Episode 179 - How Masters Triathletes Can Stay Fast After 50 with Joe Friel

How Masters Triathletes Can Stay Fast After 50 with Joe Friel

In a world obsessed with youth in sports, there's a quiet revolution happening among athletes in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. These masters of endurance aren't just participating – they're demolishing expectations and rewriting the rules of athletic performance. It’s fantastic to see and gives me hope for my future as an ageing athlete. 

That makes me sound old when in reality, I’m only just reaching my 40th year. I still feel like I can train in a similar way to what I did in my 20s - going hard with limited recovery. Though, perhaps that isn’t the smartest way to train as I age.

When I recently sat down with Joe Friel, the author behind 'Fast After 50', he revealed insights so powerful they're transforming how we think about aging in endurance sports. What he shared isn't just another training theory – it's a blueprint for athletic longevity that's backed by decades of coaching elite masters athletes.

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Episode Transcription

Episode 179 - How Masters Triathletes Can Stay Fast After 50 with Joe Friel

Welcome to the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. The show designed to serve you up evidence-based sports nutrition advice from the experts. Hi, I'm your host Taryn, Accredited Practicing Dietitian, Advanced Sports Dietitian and founder of Dietitian Approved. Listen as I break down the latest evidence to give you practical, easy-to-digest strategies to train hard, recover faster and perform at your best. You have so much potential, and I want to help you unlock that with the power of nutrition. Let's get into it.

Taryn: [00:00:00] If you're a master's athlete, chances are you've felt some of the changes that come with training in your forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond. recovery might take a little longer. Muscle maintenance becomes so much more important as we get older and just balancing training with all the stuff that real life can throw at you can sometimes be a challenge.

But that doesn't mean you need to slow down with the right approach to training. Obviously nutrition, you can stay strong and competitive and keep smashing your goals well into your later years in the sport. In last week's podcast episode, I took a deep dive into key nutrients for Masters athletes, so go back and take a listen to that [00:01:00] episode

if you haven't heard it already. But today, I'm joined by a very special guest, someone that has been an absolute game changer in endurance sports coaching to help with the training side of things. So I'd love to introduce you to Joel Friel, a lifelong athlete, and a coach for what, more than four decades now.

One of the co-founders of Training Peaks, an author of a fantastic book that you should read if you haven't already fast after 50. He is here to share. Some of his insights on how masters athletes can continue to train, race and perform at a really high level as we get older.

So whether you're training for your next big race or just wanna keep moving, then this episode's gonna be jam packed with some practical advice to help you stay strong, stay fast, and stay in the game as a master's athlete.

Joe: Hi Darren. Thanks for having me on. 

Taryn: Oh, I'm so excited to talk to you,and really help some of our listeners with training as we get older. A lot of the athletes that I work with in the Triathlon Nutrition [00:02:00] Academy program are in the master's category, and it's so exciting to have. Key nutrients that we can help as we get older, but also some of the training things that we need, and that's what you're here to help me with.

So I'm very excited to pick your brain and if you're happy and you're comfy, let's dive straight in. The first thing that I wanna understand is our physiology. And how it changes as a master's athlete from a trainer's perspective. So how does training need to evolve as a triathlete, as we move into our forties, our fifties and beyond?

Joe: Yeah, I'm in the beyond category, so I've had some experience with all of this. the first thing that changes is really quite obvious, I think, to the athlete. They realize this, every time they go out for an even moderately hard workout as they age up is that they're breathing harder.

Aerobic capacity is changing. that's why they're breathing harder. it, it drops something like, five to 15% every decade

Taryn: [00:03:00] Wow.

Joe: and that starts happening usually sometime around your mid thirties for some athletes, low thirties, some other athletes, high thirties. So VO two max starts going down. It's roughly, if you look at that in terms of years, it's, you know, half point to one and a half points, percentage points per year, which is considerable. That really takes a big toll on the athletes,performance, probably more than anything else. VO two Max capacity has been, uh. Determined, I guess is the right word, I guess is the right word, to, to be the best, the best marker of, of your, of your, uh, fitness as you get older. Uh, and that's, that's the one that's gonna decline the most. It's going down for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is the max heart rate is, is dropping as you get older.

Uh, for some athletes that begins to happen in their, in their forties. For other athletes, you don't experience it until their sixties. But it's gonna go down. Uh, it's definitely going to go down as you age up. And that's is one thing that really causes the O2 max to drop is, is that going down at the same time as that's going down [00:04:00] because of many, many years in the sport, the athletes building up pretty thick walls to the heart.

And, and one chamber of the heart is critical here. It's called the left ventricle. The left ventricle is what, uh, pushes all the blood out to the body, to all the muscles. And, uh, so what's happening is as that wall gets thicker, the, the, the chain, actually, the, the chamber actually gets a little bit larger, but the walls are getting thicker than us getting larger.

Consequently, there's enough less blood to be pumped per pump of the blood of, of the, of the left ventricle. And so we can't combine that with the max heart rate declining. And we've got a, we've got a double whammy going on, and then there are all kinds of things downstream that are happening also as you get older.

