The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Episode 204: Joe Friel on Science-Based Training for Older Athletes - Part 1

July 10, 2024 • CTS • Season 4 • Episode 204

Share episode

Unlock the secrets to maintaining peak performance at any age with our special guest, Joe Friel, the mastermind behind "The Cyclist's Training Bible" and "Fast After 50." Joe delves into the crucial role of anabolic hormones and their impact on athletic performance. Discover how a long-term dedication to training can help maintain higher hormone levels and slow the decline in VO2 max as we age. We also discuss the invaluable wisdom and strategies that experienced athletes employ to compensate for physiological changes, emphasizing the importance of exercise, sleep, and diet in maintaining peak fitness. Tune in for a treasure trove of tips to train hard, train smart, and achieve your athletic goals, no matter how old you are.

IN THIS EPISODE

  • Healthspan vs. Lifespan
  • Hormonal changes affecting aging athletes
  • Age-related physical declines
  • Importance of weight lifting and varied activities
  • Emotional responses to aging as an athlete
  • Do older athletes respond to training?

LINKS

ASK A QUESTION FOR A FUTURE PODCAST

GUEST
For endurance athletes and coaches, Joe Friel needs no introduction. A legend in the endurance coaching profession, Joe is the author of some of the most successful books on endurance training, including "The Cyclist's Training Bible", "The Triathlete's Training Bible", and "Fast After 50". He was a founder of Peaksware, creator of TrainingPeaks software. As a coach, his clients have included elite amateur and professional road cyclists, mountain bikers, and triathletes and duathletes.

HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast platform

GET FREE TRAINING CONTENT

Join our weekly newsletter

CONNECT WITH CTS

Website: trainright.com
Instagram: @cts_trainright
Twitter: @trainright
Facebook: @CTSAthlete

Speaker 1:

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now onto our show. Welcome back, or welcome to the Time Crunch Cyclist. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford. My guest really needs no introduction for most. He's a renowned author, coach and thought leader in this space, and has been now for decades. He's the author of the cyclist training Bible, the triathlon training Bible. Fast after 50 and hell. He'd probably have a Nobel prize in coaching If there was such a thing. Joe Friel, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

I am Thank you. I'm not sure about that Nobel prize thing. That's interesting.

Speaker 1:

Well, for, for an audience who may have not read your books and thought about the Nobel Prize themselves, they're probably using a technology that you helped create called Training Peaks. But we could spend a few podcasts talking about your storied history and coaching, and I'm sure we'll get into some of that today. But what I and perhaps some of our audience members are thinking and wondering is, when you're not writing books, coaching or working in the peaks where business side of things what the heck does Joe Friel do with his spare time?

Speaker 2:

Well, actually I don't get involved very much in training peaks at all. My son runs training peaks and so I stay out of his way. He does a much better job than I ever could, so I'm not involved at all. It really meant at all. Um, I ride my bike every morning. I got in uh two hours this morning, lifted weights for about uh 40 minutes and uh, and I am writing another book right now. You mentioned that I'm working on. This will be my my 18th book, uh, and I've almost got it done. Uh, it's uh. I've been working on it for it'll be a year in august. I've been working on this book and anyway I'm looking forward to having it on the market. Also, I'm I'm pretty excited about the ideas I've put forward in there. Stuff I've I've added to what the cyclist training Bible has in it. So we'll see what comes of all this stuff in the coming future.

Speaker 1:

That is. That is super exciting, is there? I mean, I didn't know you're writing the 18th book. I mean, is there any teasers that you can provide in that space or or anything to tell our audience before it hits the shelves?

Speaker 2:

Well, the title is going to be a Joe Friel's high performance cyclist, Love it. Before it hits the shelves Well, the title is going to be Joe Friel's High Performance Cyclist, Love it. So I'm getting away from the Turning Bible titles I've had in the past, which have been going on, by the way, since 1996. And I finally decided it was time to retire that. So this has got a little bit different title.

