TriDot Podcast .139

Revisiting Behind the Scenes:Optimizing Your Training Schedule

Intro: This is the TriDot podcast. TriDotuses your training data and genetic profile, combined with predictive analyticsand artificial intelligence to optimize your training, giving you betterresults in less time with fewer injuries. Our podcast is here to educate,inspire, and entertain. We’ll talk all things triathlon with expert coaches andspecial guests. Join the conversation and let’s improve together.

Andrew Harley: Hey everyone! Great showtoday as we revisit episode five of the TriDot podcast which originallypublished on December 2, 2019 and was called “Behind the Scenes: OptimizingYour Training Schedule.” Listen, we’ve got well over 100 episodes of the TriDotpodcast now which is awesome, but as the list of episodes grows we want to makesure that our core episodes don’t get lost in the shuffle. If you scan our listof episodes and see the word “revisiting” in the episode name, let that standas a beacon calling you to listen as all of our revisiting episodes arehandpicked by our staff for their importance. As for episode five, maybe youheard this back on December 2nd and haven’t thought about it since, or maybeyou never went back and listened to this episode at all from 2019. Either way,we’re going to revisit the clutch information from this episode. Joining me forthis revisiting is Dr. B.J. Leeper. B.J. serves as the product owner ofPredictive Fitness. He graduated from The University of Iowa Carver College ofMedicine with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science. He isa Board Certified Orthopaedic Specialist, a Certified Strength and ConditioningSpecialist, and a USA Triathlon level 1 Coach. He specializes in comprehensivemovement testing and is an avid triathlete himself with over 50 tris under hisbelt. B.J., welcome to this revisiting of episode five of the podcast.

B.J. Leeper: Yeah, thanks Andrew. It’s good to beon and excited to talk about this stuff.

Andrew: So here’s how this will go. We’ll doa fresh warmup with my guest, B.J. Leeper today. Then we’ll listen to theoriginal main set from episode five where I interviewed Jeff Booher and JohnMayfield about our training schedule. Then B.J. And I will spend just a coupleof minutes reflecting on what we just heard and B.J. I think at the end of theepisode you have some new information today for us. Is that correct? You’ll beteasing some new TriDot app functionality today. Am I right?

B.J.: Yeah, I’ve had the privilege over thelast several months of being under the hood so to speak with TriDot and oursoftware development team and they just do a phenomenal job and there’s justcool things they’ve been working on to make utilization of TriDot for yourtraining even easier.

Andrew: Super, super dope. Well, I’m Andrewthe Average Triathlete. I’m pumped to listen to myself talk for the next 45minutes with Jeff and John and then even more pumped to talk with B.J.afterwards.

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Warm up theme: Time to warm up! Let’s getmoving.

Andrew: When we revisit a podcast episode,we also like to revisit it’s warmup question. We’ll get to hear Dr. B.J. Leeperanswer the question, plus we’ll get to hear what our audience has to say onFacebook. When we first started the show we were not throwing these warmupquestions out on social media like we do now. So I’m eager to hear what y’allthink of this one. Now this warmup question was inspired by a Facebook post byTriDot athlete, Ron Raymos where he compared the nuanced wine palate of asommelier to a nuanced aches and pains palate of triathletes pointing out thatwe all know the difference of the pain induced by a long stamina workout and ashorter, but harder interval workout. The pain is different based on what youjust finished. So it led to the question, what is something that you havecompared triathlon to because Ron was comparing the aches and pains of tritraining to the sophisticated palate of a sommelier. Now back on episode five,Jeff Booher compared the dedication to your craft that triathletes have to thesame dedication within MMA fighters. John Mayfield referenced a Mark Twainquote while comparing triathlon to a round of golf arguing that both are just areally good walk gone bad. And I compared pacing myself at social events as anintrovert to pacing yourself in different types of workouts. So all of thatbackground B.J. Setting you up here, what is something that you have comparedtriathlon to?

B.J: Well, this is kind of a funny story.It’s not my best moment in life.

Andrew: Okay. This ought to be good.

B.J.: But this question reminded me of mywife and I, my wife mostly, going through labor and delivery of our thirdchild. We have four children.

Andrew: That was mostly her. Correct.

B.J.: It was all her. It’s funny because Iwas thinking about this question you posed and we had this game plan going intoour third. Where my wife is a big runner, and I guess this isn’t applicable tothe entire triathlon, but the run portion it definitely relates.

Andrew: Sure.

B.J.: But my wife is an avid runner andmarathoner, Boston qualifier. So she had this idea—and it was her idea—of goinginto our third labor and delivery for our third child, she wanted to go naturalchildbirth and she was able to do that with our second and she had this gameplan with our third she wanted it to go a little easier so in her mind shewanted to envision her labor like a marathon. And be thinking of “okay, I’m atthis stage of the marathon and I’m pacing myself and I just have this much moreto go” and in her mind it was going to kind of work for her to kind of mentallywrap her mind around labor and delivery like she would her marathon. So beingthe good husband, you know, I’m trying to be her coach for her and I’m thinkingwe had this game plan that at the halfway mark you know we’re going to betalking about this. So fast forward to the actual labor and delivery and we getto the portion of things getting pretty intense and heating up pretty quick andI’m thinking in my mind, she’s at the proverbial mile 20 mark and about readyto hit the wall, we’ve got just a little bit more to go, thinking of it thatway. So I made the mistake of going ahead and saying it like that because Ithought this was our plan the whole time. I’m saying mile 20 and in her mindshe’s thinking she has like 400 meters left to go. So I start saying, “heyhoney, it’s okay. You’re at mile 20. You’re doing great.” And she just looks atme and she was just like, “Just shut up.” You know, just don’t even— stoptalking about this marathon analogy. So right then and there it was like therunning analogy went out the window.