Um. And a lot of, most of these things have to do with inconsistent training. So if the athlete doesn't train as much as they did when they were younger, they're gonna experience a lot more decline in VO two max because all these other downstream things are going to go south also. And as they go south, then the athlete is, is having, uh, uh, [00:05:00] significant, really measurable, remarkable changes in their VO two max.

So that's, that's the biggest change and occurring along with that. Something you already mentioned, which is muscle. There is a, a change in, uh, in power. The athlete's power begins to drop. That power affects not only cycling power obviously, but also everything you do in the sport, running, swimming.

Anything else you may be doing in cross training that power declines. There's a very slight change in efficiency going on. This is the one good news for the aging athlete. As you get older, your efficiency doesn't decline nearly as much as VO two max does. VO two max is dropping really rapidly.

Efficiency is not moving down all that fast. It, it's actually staying fairly, fairly high. Efficiency means how much oxygen it takes the athlete. To go a certain distance, how far at a certain pace. So if I have you run at a certain pace for a kilometer, how much [00:06:00] oxygen did you use? The more oxygen you use, the less efficient you are.

The less oxygen you use, the more efficient you are. That's the one really good piece of good news is it doesn't change as much as the other probably because we're staying very active as we get older. We've got many years, decades in the sport, and because of that, our skills, which is where the, at the base, the foundation of efficiency, stay pretty good throughout life.

They, they're gonna lose, they lost somewhat probably because the loss of muscle mass, 

but it's not gonna go down as rapidly as the other change of power, for example,  or max heart rate or VO two max. Greater risk of injury When you get older,  we can talk about that later on as a separate item because it's really important to the athlete. There's a loss of muscle mass, which is already been mentioned and talked about in terms of these other things. There's a loss of bone density as you get older. This starts probably in your forties.

The bone just begin to lose some of their,  hardness, if you will. And because of that, [00:07:00] bones break easily. You crash your bike and you've broken a couple of bones, a couple of ribs or whatever. It's clavical, scapula, could be all kinds of problems that come from that. So there, there's lots of things going on.

There're not pretty things, but there's a lot of them. And so you've gotta kind of be on top of all this stuff all the time.

Taryn: Yeah, it is a big list and it makes me feel a little bit sad,

Joe: Yeah.

Taryn: but there are things that we can do about it. So as we get older, like in all honesty, like I turned 40 this year and I'm having a massive midlife crisis. So I'm like, what can I do now? And I'm a dietician, right?

I eat well, and I've eaten well for a long time. Like what can I do now to set myself for a long and, you know, healthy lifespan, not just a long lifespan, but health span that goes along with that. As we get older, how does our training need to change to combat those things? So, intensity, volume, do we need to recover differently?

What sort of things should we be doing differently compared to when we're younger?

Joe: That's a very good question. I think at the [00:08:00] heart of this entire issue is, for the aging athlete is rest and recovery. That's really where, where the, the benefits can, can really show up for the athlete when you're younger. I, I recall when I was in college a long, long time ago, I ran track, and the coach would've us do the same workout every day.

I used to call it intervals till you puke. It was just these one intervals after another. There were always 400 meter intervals

Taryn: Sounds fun. 

Joe: we were never told what our times should be. We were never told, you know, how hard to run, just run as fast as you can. Um, he never even called out our times as we came across the finish line every time.

But then we'd do one doing 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 of these in a workout. And we'd do that five days a week. Today, I would've a hard time being through one of those workouts, let alone one every day. But when you're young, you can do that. When you're young, you're, you know, 20 something years old, you can probably put together, cobble together a couple of hard workouts back to [00:09:00] back, and somehow you manage to recover from it.

But as you get older, that doesn't happen anymore. 

Taryn: you can go out partying all night and get up and train and still do an all right session.

Joe: That's exactly right. So rest and recovery really becomes the key thing for the older athlete. But unfortunately, many of the older athletes try to maintain  their youthful way of training, which is to train too much, too hard.

And so what I proposed for athletes is, is one of two, train one of two ways.

There's two ways to do this. They both work. The preferred one physiologically is not the preferred one in terms of the athlete's choice, I've found. It's called the nine day training week. So instead of having a seven day training week, the athlete has a nine day training week. And so what happens is the athlete has a hard workout on day one, and then an easy workout, easy workout in the next two days.

Then a hard workout on day four, and then day five and day six are easy again. So it goes [00:10:00] hard, easy, easy, hard, easy, easy, hard, easy, easy. That's nine days, and you start over again. And at the end of those nine days, then you add three more easy days on. So you wind up with about five easy days back to back at the very end.

And then you start all over again with another nine day week, that works really well. But the problem with it is, it doesn't work for most people's lifestyles if you've gotta be at work at, eight o'clock in the morning. And the workout sheet says that she was supposed to be doing a three hour bike ride today.

Uh, it's not gonna work. Something's gotta get someplace so you skip a workout and so it really, it doesn't work out well for people. It is the best way of doing it, but it doesn't work out well for people's lifestyles if you're retired.