Speaker 2:

But I've changed the way I've written the book. I've changed my way of talking to the athlete, if you will, through the written page, and things are organized in much different ways. I've added lots of new information, lots of new ideas from the research and other stuff I learned I spend. The best way to learn is to write a book. It forces you to think forced to do some research. So I spent I've spent most of the last year just doing research on topics I wanted to learn more about, and so I'm building them into the book also. So it's kind of like something that's really uh, uh near and dear to me right now. So I'm putting a lot of time into it.

Speaker 1:

Uh, that's so cool, yeah, and, and from what I hear about writing a book with friends that that have it's, uh, it's, it's an undertaking, and you do learn a lot as you're as you're doing that. So, um, yeah, well, thank you for taking time out of your day to join us on the podcast, and I do think that everything that we talk about will be amazing lessons for our audience and myself too. So one little disclaimer before we get into it is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We're known for shorter episodes and actionable advice, but with a legend like Joe on the show, I can guarantee the actionable advice part, but the next few episodes we might be on the longer side of things. It's totally worth it. So, with that said, let's dive in. So this topic, or the questions formed here, will be coming from the races regularly over the past five to 10 years. I think it's pretty clear that not only are there just more older athletes out there competing, they're still pretty fast too.

Speaker 1:

And as I listened to my athletes who are competing at those events, teammates and friends, training partners who are masters, grandmasters, really anywhere between like 35 plus to 75 plus. The physiologies are different between the two and they're changing as they cat up and age up, but they're changing at different rates for those different age categories. So what I'd like to do is explore those changes in physiology for athletes, specifically in the fifties, sixties, 70s and beyond, then discuss training strategies that can help navigate these changes for the better in the way of increased health span and performance.

Speaker 2:

The health span is really a very important topic as far as I'm concerned. Most Americans, most Western society, really don't have much involvement with that concept, but it's something that athletes are really primed to take advantage of.

Speaker 1:

So glad to see you're thinking about that also, absolutely, and we'll get into health span, we'll kind of define that. But I think what I want to start is like when we talk about an aging athlete, just to you, joe, for real, I mean, where do we start with the aging athlete?

Speaker 2:

Where does that term actually apply? At what?

Speaker 2:

yeah, good question everybody's aging, obviously I think the reason we use the term aging athlete is because we don't like in western society to use the word old, um, they're, they're old athletes, um, which is a little more defined defined than aging athletes, but it's just not as nice. But there are some other categories too. There's a super ager which is, I think, a gigantic market right now. As you mentioned, you see a lot more athletes from all age groups up the higher end 50, 60, 70, even more, sometimes still out there competing, even more, sometimes still out there competing, and you know that's a good sign for what's going on in our society. At a certain level.

Speaker 2:

I'm afraid it's not impacting a big enough margin of our society to turn things around, because right now, really, our health is pretty bad in this country On average. I'm sure we'll get to that topic throughout the day, so we'll go into it right now. Our health is pretty bad in this country on average. I'm sure we'll get to that topic throughout the day, so we'll go into it right now. But anyway, this topic is very near and dear to me. But I've been thinking about what's my next book going to be after this book I'm writing right now, which I just mentioned a while ago and I've been kind of thinking about doing something with super agers. Um, there, there's a gigantic number of people out there, athletes, who just have blown me away how good they are, uh, in what we used to be considered senility, people who are still cranking out big numbers and and are very fit, very healthy, and they're in their 50s, 60s, 70s and even older. So it's a great topic. I'm glad to see you bringing it up.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no for sure. And I think, to grand scheme of things, I mean when we are talking about our aging athletes and athletes who are old, somewhere right around 50 and older, and I think that there's some science to show what's changing in those physiologies. So I would say I mean correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean hormonal changes in the body are going to be the primary drivers of those changes in physiology, correct?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they are, especially as far as we're concerned. We're talking here primarily about sport, so what we're concerned about here is the anabolic hormones, the ones who actually do the rebuilding of tissues which, by the way, occurs when you sleep. It's really not going on throughout the day, so much. It's really nothing happens while you're asleep. But you know, there's all these anabolic hormones, growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, uh, insulin, like growth factor, and the list just goes on and on. There's a tremendous number of like growth factor and the list just goes on and on. There's a tremendous number of anabolic hormones, and what makes the athletes who are doing so well, who are older athletes, what's the longest to happen to them, is the fact that they are still keeping these hormones at a relatively high level. These hormones all decline or decrease as we age up Most of the hormones we're talking about here from about age 10 to about 20, when we're little kids still growing up that's when those hormones are increasing and we hit a peak for most of them somewhere around late teens.

