Paul Oneid tore both quads and rebuilt himself from powerlifter to trail runner, with coach Cody Miller guiding the transition. They break down the emergent training approach, VO2 max and cardiac adaptations, and the mental side of suffering across strength sports and endurance.
In this episode of the Flex Diet Podcast, I sit down with Paul Oneid, MS, MS, CSCS and Cody Miller for a conversation about rebuilding from injury and the transition from strength sports to endurance training.
Paul Oneid tore both quads and rebuilt himself from powerlifter to trail runner, with coach Cody Miller guiding the transition. They break down the emergent training approach, VO2 max and cardiac adaptations, and the mental side of suffering across strength sports and endurance.
In this episode, you'll learn:
Find Paul here:
https://masterathletic.com
https://coachescorneru.com
https://www.instagram.com/pauloneid/
Find Cody here:
https://hoopiestrength.com/
https://www.instagram.com/coach.cody.miller
[00:00:00] Paul Oneid: What's up?
[00:03:03] Cody Miller: Hey, what's up?
[00:03:05] Paul Oneid: Oh, you know. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can... Yeah, I can hear you good. I can hear you well.
[00:03:11] Cody Miller: Sweet.
[00:03:11] Paul Oneid: Since we're gonna be on a podcast, might as well speak like an intelligent-
[00:03:21] Cody Miller: Clean it up
[00:03:22] Paul Oneid: Yeah. You know-
[00:03:24] Cody Miller: How are you
[00:03:24] Paul Oneid: doing? You, you and I, not me and you. I'm good. I'm good. I- You
[00:03:32] Cody Miller: look thin in the face
[00:03:34] Paul Oneid: like 214 pounds.
[00:03:36] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:03:38] Paul Oneid: Skinny Minny. Skinny Minny. My mom, my mom just ruined me, though. Like, that was, that was ruthless.
[00:03:45] Cody Miller: Is she fast? She run with you?
[00:03:48] Paul Oneid: She runs with me, but no, she's not fast.
[00:03:52] Cody Miller: But she can do it, but, like, she can run.
[00:03:54] Paul Oneid: Yeah, like I did 10K, she did 8K.
[00:03:57] Cody Miller: Okay.
[00:03:58] Paul Oneid: On the track, so like-
[00:03:58] Cody Miller: You're just, like, running at the same time?
[00:04:00] Paul Oneid: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, let me kick out this note taker. Um-
[00:04:12] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hello.
[00:04:13] Cody Miller: Hey, Dr. Mike.
[00:04:14] Paul Oneid: Mike. Mike, kick out- Hey, how are you guys? ... kick out my note taker.
[00:04:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Kick out your note taker. All right, let's see here. '
[00:04:20] Paul Oneid: Cause it'll me- like, if you post video, it'll mess it up.
[00:04:23] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, good idea. All right. I'm a smart monkey, I'll figure this out. Let's see. Right click, uh, chat, pin, make host, rename.
[00:04:33] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Remove, ha ha. Remove. Uh, don't report. Hey, look at that. I figured something out with technology. Yeah,
[00:04:45] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: you know. How amazing.
[00:04:48] Paul Oneid: Couldn't get, couldn't get the automations for the podcast to work, but you got the, uh-
[00:04:53] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. That's, um, a work in progress. The worst part is the, the changeover part, 'cause at some point you're like, "All right, I just have to make it live." And then I made it live as we were rescheduling all your g-
[00:05:07] Paul Oneid: Oh.
[00:05:08] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: As we were rescheduling all your guys' stuff, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I didn't, uh, didn't plan that out quite so well." But, uh, it worked well for three of them so far.
[00:05:19] Paul Oneid: All right. Fair enough.
[00:05:21] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, yeah. How's everything with you guys?
[00:05:25] Paul Oneid: Good.
[00:05:26] Cody Miller: Great.
[00:05:27] Paul Oneid: Gotta go run some hills after this.
[00:05:30] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, boy. I
[00:05:31] Cody Miller: got all my training done, thank God.
[00:05:33] Paul Oneid: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:34] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I,
[00:05:34] Paul Oneid: I went and trained- I'm doing
[00:05:35] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: today, too ...
[00:05:36] Paul Oneid: I trained early and then I got caught up with some work and didn't have enough time to run before my 3:00.
[00:05:42] Cody Miller: Mm.
[00:05:44] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Oh. How many hills tonight?
[00:05:47] Paul Oneid: 40 minute, 50 minutes of hills.
[00:05:49] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, gee. Yeah.
[00:05:51] Paul Oneid: Yeah. It's gonna be, gonna be good.
[00:05:56] Cody Miller: Need some downhill.
[00:05:57] Paul Oneid: Need some d- I need some downhill, for sure.
[00:06:00] Cody Miller: Need some downhill.
[00:06:01] Paul Oneid: But I'm excited. 30K, gonna get dusted. I actually don't think it'll be that bad.
[00:06:08] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Did you say 30K?
[00:06:10] Paul Oneid: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:12] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, distance run or what?
[00:06:13] Paul Oneid: Yeah, July, July 17th, 18th. Um, do you know Andrew Serrano?
[00:06:21] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: That name sounds so familiar. Mm-hmm. I feel like I should, but I can't place him.
[00:06:24] Paul Oneid: He and I met back in the day when we were working with Brian Carroll, who's a former powerlifter, but he- Oh, okay
[00:06:30] Paul Oneid: he got into, into trail racing and stuff. He's great friend of mine. Um, he just was like, "Hey, I'm doing this race. Do you wanna do it?" 'Cause I've been, been working with Cody for a while, and I was like, "I mean, that's a long distance." The most I- Yeah ... the most I had done at that time was what, like eight or nine miles?
[00:06:50] Cody Miller: Probably, yeah.
[00:06:51] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[00:06:52] Cody Miller: Something
[00:06:52] Paul Oneid: like that. But last, last weekend I went out and I did 13, and it was-
[00:06:55] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh ...
[00:06:56] Paul Oneid: pretty manageable.
[00:06:56] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Miles or 13K?
[00:06:58] Paul Oneid: Miles.
[00:06:58] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, okay.
[00:07:00] Paul Oneid: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, it's just gonna be a little bit longer, a little bit hotter, a little bit uphiller.
[00:07:06] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Downhill's
[00:07:08] Paul Oneid: nice also.
[00:07:08] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: What's the date on the race?
[00:07:09] Paul Oneid: It's in two weeks.
[00:07:11] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:07:12] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh.
[00:07:13] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[00:07:13] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Forgot your point now about downhill. Mm. Yeah. Otherwise you can't walk the next day.
[00:07:17] Paul Oneid: Yeah. It's, uh, it's a weird race. Like, it's an out and back. The whole way out is uphill, the whole way back is downhill.
[00:07:24] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I would rather ... I'm not a big runner, but if I were to do anything, I would much rather do it that way.
[00:07:30] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I don't know.
[00:07:30] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:07:31] Paul Oneid: Yeah, probably.
[00:07:33] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Make it hard at first. Don't make it hard at the end.
[00:07:35] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:07:36] Paul Oneid: I think the hardest thing for me is gonna be fueling. Oh. And, I mean, we, we can get into that on the podcast- Yeah ... but, like, I'm- Yeah ... I'm take- I'm having to take in so many calories on these runs.
[00:07:47] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.
[00:07:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You're a large mammal to be running.
[00:07:50] Paul Oneid: Not, not so much anymore. I'm only 215 pounds.
[00:07:53] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, only 215. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, shit. Then I take back my comment. You're 20- It's
[00:07:58] Cody Miller: all relative.
[00:08:00] Paul Oneid: Fair. Yeah, that's true.
[00:08:01] Cody Miller: So Paul, he's like, "I'm a, I'm a paltry 215 now. I'm so small." Yeah. I could, I could only be a small outside linebacker in the NFL.
[00:08:12] Cody Miller: It's not even anything impressive.
[00:08:14] Paul Oneid: Well, my mom, my ... I told, told this to Cody. My mom, I asked my mom, 'cause she came to the track with me, uh, uh, yesterday to do- Oh, cool ... like a track session.
[00:08:23] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, I saw your note.
[00:08:24] Paul Oneid: And, uh, she ... I, I was like, "Do I look athletic when I run, or do I look like I'm completely ridiculous?"
[00:08:31] Paul Oneid: And her response was, "You're not as big as you think."
[00:08:35] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh.
[00:08:36] Paul Oneid: I was like, "Well, that's-" I thought ... That
[00:08:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: sounds like a compliment, I think.
[00:08:38] Paul Oneid: No. It's n-
[00:08:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: No, it's not?
[00:08:40] Paul Oneid: No.
[00:08:41] Cody Miller: No. It's a
[00:08:43] Paul Oneid: backhanded compliment, I think. It's a backhanded compliment. Oh, okay. Depends how you take it.
[00:08:45] Cody Miller: She- Yeah ... agreed with him that he did look athletic, but she said it like, "You're not that big."
[00:08:50] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[00:08:50] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Ah, I gotcha. Uh, one of the best compliments I ever got was from a buddy who I'd only known for about five years. He actually asked me, he's like, "Oh, did you play, like, football in high school and college?" I'm like, "What are you... No." He's like, "Oh, I thought you were a, a tight end or something." I'm like, "Oh, that's like the best compliment anyone's ever said to me-" There you go
[00:09:14] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: considering first year of college I was this height, 155 pounds, and got hit in the face with balls, so. I was like, "Oh, I'll take it."
[00:09:24] Paul Oneid: All right. All right.
[00:09:26] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Cool. Any questions, Cody?
[00:09:28] Cody Miller: Uh, yeah.
[00:09:30] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Before we get started.
[00:09:32] Cody Miller: No, not really. Uh-
[00:09:34] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Okay ...
[00:09:34] Cody Miller: it's nice to meet you. I remember talking to you before. Yeah.
[00:09:35] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, nice to meet you, too.
[00:09:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, you guys are good for an hour?
[00:09:39] Cody Miller: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:39] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: All right, cool. All right, well, I'll just do a short pause, then, uh, away we go. Welcome to the podcast. How are you today, uh, Paul and Cody? And I'll have you briefly introduce yourself, 'cause a lot of people are just only listening on audio, so they'll know who's who in terms of the two guests and their voice.
[00:09:57] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So go ahead, Paul.
[00:09:59] Paul Oneid: Sure, yeah. My name's Paul O'Neill. I'm the head coach at Master Athletic Performance. I'm also the lead educator at Coach's Corner University. Um, been a powerlifter, been a bodybuilder, now doing a bit of the old hybrid suck at everything thing. And, uh, yeah, I've been working with Cody as his...
[00:10:17] Paul Oneid: Co- I mean, Cody and I have been friends for almost 15 years now, and we, uh, we started working together when I decided to start running, so pumped to be here.
[00:10:27] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Nice. Awesome. Cody?
[00:10:29] Cody Miller: Yeah, I'm Cody Miller. I am, uh, the director of performance at Hoopy Strength and Conditioning, and, uh, I was a longtime collegiate strength coach for about 10 years.