If the athlete's retired, it works out pretty well.

The other option is polarized training, which is very popular right now, has been going on. Studied for 20 some years by Steven Seiler and other, researchers. And [00:11:00] basically what they've shown is that, if you train 80% easy and 20% hard, then that's gonna, boost your fitness better than probably any other way of training.

In fact, the research seems to support that. At all levels of performance from elites down to novices, that seems to work very, very well. let's put that into real numbers. 80 20 sounds nice, but what does that mean? 'cause it's seven day training weeks, which we're talking about here. What I have athletes do is five days easy and two days hard.

So call it five, two, five days. Easy. Could include one day off. Doesn't have to, there'd be five days. You're going easy and two days you're going hard. So that's seven days. Start the week with an easy day on Monday, and it's a hard day on Tuesday, and then it goes Wednesday, Thursday easy, Friday hard Saturday, Sunday easy.

So now we're, in a five two pattern, but we're doing either three days between hard workouts or two days between hard workouts, and that gives us about an 80 [00:12:00] 20 relationship. And I found that works really well for most athletes. They can handle that, very nicely in terms of their lifestyle and it does make a difference 'cause now they can recover a lot of athletes don't wanna do that.

A lot of athletes want to avoid taking any kinda rest at all. They wanna push hard all the time, which is another topic all by itself. But this is a very.  Beneficial way of training, which are highly recommended athletes, especially older athletes doing their training. Five, two.

Taryn: Less is more is what I heard.

Joe: Less is more in this case. That's true.

Taryn: So you mentioned some of those mistakes that older athletes make, you know, training too hard, training too much. How do we stop doing that and how do we fix that as we get older?

Joe: Yeah. Related to the thing I just talked about is the idea that, what I call the tortoise and hare problem.

Some athletes are tortoises. They wanna do when they're older. All they wanna do is go slow all the time. And there's, there's lot to be gained by going slow. But there's lot also being lost by going slow all the [00:13:00] time.

So they, it's, it's fine if they wanna do some slow earning or slow cycling, whatever, but they're gonna do some hard stuff in there occasionally. Otherwise, the system is never stressed. It takes stress to build fitness. And one of the best forms of stress besides durability or how long you endurance workouts, besides that with the best markers is intensity.

The higher the intensity, the more the stress is. And so if we, if we can blend in this, this hair ath or the tortoise athletes, easy workouts with a couple of hard workouts a week, they're gonna be, they're gonna do really well. In fact, they'll do great because they had so much he built. So much of a base of turning with lots and lots of, easy turning.

Then we have the hares. That's the other side of the coin I see in in older athletes too, as they age up, is they decide if I'm gonna get better, what I gotta do, suffer a lot. So they, they decide they've gotta go out and do a hard workouts. Every time they get a chance, they've gotta go hard. So if the workout calls for zone two, it's gonna be a zone three workout.

If [00:14:00] it calls for zone four, it's gonna be a zone five. If they've got a training partner for the day, it's a race. Uh, 

Taryn: Always.

Joe: they've always gotta be suffering, and that's just not the way it works. When I was a kid back in the 1950s and sixties, all the movies about athletes in those days, the black and white movies all showed the athlete, suffering all the time.

And that's how they overcame. The problems. In fact, if you saw Rocky Balboa, you know, the Rocky movies, that's what he's all about is suffering. And that's how he winds up winning all his fights because he pushes himself to the limit all the time. And that's how we all accept it as being that we're all supposed to treat this as hard as we possibly can all the time.

And that will get assure of us, of, of being highly fit athletes. It, it doesn't work that way. It does not work that way at all. I guarantee you all you're doing is digging a bigger hole for yourself and, and it gets deeper every day. What you've gotta do is you've gotta throw in some easy workouts. So go back again to the five, two thing, and [00:15:00] we've gotta get some easy training in there.

In fact, there's all kinds of things happening during easy training that most athletes aren't even aware of. For example, everybody thinks that lactate is a, is the enemy. If you're producing lactate during a workout or run or something that, that's bad for you, 'cause it's gonna cause you to slow down and it's also gonna cause you to be sore the next day after a hard workout.

That's a old, lie that's been around since the 1920s, which refuses to go away, is because one scientist back in the 1920s in England did some research on frog and he drew the conclusion that. Fatigue because of this white substance he saw coming out of the muscle, which he called lactate.

And ever since that day, we have believed around the world that lactate causes you to slow down, causes fatigue. It doesn't happen. In fact, the body uses lactate as fuel. It's the first form of fuel of the [00:16:00] body. If you go from running really easy to all of a sudden pick up the speed and start going really fast, the first thing will happen is lactate will become the fuel you use.

Then it turns to glycogen, carbohydrate. And then, if you go for a long, long, long, long time going fast, you'll eventually start burning protein and maybe a little bit of fat. If you're really toward the end, but before you that ever happens, you're gonna bonk and not make it to the finish line.