Speaker 2:

Early 20s is when that peak is hit, and then, from that point on in life, the typical thing that happens is there's a decline in all those hormones, and the thing that allows the athlete to keep those hormones from declining at a very fast rate is exercise, is movement. That's the key to it. There's other things also Sleep is important, diet is important and there's other stuff that's going on here also. But number one, the most important thing in this category, the most important thing in in maintaining this hormonal level and decreasing that the rate of loss of hormones, is exercise. So that's why these athletes are doing so well is because they've got.

Speaker 2:

Number one, they've got genetics on their side. More than likely, they just inherited some really good genes that allows them to do this. And, number two, they've taken advantage of those genes by exercising regularly for a number of years. It just didn't start yesterday. This started decades ago for these people and they are still finding their limits and pushing those limits, and that's what makes them stand out from the crowd, I think, is this fact that they're active throughout their entire lives coaching for 20 plus years and it definitely seems like those who were great athletes, you know, in their twenties or so the one that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be great in your fifties.

Speaker 1:

The ones who kept going, they're great in their fifties. The ones who took a break because of all the reasons, right, um, and then they come back. They've got challenges and I'm going to pull on just a few threads from a presentation that you gave to our CTS coaches, where we're talking about this subject, where fitness changes with age and I'm looking at one of your slides right now where we're looking at really like 30 years and younger, that you're kind of maxed out on a lot of these fitness changes. Between ages 30 and 39, things start to shift a little bit and we're looking at VO2 max efficiency and peak sprint power. But as soon as we hit 40 and 49, I would say that's when I'm in the data I'm starting to see the changes wobbling. And then 50 to 59, that's big changes occur 60 plus 70 plus. Can you describe that a little bit more of why that precipitous fall off starts to happen at those times?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, let's just take one of those. Let's just take aerobic capacity, vo2 max. That's an interesting one. Typically typically we hit our high for vo2 max sometime in our 20s, mid-20s or higher for some people, a little lower for other people, but that's when we get the maximum amount of oxygen our body can process, produce energy, and after that it begins to decline. If you don't do anything, the decline is rather rapid. It's something like about 15 percent per decade loss of vo2 max for those who are sedentary. 15 percent per decade. So that's like one and a half percent per year. So it's now becoming noticeable.

Speaker 2:

So if you go into your 40s and you're not doing anything, you're losing about one and a half percent per decade, or per year rather, of your aerobic capacity. On the other hand, the athlete who is working out regularly, steadily and has, for a number of years, maintains their drop is something like seven percent per decade, so seven tenths of 1% per year, which really is not going to be noticeable. In fact, the athlete who is aging and having this happen to them when they're in their thirties, for example, they may have lost by the time they're in their late thirties. They may have lost 7% of their fitness from 10 years earlier, but you really can't tell it, because the reason why you can't tell it is because these athletes have become smarter. They're wiser, they've learned how to train, they've learned how to race. They know what to do at the right time, for example, in a race. They can read the race really well, whereas in their 20s they were trying to learn how to read a race. Now they know how to do it.