[00:10:40] Cody Miller: Uh, moved over, uh, into the private sector, uh, and also working for the military. Uh, but yeah, moved into, like Paul, was a powerlifter for a long time, and, you know, started to shift more into the endurance space, uh, probably six, seven years ago. Uh, and here we are, you know, going out, hitting some trails, suffering, doing that thing.
[00:11:06] Cody Miller: So- Yeah ... new challenges. A little bit different than, uh, doing the power lifting and grinding against a barbell, but still fun.
[00:11:14] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: A little different. Oh, awesome. So why did you decide to make the change, Paul? It's not like you went from one extreme to the other, from trying to lift the heaviest weight possible for a one-rep max to now you said you're gonna do, what, a 30K trail run thingy coming up?
[00:11:33] Paul Oneid: Yeah, so the 30K trail race will be my first, like, competitive thing that I've done in the endurance space. But for me, it was pretty simple. I knew, uh, you know, two years ago, actually al- almost two years, two years and a couple weeks will be, um, the anniversary of me tearing both my quads.
[00:11:51] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: It's been two years already.
[00:11:52] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: That's wild.
[00:11:52] Paul Oneid: Yeah, man. Yeah, it was in, uh, 2024. So yeah, two years ago, tore both my quads, and even though I rehabbed really well from it, you know, I'm actually more functional now than I've been in many, many years. Uh, in term- And I mean functional in terms of, like, orthopedic movement quality. Um, I knew that the things that would be required for me to exceed my performance in power lifting were just not things that I was willing to do anymore.
[00:12:21] Paul Oneid: Uh, I had also competed in bodybuilding. I did a show 13 months after my surgery, and I won. But I knew that to take bodybuilding further, again, just not willing to walk around at 270 pounds anymore. Um, and there was a thought, uh, that was ultimately the decision-maker for me in my, in, you know, pursuing something different.
[00:12:42] Paul Oneid: When I was injured and in the hospital bed, I remember looking at my wife and just thinking like, "Hey, if, if I'm the reason that I can't be up, like, get on the ground and play with our kids, like, there's a problem here." So I still needed to pursue something challenging. Um, I grew up as an athlete. I played college basketball.
[00:13:01] Paul Oneid: I played football. So running is something that I'm very familiar with, just hadn't done it in about 20 years. And I reached out to Cody, and I was like, "Yo- Let's start running. And, uh, I'll tell you what, at first it was really bad. You're kidding. But then- Yeah, it was, it was bad. Um, but honestly I love it now.
[00:13:26] Paul Oneid: Like, it's, it's almost therapeutic to some degree. Uh, I definitely get the same amount of suffering from running as I did from bodybuilding. It's a little bit different than power lifting because the suffering is very extreme in power lifting, and it's very short-lived. But I always need, like mentally for me, I need to be doing hard things, and I just needed a new hard thing, and this was something that I could be a beginner at again.
[00:13:51] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Very cool. What was it like to get the email from him, Cody? Were you kinda surprised, or like, "Oh, this might be fun," or, "Oh boy, I don't know about this?"
[00:14:00] Cody Miller: You know, I think Paul's a pretty serious person, so it- Mm-hmm ... it didn't really... When he said he was gonna do it, um, you know, I knew he was, you know, he was gonna do it.
[00:14:09] Cody Miller: I, I, I, you know, you hear a lot of people say, you know, "I wanna do this. I'd like to do this." Uh, uh, and you know, it fizzles out, never comes to fruition, but Paul is not that type of person. So whenever he said, you know, "I want to be a runner," or, "I wanna be..." You know, and I think his words were, "athletic weapon."
[00:14:30] Cody Miller: Uh- Yeah.
[00:14:32] Paul Oneid: I wish I could have trademarked that- ...
[00:14:34] Cody Miller: but freaking Pat Davidson- I know ... did
[00:14:36] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: it. Uh, Davidson-
[00:14:37] Cody Miller: Yeah ...
[00:14:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: has a trademark on that, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's so brilliant. I was like, "Oh, it's so good."
[00:14:41] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:14:42] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So good.
[00:14:42] Cody Miller: Yeah. It was... And he said that, and, uh, you know, I took him seriously. He's, he's a committed person. I think that's a quality of people that achieve things, is that they're committed to whatever it is.
[00:14:55] Cody Miller: And so, yeah, when he said that, uh, it was basically, okay, what does the roadmap look like for a person who hasn't done any endurance work in a long time? Oh, and by the way, they also just tore both their quads. How do we get them running again? Yeah. You know? Interesting puzzle ...
[00:15:13] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: yeah. Like, where, where did you, I mean, I have some ideas on that, but where did you, you start with that?
[00:15:19] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: What is kinda your thought process? 'Cause this, I think, could apply- Yeah ... to a lot of people who are thinking like, "Oh, maybe I should start running." And most of the time if I have a large mammal that's a client who hasn't done a lot of running, and they come to me with that, my first thought is, "Okay, let's start easy.
[00:15:36] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Let's look at some orthopedic, let's look at some biomechanic stuff." 'Cause usually they're super motivated and they're like, "Why don't I just go run like three miles today?" And I'm like- Mm-hmm ... "Just for God's sake, please don't do that tomorrow yet."
[00:15:46] Cody Miller: Yeah. It, w- with someone, there's, there's a lot of confounding factors.
[00:15:51] Cody Miller: Number one, you have the bilateral tear. Number two, you have the large mass, uh, overall and, you know, large BMI or large FFMI. For Paul's height, he's carrying a lot of mass, uh, for his stature. There's those two factors, and then, uh, you know, the fact that he hasn't ran. He's a low training age with, with, uh, running.
[00:16:18] Cody Miller: So those three things combined. Uh, the way I try to think about problems is like what are the unknowns, and there's like a huge unknown with, you know, how is he gonna respond to locomotion just in general, you know? Uh, so the approach was that we had to take a very emergent approach and kind of be responsive to however, uh, training was affecting him.
[00:16:47] Cody Miller: And so we started out with five sets of, Paul, you remember this, one minute of running.
[00:16:55] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Ah. So a little time do- time domain work.
[00:16:58] Cody Miller: Yeah. Five sets of one minute o- of running. That was the, the very start, and we, we ran that for, you know, a couple weeks. Yeah. Five minutes of, five, five minutes of running, and then, uh, it was separated by a, a minute of walking.
[00:17:11] Cody Miller: So it was a, a 10-minute workout, you know? Uh, but to fill in the gap of, you know, obviously we can't run that much because like you said, the orthopedic cost, the muscular cost. Uh, we filled in with a lot of the low impact, uh, so we get a lot of the central stimulation without the cost of all the peripheral stuff.
[00:17:35] Cody Miller: And so we were doing a lot of ... Sure, Paul was actually training a ton. He was training a ton. Yeah. He was doing some metco- he was doing, you know, two to three sessions a day. Uh, only three of those running sessions a week was how we started. So- Hmm ... he was getting a total of, when we started, 15 minutes of running a week And, but he was getting in, you know, 14, if you're, you're just talking about the endurance training, at least what, what would you say, eight to 12 hours, Paul, if you count all the- Yeah
[00:18:08] Cody Miller: MetCons. It's kind of hard to go back in TrainingPeaks and look at all of it, but I think the beginning it was closer to eight to 12 hours just of endurance training.
[00:18:17] Paul Oneid: Yeah, 'cause Monday, Wednesday, Friday was, uh, a low impact session sandwiched with a run. So I would do-
[00:18:24] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm ...
[00:18:24] Paul Oneid: like 20 minutes on the elliptical, my 10 minutes of, like my five rounds of running, and then 20 more minutes of elliptical.
[00:18:32] Paul Oneid: Then I would go weight train, and then in the evening I would come back and I would do more cardio.
[00:18:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Damn.
[00:18:37] Paul Oneid: And then th- on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would do bike sprints in the morning and a MetCon in the afternoon.
[00:18:45] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:45] Paul Oneid: And then Saturday was more zone two and another lift, and then Sunday I would typically do more zone two as well.
[00:18:52] Cody Miller: You would ruck on the weekends.
[00:18:54] Paul Oneid: Oh, yeah, yeah. We were rucking then. Yeah. So s- You were just- Sorry, Saturday was a long ruck ...
[00:18:58] Cody Miller: you were just walking, which was great. Uh- Yeah ... awesome part of training.
[00:19:02] Paul Oneid: That first ruck, I remember- Yeah ... my fucking shins exploded.
[00:19:09] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: That was great. You were doing it on like a trail on an incline too, I assume.
[00:19:11] Paul Oneid: No, it was just around the neighborhood.
[00:19:12] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, just around the neighborhood? Okay.
[00:19:13] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[00:19:13] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: It was like a f- What, what kind of
[00:19:14] Paul Oneid: weight? ... 50 pound pack around the neighborhood.
[00:19:16] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Okay, so 50 pounds.
[00:19:17] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[00:19:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Got it.
[00:19:18] Cody Miller: I remember we had a lot of fun with that. Yeah, we did. It was a lot of fun in the beginning. Yeah. Uh, so we transitioned to now, we went all the way from there and progressing five by one minute running to five by s- it's gonna, it's a really complex progression, five by one running to five by two running.
[00:19:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Ooh. Yes. Yeah, that's crazy. Very complex.
[00:19:41] Cody Miller: All the, all the way up to five by five running. Uh, and then we took the interval away, went to, uh- 20, 25 or 30 minutes of just continuous running, just see if we could run continuously. Uh, so we just did 25 minutes of, of an interval of walk to run. Um, and, and then from there you're, you, you know, without the knees acting up at all, which they didn't really.
[00:20:04] Cody Miller: I mean, may-
[00:20:05] Paul Oneid: No, knees- There was- ... knees haven't been an issue at all.
[00:20:07] Cody Miller: No. Hmm. Quads, yeah. Nothing, nothing really. We've had some hiccups in other areas, all that, you know, we've kind of mitigated. Uh, but, you know, once you get that, that first, you know, 25, 30-minute run, you know, for the first week or two, like we were off to the races.
[00:20:25] Paul Oneid: Yeah. Yeah. It, the, the hiccups that we ran into, I was having a lot of calf stuff, calf and lower limb.
[00:20:33] Speaker 4: Mm.
[00:20:33] Paul Oneid: Hmm. Um, that mostly had to do with my stride and cadence. Um, number one, when you're only running for a minute mentally, you automatically try to run faster.
[00:20:46] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm.
[00:20:47] Paul Oneid: So I kinda learned to just slow my pace down and just go out and enjoy it.
[00:20:52] Paul Oneid: Um, so that like first 30-minute run, it was almost like I was going and I was like, "I feel like I should be tired at this point," but I wasn't. Um, the fixing my cadence was the biggest thing, just like picking up a quicker cadence, making sure that I was getting full foot contact on the ground under my body.
[00:21:11] Paul Oneid: Um, even now I'm still conscious of that 'cause obviously as I fatigue, I default into like huge extension 'cause I'm still, I'm still not, um, I'm s- I'm still not adapted to running- Mm ... as a runner would be, where I still- Do you
[00:21:29] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: tend to like overstride so you're almost kind of breaking a little bit too much then,
[00:21:34] Paul Oneid: or?