Andrew: It was done. It was over.

B.J.: It was just hanging on. So that wasmy story of kind of comparing an actual running event or triathlon event tosomething in the real world. It didn’t go so well, but that’s what thatreminded me of.

Andrew: And we obviously, B.J., don’t havefirsthand experience there, but on the surface it seems like it could be a goodcomparison. But in a marathon you know that finish line is at 26.2 mileswhereas in labor and delivery that can be done in an hour or that can be donein 24 hours and you don’t necessarily know where that finish line is.

B.J.: Right, right.

Andrew: So to your credit, it just kind ofseems like you both had a different notion of where in the race you were.

B.J.: Which is very much like thetriathlon. Sometimes things don’t go as expected.

Andrew: Sure.

B.J.: Sometimes you’ve just got to go withthe flow and sometimes you’ve got to scrap your plan.

Andrew: Yep.

B.J.: And that’s exactly what happened.

Andrew: Absolutely. Absolutely, right. Wellwe’re going to throw this question out to you. It was originally on episodefive of the TriDot podcast and we brought it back today for this revisiting. Sogo to the Facebook page. Make sure you are a part of the I AM TriDot Facebookgroup. We have thousands of athletes just talking swim, bike, and run everysingle day and this question will be thrown out to you. What is something inyour life you have compared triathlon to? Can’t wait to hear what you have tosay.

Main set theme: On to the main set. Going in3…2…1…

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Andrew: So, today Jeffand John will explain everything about TriDot’s Training Calendar. Now when Ifirst started using TriDot, I honestly thought I would feel confined to theprogram. But I immediately found trusting the process to be liberating. Itfreed me from the confines of the few workouts I knew how to do. Jeff, thereare a ton of factors that generate what workout TriDot athletes do on any givenday. Walk me through some of the main variables that generate the trainingschedule.

Jeff: Absolutely. There's alot of built-in flexibility, of course, of moving your stuff around so thatconfinement’s not there. But I'll share, you mentioned the Training Calendarand that's what a lot of our athletes, our users say they see as the name of thescreen that they're on, you know, daily training or the calendar that shows theweek. But there's a whole lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. And before I dig intothat and kind of lift the hood, and show what's going on there and describe it,I just really want to stress that there's a lot going on there and don't gethung up on all of that.

Andrew: Which is why wesay, trust the process.

Jeff: Right, trust theprocess. So, it's not a need to understand all of that to be able to execute.The back end is sophisticated, the front end is simple. Just do the workouts,and you're going to get the result same as using a smartphone to travelsomewhere you've never been. You don't have to understand GPS and satellitetechnology just to plug it in, here's where I want to go and follow thedirections. So, there's a lot of technical stuff going in, but I know there's alot of data geeks and nerds and people love, you know, to know and some peopleare just curious so they definitely want to know what’s going on.

Andrew: Absolutely.Especially triathletes.

Jeff: Yeah. So, I love it. Icould do this all day. I promise we won't, but I'll try to keep it sustained,but share some of that. So, on the back end, you drop in a race, all of thedata that an athlete enters goes in starting with the Season Planner, actuallywhen you drop in a race, change race A, race B, whatever that is. There's awhole process of calculations to go, how much time is there between now andthen, and how should the phases be broken up from phases to mesocycles,microcycles, and drills down. When it goes through that process, it takes anathlete, profile information, your age, your training age, your gender, yourbody composition, your TriDot Scores, your values, those are normalized on ascale of one to 100, your Swim Dot, Bike Dot, Run Dot of your functionalthreshold in each of those. So, we get an absolute value, and then a relativevalue, so we not only know that your bike is faster than your run, but by howmuch? And then we can look at your physiology and say, well should you be fasteron the bike than run, you’re a big person, you have to carry your weight on thebike, but you use a mechanical wheel on the, you know, carry your weight on therun using a bike wheel and so there should be some differential there. So, wecan actually look at what are the physiological improvement opportunities foreach of those as we optimize. Then we have a training stress profile, which isan athlete’s ability to absorb stress over a certain period. So, whether it'sneural stress, muscular stress, or aerobic stress, threshold stress …

Andrew: Because that’svery different for everybody.

Jeff: Absolutely. It isdifferent per discipline, so you're able to do those differently because you'vebeen doing the different disciplines longer, your body composition isdifferent, your age. All of those things are different for each person, bydiscipline, by energy system you use, and then they're different by timeperiod. So, each of those metrics, different disciplines, different energysystems, and then different time periods. How much stress can you take in, in aday in a microcycle, a week, a month, mesocycle? So, all of those are factoredin. A bike-to-run factor is another thing when we compare your bike in your runin those, there's a lot of overlap there. So, if you stress one over the other,there's a cost. And so we look at that opportunity costs.

Andrew: Because we havethree sports to train for and not just one.

Jeff: Exactly, right. Yeah.And this one doesn't overlap as much, some, but the bike and run sure do. So,if you're going to emphasize one, you need to look at why, what doesemphasizing it mean? Does it mean more intensity, more time, more frequency,more overall volume or all three?

Andrew: What does thatdo to the other sport.