And, and the. This, this thing works for the lactate is the lactate has to get into the muscle. It's been created by the muscle, but it goes out of the muscle and now it has to be brought back into the muscle, and it's by something called an MCT1, which is a protein transporter that carries lactate back into the muscle so it can be used for fuel.

when do you build up that MCT one? And it takes a lot of it to do this. It's during slow workouts. That's when the body builds MCT one, all this protein that's necessary to make the, lactate useful for the, [00:17:00] for the muscles and there's just a long list of things in, in the book.

I'm rewriting, I'm, I'm rewriting the fast after 50. In the book, I go through all the things that change because of going slow that are positive, none of which you can get by going fast. So you've gotta have a, you've gotta have a blend of both easy workouts and hard workouts. And if you do that, then there's a really good chance you're gonna have a, an excellent, performance in your next race.

So.

Taryn: So if we're trying to balance the easy training, you know, zone two stuff and some of the high intensity work, where does things like strength training and mobility fit into that picture in your two and five plan?

Joe: Yeah, well, let's start with mobility. As you get older, mobility is one of the things you lose mobility is the, ability of a joint to make movements through its normal range of motion. Like when you were young, you probably could scratch your back because your shoulder was quite mobile.

As you get older, you find you can't scratch your back anymore, can't reach [00:18:00] down your back as far because you've lost mobility in your shoulder, which for a swimmer is very important. A swimmer's got to be able to get a lot of reach with the arm and the shoulder's a big part of that. So if you've lost mobility in your shoulder, you've lost the ability to swim fast.

So we need to work on some mobility for the shoulders, probably for the lower back, also for aging athletes. Probably for the hips, especially for running. And if I won't go into all the exercises here that you have to do with it, 'cause it gets really confusing after a while with trying to explain on, on what a exercise is.

But simply go online search for, mobility for athletes, and you'll come up with all kinds of exercise examples. Then look through these and find ones that may work for where your loss of, if you can't scratch your back anymore, it's shoulder needs some help. If you have a hard time with a long stride, with a long length of your legs, it may be the hip that's giving you problems, or if you find, if you lay on the, on your back. And you spread your [00:19:00] legs apart and try to touch the ground with your knees and you can't get close to the ground. That's mobility in the hips. If you have a hard time bending over at the waist, perhaps you've got a mobility problem with a lower back. So we've got all these things that need to be worked on they need to be done two, three times a week.

You have to be working on mobility. In fact, it's the sort of thing you can do anytime you can while you're sitting in the office. At work, the athlete can do exercises from build mobility, exercise for the shoulder, just, reach back and scratch your back and, work on the, movement of that joint.

So that's number one. You gotta work on mobility. And number two, you have to work on strength. Strength is being lost as you get older, but it's being lost at a fairly slow rate at first by the time you're in your forties. You've lost a little bit of muscle already, probably not aware of it. It's less than 1%, more than likely by the time you're in your fifties.

We may may now be talking about 5%. It depends on what your lifestyle has been like. You get in your sixties, the numbers get [00:20:00] bigger. So this loss of muscle mass is critical not only to health, but also to performance. You've got to maintain muscle mass. That means strength training. you've gotta flex the muscles to the point that they are stressed, and that stress is gonna cause them to develop, become stronger.

It takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. You can't just all of a sudden have. Strong muscles with lots of muscle mass. In fact, we don't really want a lot of muscle mass. All we want is, is a lot of aerobic muscle mass. That's what we want. We're endurance athletes, so we don't need lots of gigantic bulging muscles.

All we need to be able to do is maintain aerobic slow twitch muscle fiber strength. So how do we do that? Oh, we, we lift weights. And lift weights is a, uh, is a double whammy. It not only improves strength, it also improves bone density, which is one of the things I mentioned a while ago that's being lost too.

So bone density is being changed by that, by lifting weights. If you're a [00:21:00] triathlete, obviously a runner, that's probably not an issue for your legs, but from the waist up, you've got a problem going on. If you're in your fifties, sixties, you need to be lifting weights for the upper body also, just because it builds bone there also. 

swimmers have that problem for their entire body. The legs, the upper body, they don't get any benefit at all from swimming for, bone density. Same thing for runners or, cyclists. They get no benefits for the legs. You'd think they would, but they don't. It takes an impact. The legs have to impact to build muscle or to build, bone density.

And so that's running. It's walking and that's lifting weights. So those are the things that really we need to be very focused on, I think is mobility and strength.

Taryn: And how do we incorporate strength into our training program? As a master's athlete, how often should we be doing it? Where should it be positioned in the week so we're not affecting, our long runs because we're so tired and fatigued? How do we actually incorporate [00:22:00] it into our program differently as we get older?

Joe: Very good question. You know, if I was talking strictly to an athlete, who wasn't an endurance athlete, who didn't already have lots of swimming, biking and running, going on, I would say three times a week. But now we're talking about somebody who's already putting in a lot of time into the main events for their sport.

So in that case, I would say let's live twice a week. If I say three times a week, what's gonna happen to somebody who's gonna miss one every week? Let's just start off with two and get that right. So two times a week, lifting weights and this can combine with mobility exercises, also lifting weights, twice a week.