[00:21:35] Paul Oneid: Uh, not, not so much overstriding- Mm ... but I will default into like a big lo- lo- lordosis.
[00:21:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm. Okay.
[00:21:41] Paul Oneid: So I'm not getting full hip extension.
[00:21:43] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Sure.
[00:21:44] Paul Oneid: Um- That's the
[00:21:44] Cody Miller: one.
[00:21:45] Paul Oneid: Yep ... and, and so that was a really big focus, and my calves. I ended up straining my calf a few c- a few times. Um- The,
[00:21:53] Cody Miller: the 5K. The five yeah.
[00:21:55] Paul Oneid: Yeah. 5K turkey trot fi- uh, calf strain.
[00:21:57] Cody Miller: Yep. Yeah. What a- Yeah ... what a devastating message to get.
[00:22:01] Paul Oneid: I was like, "No!" I know. I was so pissed off.
[00:22:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Ah, I
[00:22:04] Paul Oneid: got- Like I'm- ...
[00:22:04] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: destroyed by the turkey trot.
[00:22:06] Paul Oneid: I'm going sub 25, baby. Come in with a- Oh ... four-minute 5K 'cause I had- Oof ... to walk after, I walked two mile, or like limped two miles. Um- But yeah, I mean, the, the adaptation was really slow, but it was almost like, it was almost like as soon as we got to that 30-minute mark, there w- th- have been no issues.
[00:22:32] Paul Oneid: The only thing I've run into is my left hip, still from power lifting, is kinda jacked up. So I just really have to stay on top of making sure I maintain my hip extension there, and then working on some lateral stability stuff. But other than that, I'm, I'm con- consistently pain-free. I have no issues other than my lungs hurt after interval runs.
[00:22:57] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: How was the first five by one? Like, what did you feel? Like, were you nervous going into it, or you're just like, "I don't know, I have no expectations really, 'cause I have no prior experience"?
[00:23:06] Paul Oneid: I approached it, I wasn't nervous per se, but I was not prepared for how my body would respond. So my first five by one minute was, like, three days after a bodybuilding show.
[00:23:21] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, Jesus.
[00:23:22] Paul Oneid: So I was like, well- That sounds
[00:23:23] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: horrible.
[00:23:24] Paul Oneid: Well, the thing is, is like, I'm really lean, I'm light. Like, 200- 205. Oh yeah, I was like 205 or something like that.
[00:23:31] Cody Miller: 200, 200 pounds.
[00:23:32] Paul Oneid: Um, and then, but because of all the fluid dynamics of- Yeah,
[00:23:36] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: that's what I'm thinking ...
[00:23:37] Paul Oneid: of the prep ... like
[00:23:38] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: the fluid and the, just the accumulated stress-
[00:23:41] Paul Oneid: Yeah
[00:23:41] Paul Oneid: and all that shit ... my shins blew up. Yeah, my shins blew up pretty bad. That was, that was limiting me early on. But again, as soon as I fixed my cadence and f- and foot strike, never had an issue again. Yeah, so mentally for me it was more so just admitting to myself that I was a beginner. I don't think I ever paid attention to my pace until we did, we started doing continuous running.
[00:24:07] Paul Oneid: Like, I didn't even look at- Yeah ... how fast I was running. Um, and even now on a lot of my runs, I don't even worry about my pace. I just kind of run. Yeah. Um, it was humbling, for sure. For sure.
[00:24:22] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Do you find, Cody, that there's this... I've noticed this, and I don't know why it is that, like what I've noticed with people doing more endurance stuff, like at a, it's like a six to eight week mark, there's like this exponential kind of increase in their performance.
[00:24:39] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Uh, one, I don't know if you've seen that, and two, have you ever read some research and you swear you read it and you can never find it again, and then you start to think that maybe you just c- hallucinated and made up the whole thing? But I swear there was some old Russian research that showed that the blood vessels grow from opposite ends for angiogenesis, and they don't meet together until, like, the six to eight week mark, and this is for, like, microvasculature, and that you have this big increase then of oxygenation and CO2 and O2 exchange at, at the muscle, which is why you get more of an exponential increase.
[00:25:13] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I can't find a single study to support any of that, so I could have just pulled all of that out of my ass, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on any of that.
[00:25:22] Cody Miller: Yeah. With the, the walk-run intervals, I think we ran those for 10 weeks, maybe 12 weeks, so that kinda lines up to where we, we had, um, we had some breakthroughs after that.
[00:25:36] Cody Miller: But it, it's interesting as you say that. I think it was after, 'cause we started last August.
[00:25:42] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:25:43] Cody Miller: Uh, it's closer to September.
[00:25:46] Speaker 4: Hmm.
[00:25:46] Cody Miller: And so September, October. It was probably, I think the big breakthrough for Paul was right after the holidays.
[00:25:56] Speaker 4: Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.
[00:25:58] Cody Miller: After the holidays, after the holiday break, which, you know, he had been training really hard up until that point, so it may have been somewhat of a, somewhat of a taper too.
[00:26:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Sure.
[00:26:07] Cody Miller: But we saw, like, a precipitous drop in some of his biomarkers at the- Oh,
[00:26:15] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: yeah ...
[00:26:16] Cody Miller: huge, uh, September, October, November, December, at the four, like the four-month mark-ish. Hmm. Um, for whatever, for whatever reason. I think you'd probably find some of this interesting. I even, I even wrote down some, uh, some of his stats.
[00:26:31] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:32] Cody Miller: But whenever he started, and this was, this was right after, like I said, it was in January, we saw, like, these just start to drop like rocks. Um, his, when he first started, his seven-day rolling resting heart rate was 63.7 beats per minute. Hmm. That was, that was right after, right, the first week we started.
[00:26:58] Cody Miller: His HRV... Paul, you don't mind me sharing this? No,
[00:27:02] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: no, no.
[00:27:03] Cody Miller: I
[00:27:03] Paul Oneid: think it's hilarious.
[00:27:05] Cody Miller: His HRV is 25.
[00:27:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm. And how'd you measure HRV? Was that Oura or Garmin or something, or Garmin?
[00:27:11] Cody Miller: That's through his Garmin, yeah.
[00:27:13] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Garmin, okay cool.
[00:27:13] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:27:14] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Got it.
[00:27:14] Cody Miller: PPG.
[00:27:15] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep.
[00:27:18] Cody Miller: And then I just pulled this, and this is consistent with basically the last five or six months, 'cause we saw, we saw it really drop right after, uh, after the new year.
[00:27:28] Cody Miller: But his seven-day resting heart rate now from 63.7, this, this... to this morning's, uh, seven-day rolling average is 52.
[00:27:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Nice. That's a huge drop.
[00:27:39] Cody Miller: Yeah. 60, 63 to s- 63, 64 to 52. Seven-day HRV 28.
[00:27:50] Paul Oneid: Still bad,
[00:27:51] Cody Miller: but not as
[00:27:51] Paul Oneid: bad.
[00:27:52] Cody Miller: Still the same.
[00:27:54] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Still the same. So- Interesting. I would've expected that to have a bigger change, especially- You would've-
[00:27:57] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: with that drop in resting heart rate ...
[00:27:58] Cody Miller: right, you would've expected it to go up. So from this, and, and also his sleep, his sleep got better, um, from then to... He's, like, averaging less than six, and now it's over seven, 7.2- Hmm ... 7.28. So there's nothing, like, sleep-wise inhibiting, um, HRV. He's training actually a little less than he was then-
[00:28:21] Speaker 4: Yeah
[00:28:21] Cody Miller: with HRV. So to me, the biggest thing and the only thing that really stands out is the, that resting heart rate drop, and so there's actually some... It, it, it took time to actually, uh, reconstruct or to change the architecture of the heart. And, I mean, you know all about left ventricle.
[00:28:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[00:28:41] Cody Miller: And, uh- Tell us about it
[00:28:41] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: for the people listening-
[00:28:42] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: who are like, "Well, what's this guy talking about
[00:28:44] Cody Miller: now?" So, so yeah, one of the, one of the biggest problems and kind of what people, researchers, the smart people have, have laid out as kinda like the limiting factor in endurance has been the oxygen delivery, and so actually getting the oxygen from the air into the lungs, into the blood, and then delivering it to the working muscles to fuel, uh, m- metabolism and, and a, uh, an activity.
[00:29:11] Cody Miller: And so the, the biggest problem that, uh, or the biggest way that our body changes in to support increased oxygen delivery is to change the actual, uh, structure of the heart to pump more blood. Like, more blood to the muscles, uh, equals better results basically.
[00:29:31] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. And
[00:29:31] Cody Miller: so- So
[00:29:31] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: literally just more volume of blood going through the system.
[00:29:36] Cody Miller: It's like throwing money at something, you know? Yep. Y- you know, it's... usually good things happen. So this is cardiac output is stroke volume times your heart rate. And usually the, the adaptation is increased stroke volume, so the actual chamber of the heart, uh, lengthens and, and, and relaxes more to fill more, and so it pumps more per beat, and that stroke volume is the...
[00:29:59] Cody Miller: It's per minute I think. Stroke volume is the, uh, the actual blood pumped per minute. And so that to me is, is kinda like what happened with Paul was it took a long time, but it wasn't any sort of, like, autonomic thing going on because HRV hasn't changed.
[00:30:19] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Right. Right.
[00:30:19] Cody Miller: So- It, it has to be, in my mind, the, the structural, there was a structural change.
[00:30:26] Cody Miller: And it took, you know, four to six months to happen, but it was just this huge volume, 'cause he was training a lot. But it was this huge volume of just general training. You know, he was doing a lot of rower, ski, bike. He was doing a ton of this stuff, and overall, uh, that training load over four to six months changed his heart so that he had a 20% reduction, uh, in the amount of, you know, beats per minute in his resting heart rate.
[00:30:58] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Do you think some of that took a little bit longer because he was on the opposite end of the spectrum from years of power lifting, where you've got kind of the opposite thing, where you've got, you know, probably thickening of the heart wall because it's contracting against this massive amount of afterload or this huge pressure it's trying to push all this- Mm-hmm
[00:31:19] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: blood through vessels that are squished by all the muscular activation?
[00:31:25] Cody Miller: Yeah, the, I mean, the concentric versus eccentric-
[00:31:28] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Eccentric, yeah, yeah ... you
[00:31:28] Cody Miller: know? Yeah, that, that sort of like, that sort of problem. I mean, I feel like that, that would take some time to undo. And I, I mean, the, the, the heart is not very quick to change.
[00:31:41] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Um- Oh, it seems
[00:31:41] Cody Miller: to be
[00:31:41] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: really slow
[00:31:42] Cody Miller: Super slow.
[00:31:43] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[00:31:44] Cody Miller: It's super slow at, at changing its structure. And so that would make sense too, is that if I'm always bracing down... Um, and I think a lot of the change happened too when we started doing a little bit less MetCon and lifting for our conditioning, and started transitioning more towards just steady state- Yeah
[00:32:01] Cody Miller: and, and longer, slower stuff. Uh-
[00:32:04] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: No, it makes sense- Yeah ... 'cause you're really prioritizing more of that diastolic stretch, that, that feeling that you wanna- Mm-hmm ... just push as much blood into the heart, and the pressure you're exerting against is very minimal. 'Cause like- Right ... even in a MetCon you still have some muscle contraction, so you've got this kinda weird hybrid thing that's, like, between pure endurance and between pure, like, 1RM strength.