Jeff: Correct. What do all ofthose things do? So, what levers are you pulling? It's easy to say bike-focusedor run-focused. So, that goes into your optimization, your weekly volumes, andcurrently what you're doing by each discipline, your current long sessions, howfar you go, not just that particular week, but there's an algorithm that looksover the past several weeks, four to six weeks to see what kind of a longsession are you capable of doing, while keeping your injury risks and check.Then there's your actual projected race splits. So, we look how long is itgonna take you to finish these races, what does your long session, yourterminal long session need to be? So, when we're three weeks, four weeks outfrom a race, what does that long session need to be? What is your incrementableduration from week to week we can get to, how much time do we have between thetwo now and then? What B races are in there, even the race beyond the currentphase, does that race have a higher demand than the current? So, if you'retraining for an Olympic in seven weeks, but 10 weeks after that you have anIronman, well this phase needs to have a higher long-run, long-bikeanticipating the phase that follows. So, there's all of those kind of thingsgoing on to that.

Andrew: Yes. So, a fewfactors.

Jeff: A few. And then andyou're looking at taper recovery requirements, we pull in, we're synced in withStrava, and Garmin and Polar, and we're pulling your health data, stress data,resting heart rate, all of that kind of stuff, even your genetics. So, we'repulling in your genome file, we track about 20, a little more than 20 snips.Those are single nucleotide polymorphisms. Big word there. So, that's like–  

Andrew: What a word todrop on the podcast. John, can you say that word?

John: Nope.

Jeff: So, those are markerson your genes and helps us determine from a genetic standpoint, what's yourtraining response is going to be, your aerobic potential, your recovery rate,your injury predisposition. And then we can plan accordingly when we look at thosevolume changes, increases, how much intensity can you take and kind of what'soptimal. And then drilling even further down to the day, the week, and the timeof day, even. So, we're looking at elevation, temperature, humidity, whatshould your training intensities be if you're doing a workout in the morning,afternoon, inside, outside, and calibrating everything. So, there's a lot, youmentioned that's a lot of data, yes. It's something that has been incrementedover 15 years. We continue to get more and more and more granular, as we learnmore and more about how the human body responds to training. And so with tensof thousands of athletes and tens of millions of training files have beenprescribed and doing it in a methodical, normalized, standardized way, we cantrack measure and improve. Unless you're tracking to this degree, you can'tmeasure it to this degree, and if you're not measuring, you can't improve it.It's not improvable if it's not measurable, objectively standardized.

Andrew: Yeah, and that'sone of the crazy things about TriDot over, just you know, if people have like acookie cutter triathlon training program, is that TriDot is always evolving.It's always learning. Right? So, it's like you said over the course of all thoseyears, I mean, 11,000 calculations happening over millions of data files thatathletes have uploaded over the years. I mean, it's just constantly improvinghow you need to train.

Jeff: Exactly, right. Yeah.We had about three, I guess there’s more, four-five years ago now, 2015, wewere upgrading our optimization engine and the engineers that were working onit, he was just fascinated with it and all. He just came from a mechanical engineeringbackground. I've been doing this for 20 years, but it was just kind offascinated, like wow, triathletes, this is pretty cool. And so he said, he rana test, he wanted to see when optimization occurred for a training phase, howmany calculations were happening and it's a functional training, a functionallanguage, Erlang, anyway, that’s the technical side of it. But he said hetracked how many simultaneous calculations were occurring. And he said, when hechecked, there's more than 11,000 individual calculations happening at the sametime. So, there's more than that, they were stopping and starting –

Andrew: And that’s forone athlete for one phase?

Jeff: One athlete, one phase,yeah.

Andrew: And so that'show many calculations are choosing what workout is on your training plan forthat particular day.

Jeff: Yeah, that's all of theworkouts on all the days because they're all in context. There's nothing donein isolation. Everything relates to and impacts everything else around it.

Andrew: So, there are somany individual swim, bike, and run workouts that appear on an athlete'sschedule. Jeff, how does TriDot choose which workout to prescribe on each day?

Jeff: So, there are optimalways of setting things up. We build again, like I mentioned, from the season tothe phase to the mesocycle, microcycle, down to daily sessions. So, there's alot of options. There's weekly patterns that we use where the user can entertheir preferences. One of the things that you look at when you see a dailysession, I guess, at a more granular level, a lot of times you'll hear athletestalk about distance-based workouts. Like I'm doing one-mile repeats today oryou've heard of that and so you go out and do those. And anytime there'sdistance based sessions, they always need to be derived from the duration. Iknow there's a lot of Ds there. But your body doesn't know how much ground youcover when you're working out. All it knows is here's how hard I'm working, andhere's how long I need to hold that. And so we come at it from that standpoint,what is the optimal time period for the particular effort level for thatparticular individual on that day, that set, that repeat, whatever it is, andthen we back into the distance they need to cover. And so sometimes you mighthave athletes, like distance-based-run, they might be doing 1200 repeats or1400 repeats, or 1600, 1800 whatever to be in that sweet spot of here's howlong you need to hold that intensity for the optimal effect.

Andrew: And that's aneven change, like I think of like the swim workouts that appear on my trainingprogram. They'll have certain names, and so there's one that's threshold 300s.And every time a threshold 300 workout is prescribed to me, that workout mightbe a little bit different each time it's prescribed because it's notnecessarily about –

Jeff: Exactly, right. It'snot about that particular set, I guess, being done a certain specific way. Forexample, it could be that broken 150s or threshold 300, or whatever that is. Aparticular person that needs that workout, the structure of that workout andthe components, they may not cover a 300 in the same amount of time that youcover a 300. So, someone else can have threshold 150s, threshold 250s, 400.

Andrew: And it servesthe same purpose as my 300s?