Speaker 2:

So because of that, they kind of cover up the 7% roughly 7% loss of VO2 max that's occurred in the last 10 years, simply because they've become smarter.

Speaker 2:

They know how to use their body appropriately to do things that they want to do, which is become more fit and compete. They've learned how to do that, and that's the same thing, a lot of this stuff. If you just pay attention to what you're doing and keep on training as you had when you were younger, to some extent there may be some things that change which you can get into later on, but if you keep on training like that, you're going to maintain a lot of this performance, despite the fact that VO2 max, for example, is declining at about the rate of 7% per decade. So it's a matter again we come back to. Exercise is number one for maintaining your health, your fitness, your longevity, your health span, all this sort of stuff it really comes back to. Number one is exercise, and that's what these people who are still competing at a high level late in their lives are doing, which is exercise for a long time, basically for their entire lives.

Speaker 1:

If there's anything, a golden thread that I've seen too in the research as well as observations, it's those who keep moving decrease less. But I think too, and the final thing on this chart that I'm looking at, is that efficiency expressed in the red bar, that's the one that drops the least, and I think the thing that pops out to me is that puts a huge onus on actually learning how to pace, how to race, how to get on wheels, how to drive a bike, all these other skills that are beyond what's the right interval. So in stuff that I've covered on the podcast before and stuff that you should be working on with your coach, and so if that's one of these things that will diminish the least, work on it now, whatever age you're at, because that that's going to really help you in the in the long run.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, efficiency economy is a very interesting topic Really. It has a lot to do with skills, skills handling, bike handling skills, you know, descending, climbing, riding in a group, spreading all these things that we talk about all the time, cornering all the stuff that goes into riding a bike. If you've managed to really refine these skills when you're young, it's going to stay with you for a long time. It's just not going to decline as fast as, say, video 2 max would, as you you pointed out. That's. That's a good thing and if you keep on being active, those skills will be maintained at fairly high level. There might be some loss of those skills over time, but the loss, as you pointed out, is going to be minimal compared with the, with other things that change physiologically for the athlete yeah, there's.

Speaker 1:

There's some other physical changes that I want to just point out. We don't have to get super deep into it unless you do, but the reason I want to point them out is because I want to normalize them. I want to normalize them relative to age, meaning we need to talk about these because it's part of our strategy, which we'll get to here later in the podcast, of how to mitigate them and how to train around them. And so, again, kind of coming back to that continuing ed that you gave CTS, I'm just looking at the bullet points of it. But we're looking at decreased muscle mass and strength, decreased anaerobic and aerobic capacity, which you already made a nod to, increased body fat compromised, compromised joint health, decreased recovery time and I threw in decreased coordination and some flexibility. I mean, all that's coming for us right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's out there. It's kind of starting to growl at us a little bit as we get older, and still the key is to remain active, doing lots of stuff, not just riding your bike, but being active in other ways. Also, lifting weights is critical. I'm amazed right now all the research that's coming out that talks about the benefits of lifting weights. That goes well beyond just having big muscles. It has a lot to do with health, it has a lot to do with lifespan. It has a lot to do with how you perform, also as an athlete. So you know, it's all these things that you do.

Speaker 2:

Many years ago, I started going for walks with my wife. This, I think, is a valuable thing to do besides riding my bike. It's another thing that kind of keeps my movement going. It doesn't have to always be on a bike. In fact, sometimes it's probably good to have a little bit more variety in your life besides whatever. It may be that your primary sport is. But anyway, that's one thing I think that's uh, very valuable and, interestingly enough, I'm earning a lot more people now who are talking about walking also is something they do just as a part of their daily activity. Now it all probably all started with getting, whatever it is, 10 000 steps a day or something like that. That's probably where it all started. I was doing it before I even read about that 10,000 steps thing. I'm not sure if that's true, by the way, but anyway, moving in any way you can is really good. Sitting on your butt all day long is the worst thing you could possibly do.