[00:32:29] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. I, I think that was a big part of it. Um, but yeah, I'm interested to know your thoughts too.
[00:32:36] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I mean, I agree with all of that. The thing that I just wonder about is it'd be so cool if you had, like, an echo, like pre and post- ... or an MRI or- Yeah ... 'cause I've been going back through the literature again, I'm in the process of doing this now, of all the explanations I agree with, but I'm trying to find even, like, extreme case studies of before and after.
[00:33:00] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, how, how plastic is the structure of the heart? Because-
[00:33:05] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm ...
[00:33:06] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: everybody says these things, which I agree with, but- I don't know. It just seems like the cardiac muscle turnover is very, very slow.
[00:33:17] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And so I wonder about how much architectural changes you can make in the structure. Um, there's tons of stuff showing, like, functional changes for sure.
[00:33:27] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I don't think there's any debate- Mm-hmm ... about that. Um, the rumor years ago, a, a buddy of mine did an echo. It was an N of one, was never published, on someone who was a powerlifter who went to be a high-level cyclist. And according to him, he said they had echo, which I never saw the echo, so who knows. It took two and a half years to see structural changes in the cardiac tissue itself.
[00:33:52] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:52] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Um, but anyway, I'm just curious about that because we know that if you go too far on the powerlifting side, at least from the structure of the heart, you start building up scar tissue within the muscle, and that scar tissue can then screw up some of the electrical signal. And we know if you go way too far on the other end, which usually happens in a cyclist, the wall can get a little bit too thin and you can run into issues there too.
[00:34:15] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Granted, most people are probably never gonna be at either one of those extremes. Mm-hmm. So we have data showing that if you go too far to the extremes, like we definitely see structural changes. It's just that middle part where if you were a powerlifter and then you go to more endurance stuff, like how long does that take?
[00:34:33] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Does it, your heart only get so much better, or does it take years or what? I have no idea.
[00:34:39] Cody Miller: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know either. Uh, perhaps something like with, uh, uh, just relaxation. Uh- Sure. Yep,
[00:34:47] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: yep ...
[00:34:48] Cody Miller: you know, something there. I'm n- I'm not too sure. But all I know is that, uh, it's consistent. I, I was really surprised actually, the HRV has not moved, has not moved- Yeah.
[00:34:59] Cody Miller: What do you think that is? ... one, has one iota. I, what is... I've seen lower, but not too many lower. Um, I mean, it, it, to me, it, it just, it just, you know, he's just wired a little sympathetically, a little bit more than maybe, um, you know, some other people. I've seen some, you know, really high level, in, in my opinion, high level endurance athletes that are, you know, 120, 140
[00:35:29] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: milliseconds.
[00:35:29] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, yeah.
[00:35:30] Cody Miller: You know? But I've also seen guys that are really, really fit and, and really competitive endurance athletes, and they sit around 50.
[00:35:39] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, I've seen the
[00:35:40] Cody Miller: same. Um, so the, the, the inter-individual difference, uh, with HRV is it, it's just so variable.
[00:35:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Uh, what, do you know what the highest HRV you've ever seen?
[00:35:51] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, have you done a taper and, like, pulled back training load and all that kind of stuff to see if it goes up, or it just doesn't move much?
[00:35:58] Paul Oneid: Uh- I don't know if you know me, Mike, but I don't do very well- ... with pulling back.
[00:36:01] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I know. That's why I'm asking.
[00:36:05] Cody Miller: Um, I think he's hit in the 40s before.
[00:36:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Okay. I think that was-
[00:36:08] Cody Miller: So that, that tells me it can change
[00:36:09] Cody Miller: that's o- one, one time.
[00:36:11] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, yeah. But at least, you know, someday
[00:36:13] Cody Miller: that's- Even, even when he's on vacation, I mean, it's, it's kinda the same.
[00:36:17] Paul Oneid: It's in the low 30s. Yeah. I think, yeah, we went to Mexico last week, it was in the low 30s and I was sleeping, like, eight or nine hours a day and napping. Um, I mean, on my end, there's a few, a few confounding variables that I think, like, on a podcast like this are worth mentioning.
[00:36:34] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:35] Paul Oneid: So obviously training for a bodybuilding show, there's going to be PEDs involved.
[00:36:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You're kidding.
[00:36:41] Paul Oneid: I know. I know, revolutionary stuff.
[00:36:44] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Shocker.
[00:36:44] Paul Oneid: Uh, so following the bodybuilding show, went down to a physiological TRT, so I think that definitely played a role in, like, heart mechanics, for sure. Mm-hmm.
[00:36:56] Paul Oneid: Um, I did see some pretty significant changes personally in my hemoglobin.
[00:37:02] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm.
[00:37:02] Paul Oneid: So the last blood work that I did a few weeks ago, my hemoglobin was the highest it's ever been-
[00:37:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm ...
[00:37:07] Paul Oneid: on the lowest dosage of testosterone I've ever taken consistently.
[00:37:11] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. And that would match with endurance training, right?
[00:37:13] Paul Oneid: Right. Right. So I went, I went and donated blood. Um, and funny enough, I felt way better afterwards, obviously.
[00:37:19] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Um- I just donated blood two weeks ago 'cause my hematocrit was, my ferritin and everything was fine, but my hematocrit was, again, probably pushing the area of- 推しぎみ、huh? ... eh, starting to make me a little nervous.
[00:37:30] Paul Oneid: Yeah. It's like sludge. Yeah. My, um, I also was taking, um- So during, like, bodybuilding I was taking metformin.
[00:37:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm.
[00:37:41] Paul Oneid: So metformin does increase lactate production.
[00:37:44] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep.
[00:37:44] Paul Oneid: So I pulled that out, so that obviously helped a little bit. Um, and then the, with regards to the HRV, I think it was c- it was coming up into the 30s more consistently prior to vacation, but I did start taking Vyvanse.
[00:38:02] Paul Oneid: Um-
[00:38:02] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, that'll cr- from what I've seen- Hasn't moved
[00:38:05] Paul Oneid: it ... that one's- Hasn't
[00:38:06] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: moved it. Hasn't moved it?
[00:38:07] Paul Oneid: No.
[00:38:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So that one I haven't seen to be as bad, but the, the old school sympathomimetics like Adderall, things like that- Mm ... I've seen those crush people's HRV. Um, just 'cause- Yeah ... it's a sympathetic, it's a sympathetic stimulation, right?
[00:38:24] Paul Oneid: The first, the first week or so I was taking it I did notice that my heart rate at relative exertion was higher.
[00:38:31] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[00:38:32] Paul Oneid: Um,
[00:38:32] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: but- But that'll
[00:38:33] Paul Oneid: probably
[00:38:33] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: normalize ...
[00:38:33] Paul Oneid: but now it's normalized. Yeah. So it's totally fine. Um, yeah, so I just wanted to throw that out there- Yeah, yeah ... just like, "Hey, there's th- these are some confounding variables."
[00:38:42] Paul Oneid: One thing for me, like from a subjective standpoint, is when we started differentiating between the sessions and having sessions that were, like, deliberately very, very, very hard, and then sessions that were deliberately very, very easy, that's when I personally saw, like, the massive change because, like, I saw, I saw peak heart rates during training, like 180, 190 that I've never seen in my life.
[00:39:07] Speaker 4: Mm.
[00:39:08] Paul Oneid: And as soon as we started seeing those, even now in my VO2 sessions, I think we did... The VO2 session I did yesterday, I think my peak heart rate was 174 and I was- Oh, nice ... running, like, 6:31 m- pace for three minutes.
[00:39:24] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:39:24] Paul Oneid: Um, so I mean, m- the heart is definitely adapting. And my easy pace running, Cody, did you, did you pull up the, the efficiency?
[00:39:36] Cody Miller: Bro, I've got numbers for you.
[00:39:37] Paul Oneid: Okay, yeah. Yeah, I like the numbers. Th- throw this up. This is crazy, Mike.
[00:39:41] Cody Miller: Uh, okay. First- easy run that he did, which was a 30-minute run, continuous. Uh, this was the first r- no, no, this was the first. I actually pulled the first one. 10/27, October 27th, uh, he ran a 12:05 average pace for 30 minutes at 131 beats.
[00:40:08] Speaker 4: Hmm.
[00:40:08] Cody Miller: Okay? So I used something, basically just call it efficiency, uh, or you call it, like, s- speed over heart rate or whatever, and it's basically meters per minute divided by the, uh, beats per minute. Yeah. And you get s- just sort of like a, um, a, a meters per minute, and then kinda that output over some internal metric, the beats per, or, uh, the meters per minute divided by beats per minute.
[00:40:32] Cody Miller: And so it comes out to a 1.02 efficiency for that, uh, for that run. And then on March, I pulled March 16th was another easy run. Um, I try to control for the environment a little bit since it was, it got a little hotter. Uh, but both, both relatively cool runs, one October, one March. And March, he ran for 60 minutes and ran a 9:29 average pace-
[00:41:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm
[00:41:03] Cody Miller: at 139 beats. Wow. So eight, eight beats more.
[00:41:08] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[00:41:08] Cody Miller: But, uh, through- But
[00:41:09] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: that's a big difference in pace.
[00:41:11] Cody Miller: Yeah, two and a half minutes, over two and a half minutes faster, which is a 1.22 efficiency. Nice. So it's about a 20% increase in efficiency. Funny, uh, going from a 64 resting heart rate to a 52 resting heart rate is a 19% drop in resting heart rate.
[00:41:28] Cody Miller: Right.
[00:41:29] Paul Oneid: So it's almost one for one heart rate efficiency and resting heart rate change.
[00:41:33] Cody Miller: Drop in resting heart rate.
[00:41:34] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. And that makes sense, right? You would expect that to translate to at rest, because your stroke volume is better. Mm-hmm. So at the same given heart rate, you're putting out the same, you know, cardiac output.
[00:41:44] Cody Miller: Yeah. Hmm. I think that another, I think that Paul is right too with the, the harder runs being, uh, stimulating. I think there's something in terms of maybe you can kinda highlight some of the physiological differences. Uh, but the, the higher heart rate, you know, one part of that is becoming more sensitive to, uh, epinephrine.
[00:42:13] Cody Miller: Sure. Getting, getting heart rate up. Um, I think that plus, in my opinion, and you can probably comment on this as well, but the, the stroke volume, you know, some people say stroke volume peaks at, at a certain point, and then, like, dips and will go down. Um, I'll, what, from what I've seen, I don't know if stroke volume really goes down that much even at, at, you know, hard- at higher heart rates.
[00:42:41] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I don't think it does unless you-
[00:42:43] Cody Miller: From what I've seen, you
[00:42:46] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: know, it doesn't ... get crazy outliers. I don't think it does, is my bias, if I were to pick.