Jeff: Well, it's the same, ifyou took out the distance covered, it would be a certain number of repeats fora certain amount of time, with a certain amount of rest. You're covering 300,someone else is covering 200, someone else is covering 400, and so it's donethat way. So, for a particular swim set, there's 280 variations for everysingle swim. So, it's based on intensity level, how fast you're going, how faryou're covering those different distances, breaking it up by 50s and thendifferent times, is that whole workout, squeezing into 40 minutes, an hour and10, an hour 20. And so there's a different amount of rest in between sets orround of efforts. So, one set has many, many different versions orcombinations.

Andrew: I know I'm gladthat there is somebody else doing all that work for me and I just have to getmy workout and go to the pool and get it done and I reap the benefits from it.So, when we complete a workout, TriDot gives us a TrainX Score, based on howclosely we completed the workout as prescribed. Now, we'll talk in depth aboutTrainX another day, but for now, do these scores affect our upcoming training?

John: No, not directly. So,the data that is used to populate the TrainX Score is the same data that isused to influence future training, but the score itself does not have an impacton future training. So, really, the intent of TrainX is to provide objectivefeedback back to the athlete as to how well they achieved the purpose of thatsession. So, what kind of session it is, is going to determine how it's scored,how it's created, based on that incoming data. So, whether a session is athreshold set, whether it's a stamina set, whether it's active recovery, theintent of the session is really going to determine how and even what metricsare used to score it. So, for example, we primarily use pace and power to scorethe threshold sets, the stamina sets, because those are more objective metricsto use. However, on things like active recovery, and the easy runs at zone two,where you utilize heart rate for that, because that's the intent of thosesessions is to provide for that easy set, either to develop that aerobicefficiency or to provide for that active recovery. So, really, it's amotivation tool. So, it's that immediate gratification when you nail a set, andyou come back and you see that score and you get that little bit of a reward,little bit of applause, even if it's just you and –

Andrew: I believe theyTriDot athletes out there call it the unicorn when they get 100 on a workoutthey weren’t expecting to get 100.

John: And so it's motivation.So, I know for me, I go out with every set with the intent of trying tomaximize my TrainX Score, and I'm always real quick coming back to sync mydata, so I can see exactly what my score was. And that's really what it is.It's a gain. It's something that's fun. It does not influence future training,but it's just really something for the athlete, to use as motivation andaccountability.

Andrew: So, whether Iscored an 86, or whether I scored a 93, that's not necessarily affecting whatmy training is going to be moving forward?

Jeff: That's correct. Thatdoesn't directly affect the same data that affects that score affects yourfuture training, but that score itself doesn't. So, there's an indirectrelationship, but I think the most powerful thing is that affects people'sdesire to do the training as prescribed. And there's no perfect session, youcan't control all the variables around you, all kinds of stuff can happen, yourwatch can, whatever, stuff happens. But when people have that focus, thatmetric, and they say they just want to get a good respectable score, notperfection, but you know, 70, 80, 90, somewhere in there, if they keep tryingto do it, they're going to be very , lot better at performing, in the long run,their sessions, and they're gonna start learning how to do all of the sessionsbetter. And if you get in there, not looking for perfection, but looking to dothe best you can on that day, you're going to get so much more out of thetraining. So, in that regard, it directly affects your training.

Andrew: Got it. So,assessment weeks are a monthly staple on the Training Calendar. Many TriDotusers express a love-hate relationship with the assessments. Why does TriDotschedule these once a month?

John: So, these areincredibly important sessions. If we had to identify what was the mostimportant session that's in an athlete's training plan each month, it wouldprobably be these assessments because they serve so many functions and they'rerepeated on a regular basis for several reasons. First, it establishes theirfunctional thresholds in the swim, bike, and run. And this provides us withseveral pieces of information. It's used for benchmarking their progress. So,we want to see these assessments improve month a month, that gives us thatobjective measurements of how an athlete is progressing and how they'reimproving. Their intensities are based on these assessment results. So, theirpaces on the swim, their power, and heart rate zones on their bike, the heartrate zones and paces on the run are all based on results of these assessments.So, we want to make sure that those are current. If the athlete goes 2, 3, 4months without updating their assessments, they're now using stale data fortheir training intensity. So, we want to make sure that the athletes aretraining at the proper intensity for their current fitness level, not wherethey were three or four months ago, for better for worse. So, sometimesathletes take time off. They shouldn't be running the same pace that wererunning three, four months ago. Or maybe they should be running faster thanthey were three, four months ago, but we don't know that. We don't know exactlywhat that pace should be without testing to determine these functional thresholds,which in turn, determine their assessments. They're hard sessions, they're allout, best effort, which is probably why a lot of the athletes don't like thembecause it's the polar opposite of a nice, easy session that, you know, astroll through the park. These are hard but that's part of racing. It's a raceskill that has to be developed, so it's very much a race-day skill being dialedin. So, if the only time –

Andrew: It’s a littlebit of learning how to push yourself, it's learning how to hurt.

John: It’s learning how torace. If you show up to a race and you haven't really pushed yourself or gottenuncomfortable, gone to that place that we refer to as pain since your lastrace, the guy who's been practicing every month is probably going to beat you.Because he has that skill, he has that ability level, and it's really somethingthat does have to be dialed in and refined. So, it's learning what it feelslike to push your body, it's being okay with that uncomfortable feeling ofpushing the body. And so there are several other things that it achieves, butthey are very important. They update the training, they update the intensities,they benchmark progress, and they really teach the athlete how to race.