There's two ways of doing it as far as what day of the week do you do it? One is. And this is the least popular, is to do it the same day as a hard, a hard workout. Like you do a hard bike ride that day after the hard ride, bike ride, lift weights. That's not very popular.  

Taryn: I wonder why. 

Joe: That's one of the best, times of day to do it, or one of the best [00:23:00] times of the week to do it.

Joe: second best is a day after a hard workout. So if we're doing two hard days a week, the five two thing I talked about a while ago. It means a day after each of those two hard days would be a weightlifting day cause this is gonna be an easy day. Otherwise it's an easy day.

But we're doing a hard day now in the weight room, and then you're gonna get at least one more day after that. Easy. Five two, possibly two more days depending on where you are in the week. 'cause there's gonna be either two or three days after every hard workout. so now we get in, we've, we've blended in two hard workouts, a week along with the following days, two strength workouts.

Most athletes think when they lift weights, what they're supposed to do is push themselves to the limit every time they go in the weight room. For the entire year. They've gotta push themselves to the limit. It's the same old thing we talked about a little while ago.

You have to periodize strength weightlifting, the same way you periodize swimming, biking and running. You start the season [00:24:00] off very early in the season. You start off by doing, lightweights and high repetitions. I call that the anatomical adaptation phase. You're kinda getting used to the movements, like you're doing squats, you're getting used to what a squat feels like so you can do it properly or what an exercise may be.

and that lasts typically three weeks or so, depends on the athlete. So we're talking there about six workouts. And then we go to the next phase, which is, max transition. So now we're gonna start adding a little bit of weight onto the bar for the lifts we're doing.We're now gonna be something like about 10 to 12 repetitions.

Taryn: Are we talking per set here or That's the total amount 

Joe: 12 repetitions per set. We're doing

two to three sets but we're not doing these to failure, we're doing these to, 10 to 12 reps, knowing you could have done one or two more. When you stop,

So take it easy. just do 10 to 12 reps easy. Then that's, that's and la last, maybe another three weeks again. So there's six more, uh, sets or [00:25:00] six more workouts that were done. Then we go to the max strength phase, and this is the one that, that I'm always skeptical of in terms of who the athlete may be.

If the athlete's been around weightlifting for a long time, it's not a problem. So now we're gonna bump the weights up to something like about, four or five, six repetitions per set for two sets. the weights are gonna be heavy enough still. We're not gonna go to failure still. We're gonna stop short of failure.

But if the athlete has not been lifting weights for a long time, as in a couple years, if they've not been doing this, we're gonna leave out this phase. In fact, we'll probably leave it out for two years. We're just gonna do the max transition phase I mentioned, which is like 10 to 12 reps, and then we'll go into what, what would follow that would be, a strength maintenance phase.

So now we're gonna go into strength maintenance phase, which is really easy. So once a week, the athlete goes to the gym. So now, now we're in the late base period. , so we're [00:26:00] still in, in the earliest stages of the season. So now the athlete's working out in the weight room once per week, and all they're doing is, is two sets.

One set is light, it's a warmup, so it's 10, 12, 15 reps every exercise you're working on. And after you recover from that warmup, then you do a heavy set around five repetitions. Again, four or five, six repetitions like we did before. And we get that done, then that's the end of that, of that exercise. So you go to the next exercise and do the same thing.

So we're, we're now backing off on loads and we're also backing off on repetitions, and we're backing off on the number of, of, uh, the density. How many times per week we're doing this workout. We're only doing it once per week. That goes on until about two weeks before the race, a race, now the most important race of season, and now the athlete stops doing.

weight training, we rest that's all explained in the book. 

Taryn: I'm [00:27:00] interested to know why you think that we should do your hard strength training on the same day as a hard training day. What's a, what's a methodology behind that madness.

Joe: That means you got two or three days to fully recover from everything that's going on.

That you stressed in that one day?

 

Joe: it's not popular because usually we come back in from a hard run and we really don't feel like lifting weights at that point, especially max strength phase when you're doing lots of heavy weights.

Taryn: Yeah, there's some legs shaking going on there. 

Joe: Yeah, it could be kind of dangerous too, if you're doing squats with tired legs, you know that. It should never be done before a run. Let's start there. Should never lift weights before a run. That's, a ticket to an injury right there. if you can do any other exercise, any other sports that same day, you could do a swim before. You could do a bike before.

They're better off being done after you. You'd be better off lifting weights first thing that day, but you could do the other workouts after. But never do, a heavy weight workout before you do a [00:28:00] run that fatigues muscles and you're already very prone for injury as a runner.

let's not aggravate that and make it even worse.

Taryn: Hmm. Do you have any insight into time of day that you do strength training as a master's athlete, male versus female?

Joe: I don't think it really makes much difference. I think whatever works into the person's lifestyle is the best way to do it. what I found is that most athletes tend to like to do it in the morning, but that may not be the same for everybody. there's something about going to the gym. When there's other people there perhaps, and you feel more like lifting weights at that point, but it can be done any time of day, so long again, as you don't do it before a run.