[00:42:50] Cody Miller: That's, that's my opinion. So you get like the, the stimulus of this really large stroke volume, um, and all the mechanics go with like maximal filling, and then you combine that with the, like, neurotransmitter side and getting much more, um, m- m- much more exposure to epinephrine.
[00:43:12] Cody Miller: Uh, and so, you know, probably a better relaxation in between these harder bouts. Um, and I think that Paul's right that, that, that really led to a lot of the, the kind of the huge cascade of results we saw right after that.
[00:43:28] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. I also wonder how much of it is the body just literally solving for the issue of no matter how you ever slice it, like cardiac output is gonna be the limiter at some point, at some time, that it realizes, oh-
[00:43:44] Speaker 4: Hmm
[00:43:44] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I can actually push heart rate up a little bit higher, right? What if you believe Noakes' Central Governor theory or whatever theory, that it's almost like the more you train at that higher level, so like for Paul, it'd be like training at heavier loads at more 1RMs, like you can push a little bit harder and extract a little bit more out of the muscle.
[00:44:04] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I wonder how much of the body realizes, okay, it is safe to kind of operate at this high heart rate, so we'll go a little bit higher, a little bit higher. A- again, that always has a limit, but I've seen that in pretty much everyone, where their max heart rate on a measured thing with a strap, everything else, you know, one person was, I think their max was 167 on, you know, what was legitimately probably a 9 1/2, maybe a true 10 RPE.
[00:44:30] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: They added like five to seven beats per minute over the course of, it was eight months.
[00:44:35] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:44:35] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You know, and I don't think it was just they were holding back or sandbagging or anything, and you could see it when we would really push them really hard, like not all the time, but a lot of time that max heart rate would go up.
[00:44:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And the confounder, I don't know if you've seen this too, is that if they were fatigued or their HRV score was a little bit high, their, they would not get close to a max heart rate.
[00:44:57] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm.
[00:44:57] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Right? So if you're a little bit on that- Yeah ... parasympathetic side too much, that'll actually, on that training day, that seems to cap, like, your max heart rate, too.
[00:45:07] Cody Miller: Typically, I would say nine times out of 10 that, uh, the, like, best way to know if you're fatigued is that you are unable to achieve heart rates that you would otherwise in, like, harder sessions.
[00:45:24] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep.
[00:45:24] Cody Miller: It's kind of like I'm- That's when I know
[00:45:25] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: you really are
[00:45:25] Cody Miller: getting- Yeah ... a bit
[00:45:26] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: cooked.
[00:45:27] Cody Miller: I, I'm pushing, I'm pushing and, you know, I'm going hard and, like, my heart rate just will not, will not move.
[00:45:34] Paul Oneid: Yeah. We saw that with the intervals.
[00:45:35] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[00:45:37] Paul Oneid: We saw that with the intervals, 'cause initially the interval session that Cody had programmed for me was, uh, push as hard as you can until your heart rate reaches X number.
[00:45:46] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Sure.
[00:45:47] Paul Oneid: And then recover until it reaches X number, and then go again.
[00:45:50] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep. I love that.
[00:45:51] Paul Oneid: And there were some sessions where- I remember one air bike session, Mike, I had to sprint on the air bike-
[00:45:57] Paul Oneid: for seven and a half minutes-
[00:45:59] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: What? ...
[00:46:00] Paul Oneid: to get my heart rate above 150.
[00:46:01] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, 'cause you're doing it by heart rate, not output. Ah.
[00:46:05] Paul Oneid: Yeah. So I was hammering on this air bike- ... trying to get my heart rate- Ugh ... to 154, and it took me seven and a half minutes.
[00:46:12] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. That's what I've seen. Like, if you really try to- Whoops.
[00:46:15] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: override it, you can kinda get there, but the time domain just gets- Yeah ... super prolonged.
[00:46:21] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[00:46:22] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Right? That's why that's a- I was, I was
[00:46:23] Speaker 4: w- I was the
[00:46:23] Paul Oneid: worst.
[00:46:24] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh. Yeah. And you feel like just absolute shit- I did it, though ... doing it. I
[00:46:27] Paul Oneid: did it. I did it.
[00:46:31] Cody Miller: That's why heart training i- heart rate training is, like, it's really good for low-intensity stuff.
[00:46:38] Cody Miller: Like, it's- Yeah ... it's great. It's awesome. As you get further and, and you get closer and closer to really either real maximums that you've seen or theoretical maximums that you've- Mm-hmm ... never even seen, heart rate becomes so unreliable because- Yeah ... the, like, those two things become decoupled. Mm-hmm. Heart rate and pace or output or whatever.
[00:47:04] Cody Miller: Um, because you're like you said before, your, your body is, uh, it, it's trying to figure out, like, how to achieve an output, and sometimes it does it through increased heart rate. Sometimes it does it through other means. And so, you know, sometimes you get up to, if you prescribe, prescribed, you know, f- foolishly in, in the past I've, I've prescribed, like, 90% heart rate or something.
[00:47:30] Cody Miller: This was years ago. Yeah. Years ago. You know, the- I made that
[00:47:32] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: mistake, too.
[00:47:33] Cody Miller: Get up to 90%. That's why I'm laughing. Yeah. Get up to 90% heart rate, and this was, like, with soccer, you know, back in the collegiate strength and conditioning days. And s- the, these girls are, like, cranking on this air bike, and- Yep
[00:47:45] Cody Miller: you're going for, like, like, dying. Like, sitting at, like, 88% or something, and you're just absolutely ... They're like, "Why isn't it going up?" And I'm like, "Uh, I guess 88's good enough, you know?" So, you know, a lot of times the, the heart rate at those higher percentages, it just does not act linearly like it does at- Yeah
[00:48:07] Cody Miller: lower heart rates. Not at all.
[00:48:09] Paul Oneid: If I can chime in with something- Yeah ... subjective too, like we're talking a lot about physiology, which I think is important. But one thing that I'm, I've noticed, especially in the, the more recent training, training months, probably the last two, three months where my mileage has really climbed up, is the mental side of things-
[00:48:29] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah
[00:48:29] Paul Oneid: for me, has played such a more important role, especially when we're talking about these high heart rate sessions. Because mentally, the signal that you get when your heart rate climbs is immediate panic. So you are, whether I'm on a treadmill doing intervals, which I find overrides that to some degree because it locks you into a pace-
[00:48:55] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm
[00:48:56] Paul Oneid: versus if I go to the track, as soon as my heart rate's getting up to that 165, when, more so like that 170 range, it's, "Oh my God, I can't sustain this. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God." And I think for, in, in earlier sessions, like previously, I wasn't used to that. So I would almost self-govern-
[00:49:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm ... based on the
[00:49:18] Paul Oneid: sens- like the, the mental sensation that I was getting.
[00:49:22] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep.
[00:49:23] Paul Oneid: So I think a big part of this, like, high heart rate conversation comes down to how comfortable are you with those feelings of anxiety at high heart rates? Plain and simple.
[00:49:35] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, I had a discussion with Dr. Nathan Jenkins about this too, and I get your guy's opinion on it. But I've had times in the past, like even now, like if I were to get on the, the rower and do a 2K, and if I was rested and fed and everything, I'm probably within about five to eight seconds of my all-time PR.
[00:49:54] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So not my top priority now, but I'm not that far off from where I wanna be. But I can tell you that it would absolutely suck, and I would hate my life because I am- I haven't done the hard intervals to be prepared to mentally know what it's like to suck for many, many minutes at a time. Do you know what I mean?
[00:50:15] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, you- Mm-hmm ... th- it's almost like it's a, a trainable quality where it can be just as hard- For sure ... but you, you have, like, more of the... It's like a skill almost. Like, I've lost the skill of being able to sit there in that suffering and watch the world go to, like, a pinhole where you're just looking at output only and being okay with it, no matter how much it sucks.
[00:50:39] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, I'm not trained in that portion of it right now, which sounds like a weird thing to be trained for.
[00:50:48] Paul Oneid: Well, w- so I, I kind of figured this out yesterday on the track actually, funny enough. Because, you know, we did a one-mile time trial, what, two months ago?
[00:50:59] Cody Miller: Yep.
[00:50:59] Paul Oneid: Almost. So I ran a 6.47 mile.
[00:51:02] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Nice.
[00:51:03] Paul Oneid: And I was stoked.
[00:51:04] Paul Oneid: I was like, "Okay," That's good ... "this is sick." Yeah, I f- I felt great about it. Um, but now, like, for a three-minute interval, I can go 6.30. Mm-hmm. And I'm questioning, I'm like, "Hmm, could I stretch that to six minutes if I only had to do one?"
[00:51:20] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:51:21] Paul Oneid: And I know because I know how that 6.47 fee- felt like at that time.
[00:51:28] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:51:28] Paul Oneid: I know for sure I could do it, and I know for sure I could probably get even lower. Just mentally- I'd have to do it. 'Cause this session that I did yesterday was four by three minutes hard. Three minutes, three minutes hard, three minutes easy. So that first one I know I still have three more.
[00:51:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-hmm.
[00:51:49] Paul Oneid: So I can't really sewer myself. But if I can match my output on the first one on the last one-
[00:51:56] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep ...
[00:51:56] Paul Oneid: well, now I know I'm making progress.
[00:51:59] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[00:52:00] Paul Oneid: Um, and I, I know for a f- like, so my first one was, was fast, then my second one was fastest, then my third one was a little bit slower, and my fourth one was faster than the third one.
[00:52:12] Paul Oneid: So for that fourth one, I knew it was the last one, I knew I could be okay suffering, I knew I was gonna be okay at that high heart rate, so that to me was just mental more than physical. 'Cause I remember, I, my s- cadence fell apart, I was just fucking trying to not to die. But I was like, "It's okay. I'm okay.
[00:52:31] Paul Oneid: I'm done after this."
[00:52:32] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[00:52:33] Paul Oneid: Um, so yeah, it's just that mental side of things with running. And I don't know, like, Cody and I have had this conversation before. Mike, I'd love your input. So I, I love thinking about the mental side of, of suffering when it comes to the physical activities that we endure. Like, so if I take power lifting, bodybuilding, and running.
[00:52:52] Paul Oneid: So with power lifting, it is a very intense form of suffering that is short in duration. In bodybuilding, it's a very subtle form of suffering, but it is 24 hours a day.
[00:53:06] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Everything sucks.
[00:53:07] Paul Oneid: Everything sucks. You have... You sit down in a chair, it's taking you three to six minutes to stand up out of that chair.
[00:53:14] Paul Oneid: You know? But the thing with power lifting is you can fail. You can miss a rep. In bodybuilding, you eat the food, you do the training, you do the cardio- Mm-hmm ... it'll get done, and you're just su- it sucks during. With running, it's different, because the suffering can be very intense, but you will never fail at running.
[00:53:37] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:38] Paul Oneid: Even, like, Cody, you talk about time to exhaustion a lot, which is a conversation I, I would, I would love to, to have after this one, is- Are you truly exhausted? Mm-hmm. Because if your pace slows down, but you're still going as hard as you possibly can, as hard as you possibly can could literally be one foot in front of the other.