Andrew: I know someathletes and myself when I first came on, sometimes you'd be tempted to skipthe assessment for a month. And you think to yourself, like oh, like this weekisn't ideal for me. I know, I'm not gonna perform my best this week, there's noway I can hit the paces that I think I can hit. And so they kind of put it off.But I heard a coach tell me one time, like, hey, the assessment, it's for thebenchmarking that you just talked about, but there's also the purpose of itskind of a recovery week. Can you talk about that just a little bit?

Jeff: It is. The overallvolume in those weeks goes down, intensity on other days goes down. So, thereis a dependence on this one to be your training value. If you think about goinginto that training week and if you skip that workout, you say, “Oh my benchmark,I'm not ready for it, I don't think it's going to improve, I already know whatmy 5K is.” You're going to go very long, you can go up to 10 days without anysignificant quality, which you're gonna have a detraining during that time. Andso we're counting on this not just for the benchmarking, the mental toughness,the skills, the stress the grit factor, but to also have that training value.And so you're going to push to that level. It’s not an interval, it’s aconstant effort, so you're going to give that effort there so that it has avery significant training value. It’s generally right in the middle of theweek. It depends on how you structure your weekly pattern based on yourpreferences, but it's generally going to be in the middle of the week when youdo that.

Andrew: Now a typicalweek for me is a swim on Monday and Friday, cycling on Tuesday and Thursday, arun on Wednesday and Sunday, and a longer brick workout on Saturday. Now, thisobviously, will vary a little for everyone. But what is the reason for aconsistent pattern?

Jeff: There's a lot ofreasons for that, what you just described is kind of the base, the default,that's the optimal week and there's a reason that's the optimal –

Andrew: I'm glad I’mdoing the optimal week, good to know.

Jeff: So, if you log in,onboard to TriDot, that's the weekly pattern that's going to be there. You cancome in and change that, you can add off-days and change your long run, yourlong bike around. But that's the best, so we call that a weekly pattern. The goodthing for the consistency is because you get into a routine, your body getsinto routine, you make sure that there's adequate rest in between the differentquality workouts, that they're spaced out, that your bikes and your runs arespaced out, the quality, and that you're getting this intermittent stimulus tothe different energy systems. And so there's some things that are working, youraerobic fitness in different areas and you want to optimize that training. So,making sure that they're all spaced out is great. I think linearly when I'mthinking through the pattern, usually, the pattern is driven by when it startswith when your long bike has to be. You know, certain people, I can only do thelong bike, you know, I can’t do that in the middle of the week. So, there's oneday that has to be, maybe two, Saturday-Sunday. Then next is your long run,when does that need to be? And the best day to do it is Wednesday. If you'redoing on a Friday or Saturday long bike. So, it’s spreading those out, so you’rehaving that long, sustained effort, you take a little bit longer to recoverfrom them, and they're spread out. So, each one is better quality. And then thetraining around each one is also better because you're recovering more fully inbetween them.

Another big thingthat people don't realize for having that Wednesday, get up early, just do thatlong run, get it done. The benefit of having that on a Wednesday is when youwork in other A races or B races and you start to taper, if that's a weekend run,say it's a long run on Saturday, and a long bike on Saturday, long run onSunday. If you're going into a race the following weekend, you're probablygoing to taper that long Sunday run that’s only seven days out. And then you'regoing to go do a race, and then you're probably gonna have recovery thefollowing week, you're not going to be up for another long run. And so it mightbe two, two and a half weeks between long run to long run. So, if you have a Brace training for an Ironman, that's three increasable weeks. But if you movethat back to a Wednesday, you can do a long run on a Wednesday, race, not thenext weekend, but the next weekend, that's only 10 days away, and then thefollowing week, and then another few days. So, you have a Wednesday long run,probably a long run on that race. And so you're not going any more than a weekand a half without that long run and so you're not losing that fitness. And soin the accumulation over a long period of time, you're having more sustainableconsistent weeks with your long runs and your long bikes intact, and so there'sa benefit there.

One of the worstscenarios when you drop in these off days and can you imagine doing your longbike on a Sunday, all right, and then your long run on a Wednesday andselecting Tuesday off. So, when you're doing that you have, your long bike ison a Sunday. So, you're not going to do another quality bike session on Monday,you're off on Tuesday, you're not running the same on Wednesday, so that leavesThursday. So, you've had four days, the fifth day you're going to do anotherbike and then you can't do another one because two days later you're doinganother long bike. So, there's implications and this cascading effect like aripple effect of when days have to be. So, with having your long biketraditionally on a Saturday or Sunday, your long bike is going to be on theother weekend day or a Wednesday.

Andrew: Run in themiddle of the week.

Jeff: Run in the middle ofthe week or even if it's not, you choose one of those three days typically,it's the middle of the week. And then you're gonna have an off-day or not, it’sbetter to not. Most people have an off-day because they overtrained on all theother days. If you have a sustainable weekly pattern that’s a good routine,then you break it down and every day is easier to absorb, and your body is usedto that. You don't have an off-day of walking, you do everything else in lifeconsistently every day.

Andrew: That’s verytrue.

Jeff: And that's just part ofwhat you do. So, in all of those combinations, there's 28 possible combinationsof weekly patterns, where you have to optimize where you drop those days. So,it's based on either default, or the user's preference. User says I want thisday off, this long run, this long bike, and then there's a systematic rippleeffect of how you in an optimized way put all of those other quality sessionsand recovery sessions.

