Thin slicing

As many of you will know I spend my working life split between facilitating Leadership training programmes for corporate clients and coaching athletes. I find both areas really motivating as they are fundamentally about helping to develop an individual's potential. Recently I have been working on a Leadership project for a major bank and was reminded about the book "Blink", by one of the participant's performance in some of the tasks we coached them through. In the book, it's author Malcolm Gladwell describes how the human brain is able to take in, what on the surface seems, a very small amount of information and extrapolate it very quickly. A good example would be how a tennis player reacts to return a fast serve, the unconscious brain takes in lots of sensory information from the servers body position and ball toss and seemingly without a thought moves to the position where the ball can be hit and returned over the net. All this happens in fractions of seconds. Gladwell calls this ability 'thin slicing'. He puts foward the idea that the more we have practised and mastered a particular skill the better we become at thin slicing information. He asserts that because our brain, through its learned experience of these very specific experiences, can effectivly short cut through the sensory information and make super fast decisions in fractions of seconds i.e. in the blink of an eye or even faster. We all wonder why Rodger and Rafa seem to have so much time when returning a serve, now it becomes obvious, their abilty to thin slice the information and move even before the ball is hit, means that added fraction of a second seems like a lifetime.

This theory makes a lot of sense, we know as humans we all live in our own world of perception, experiencing life through our own very specific filters. We all make assumptions about the world we live in or we'd never risk never making it out of bed in the morning. Imagine waking up and trying to decide if the ground was going to be there or not! We assume it is and get up - well, at least its never failed me thus far. When we meet or work with people who have mastered this in an area of life we are interested in it can be a fascinating experience. I have been struggling with an injury for a couple of months, and this week I went to see my physiotherapist, Tim Cruise-Drew. He specialises in working with runners and triathletes, so he has the experience of seeing and treating probably a couple of thousand of athletes across his career. This helps him to thin slice the information he is seeing - its the tiny, inperceptual details that he is aware of, that other physios may not pick up or misinterpret, that make the difference to his ability to identify the source of the injury. Thanks Tim, your insights are making a difference already!

Its what I call the difference that makes a difference. How does this relate to an endurance athlete's performance? According to Gladwell, there seem to be lots of ways that thin slicing works - here are just a couple of thoughts. A few seconds can be the difference between a podium position and 20th place. Think about how much faster you have riden a bike course after you have done it a few times. Depending on the course the difference between riding it for the first time and and the second can be many minutes. The more we learn about the course the faster we are able to thin slice the information we recieve from it and the faster we can go, seems obvious... right? What about the times when you have just gone with the flow in a race and suprised yourself with your performance? Sometimes those thin slices of information provide what we might call a gut reaction. If you'd have stopped to consciously analyse what was going on you might have talked yourself out of it. I remember chatting to an athlete that ran a marathon and on his way broke his 10k, 10 mile and half marathon PB, on the way to his marathon PB. When I asked him about it after the race he told me he had forgotton his watch and just ran as fast as he felt his body would allow him. I am not suggesting we all throw our Garmin's away - just become aware of the potential of the thin slice :-)

Testing Times - 'Why cant I lose body fat?'

Its been a really busy month with athletes racing all over the country and abroad.
The Triathlon season is well underway, Summer is now threatening some good weather and the never ending football season continues with the World Cup.

The reason I mention football is that in the last few weeks I have been doing a lot more metabolic testing from outside of the world of swim, bike and run.
That includes professional footballers looking to head back into pre-season training to mum's that want to loose a few pounds and get back into shape. I have done hundreds of these type assessments and always enjoy them as it provides me with a window into what's been going on in their training and nutritional habits. Patterns start to emerge in the data, from which you can start to understand what they have been doing and why certain things are happening.
'I am training really hard and I don't seem to be able to lose any body fat.' was a comment made to me by a client this month and its something that comes up regularly at these assessments. This is a really important issue if you are an aspiring athlete or age grouper because there is a close correlation between lower levels of body fat and high levels of performance, much closer than body weight and performance.
For top level male marathon runners the average body fat is around 6%, in pro triathletes 7% and in sports like rowing and football 8/9%. Its also much better for your health to have lower levels of body fat, it cant have escaped our notice that obesity is linked to hundreds of illnesses. So why do so many of us find it so hard to lose body fat? Studies tell us there are a number of factors involved, here is what I have noticed and some of the advice that I am giving to clients that want to make changes.
The first assessment we look at is resting metabolic rates (RMR) this helps us understand how many calories a client needs to eat to maintain, gain or lose weight. So let's say my resting metabolic rate assessment suggests I need 2500 calories per day to maintain my body weight. Clearly if I exercise, burning a further 1000 calories my daily calorific requirement go up to to 3500 calories. If I eat less that 3500 calories over time I am going to start to loose weight, but this needs to be done cautiously and slowly to let your body adapt. Sometimes I have seen very low RMR calorie requirements(below 1000) and this is usually a sign that the person has gone on some type of fad diet or just is not eating enough. As counter intuitive as it seems sometimes you need to eat more to lose body fat. If we eat to little the body triggers a survival mechanism and starts to store fat, our bodies need a certain amount of ready carbohydrate to burn fat. This will also have a very negative effect on our ability to recover from workouts, we will be carrying fatigue over from sessiont to session and this can eventually end in illness or injury.