Speaker 2:

If you look at our ancestors, I always think about this in terms of how did we get to this point in time? Most of us think that we've been around for just a few hundred years. This is the way it's always been, is the way we are right now, but it's not like that. Um, our, we can take our ancestors back, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, to our earliest ancestors and, uh, the hominids, the ones who are really our closest ancestors. What they were doing throughout the day was they were hunting, they were gathering food, they were carrying it back to wherever their joint meeting place was for the group. They would prepare the meals for the group. They would socialize with one another in the process of doing this, and after their meals they would dance.

Speaker 2:

You wouldn't see these people sitting on a rock someplace for 12 hours a day. They just didn't live that way. They were movers, and that's us. We've inherited their genomics, we are them, but we don't treat ourselves the way they did. We tend in our society to become very docile, very fixed to the TV, very fixed to the computer, very fixed to the couch, like our ancestors did, which is you know they were. They were active throughout their entire day. Which explains why we've got so much health problems in our country right now is people just don't live the life we were supposed to be living living. So, anyway, that that's the get me started on this topic. It's, finally, one of my favorite topics is how we got to this point. So, anyway, I'll stop right there before I get too far into it.

Speaker 1:

No, I love it. No, I mean. The best way I summarize that, to my athletes too, is like adaptation is a shorter time course. Evolution is a much longer time course and whatever you think of how long humans have been here or not, it's the evolutionary aspect that we need to pay attention to, because that's been proven with science and we just haven't been around long enough to like evolve to sitting for 16 hours, which is terrible, and I think that if you actually tune into yourself, you'll notice that sitting sucks. Moving is awesome and laying down is awesome. Just do that a lot when you sleep. Everything else move a lot. Be busy.

Speaker 2:

Just do that a lot when you sleep. Everything else move a lot, be busy away for the most part, and we would be a much healthier and happier society if we did.

Speaker 1:

Agreed. I want to also express that these kind of listed off bullet point here of what's coming for us as we age and the advice that we're giving this is actionable to both men and women. We have different hormones that are changing in our body, but correct me if I'm wrong I mean these observations that we're seeing. I mean this applies to both men and women, correct?

Speaker 2:

Oh, no doubt. Yeah, it's exactly the same things pretty much all the way through life. I don't know if there's any studies that have been done on who are more active, males or females. I've never seen anything on that, but I suspect we both need to be. Both sexes need to be more active than we are right now. I see my neighbors and it's almost sickening to see them sometimes how grossly out of shape they are and they can solve it so easily just by getting out the front door and going for a walk. It's nothing else. They don't have to ride a bike or run or swim or anything else, sign up for races. All they could do is go out and walk around the block a few times a day and that would do a lot for them. But we've gotten so used to being tied to the TV and the computer that we just don't get outside enough. We just don't move enough.

Speaker 1:

As I sit here and observe these and I and I observe my athletes too what I notice is that there's emotional changes that occur as we age, like we just were concerned about. Oh you know, I don't have the sprint I once did, I can't recover as fast and emotionally that takes a hit. I don't have great advice. So I'm turning to you of how you've managed that with coaching athletes over time, because those physical changes are real. The emotional changes are real too. I don't think athletes are talking about that as much. So what's your advice on handling kind of the emotion of these physical changes?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is the starting point for all this is just deciding that, um, um, that you're going to, you're going to make things different in your life. It really starts in your head. It doesn't start with your body, it doesn't start with exercise. It starts with your decision that, um, you're going to try to improve your performance in some way. There could be lots of ways of doing that, besides riding your bike, for example, or whatever your sport may be. It could be things along the lines of lifting weights.