John: So, this is something Isee self-coached athletes struggle with a lot, athletes that are new, that'sit's a concept that's not always immediately grasped. But the frequency ofworkouts and the sequence of workouts are two very important training variables.I see a lot of coaches even neglect this when they're writing training plans.The way the sessions are planned out and how these sessions influence oneanother is an incredibly important variable. So, all of that is taken care ofby these features that Jeff has been describing. So, it's just anotheradvantage of utilizing optimized training so that you know that each one ofthese sessions is going to complement the next, and you're going to haveadequate recovery one session to the next. That’s another thing we see that's apretty common question among athletes coming to TriDot is why is there not adefault day off? And the fact of the matter is, you only need a day off whenyour other days have not been structured properly. It is completely feasible totrain seven days a week for months and years on end.

We've hadhundreds of users that have been training seven days a week for years. And it'sbecause what goes into those seven days is prescribed specifically for them.We're not having to rely on guesswork or assumptions to say, is this enough? Isthis too much. You only need a day off when you've done too much. When you'vedone the proper amount of stress and you've done the proper amount of recovery,you can train perpetually seven days a week. And in doing so, you're able toachieve more in those seven days. So, there are instances where you need a dayoff, there are those where you have to take a day off. Sometimes folks justdon't have a day available for training. So, that option is available, but Iwould say only use it in that case, when there's just a hard and fast rule thatyou cannot train on a given day. Otherwise, take the day off here or there whenyou need to, whether scheduled or body fatigue just says hey, I need a day off.That's absolutely fine. But there's no reason to schedule a day off every week.All you're really doing is reducing the amount of time to achieve the sameamount of work. So, even scheduling a day off doesn't necessarily reduce theamount of training you have to do in a week. It just reduces the amount of timeto achieve it.

Andrew: So, in a lot ofways when an athlete sees what workout is on their calendar for that day, it'sabout hey, this is the best workout for you based on all the factors we talkedabout earlier, but it's also, this is the best day for you to do this workout inrelation of recovering for your other work.

John: Exactly. Yeah.

Andrew: So, anotherfeature TriDot users enjoy is the fact that you can move workouts, right? Imean, you're not trapped. If it's swim day and you missed your swim, but youhave the chance to go run later that night, you can move those workouts around.But based on what you're talking about, that doesn't sound like, it'sallowable, but it's not, maybe the best thing to do, is that a good way to sayit?

Jeff: It’s optimized. So,your training is optimized, but it's not about one workout. It’s the cumulativeeffect of all of these little optimizations over a long period of time. So,it's just more and more powerful. When you consistently do all these things thetraining is so much more effective. So, if you move one workout, skip oneworkout, anything, one workout is going to have a very minimal marginal effecton your overall fitness. And so just don't stress about that, that's anotherthing that I kind of mentioned in the very first start. You mentioned all thesethings that are happening in the back, all this optimization that’s happening,you're not going to jack it up, just do your best, do your best with the TrainXScore, every session do the best you can, try to get in all your sessions, ifyou can't, no big deal, move on. Whatever you do is going to be better and it'sgoing to produce more results more effectively because of the optimization. So,life just happens. Don't stress about that.

John: And I would say whenmoving these sessions around, take these things we mentioned intoconsideration. What kind of session is being moved? Is it a long session? Is ita recovery session? Think about what are the implications of doing sessionsback to back or three sessions in a row, and make sure that we're maintaining afrequency of workouts, a sequence of workouts that is going to be advantageous.We don't want to do four days in a row of hard runs. Or we don't want to havethree days of easy recovery sessions in a row. So, those are the kinds ofthings that we want to consider and take into consideration when moving thesesessions. It's a great conversation to have for those that work with a TriDotcoach. They're experts at doing this and they can help with that. But theself-coached athletes can absolutely do this on their own as well. Just look atit, identify what the session is and when and where does it make sense to movethat session?

Andrew: Both you guyshave touched so well on already on what happens when life kind of gets in theway, you can skip a session, no big deal just so long as that consistency intraining is there. So, let's say on a busy week if you can tell you're notgoing to get all of your scheduled sessions in, are there certain sessions youwould recommend skipping over others?

Jeff: Absolutely. If you knowahead of time. First of all, if it just happens and you're not expecting it,just skip the session and move on. If you're looking ahead and there's two orthree days and you have you know multiple workouts, you know, I can't get allthese run workouts in or all of these bike work workouts in, get the qualitysession, the one with the most intensity in it, get that session. But if it's alonger period of time or you're looking just to prioritize, I would go ifyou're in a race prep phase, you're building up, you know your long sessionsare increasing, make sure you get your long sessions in. That may mean ifyou're traveling for a week and you don't have access to a bike or you can'trun or something like that, it may mean moving, you know, if you're leaving ona Wednesday and come back on a Tuesday or something like that, you might moveyour long session closer to right before you leave. And then as soon as you getback and do another one, so it decreases the amount of time in between longsessions. So, that's one strategy you can use. If you're not, always like Imentioned before, always use the quality session. Whatever has the mostintensity in it, if you can only get in a few, do that. Try to get at least onesession of each discipline in. And then after that, if you're going toprioritize, do the run, then the swim and then the bike. Consistency, yourlower limb, durability, all that thing is so important on the run unlike theswim and the bike as much. And so that's much more important entry ofprevention is injury is going to happen a lot more on the run. So, keeping thatconsistently consistent, and not stopping and starting is very important on therun. So, those are the things that I do. When I look at it, obviously, thoseare kind of done ad hoc, so that's not built in the optimization. So, you kindof have to adjust those, you can use your coach to help advise you on those.