That's the key. The key point.

Taryn: Yeah, and from my perspective it's just getting your nutrition right around that session no matter what time of day it is

Joe: Yeah. 

Taryn: so you can get your maximum strength gains.

So as we get older and recovery, takes longer or is harder, what can we do to maximize recovery [00:29:00] for performance and I guess longevity in our sport as well?

Joe: Yeah. I've already talked about the two biggest things, which is rest and recovery. You gotta make sure you build those into your schedule. 

Taryn: Yeah. And ha have an off season, you know, that that elusive off season that people don't have.

Joe: Yeah, I'm working way up to that. we're taking it easy, you know, after several days of training, you need to have some downtime where you are cutting way back on training. Maybe you cut it back by 40, maybe 50% volume. So instead of 10 hours a week, you're doing six hours a week.

for maybe four or five days, depending on the athletes. Some people need more recovery than others. And after you've done that, then you're ready to go back into, a normal training week again, back into a five two training week. But during that one week that you're down, the athlete needs to take an extra day off from what they normally do, if they normally have Monday off, and they're gonna take five days easy.

Let's also take Friday off, so take Monday and Friday off. We'll do three easy workouts in the middle [00:30:00] Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Short, easy workouts taking Friday off, we'll come back on the weekend. And now, now the is a good time to, to test.it could be lots of different types of tests. The athletes are doing their FTP test, for example,or whatever it may be.

they're testing to see where they are to see if they need to change. Heart rate zones, power zones, pace zones, all that kind of stuff may need updating. Then on the following Monday, they go right back into their normal routine.

Again, the five two routine or the nine day routine, whichever they're using. then you mentioned a little, the second ago, the, uh, the need for the end of the season to have some downtime. that's critical to long-term performance is you've gotta take time at the end of the season where you detrained. You have to lose fitness. And I know people hate to even think about that, but you have to lose fitness. There's no other way to do this. If you don't, it's only gonna come back to haunt you. You must give up some of that fitness. so you take it really easy for, let's say, [00:31:00] depending on what the athletes training is like, and what type of race they did.

They did an Iron Man, maybe they're gonna take four weeks off after a race. It's really, really easy for four weeks. Go out for an easy bike ride every second day. Otherwise just take a day off. If it was a sprint distance race, maybe it gonna take a week to 10 days off after the last race, the season. So it kinda depends on what kinda race the athlete's done, but at that point, the athletes that come back on training, recover, spend time with their family again for a change and be prepared or get started again on for the following season when it's appropriate time to do that.

Too many athletes rush into that. Do it, get started too soon and it screws everything up from that point forward. Then there's, you know, really touched on nutrition yet, this is your big area is, is nutrition and what should the athlete be doing as far as nutrition to recover? Well, I'm not gonna get involved in that 'cause that's not  my area of expertise.

I'm more on the training side. [00:32:00] But when I read the research, what I read over and over and over on, on aging athletes is they don't get enough protein as they get older. , I've been seeing that research going back late 1990s, early two thousands.

Up to the current time is. a lot of research showing that older athletes probably need more, protein than what they're getting, more protein than what is suggested. 

 

Joe: So, but I'll stop there and not get too deep into that because that's get myself in trouble there.

Taryn: Yeah, some really good tips there. I find like even just personally in my own training, if I have a week off for whatever reason, I am more motivated to come back and often outperform what I did in the last hard week of training because I have Deloaded and have had that rest. You really need to have the wrist to then

back up and go hard again. And a lot of triathletes don't do that. We have something in our mind that blocks us from doing that. We just think we've gotta go hard and go home all the time. And if I had my time again, gimme 20 years or so, be back in the [00:33:00] sport. But I wish I went slower more 'cause I was just go hard or go home all the time.

So some good advice as we get older to slow down. Take some rest. It's okay. You'll be okay if you have some time off.

Joe: Yes, rest. REST is essential.  You we can measure stress, for example, with your listeners are probably familiar with HRV heart rate variability,

Taryn: Yep.

Joe: which is a good indicator of a pretty good indicator of what's going on as far as stress. For the athlete and stress could come from not only physical stuff, but also psychological stuff, mental stuff.

we need to be watching that because it gives us some idea of, how we're doing are, are we really recovering after these workouts or are we pushing ourselves too hard, too often? and so, you know, checking HRV for example, every morning when the athlete gets up, it's very easy to do.

It only takes like a minute. There's all kinds of apps available online and you can check this and, and know, [00:34:00] have a pretty good idea of that day, of how ready you are to train hard. And unfortunately, a lot of athletes don't do that. So they, they go to the end of the day just thinking that. They've gotta push themselves to their limits regardless of what they're feeling.

they have a very high goal, so they stay focused on that goal, and they don't give any thought to, how's my body responding to training right now? It's simply push the limits every day, which we have to get away from.

Taryn: have a favorite tool that you like to check Heart rate variability with?