Speaker 2:

I mentioned this once before, but I think this is one of the most important things we can do is to stress our bodies in a way that we don't normally stress it during the day, which is by lifting heavy things and having some kind of program that we're on that we do regularly, and that's where the real problem comes in. You can get athletes to lift weights. You just can't get them to do it regularly, or the average population. That's where the real key is. It's not so much how much weight you lifted. It's not you know how many ton, what the tonnage was that you did today. It's how often did you do it. That's the key issue here. It really comes down to consistency, that's. That's what it's all about. It's really not about maximizing, doing the biggest thing you can do. It's about doing these things over and over and over. That's where the benefit really is to be received from exercise, such as lifting your weight or riding your bike or running, or eating a better diet. These things all come down to consistency. You can't break down every few days and decide not to do it because of some other reason. You've got to figure every few days, decide not to do it because of some other reason. You've got to figure out a lifestyle that allows you to do these things.

Speaker 2:

Lifestyle is one of the key issues, I'm afraid, for Almost everything we talk about. It'll come down to eventually, to lifestyle. We'll talk about it, I'm sure, later on. That's what we have to do. We just have to make a decision that we're going to change our lifestyle so we become more active. We eat the foods we want to eat. We exercise as we want to exercise in our sport, we lift weights. We just do lots of things that make us a much more rounded person than we might become otherwise. If we get lazy and just decide to watch television all day long, or whatever it may be, that really turns this on, like your computer or something yeah, I mean, I think what's going to be what I'm hoping for and what the consistent answers are going to be here on this podcast?

Speaker 1:

a lot of boring answers. A lot of boring answers of consistency. Be healthy, do this, but you'll find joy in it. And I think too, like in the way of, like that emotional health, I think exercise makes you feel better. So again you come back down to what is the answer exercise, lift, walk, run, ride, that sort of thing. But if, if there's an audience member that's like in their fifties and they've focused on family and business, they let training go by the wayside. They haven't done much training in a while. Is it all over for them? Or can they kickstart it now at 50? And is that trainable? Is there trainability beyond in the older years, if you haven't been doing it for several years?

Speaker 2:

Well, let me give you a couple of studies that have been done on this very topic.

Speaker 2:

There was a study I'm working off my memory of all the details, but there was a study done a few years ago which involved people in a nursing home who were in their 90s, and they had those people who were in the study. They had them lifting weights, doing certain exercises, lifting weights. At the same time they had a control group who were college students. They did the very same exercises, lifting weights, and after six weeks I think it was six weeks, I may be wrong on that, maybe 12 weeks, I don't recall exactly but after a certain amount of time they then tested both groups to see how much they improved. Interestingly enough, both groups improved at the very same rate. Now, the 90-year-olds weren't lifting as much weight, that's obvious. They just were not as strong, but they improved just as much, percentage-wise, as those who were college students. So that's one example. Let me give you another example, even older.

Speaker 2:

There was a cyclist by the name of Robert Marchand he was a Frenchman was a cyclist by the name of Robert Marchand. He was a Frenchman and at age 103, if I recall right, he broke the world's record for his age group, which probably weren't too many people in that age group. At age 103, he set a new hour record on the track at age 103. He decided over the next two years that he could break that record. He could go faster with over the next two years and he could break that record. He could go faster. So at age 100, but in the next two years 103 to 105, he started working with an exercise physiologist to improve his performance, improve his fitness. They improved his VO2 max by 13% over the course of the next two years from age 103 to 105, improved his VO2 max by 13% over the course of the next two years from age 103 to 105 and proved his VO2 max by 13%. That is gigantic.

Speaker 2:

He went on then to break the record again. He went roughly 17 miles per hour, 17 miles in an hour on the track at age 105. The guy was an amazing athlete. But this again, 13% improvement in VO2 max at age 103 to 105 is nothing to take lightly. That's gigantic. If you could get you know any athlete to improve by 13%, that would be like huge. So there is no, there is no limit on when this can happen for you. At any age. You can improve, you can become a better athlete, you can become faster, you can have better endurance. You can do almost anything you want to do if you set your mind to it and do the right things, and I'm sure we'll come back to those right things later on.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Adam Pulford

Host