Today’s episode features Evan Peikon. Evan is a coach, physiologist, and educator at the Training Think Tank HQ in Atlanta, GA. He has experience working with athletes on-site and remotely across the U.S. and internationally. Evan is a former track and field athlete and has learned from world-leading experts in applied muscle physiology and performance.
I’ve recently found myself thinking about the topic of lactate as a factor in training, and how we should look to manage higher repetition training sets (such as 1×20, or the Inno-sport “AN2” bracket of work), longer sprints and lactate buffering work in general, in athletes. I’ve also recently read Pavel Tsatsouline’s book “The Quick and the Dead”, presenting an “anti-lactate” view on training, but then think about contrasting this to the results Mark Wetzel (and many others) have gotten from doing long duration extreme isometrics with their athletes in the realms of strength and work capacity.
I also think about ideas from the track and field world, such as Boo Schexnayder looking for a mild to moderate dose of lactate as a result of dense power training (such as 12x30m sprint accelerations) in some training periods, as well as Andy Eggerth mentioning how some athletes need to have some longer sprints present in peaking portions of the year, where they are accumulating a little bit of lactate.
Evan Peikon is a fantastic source of information in this regard, as he has had tremendous mentors in the energy system world (such as Aaron Davis) and is regularly synthesizing his wealth of knowledge in working with a population where lactate is an ever-present reality, that of cross-fit competitors.
On the show today, we talk about energy systems in an applied manner, and in a holistic manner that shows oxygen saturation as a rate-limiting factor that supercedes the thought process of lactate levels in muscle in regards to training effects and how long recovery processes will take. This show is great for learning more about training individualization, as we go in depth on all things running, strength training, fast-twitch recruitment, 1×20 method and more, in regards to muscle oxygen, lactate and how it impacts our programming and methods.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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View more podcast episodes at the podcast homepage.Key Points
- Evan’s background as an athlete and what drew his interest in lactate and oxygen’s role in assessing training differences in athletes
- What it means to have good or poor respiratory versus oxygen delivery in athletes
- Why having high muscular tension can reduce the ability of the heart to deliver oxygen to the muscle
- Thoughts on training the aerobic system for a short-burst power athlete
- How athletes can self-regulate workouts in a manner where they avoid staying in muscle hypoxia (in order to maximize their ability to recover from the workout)
- Thoughts on “Anti-Glycolytic Training” or training with the distinct purpose of not training to the point where significant lactate accumulates in the muscle
- Ideas on a “sweet spot” of sustained muscular work and physiological response
- Training for the sake of preferential improvement of fast twitch fibers
- Using an “ends to middle” style approach where power and aerobic work are trained early, and the lactate buffer zone is trained later in training
“I think the 800m run lends itself well to being that event that sparks your curiosity (on how such a spectrum of body types and training styles can excel at it)”
“What is one man’s junk (running) volume, is another man’s great training tool”
“I like the term “delivery” instead of cardiac output”
“A delivery limitation is kind of a battle between the heart and local muscle physiology. The muscle could vaso-dilate more than the heart could pump against (due to tension). Arterial pressure is extremely tightly regulated”
“Athletes can be “too strong” relative to what their heart can push through”
“For a sprinter, my biggest concern (for endurance work) is that they are not getting enough blood flow to the tissue (due to high muscle tension)”
“Once oxygen (in the muscle tissues) bottoms out and hits its low point, that’s when performance stalls”
“Being able to experience swelling is a useful proxy for when someone is experiencing occlusion in a muscle”
“You might have an athlete go for a 20 minutes easy run, and see that they are maintaining a 10% oxygen saturation in the tissue the entire time. If their entire run is in hypoxia, you made that session the more stressful session of the entire week”
“When people are trying to do work in muscle hypoxia, that’s when coordination and technique goes out the window”
“If we are going for maximal fast twitch fiber activation we don’t want to be bathing those fibers in lactate”
“When we produce more lactate than needed, that’s when it interferes with calcium uptake. The issue isn’t lactate, it’s when we are producing more lactate than what we can consume”
“You aren’t going to be training fast-twitch fibers once lactate accumulates”
“If lactate is accumulate at a fast rate, then you are probably in a de-oxygenated state”
“We have three different types of bloodflow reactions: compression, light squeezing of blood vessels (usually 0-30% of 1RM), venous occlusion, that swelling feeling (usually 30-70% of !RM) and arterial occlusion that’s generally 70+%.
“As long as a set is taken to failure within 30-90% of an athlete’s 1RM on a set to set basis, those are equally effective for hypertrophy”
“If an athlete over-delivers oxygen to a muscle, they are not going to be able to de-saturate that tissue, and if they are not de-saturating on hypertrophy work, they are not getting maximum hypertrophy recruitment”
“(For the sake of preferential recruitment of fast twitch fibers) we are primarily going to want to be using tension based modalities and we are also going to keep session pretty low and keep frequency as a point of control”
About Evan Peikon
Evan Peikon is a coach, physiologist, and educator at the Training Think Tank HQ in Atlanta, GA. He has experience working with athletes on-site and remotely across the U.S. and internationally. Evan is a former track and field athlete and has been mentored by world-leading experts in applied muscle physiology and performance. He shares his knowledge and training philosophy via Training Think Tank educational courses, as well as in his daily writings on IG @Evan_Peikon.
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