Joe: Yeah. One I use is called HRV for training, so HRV and then the number four in the word training. you can go online and, and find that very easily. And, and, uh, the guy who does, it's got a PhD in the stuff and he, he has written, resource papers on the topic He puts a lot of time and energy into making sure this thing works well.

I would highly recommend that one. but there are others also that [00:35:00] are, very good. I think you need to have something along that same line.

Taryn: I'll put a link for that. I'll go find it and put a link for that in the show notes if anyone wants to have a look at that. I noticed you're not wearing an aura ring or whoop band or anything like that, Joe, so.

Joe: no, I, I wear a, a Garmin watch, which I find is usually wrong most of the time. It tells me how much time I slept last night is usually off by a couple of hours.

Taryn: Oh wow. 

That's not very helpful, is it?

Joe: it's hard to say useless, but that's, it's probably not a good word to use. It, it is not very good in terms of, of.

Sleep, which makes me question the other things. It tells me also, I, so I, I'm always very doubtful of wearable devices. I think that they can help you, you, they can tell you what's going on as far as trends, but you can't accept the numbers you see there as being, what is exactly is going on with your body.

Taryn: Yeah, and a lot of people find that when they do track that stuff and it tells 'em they've had a terrible night's sleep and they might wake up feeling all right, then they're more likely to [00:36:00] get in their head around it and go, I'm gonna train like crap now. And this just this big vicious circle of too much data, too much information, and not actually listening to your body, which can be a little bit counterintuitive for some people.

Just another layer of stress to 

Joe: I agree. I agree. we've got enough stress already in our lives, I'm sure. Without adding, without adding more. So the bottom line is we need to dial back the stress in our lives. Uh, and that includes our training for the athlete who trains like the hare always pushing themselves to like Rocky Balboa always pushing the. 

We need to dial back that stress and the athlete. Not only will you be healthier and live longer, but you'll also perform better. So this whole thing you've got in, in your head about, you've gotta push your limits all the time, is really bogus. It that's not the best way to do this. Keep it easy, 

Taryn: if you're not vomiting, you didn't go hard enough, right? Yeah. Oh, I don't think I [00:37:00] could do that. So that's some really good advice for how to manage, you know, training weeks, how to get the flow of hard and easy, how to put some mobility into your training, and also how to layer in some strength training. I really loved all that explanation. What are some of the key habits that Masters athletes can be doing every single day to keep, you know, healthy and longevity in our sport?

Joe: . well, there's lots of things. It's hard to know where to actually start on the. One of the things I like athletes to do, but this doesn't apply to triathletes quite as much as that I think about it. in the winter months, I like to see athletes, mostly runners and cyclists and skiers and so forth, is cross-train in their off season, whenever that may be.

So take up another sport besides the one you're already doing, that'll give you a little bit of, uh. Relief relief for the rest of the year, but spend a few weeks just doing two sports. If you're a runner, do some running, but also throw in some swimming. Go to the pool or [00:38:00] ride your bike. Do something besides just run for several weeks and then come back to your running.

Later on, you'll find out you're actually more eager to ride your bike, but you're also in better shape. You've built a lot of. Aerobic fitness by doing that. So that, that's one of the things I think athletes can do to really, build their health and fitness long term in preparation for races later in the season.

But again, triathletes don't have to worry so much about that because we've already got three sports, so you don't need to add more sports to that, mix.  diet again, come back to that. You know, what I believe in is, I like to eat a, what I consider to be  a simple diet, fruits, vegetables, and animal products.

if it comes in a plastic package, I, I, I don't buy it. and we buy things that we can put on the shelves and they all last for a while. we have those things with every meal. Every meal's got vegetables, every meal's got fruit. That's usually the dessert is, for example, after supper, we'll have some fruit for dessert.

And, um, I think having a, a very basic diet like that is very healthy. Also, one of the issues for older athletes, it has [00:39:00] to do with health, also weight gain. this is a very common problem for athletes as they age up, as They begin to add,excess kilograms, pounds to their bodies. And for the most part, it's, something that's going on as we get older is causing this to happen.

it's still up in the air. What that thing may be. I. I. I've read research that says, metabolism slows down, but there's other research that says metabolism is not slowing down. We've tested all these older people and metabolisms are the same as the younger people. so I don't know what's going on, but as we get older, there's a propensity to add weight and maybe because we train less. So if you're starting to bottom out, that may be the reason why you're, adding kilograms of body fat. and then we need to do something about that, which is basically, eat to satisfaction as opposed to eating until you're ready to throw up. keep it under control.

Don't get carried away with food, but at the same time, this is a tricky subject. I really almost hate [00:40:00] even talking about weight because. It's become such a bugaboo in people's lives that their whole life revolves around what the weight scales say.

And so it's difficult to even bring the topic up without causing problems for somebody, but it's an issue that needs to be addressed.we do need to control body weight. We just can't let it go. We need to control it, but we can't make it the central focus of our lives.