[00:54:02] Cody Miller: You can always- Mm-hmm ... take another step.
[00:54:03] Paul Oneid: You can always take another step, which from a mental perspective with me and running has been something I've tried to really embrace, especially on, like, a 13-mile effort that I've never done before- Mm ... or trying to run an interval I've never done before. That, I find so incredibly fa- Like, the delineation between those three forms of suffering is, is similar, but just different enough to keep me really engaged.
[00:54:28] Cody Miller: If I could just one second. Yeah. What... And Paul talking the last, like, five minutes, I think, uh, it highlights, like, what I think high-level people do, is they turn everything into a game.
[00:54:42] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, for sure.
[00:54:43] Cody Miller: And this is like, Paul's like, "This interval, and then, like, the fourth one is like..." And it, it really is. Like, and this is the same way that I, I treat, I treat training, is that I keep structuring training in, in a way that is a game, and I try to structure it in a way that, like, it just biases that I can win it.
[00:55:03] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm. Just a little bit. It's gonna be tough. Like, it's gonna be a challenge, but, like, I'm, I'm gonna create it so that it's, it's right in that sweet spot. Not too hard, not too easy, but, like, right there where it's a good challenge and I can win. But it's, it's all a game. Like, all these, these intervals.
[00:55:19] Cody Miller: Like, and then once, uh, I find that once the game becomes a little stale, like, the same thing with if I'm running, uh, a block of Like, sets of five squats or something like that. Once I get to the point where I'm set, I'm, I've, like, worked myself up to, you know, heavier, heavier weights, and, like, once I get to the point where I, like, don't wanna go to the gym and do it because I know that, like, it's gonna take my eyes to bleed to, like, make it better to, to win at the game, to put more weight on the bar, then it's time to change the game, and I'll do something else, and then I'll, like, do the exact same thing over and over again.
[00:55:54] Cody Miller: Same thing with the intervals or the different structure of the endurance training, is that I can just change the game. I change the structure, change the constraints, and then, like, we play again. And, like, I change the constraints, we play, play, play, play, and change the constraints, and play, play, play. It's, like, basically the, like, ecological dynamics or constraint-based, uh, training.
[00:56:15] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. It's always... The, the way I've explained it to clients is with the weight training, with endurance stuff, it- wherever, it's... The couple principles I like are do the highest quality work you can and then repeat that. Now, that may be different per days and per goal and per what you have going on. And then move where you can.
[00:56:35] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So if you can't do something today and it's just not there, then okay, I bet you there's something else you could do. Or if that doesn't work, there's something else you could do. Like, for lifting, like- Mm-hmm ... wanna increase your bench press, maybe max isn't there. Maybe you could do reps. You could do a different lift.
[00:56:49] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You could maybe need to do contra specific. Maybe you need to work on rowing that day- Mm-hmm ... 'cause your lats aren't strong enough. Whatever, right? There's always these multiple constraints, and you're just trying to play the game of moving through and see does it transfer, right? Mm-hmm. I got better at this thing.
[00:57:05] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Ooh, does that transfer back to this? You know, which is... And I think all high-level people do that, and after you've been doing stuff for years and years, that's, I think that's what-
[00:57:17] Paul Oneid: Keeps you engaged ...
[00:57:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: keeps you going, right? Because I think clients I've worked with, they, they just get it in their head that there's only one way to do it.
[00:57:26] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And I'm like, "No, there's multiple ways to, to do stuff." Mm-hmm. And it's the game of figuring out what is the most efficient path, and what the most efficient path on physics is one way, but then you have your own constraints. You have your own mentality. You've got your own schedule. You've got all your other constraints that may not allow you to take that air quote perfect path.
[00:57:45] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm.
[00:57:46] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And that's the game, to figure out how you can get through those in the fastest manner and still make progress.
[00:57:53] Cody Miller: Do you remember w- uh, was it Corey Gregory? Do you remember that name?
[00:57:56] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-mm.
[00:57:57] Paul Oneid: Mm-mm. Yeah, I do.
[00:57:58] Cody Miller: Paul?
[00:57:59] Paul Oneid: The guy who, the guy who did Mus- did MusclePharm?
[00:58:01] Cody Miller: Yes, MusclePharm. Yeah.
[00:58:02] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, yeah. I know who you're talking about
[00:58:04] Cody Miller: now.
[00:58:04] Cody Miller: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he, but he d- he used to do, and, like, people used to make fun of him because he was like, "This is my 3RM safety squat with chains with a reverse band to a box," and it's like, people made fun of him 'cause it was like you're PR-ing every single time. Yeah. But at the same time, like- Yeah, I love that
[00:58:23] Cody Miller: but at the same time it was like, but he's, he's really engaged in the training because he's setting a personal best. You know, he's beating, he's winning at the game, you know, by adding all these constraints and changing the constraints of the exercise. And like, okay, yeah, maybe it's, you know, at some point it's, you can make fun of it a little bit.
[00:58:43] Cody Miller: But, like, he's, he's winning. He's gaining self-efficacy because he's having all these mastery experiences. He's winning at the thing that he's doing. Like, I think that's a viable way to train.
[00:58:55] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, in my notebook now for my goal to pick up the inch dumbbell is, I, I think I've got 13 different permutations of it- Mm-hmm
[00:59:05] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: of, you know, the inch with counterweight, the inch with straps- ... small straps, short straps, the 135 replica with a 2 1/2, a five pound, a 10 pound counterweight, tilt, no tilt, because that's my main goal, and I'm just looking and tracking to see, okay, what can I do today? Can I make progress here? Oh, cool. Okay, I could do this lift.
[00:59:27] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And, like yesterday with tilt on the 135, I got five singles. Most I've ever done before was four. So great. Mm-hmm. I was happy. That's, that's awesome. That's, that's progress. But I think once you get to kind of an intermediate, semi-advanced, whatever stage, that i- that is progress, right? Yeah. That's the old Ed Coan thing of like, you know, if you can just add a couple reps, a little bit of weight, more volume, all those things over time, you compound that with violent consistency over time, like, you're gonna get to your goal.
[00:59:57] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: It's just- Mm-hmm ... you're rate limited on time is the only thing.
[01:00:02] Paul Oneid: Yeah. Good way to think about it. Um, one of the things that I wanted to-
[01:00:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, you were asking about time to exhaustion? Was that one of your questions
[01:00:10] Paul Oneid: you said? Yeah. So, like, I wanna, I wanna talk about that 'cause this is something that I've actually never seen anyone talk about the way that Cody talks about it.
[01:00:17] Paul Oneid: Because most people talk about heart rate zones or they talk about pace. So like, oh, you wanna do X amount of, of time at X pace or whatever it might be. Um, but Cody, Cody has this really nuanced way of looking at, you know, different thresholds and different paces and how much time to exhaustion, and then that's what he uses to structure the inter- intervals of his sessions.
[01:00:40] Cody Miller: Mm.
[01:00:41] Paul Oneid: Um, so yeah, I just wanna kinda pitch that out. Throw it o- throw it over the plate. Knock it out of the park.
[01:00:47] Cody Miller: Yeah. I'll, I'll try to do my best. Uh, so endurance training. In my mind, you have two things. You have an output, and you have time, okay? What is the relationship between time and your output? Output could be your pace, could be power, could be, uh, a few other things.
[01:01:07] Cody Miller: But the relationship between time and output in terms of an endurance training, if you're looking at biking or running or any of those things, it's a, it's a hyperbolic relationship, and you can fit it to a power. It can be a power relationship, a power curve. So if I know that, then I can start to look at some, maybe some nerdier things like how does the pace change with an increased duration?
[01:01:43] Cody Miller: Um, so know that if you have a, you know, a 10-minute, uh, duration and you can hold six minutes per mile at that pace, if I doubled the, uh, time, say I go 20 minutes, you don't also double the pace, right? Yep. It's, it increases non-linearly. The, the duration, uh, for 20 minutes, you might be able to hold, you know, seven minutes per mile.
[01:02:14] Cody Miller: So you're looking at very small increases, uh, in pace or, or output for relatively large increases in, in time. And so w- what I can do and, and what a lot of people have done before me is model this out and, and look at, you know, what is... This is why we did a time trial with, with Paul for a mile, and then we did, uh, a, a 5K, which he did- Mm
[01:02:40] Cody Miller: 23:54, which is like 7:42 pace for his 5K. Which I just
[01:02:45] Paul Oneid: did in training. I just did a 23:23.
[01:02:48] Cody Miller: That's true, yeah. Yeah. Doing an interval.
[01:02:51] Paul Oneid: In training, I just did that, yeah.
[01:02:53] Cody Miller: And so I can, I can look at these things and- Kind of map out kind of the important duration. So on either end of the, uh, of this hyperbolic or this power curve, the lines flatten out.
[01:03:08] Cody Miller: So if I imagine like, it's like almost like a L or, or you know, a sideways, I guess an L would be the best way to put it, or like a really wide U. And, uh, so the, the... At some point, there's no increase in duration that really changes pace, or there's no decrease in duration that really changes pace. So like my, my 100 meter time and my 200 meter time are, are like my, my velocity are relatively the same.
[01:03:37] Cody Miller: There's really not-- I've doubled the distance, but really the, the, the time of my 100 meters and my 200 meters is basically the same. Okay, but as I keep going, then if I go from my 800 to my, you know, mile, you know, there's big changes in my 400 to mile, 800 mile whatever. Um, there, there's big changes in the, in, in the, in the velocity, and you keep going all the way out to, uh, let's say an hour and a half to three hours or so.
[01:04:07] Cody Miller: Uh, even a- an hour, hour and a half, you keep going in duration, it's basically indefinite. You know, there's basically no change in pace. So the way I model running is I target the, the first kind of quality sect- uh, section is 1.5 to 3 hours, which most people will say is your veloci- or your, uh, ventilatory threshold one, first ventilatory threshold, and then go all the way to VO2 max, which is like between Five to 10 minutes, six to 12 minutes, somewhere in there.
[01:04:41] Cody Miller: Uh, and, and you can look at this several different ways. I like to name them with physiological landmarks, just so people kind of understand and have some reference. So like lactate threshold, like 40 to 60 minutes, you know, or, um, VT1's one and a half to three hours. VT2, which is basically lactate threshold, but maybe a little faster, I'll, I'll put at like 20 to 30 minutes.
[01:05:06] Cody Miller: Uh, and then VO2 max, like five to 10 minutes. And, and all I do is I just plot out and I, I use a percentage of those times to exhaustion to create intervals. Hmm. And Paul S- Paul Skiba does the exact same thing, but he uses W balance, which is like super nerdy, critical speed, critical power.
[01:05:25] Speaker 4: Critical
[01:05:26] Cody Miller: power, yeah.
[01:05:26] Cody Miller: Um, yeah, another s- super nerdy thing. Um, but basically all it comes down to is if I give you a four by... If I, if I have Paul doing a four by three minute interval, um, it's 12 minutes total. There's, there's on- he can only go so fast for that four by three. And if I just understand that a four by three is not very different than a four by five, you know, it's 12 to 20 minutes, not gonna be that big of a difference.
