.
Chapter 3: How does lactate threshold affect performance?
Yeah. So in many ways, you're kind of an applied scientist. Yes. And your laboratory is both a CPET lab and then a racing environment where most of the athletes you work with are triathletes, correct?
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.
Yeah. I feel like we're going to use a lot of terms today. We're going to probably throw out the word anaerobic threshold, lactate threshold, VO2 max, FTP threshold. So I just want to make sure everybody kind of understands those things. So let's just take them one at a time. Can you define FTP or functional threshold power for folks?
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.
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,
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.
Yeah. We used to sometimes do 20 minutes and subtract 10%. So we would do a gentle warmup for an hour, then do 20 minutes and then subtract 10%. So yes, But I guess the spirit of FTP, which is maybe what we want people to think about and not get mired in the details, is it really approximates an energy zone that is more than just an all out, but clearly less than what you could hold indefinitely.
And it's directionally about the highest output you could have for an hour. And there's different ways to approximate it, of course.
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Chapter 4: What strategies optimize VO2 max in athletes?
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.
And then how does that differ from another term that is used interchangeably, but I believe erroneously, which is critical power?
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.
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.
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.
And where does critical power typically lie in relation to FTP?
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of nutrition in endurance performance?
Okay, you mentioned two other terms there, anaerobic threshold. Let's start with that. How do we define it?
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
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
Where does anaerobic threshold typically, if we're just limiting this to make the discussion easier and talking about, say, cyclists with a power meter, where does anaerobic threshold tend to sit relative to FTP?
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.
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.
So at the lower power. So if we're keeping track, we've got critical power, FTP, AT.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: How do athletes utilize carbohydrate metabolism during races?
And then lactate threshold, just adding more definitions.
Yes.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What advancements in technology are influencing endurance sports?
So that's also a little bit of the challenges when you also start to mix something external with something internal as well.
And so if we did a lactate protocol, a speed or power escalation, right? I think we talked about this on the last podcast, which was kind of the way we used to do it in swimming is you'd think we would do 200 yard swims. So you do a 200 yard swim at a very modest pace, come back, check the lactate, rest, do it again, five seconds faster per 200, go and do it again. lactate, and you get a plot.
So pace on the x-axis, lactate on the y-axis, and the curve is very distinct. It is very, very flat, and then it is not. And we would draw these tangent lines between the two, and then that point was the lactate threshold. Where would that typically lie? Assuming we did it on a bicycle, so it was really easy to do the power checks.
First of all, how long a duration would you have an athlete do this if you were doing it on an ergometer? Would you say we're going to do three minute efforts or something like that? Is that appropriate to generate the lactate performance curve?
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.
Even taking into account that there's some lag between what's happening in the muscle and what's happening in the blood?
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: How can artificial intelligence enhance training insights?
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.
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.
And then two and a half at LT2 or anaerobic threshold AT.
We usually saw them a little bit higher than that. Actually, I didn't really differentiate between LT1 and LT2. I kind of looked at the single inflection point just using a two line. Usually people were kind of in the three to four range was where that inflection point. You're saying that corresponds to LT2? Yes. So, and this also comes back to a little bit what kind of athlete you are.
Yeah, this was mostly swimming that we were doing. I found swimmers, by the way, had the highest lactate capacity.
Basically for how much lactate?
How much lactate they would produce and tolerate. And tolerate, yeah. Any idea? I mean, it could be just a small sample size. Very often, it depends on what kind of swimmers. If you look at a 100-meter swimmer, for example. So call it 200 to 400 breaststroke butterfly individual medley. I never saw higher numbers of lactate in myself or other swimmers than in those.
I always assumed it was two things. It was individual medley. You're using every muscle in the body. It's not like cycling or running. You're hemorrhaging lactate into the system. And then secondly, at that distance, two to 400, I mean, you're really in the pain train of, you're clearly not able to do this fully anaerobically. So you're sort of maximizing aerobic and then topping up anaerobic.
But that was sort of why I sort of assumed, I mean, literally I measured on several elite swimmers, lactates over 20 millimole.
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