Andrew: And that's whyit is a great idea to invest in a coach at that point is when you know thatthere's a lot of life that gets in the way because they can advise you on thosethings. I know that, so I have a TriDot coach, Ryan Tibble, out there. He'sawesome and has given me some great advice. And I did, John said it like fiveminutes earlier and I was laughing to myself, like, I went on a beach trip withmy family over the summer, and I didn't take anything to swim, I didn't takeanything to bike, and I was like oh, while I'm there, I'll just do all myrunning sessions. And so in three days back to back to back one of those waszone two run, but two of those were longer duration, with high intensitysprinkled in kind of runs. And I left that beach trip, my knee was kind of hurtand I had kind of a funky thing in my hip and I had to back off of running for2, 3, 4 weeks because of just the minor tweaks I picked up by stacking all thatrunning back to back to back. Is that kind of a common thing you hear fromathletes?

John: Absolutely. And this issomething that's very common that the coaches work with our athletes. So manyof the athletes are busy professionals, they travel, they have families thatare-- have things going on. So, rearranging the schedule is just a fact oflife. Triathlon, for a vast majority of us, is a hobby and something that issecondary or even tertiary to work and family and all those kinds of things.So, we need to be flexible, and there's nothing wrong as we've mentioned withthat. But doing it right is important and our TriDot coaches are a fantasticresource in understanding and knowing and making those recommendations of howto rearrange the schedule, which sessions to drop, which ones to prioritize tomaximize your overall results on race day.

Andrew: I think we allhave days where we're invited to join a club ride or a group run or somethingthat kind of takes us out of our normal training routine for that day. Butwe're still logging some form of exercise. Does that abnormal exercise sessionimpact the Training Calendar at all?

Jeff: Yeah, it definitelydoes. And again, it's not just one session. So, we're looking at the wholetotality of the workout, not just even that session that week, but over thepast four to six weeks, and what we can do. So, the more consistently you’retraining, the better. There's a lot of ways that you can do that if you'reriding with a group, right? I mean, people need their social fix. They want toget out there and that's important. That's just as important aspect of training–

Andrew: Yeah, I want tobe part of my club, I want to train with TriDot.

Jeff: Right. And so there'sjust a lot of ways, choose to if they're going harder group, don't pull, stayin the back if you're on a bike if you need to ease off. Opposite, if you'restronger in the group, get out ahead. I know, when I was training for a whilewith a group that was kind of bringing on a lot of newer athletes. And we'dmeet at a coffee shop seven o'clock and rolling out, I’d come at 6:20 and setup my trainer and get some threshold work in and then take it off the trainer.They get there and we go ride, but I get that and I get a few pulls that werepretty hard, go out front, circle around. And so you can work that stuff in ifyou need to. But any one session is not going to make or break your training.

Andrew: Now it goeswithout saying that the closer an athlete follows the program, the better theresults. So, John, what advice do you have for our athletes on ways to followthe program?

John: Probably the mostcommon tip I give is, “Consistency is your best friend.” Perfection is notrequired. Oftentimes, perfection can be counterproductive. Oftentimes, if youhit every single session prescribed in a month, there are probably sessions inthere you shouldn't have done. Either you may not have been ready for thesession, you may have made a sacrifice of something that wasn't necessarilynecessary. So, I would say a well-balanced, well-rounded triathlete is going tomiss a couple sessions every month. Hopefully, they're the lower qualitysessions or the lower priority sessions, I should say. But consistency andtraining is going to be your best friend. That's where you're going to produceyour best results, that's where you're going to still be able to enjoy thesport, that's where your job and your family is still going to be a priority.And it's going to afford you the opportunity to take the day off here andthere, whether it be a day just where you're particularly busy and don't havetime to get to the session. Maybe you're tired, maybe you've got an illnesscoming on, maybe you didn't sleep well. And oftentimes, in that case, the bestthing for you to do is just take the day off. And when you've trainedconsistently, you're gonna have no negative impact for missing that session ortwo in that week. But yeah, if you've been sporadic in your training, and nowyou still have to miss additional sessions on top of that, that's going to be amuch bigger impact. So, what I preach to everyone is consistency is your pathto your best results. So, be consistent, don't be obsessed with being perfect,be consistent.

Cool down theme: Great set everyone! Let’scool down.

Andrew: Excellent main set right there fromepisode five of the podcast. It’s really fun to me just to get to listen againto some of our first few episodes and in some ways it feels like we justrecorded those and in other ways I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t doingthe TriDot podcast. So B.J., as you listened to that main set, what were maybetwo or three nuggets that really jumped out to you. It’s all information youknow, but even still hearing it articulated by Jeff and John is always a goodtime. B.J., what really struck you there?

B.J.: Yeah, I’m always amazed when I talkto Jeff. Just, you know, the designer of TriDot. We always affectionately referto him as “The Dot Father.” But just all the calculations, the algorithms thatare going on behind the scenes. The tens of thousands of calculations going onat one time. You know in one moment for one user for one training phasegeneration. Those things just blow my mind. The engine that TriDot has to dothat and as John mentioned throughout the podcast, just training doesn’trequire perfection it requires consistency.

Andrew: Yeah.

B.J.: I’ve always loved that thoughtbecause very rarely is my life ever perfect especially with regards totraining. So if I could just own something. If I could just be consistent andTriDot can help me do that just with my training schedule and again that ideaof going fast before far, strong before long I think that just holds up in somany ways. Not just with training, but just in general the human body and mybackground with the human body and injury risk prevention. I think that’s justthe smart way to go.