[01:05:57] Cody Miller: But if I understand that a four by three versus a four by eight in 32 minutes, now we're talking about some changes. Uh, so if I understand the difference between how to structure, like we were talking about some of these constraints, then I could get a different output.
[01:06:14] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[01:06:14] Cody Miller: Uh, a- and so that really is what, what it comes down to, is if you can just, I don't really need to know someone's lactate threshold, I don't need to know their VO2 max.
[01:06:24] Cody Miller: Those things can be useful. They can be good to know. Sure. But all I have to do is set the constraints in a way to produce the result I want, and, and I do that by giving you, uh, based on the time to exhaustion or these different timeframes, I give you intervals. And- I take the approach of kind of a, a Bondarchuk sort of like we're gonna run this interval, and then we're gonna run it again, and we're gonna see what your response is.
[01:06:51] Cody Miller: And then we're gonna run it again, and we're gonna see what your response is. And basically, we're gonna keep going and keep getting better at this interval until, uh, you don't get better at it, or you get bored at it, and you don't wanna do it, and you, like, hate training because you, you know, it's, it's kinda scary to go any faster, and then we change the constraint.
[01:07:10] Cody Miller: Um, so time to exhaustion is just a, a very clean way to, for me to program because the whole, like, time at lactate threshold when I don't really know what lactate threshold is, you know, or I'm using some sort of proxy, or, you know, I u- have to use a very invasive method like I'm doing a prick. Like, all of these things, there's just too much, uh, there's too much noise around it, or it's too invasive, or there, there's just a lot of problems with measurement.
[01:07:42] Cody Miller: Um, so instead of doing that, you know, it's basically like you have a constraint, and you're gonna work hard at that constraint for that work interval. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna do easy training in between until we get to the next time we're gonna be fresh enough to do more hard training.
[01:08:01] Cody Miller: And I mean, that's basically it in a nutshell. And we change it up when you get bored or you, you know, you start sucking
[01:08:10] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: No, that's, that's cool. I really like that. That reminds me of... So one of the programs I do, I just called, uh, QDR, so quality density repeats.
[01:08:18] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[01:08:19] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So for someone who's doing shorter mileage, like if they wanna increase their mile time or three-mile time or 5K, but they're super...
[01:08:26] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: They're relatively trained, but they're super limited on time.
[01:08:29] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[01:08:29] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You just figure out, okay, what is your time goal? Let's say you wanna run a seven-minute mile, right? Yes. And they're like, go run. Oh, oh, wait. You can't run a seven-minute mile. It was a 10-minute mile. Okay. What, what is the shortest distance you can run at a seven-minute mile pace?
[01:08:44] Cody Miller: Seven-minute mile. I love
[01:08:45] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: that. And then you do that, and you rest completely, and you do it again. You rest completely, and you do it, and we just keep stacking volume. And then over time, oh, shocker- Mm-hmm ... like you were saying, you can run a little bit longer at that same pace again. Mm-hmm. So we lengthen it back out, and we just cycle again.
[01:09:00] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And there's other work and, you know, other stuff you can throw in with that, too. Um, and then the profile you have is very similar to, like, the, if you've seen the Kurt Jensen profile, um, which is some Scandinavian research. My buddy- No, I'm familiar ... Hans Jaef applied it to, uh, rowing. And so what he did with, with rowing is you can just map basically your bioenergetics.
[01:09:21] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So you'll have 100 meters, you'll have a 30-second wingate, 60-second wingate- Mm-hmm ... 180 seconds, a 2K, and basically a 20-minute capacity. There's also a 60-minute test in the formal one- Mm ... but, fuck, no one's wanting to do 60 minutes on a rower.
[01:09:35] Cody Miller: That would be terrible.
[01:09:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Horrible. I've never done it. I've never even tried.
[01:09:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I cap it at 6K. That's, that's, that's even plenty different. But you can look at the curve then and see- Yeah ... and there's normalized ratios from the research of, okay, are you really... Your 2K is good, but you're sucking on the power end, or your lactate sucks, or maybe like in lifters, a lot of times I see that's good, but then everything drops, and then at the 20-minute mark, you're just, you're, like- Mm-hmm
[01:10:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: way below. So that's telling me, oh, okay, the aerobic capacity end is where you're missing. Yeah. And so similar to what you were talking about, that tells you where you can structure more of your training from a needs basis.
[01:10:14] Cody Miller: Yep. Super nerdy time. So what I'll actually do is I'll take those points, like I'll take that mile and that, uh, that, that 5K or five-mile or whatever.
[01:10:24] Cody Miller: I'll plot them, but I'll take the, the base 10 logarithm of them.
[01:10:28] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm.
[01:10:29] Cody Miller: So what happens is they end up being a straight line.
[01:10:32] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh,
[01:10:33] Cody Miller: yeah, because you're- Is what happens on a- ...
[01:10:34] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: converting.
[01:10:34] Cody Miller: Yeah. A power... Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[01:10:36] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, yeah,
[01:10:36] Cody Miller: yeah. Yeah, so- 'Cause it's...
[01:10:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I got it.
[01:10:38] Cody Miller: Yeah. So power- Oh, that's
[01:10:39] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: cool ...
[01:10:40] Cody Miller: logarithm. So then I can just look at the decay rate.
[01:10:43] Cody Miller: I can look at the tilt- And so actually- Yeah, so you're looking at the
[01:10:46] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: slope ...
[01:10:47] Cody Miller: uh, you're looking at the slope.
[01:10:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:48] Cody Miller: Right? And you're just comparing, like, how much am I fatiguing over time?
[01:10:53] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[01:10:53] Cody Miller: Um, and so Paul's actually, I just, I just ran a- actually, I might have to do it with the 23, 23. Uh, it probably won't change a whole lot, but his, his, um, his, his decay, his t- his slope is not i- uh, greater than, like, the normal, normal decay that we would see.
[01:11:10] Speaker 4: Hmm.
[01:11:10] Cody Miller: Um, and so what I can do is I can s- I can... There's two things that I would do. You look at, like, is this person fast? Like, from an objective standpoint, and then you say, "Okay, did, does their pace decay?"
[01:11:22] Speaker 4: Mm,
[01:11:23] Cody Miller: yep. There's two things, because if they're objectively fast and their pace doesn't decay, awesome.
[01:11:28] Cody Miller: Like, I can run a- Yeah, you're good. I r- I run a four-minute mile, and my marathon's at 4:45.
[01:11:34] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[01:11:35] Cody Miller: Good. All right. Are you slow? Okay, you are slow. You don't have a bad decay rate. We need to get faster.
[01:11:42] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep.
[01:11:42] Cody Miller: So part of why, uh, Paul's been doing eight by one and then a four by three is trying to induce more speed.
[01:11:50] Cody Miller: Um- Yep ... and so you can basically use those two things, and there's a few ways you can objectively say, you know, like, is someone fast, uh, and use, like, really shorter timeframes, but that's basically, you know, a- another way to profile and, uh, create some, like, individualization off of that stuff.
[01:12:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I like that.
[01:12:08] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And you've probably seen the research on, like, the durability scores and stuff they're doing with athletes now, which in my opinion of that research is, it's just the decay rate.
[01:12:17] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[01:12:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: I'm like, okay. Like, I did this years ago, and a buddy of mine pointed it out to me, and he's like, "Hey, did you know there's, like, research on this now?
[01:12:25] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: They call it durability." I'm like-
[01:12:27] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm ... "
[01:12:27] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, you mean just your decay rate over time?" What- He's like- You
[01:12:30] Speaker 4: mean just-
[01:12:30] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. I'm like, "Oh, okay. I thought people did this all the time."
[01:12:35] Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. I'm
[01:12:37] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: a- 'Cause if you start fast and you just go like that, you're not gonna do well. Even if you go really slow and your line's flat, okay, now you're just slow, right?
[01:12:47] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-hmm. Right. But, like- And what- ... the good people are fast, and they just don't drop much during the, the course of the entire time.
[01:12:53] Cody Miller: Exactly.
[01:12:54] Paul Oneid: Yeah. One, one of the things that I've found with the way that Cody structures the, the time to exhaustion stuff is that because he's done the run modeling on me, and he- we know kinda where my paces should be at these given time domains, when we start a new interval, he'll tell me, "Hey, this is where I want you to start your paces at."
[01:13:13] Paul Oneid: Mm. Yeah,
[01:13:14] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: yeah.
[01:13:15] Paul Oneid: And then progress as you can.
[01:13:17] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yep.
[01:13:18] Paul Oneid: So I remember when we started our three by 10-minute interval, so 10 minutes hard, five minutes easy times three, he's like, "Start it at 8:30." So we've run that for what? Five weeks, four weeks, something like that. Mm-hmm. My last 10-minute interval of my workout on Tuesday, I ran it at 7:19.
[01:13:38] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Nice.
[01:13:39] Cody Miller: Which is bananas.
[01:13:40] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, that's a huge increase.
[01:13:42] Paul Oneid: Yeah, so I mean, it, it's just giving me... Basically creating a runway of progression based on some sort of predictive variable, and letting me treat it like a game.
[01:13:50] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm. And you get all of these, like, you keep getting faster. Mm-hmm. And from my, from my standpoint, s- like, one of the key, if not the key principle, is mastery experiences.
[01:14:02] Cody Miller: Mm. Is Bandura's, Bandura's self-e- efficacy.
[01:14:05] Speaker 4: Yeah,
[01:14:06] Cody Miller: yeah. I'm just gathering mastery experiences. Oh, I'm gonna hit this interval. It's a challenge. I conquered it. Hit this ch- I'm gonna do it the same thing again. Conquered it. Do the same thing again. Conquered it. Do the same thing. Conquered it. If you keep doing that, what can't you do?
[01:14:19] Cody Miller: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, if I just keep going and doing the... If Paul just keeps doing these intervals and j- just keeps getting faster, it's like, what can I not set my mind to and just accomplish?
[01:14:29] Paul Oneid: I will say, when I did that three by 10 minute in Mexico and absolutely died- 'Cause it, it was so humid, and I did it on the treadmill in the hotel gym.
[01:14:41] Paul Oneid: Oh, God. And the attendant wouldn't let me take my shirt off. So I was just, I was literally d- the, the treadmill was soaked. There was no- ... dry spot left on the tread. And I was like, "This is awful." I think I went, like, 7:30, 7:30, and then, like, 7:55.
[01:15:00] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[01:15:00] Paul Oneid: And then this week, I did a 7:19.
[01:15:03] Cody Miller: That, yeah. And that's- So I'm
[01:15:04] Paul Oneid: like, "Okay, thank you.
[01:15:05] Paul Oneid: I'm not, I'm not getting- ... unfit."
[01:15:07] Cody Miller: When you do that, you're just like, "Am I a fraud?
[01:15:10] Paul Oneid: In high school?" Yeah, am I a fraud?
[01:15:12] Cody Miller: As, as, like, have, do I have the wind at my back this whole time, or what?