Taryn: Yeah, there's quite a number of podcast episodes in this podcast around body composition and weight that you can go back into the archives and listen to if you wanna dive into that. if you could give Masters athletes one piece of advice to finish off, what would it be?

Joe: The biggest rock is you gotta rest. We've already talked about this so much, but it's the biggest rock there is. Rest is critical. If you're not getting adequate rest, you're really not improving your performance. If you're going out and doing the same workouts over and over and over again, pushing yourself to the limit, you're just gonna get the same results over and over and [00:41:00] over.

and the key to improvement is. His rest and recovery. That's the key to improvement. It needs to be built into your, into your daily life. it needs to be built into your weekly life, your annual life. You need to build this into your life in every way, shape, or form, which also goes to your life away from training.

If you have a job, which is stressful, you know, that's, that's a problem. If your job is very, very stressful, and this is the case for a lot of people in their fifties because. They've advanced in their careers to the point that they're, in a managerial position for, for example, or maybe even an ownership position.

And because of that, they go to bed every night with lots of problems in their heads, and they're trying to cope with all these problems. So you need sleep. And so we need to somehow deal with how you're gonna cope with this, all the stress of the day to get sleep. Well, you gotta find a way during the day to do something about this stress.

What can you do? there's little things that you [00:42:00] can try, but they're not big things. if a person in a managerial position has a stressful day because of, relationships with employees or meetings or something that didn't go well, go out and go for a walk if possible. If you live by a park, go to the park and walk.

Get away from people and traffic and work and all these things, and give your brain a chance to recover 

that. We don't get enough of that in our lives. We need to let our minds recover because that's gonna help us to sleep better at night. If we sleep better at night, we get up the next morning, we're better able to work out.

So everything starts going the right direction. We gotta get stress under control is, is the first thing.

Taryn: No screens as well is a good, good tip there. We get so glued to our phone and that's just a point of stress for so many people.

Joe: It is

Taryn: Okay, there's a couple of good ones there. So rest and be chill, dude. Stress free as much as you can.

Joe: exactly right.

Taryn: So what's the next on the cards for you, Joe? You're rewriting fast after 50.

Joe: [00:43:00] Yes. I just wrote another book last fall. I just finished a book last fall was just coming out. This fall, for cyclists though fast after 50, I'm about, I'll probably have it done by July. 

So it'll be out sometime after Christmas. 

Joe: called again fast after 50, but the second edition, all new, nothing is, is taken over again. Everything is. 

from scratch. that's what's going on right now and so that's got me busy to the point. I'm not thinking about anything else. I'm, I'm not thinking about what's gonna happen in the future right now

Taryn: Oh, the man does not sleep.

Joe: No, I do sleep a lot actually.

Taryn: How's your heart rate variability? Is it good?

Joe: And today was a good day. It was, uh, it was on the moderately high side, which is good. a couple days ago it was really low, so I took a very easy workout. So it's a good marker.

Taryn: And have you got any events or anything on the cards or just training for life at the moment?

Joe: I'm just trained for life right now. I've got too much stuff going on in, uh, with writing. I've been thinking about working on [00:44:00] a time trial championship. but right now that's in the back burner, so it's, I'm turning enough to be able to do that right now. That's not a big deal, but it's a problem for my brain to get wrapped around racing again when I haven't raced for the last time I did a race was like in 2013 was my last race.

Taryn: Yeah. Wow. Mm-hmm. 

Joe: I've kind of had the itch to race again, but, uh, I've got so much going on. That's the reason I have lost all these years because I had so much in my life. so now hopefully I'll get a little chance so I won't be traveling quite as much and won't be riding as much. I hope so. Maybe I'll get back into racing again.

Taryn: Okay. Are you ever going to retire?

Joe: Well, I, uh, I don't like the word retire.

Taryn: No. I can tell.

Joe: it doesn't sound like fun.

Taryn: It does sound kind of boring, but it depends what you fill your time with. You kind of are retired, but doing hobbies maybe, or keeping your mind active, which is awesome.

Joe: I enjoy what I do, so I 

Taryn: Yeah, I would be exactly the same. I can't imagine a time where I wouldn't [00:45:00] be doing similar things to what I'm doing now. 

Joe: Yeah.

Taryn: Oh, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today, Joe, and just sharing all that wisdom. You've got so much knowledge in your brain there and I'm very excited to read the new version of Fast Over 50. But if you can't wait, definitely recommend giving this a read.

There's still lots of gold nuggets in there. And then refresh and upskill with the new version when it comes out at the end of the year.

Joe: Very good. hope to talk to you again. Done.

Taryn: Thanks. 

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Triathlon Nutrition Academy podcast. I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions or want to share with me what you've learned, email me at [email protected]. You can also spread the word by leaving me a review and taking a screenshot of you listening to the show. Don't forget to tag me on social media, @dietitian.approved, so I can give you a shout out, too. If you want to learn more about what we do, head to dietitianapproved.com. And if you want to learn more about the Triathlon Nutrition Academy program, head to dietitianapproved.com/academy. Thanks for joining me and I look forward to helping you smashed in the fourth leg - nutrition!