Andrew: Now we chose to revisit this episodefor a reason. Not only is it valuable to gain context for how our trainingschedule is generated, but B.J., you have a few fun updates for us on some newways athletes will be able to tweak their workout schedules IF, and that’s abig if, if needed to fit their lifestyle. So what options will athletes now seeon the app?

B.J.: Yeah, the basic way to think of it,and this is how I’ve always thought of it and why I love TriDot is that I lovewith my schedule as it is right now with four kids, my wife and I both work andvery busy. I love that I can have my training with TriDot. It can always bethere for me when I need it and it hits me exactly where I need to be. So withthat I have to have it be flexible for me. I have to be able to adjust it to acertain level to be able to accommodate my life and that’s the thing we’ve realized.There are many of our users out there that need it to be flexible, adjustableto a certain degree and what we know, because TriDot has done the research andlooked at all the data, is that there are certain things that are more optimalthan others.

Andrew: Yeah.

B.J.: So we know as we’ve developed thissoftware that many things are permissible, but not always optimal. So what wewant to do is give the TriDot user, the athlete, an idea of what is optimal andwhat we can generate for you based on the most optimized schedule that we cancreate for you, but understanding that if you do have to swim on a Thursday andyou just can’t hit the swim on the exact day that TriDot feels is most optimal,we have a way of adjusting your schedule based on what you need to make sure itis optimized the best it can be for where you’re at. I’ve always kind ofenvisioned TriDot as we’re developing your training fingerprint and with thatif we can guide you to creating the most optimal training fingerprint, we’reputting the ink pad just where it needs to be, we’re placing the right amountof ink exactly on the finger exactly to create that fingerprint, butideally—realistically I should say, oftentimes you can’t always be perfect. Sowith that in mind how can we still create the best training fingerprint for youwithin the given parameters? What we’ve created with TriDot is just a littlebit more adjustability just with your ability to adjust sessions and some ofthe volume as far as specific to those sessions. Just being able to adjust thenumber of sessions in your week and then being able to adjust your schedule. Sothe way TriDot lays out your schedule is it’s prioritized based on eachdiscipline and it’s based on as we know your TriDot strength in eachdiscipline. So we have a prioritization that we’ve created for each session andwe give you options of where you potentially can move that, but still have yourtraining be optimized. Again, it doesn’t mean it’s always the most perfectoptimal training schedule, but within the parameters we’ve set in place we canoptimize it still for you.

Andrew: I remember being just overjoyed whilewe were recording episode five because Jeff Booher was talking about what theoptimal schedule is and the schedule I have as a TriDot athlete is the optimalschedule. Now with my job working in this industry I obviously have a lot offlexibility in when I do my workouts, how I do my workouts. So I can train onthe optimal week, but it was really interesting to me. Back when we were on thepodcast I had been a TriDot athlete for just a year or so. I didn’t know allthe ins and outs of it. So I didn’t realize that the way TriDot crafts mytraining week is done for a specific reason and mine just so happens to be theoptimal week. I try to tweak it as little as possible. Sometimes life gets inthe way or sometimes pool schedules, there’s closures on Monday or Friday forholidays and you’ve got to move stuff around a little bit or sometimes theweekend schedule doesn’t let you do that long bike when you wanted to. Soobviously you can move things when you need to, but I try to as little aspossible knowing that the default week that TriDot gives me, the standard weekit gives me, is the most optimal for me. So B.J., now that athletes first ofall have been able to make tweaks to their schedule for a long time, but nowyou’re just making that easier. You’re giving more flexibility to the athleteto customize their training week just based on their own personal rhythms andschedules. So B.J., why was the ability to make tweaks given to athletes in theapp and what should we keep in mind as we make those changes?

B.J.: Yeah, exactly like you said Andrew. Ithink people that have a certain schedule that they know there’s a certain daythat does work the best for their schedule, there’s just no way they can getaround that, we don’t want them to have to move that session each and everyweek manually. So we wanted to make it easier for them. Give them options toadjust that schedule and maintain that schedule moving forward. So they can setit and leave it, again within the optimized parameters that we’ve set. I think thatjust giving people flexibility so that they don’t have to constantly beadjusting and consistency like we were saying is king. So the idea is we giveyou that flexibility to make adjustments as you need to to accommodate withyour life schedule, but then we just don’t want people to be adjusting thatevery other day. There is, again, a method to the madness behind theoptimization engine of TriDot and to get the most out of it. Again, it’s likethis living and breathing training platform that adjusts and adapts to you andcreates your training fingerprint. For it to do it’s work, you need to haveconsistent inputs too. So that’s also what helps there. But yeah, making itavailable when we know life isn’t always perfect with training. We want to makeit available to be adjusted and fit your needs.

Andrew: Well that’s it for today folks. Iwant to thank Dr. B.J. Leeper for revisiting episode five of the podcast today.Shoutout to Precision Fuel and Hydration for partnering with us on today’sepisode. Remember that you can go to precisionfuelandhydration.com and you canuse their free sweat test, the free quick carb calculator, and you can book afree one-on-one video consultation with a member of their team and then usecode TRIDOT10 at the checkout when you make your purchase. Enjoying thepodcast? Have any triathlon questions or topics you want to hear us talk about?Head to tridot.com/podcast and let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll do itall again soon. Until then, Happy Training!

Outro: Thanks for joining us. Make sure tosubscribe and share the TriDot podcast with your triathlon crew. For more greattri content and community, connect with us on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.Ready to optimize your training? Head to tridot.com and start your free trialtoday! TriDot – the obvious and automatic choice for triathlon training.

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