The assessment also tells us how efficient in percentage terms the body is at burning fat and carbohydrate (glycogen). Its no suprise that clients that find it harder to lose body fat tend to have a lower fat burning percentage and this means thier body is used to burning higher levels of carbohydrates, so fat stores are not being utilised, this even happens with endurance athletes. Carbohydrate is a faster fuel source for the body than fat, the more intensely we work the more the body turns to carbohydrate for its fuel. I have also noticed anecdotally that the less efficient carbohydrate burners report more hunger pangs, sweet cravings, swings in mood and reduced concentration. Not too suprising as burning high levels of carbohydrate is going to effect the blood sugar balance to a far greater extent.

As far as training is concerned if I see a low percentage of fat utilisation I usually find that translates to an under developed base level of fitness. For whatever reasons they have missed or skipped the base building fitness phase and are used to working at quite high intensities. This does not means to say they are unfit but they are limiting the level of absolute fitness and performance they can achieve without the level of efficiency a solid base can bring. This is normally confirmed when we do the second exercise based Vo2 assessment and we can see a big gap between the predominent fat burning heart rate zones and the clients higher carbohydrate burning anaerobic threshold.
Where I see this pattern emerge the usual advice I give to clients is simple, include back in the training programme longer lower level heart rate work outs and include some strength training to maintain muscle mass and encourage fat metabolism. Seems like a simple answer but the question I posed earlier is why do so many of us find it so hard to lose body fat? Apart from any nutritional issues (that I will come back to in the next post) The feedback I get back most regulaly from clients is 'I find it really hard to run or bike that slowly to keep my heart rate down' This is less likely to be a phyiological issue, this is more often than not a pattern of behaviour that has been developed through training with friends that get too competitive or just a preference to train at a level where 'If I dont train hard I don't feel as if I have done a workout'. Maybe this is where we need to place our focus if we are going to start to see some different results!

GO Will GO! IM Austria awaits..

On Sunday Morning TrainingBible Athlete Will Newbery will be racing his first IM in Austria, Will is a talented age grouper based in the Bournemouth area who has been coached by Mark Tickner. Will is puting himself through the ringer for a great cause the Help the Heroes charity.
www.justgiving.com/willnewbery we will be tracking his progress on IM Live. Have a great race Will!

Factors effecting Triathlon running

TrainingBible Coach Scott Murray has recently undertaken a review or recent scientific literature on the factors effecting Triathlon running of which there are many. For me the wide ranging conclusions reiterates the importance of individual athlete programming and the constant fine tuning of each element.

Some athletes will run better off the bike after holding a constant cadence of 85rpm and at 80% of Vo2 max whilst another might run more optimally after a bike leg with and average cadence of 95 and holding 90% of Vo2 max. How do we find this out? We plan, practice, record and analyse and refine for the next race. Check it out for yourself.

http://www.trainingbible.co.uk/resources/

Great Results from IM France.. what a busy weekend!

Well what a busy weekend, Nick de Meyer and I were presenting a seminar and sitting on a Q&A panel at Physio4life all day yesterday, it was great to hook up with Simon Ward and Pat Leahy. Thanks to Mark and the all the team in Putney that put on a very educational day.

In between sessions Nick and I were checking the resultscoming out of IM France on IM Tracker. TrainingBible had 5 athletes racing and producing excellent results.

Many congratulations to all the athletes that put in terrific performances on a very hot day!

Hugo Galote 10:00:15, Cory Cook 13:54:23, Christain Boye-Moller 11:20:14 (well done with limited running Christain), Simon Liversidge 12:14:59, Andy Eaglestone 12:13:57.
Well done to their coach Mark Tickner who has done a great job of guiding them through their training over the last few months..way to go Mark!