[01:15:16] Paul Oneid: I don't know. But I mean, what we're doing's working, 'cause I'm running six days a week. I feel great, and my mileage last week was 43 miles.
[01:15:23] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[01:15:24] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, nice. That's great.
[01:15:26] Paul Oneid: Yeah. Paul's
[01:15:27] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: a
[01:15:27] Cody Miller: stud
[01:15:27] Paul Oneid: Crazy.
[01:15:29] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And that was similar how I program intervals, like if you're doing a rower or assault bike, like the old 30/30 thing for people to start at I think is just the stupidest thing ever. 'Cause like the only way you're gonna complete any volume on that is to have a really low output.
[01:15:43] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-hmm. So I'm like, just hit a decent output, take as much time off as you need to hit 5 to 10% of that output again. Mm-hmm. So if you hit 300 watts, okay great, I don't wanna see 200 watts on the next one, and then 100 wat- I don't wanna see you just pound your dick into the dirt all day. Mm-hmm. Like I wanna see you actually get better at something.
[01:16:03] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[01:16:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So like take five-minute rest. I don't care. Oh, you came back and you got 301? Great. Uh, let's see if you can do a third. Let's see if you can do a fourth. And even with long rest periods, as you guys know, at some point it'll just go off a cliff. Oh shit, 220. Yeah. Okay, I'm done for today.
[01:16:20] Cody Miller: Mm-hmm.
[01:16:20] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And the next week, oh, could I do five rounds at high quality?
[01:16:23] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Could I do six? And I'll have people work up to like 10. Great, now the game is we bump the output a little bit or we start cutting your rest period a little bit, right? We're trying to do density.
[01:16:33] Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
[01:16:33] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And you just keep repeating and cycling that just over and over. And the cool part is, like your output on that day will dictate your performance.
[01:16:42] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: So it's, it's like an au- automatic auto-regulatory. So like the days you're not there you might only make like four rounds. Great, like you got some high quality work in. D- don't bother trying to push harder today. Today is not the day. Yeah. And then they'll come back and they're like, "Oh my God, I did this last week, and now I hit like nine rounds at like the same, you know, wattage."
[01:17:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And it, it's just this... People think it's gonna be linear, and it's just, it's just not linear. No.
[01:17:10] Cody Miller: No, not at all. Yeah, I, I think that you touched on the game, you know, part, and we've, we've talked about that a lot. Um, and Paul was- just made a post like, "There's no rules."
[01:17:22] Paul Oneid: There's no rules. Correct, yeah.
[01:17:23] Cody Miller: Whether you do density, you...
[01:17:25] Cody Miller: You know, it, it's interesting because a lot of times I'm at, I set my computer and it's like, okay- Do I increase the number of reps, or do I make them go faster? It's like, well, I don't think it really matters. I think novelty is the most important part, is that you're making the workouts, you know, a little bit different than-
[01:17:46] Speaker 4: Sure
[01:17:46] Cody Miller: than they saw before. They're s- getting some sort of novel stimulus.
[01:17:50] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-hmm.
[01:17:50] Cody Miller: Um, but, you know, kinda like you were talking about is it, you have to be mindful of the output, and I think some people are not. They, they don't respect that. They think just, like, get tired.
[01:18:01] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: No, they don't track any output- No ... which is my pet peeve.
[01:18:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, yeah. I've had frigging people send me metabolic heart data, all this stuff, and they're like, "I can't figure out what's going on with this athlete." I'm looking through all this pages of data. I'm like, "Where's the frigging output?" Like, well, well, how fast did they run? How, what was their road time? What was their bike time?
[01:18:17] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, g- Or like- Were they actually doing anything better? I don't give a shit about your lactate threshold- Yeah ... is then. Like-
[01:18:23] Cody Miller: Yeah, they're like, "Is that important?"
[01:18:25] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And they're like, "Oh, I didn't look at it." I'm like- ... "Oh my gosh."
[01:18:29] Cody Miller: Yeah. A lot of p- outputs are, you know, without the, without the outputs, what does a, you know, 50 milliliters per kilogram square VO2 max really mean, you know?
[01:18:43] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[01:18:44] Cody Miller: If you don't know how fast you were going. Right.
[01:18:46] Paul Oneid: Which is my VO2 max.
[01:18:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, you're
[01:18:49] Paul Oneid: a 50? 50, I'm, according to Garmin.
[01:18:52] Cody Miller: That's pretty good.
[01:18:52] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, that's good. That's good. Yeah.
[01:18:56] Paul Oneid: It's getting there.
[01:18:56] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And I think that's the purpose- There's a lot of
[01:18:57] Paul Oneid: kilograms here.
[01:18:58] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Just emphasizing to clients, like, they often laugh at me 'cause they'll be like, "Oh, I did this intervals, I did this, and I did that.
[01:19:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Like, I don't know if it's working." I'm like, "Is it better? Like, what you did today, is it better than what you did two or three weeks ago?" And they're like, "Well, yeah." "Then you're good." Like, "You're going in the right direction." And so now they'll, like, after a while they'll kinda have answer their question of, "Well, I only did this, this, and this, and you're gonna ask me if it's better.
[01:19:27] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: It was, so I guess I'm okay." And that's, like, their whole email. Nice. Okay.
[01:19:34] Cody Miller: Yeah.
[01:19:34] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Nice. Cool. As we wrap up, any other points you wanted to cover, things you should talk about?
[01:19:41] Cody Miller: I think I'm good, Paul.
[01:19:42] Paul Oneid: I'm good. I'm
[01:19:44] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: good. The only question I had- Good talk ... I had for you, Paul, was describe the, we talked a little bit about this when we met in person.
[01:19:50] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Describe the, just the day-to-day difference of how you feel now, just kinda energy wise, cognition wise, after having done more aerobic stuff to back when you didn't do as much aerobic stuff. Have you noticed anything, like, just day-to-day differences?
[01:20:09] Paul Oneid: Um- I, it's tough. It, it's tough- Yeah ... because- I know
[01:20:14] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: there's a lot of variables in that, too
[01:20:15] Paul Oneid: there's a lot of variables involved. Um, I will say that physically I feel fantastic. Like, my mobility's better. Uh, my recovery between sets and sessions is better. The amount of training that I'm actually able to tolerate is ridiculous. Mm-hmm. Um, but, like, I mean, day to day we've got a lot of stuff going on.
[01:20:35] Paul Oneid: Yeah. So it's been kind of challenging to, to equate that. But I will definitely say that I have never felt healthier. Like, I just- Hmm ... feel healthy. Yeah. Um, I was actually thinking I probably need to, to, uh, reduce the pressure on my CPAP. Um-
[01:20:52] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, 'cause that'll change.
[01:20:53] Paul Oneid: Yeah. I think, and- Yeah ... I think that's been, been something that I need to, need to have done for a while.
[01:20:58] Paul Oneid: Starting to get, like, dry mouth and stuff like that.
[01:21:00] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Mm-hmm.
[01:21:00] Paul Oneid: But, uh, yeah, I feel great. And, you know, my mom's here visiting. She's like, "You look, you look so calm. You look so..." I'm like, "My HRV- ... is 26." So,
[01:21:16] Paul Oneid: yeah. No, overall I feel, I feel great. I'm loving the new challenge. I'm loving, you know, being a beginner at something again. Um, I'm kinda worried if I ever get good at this running thing- ... that I'll start to be more competitive with it, but- ... for now I'm just trying to go do my best and, you know, for this trail race on, uh, in, in a couple weeks.
[01:21:37] Paul Oneid: And if I run, when I run, you know, 30K or 18 miles, it'll be the mo- the longest I've ever run, and I'm gonna go run in the desert with my friend at the end of the day.
[01:21:47] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah.
[01:21:48] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[01:21:48] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, that's cool. It's like- Yeah. The reason I was asking, too, is, like, I've noticed for myself, like, just my overall energy day to day, if my aerobic stuff doesn't go off a cliff, I just feel so much better.
[01:22:01] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And the amount of clients I've had come back with, like, their VO2 max was in the low 20s, just even getting it- Oof ... into the high 30s, low 40s. Yeah. They're like, "Oh my God, I feel so much better. I can play with my kids now. My sleep is better. I can concentrate during the day." It's just, it's such a-
[01:22:17] Paul Oneid: That's
[01:22:17] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: ridiculous
[01:22:17] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: a slow decline that they, they know they don't feel good, they know they have low energy, but it doesn't equate that it could be something as, air quotes, as simple as just your aerobic system just sucks. Mm-hmm. It wasn't just bad, it was bad. Mm-hmm. You know? But it, you don't know what you don't know. And when it's such a gradual decline, like, you don't notice it kinda dropping because it's this insidious, it's almost like creeping obesity but the wrong direction.
[01:22:45] Paul Oneid: Mm-hmm.
[01:22:45] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You know, clients are like, "Oh my God, I didn't realize I gained 30 pounds." It's like, yeah, that probably happened over, like, five years, right?
[01:22:52] Paul Oneid: Mm-hmm.
[01:22:52] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: You know, you just have this slow decline in the background that's just super hard to notice until you get to the point where it's significantly better and you think back and you're like, "Oh, yeah, this is so much better now."
[01:23:04] Paul Oneid: Yeah. For sure. For sure.
[01:23:08] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much. Appreciate it. Um, give out all your info, where people can find you, what you got going on, all that kind of good stuff. Go
[01:23:17] Cody Miller: ahead, Cody. Go ahead, Paul. Oh, okay, I go. @cody- or sorry, I don't even know my handle. @coach Instagram, @coach.cody.miller, I think that's it, uh- There you go
[01:23:29] Cody Miller: is Insta. That's probably the best way. But, uh, yeah, it's been a great talk. Really enjoyed, you know, the past hour plus talking to you guys. Obviously super passionate about this stuff. I like ner- nerding out. I don't get these conversations every day. So-
[01:23:41] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Oh, yeah ... thank you. This was fun. No, thank you. Thank you for being here.
[01:23:44] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Paul?
[01:23:44] Paul Oneid: Yeah. You gu- you guys can find me @pauloneid on Instagram or, uh, if you wanna follow my- my podcast, the Coaches Corner U podcast, it's @coachescorneru on Instagram. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, all those other places. And if you're interested in some continuing education with Coaches Corner U, it's www.coachescorneru.com.
[01:24:03] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: And you have a newsletter I know. I'll plug your newsletter
[01:24:05] Paul Oneid: for you. I do have a newsletter. Yes, I do have a newsletter. How do
[01:24:07] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: they sign up?
[01:24:08] Paul Oneid: Uh, you can just go to www.coachescorneru.com, sign up for the newsletter. I'm actually, uh, aiming for a August 1st relaunch of the Coaches Corner U community.
[01:24:18] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Hmm.
[01:24:18] Paul Oneid: So I'm really excited about that, too.
[01:24:21] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Cool. Awesome.
[01:24:22] Paul Oneid: Yeah.
[01:24:22] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Thank you guys so much for all your time today. This was super fun. I really appreciate it.
[01:24:26] Paul Oneid: My pleasure, dude. Thanks for having us. Thank
[01:24:27] Speaker 4: you.
[01:24:28] Dr. Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Thank you