Eliot shared with me a great podcast post this week featuring Olav Aleksander Bu, coach of Kristian Blummenfelt & Gustav Iden. It’s a really good insight into his coaching approach and techniques. I’ll let you have a listen but here are some highlights I took from it.
Demand based planning: Rather like the engineering picture above, Olav first understands the demand to meet in specific detail and then works backwards from that to solve for the training approach to take. He targets very closely those demands and trains to meet the race objectives rather than targeting specific physiological goals.
Fuel based planning: Olav tracks closely fuel consumed and fuel utilised. Similar to an airline pilot, Olav works out fuel requirements for sessions / the day / week and closely tracks the fuel onboarded to understand the relative balance (more on this later!). You may note that the total hours training was downplayed in importance as it was not something primarily used to model training.
Accuracy of data capture: Taking lactate level via pinprick blood sampling can be tricky to be accurate in field conditions. Olav notes how important it is to make sure this is done accurately as small contaminations lead to very large data errors. If then used in training it will introduce resultant large training issues.
Holistic Approach: Whilst capturing large volumes of personal tracking information (temperature, lactate, energy expenditure, fuel utilisation being more sophisticated information) he stresses that the holistic training.
Notable absence from this discussion were other elements such as bike technology or psychological training. My interpretation was this was a focus on the human body as a energy converter – taking in fuel, using it to convert to mechanical energy, understanding fuel conversion efficiency factors in order to arrive at a time to completion of fixed distance objectives.
So where does the poo chat come in?
Last year there was discussion about an isotope energy drink being used to understand transit time and utilisation of fuel and hydration. In this discussion there is a hint at investigation of energy absorption from the energy consumed and not assuming all calories taken in are calories available. This was quite topical for me this week as I had a follow-up with a coeliac specialist and much of the chat was “poo-talk” on the absorption of nutrients and energy in the body.
(Next post we will also be talking poo but this time the pooh type and the cuddly bear kind).
Have a listen and interested in take-aways you may have 🙂