Science and Understanding

VO2max Lactate Threshold Maximum Lactate Steady State Critical Velocity/Power What’s the point of the above? You may answer that they explain a physiological phenomenon. VO2max is when oxygen consumption plateaus. Lactate Threshold is a marker where lactate goes from a steady state or slow trickle of increasing lactate to a flood. Critical Velocity is the…

Team A: Renowned for its level of detail. They tested everything. What massage gel to use, what warm-up outfit, the type of mattress and pillow the athlete slept on. They obsessed over the minutia. Team B: Their head coach said he never read a book in his life. The team doctor took shoddy notes, losing…

            After grinding through those gut-wrenching 400-meter repeats or exhausting yourself in your most recent 10k race, there’s always that one thing left that we have to do before the workout is actually done: the cool down. Traditionally, we’ve looked at the cool down as a way to keep blood flow going after the workout…

If you like my work, consider checking out my NEW book, The Passion Paradox! It just came out and is on sale for $13. I’d greatly appreciate it! The (Scientific) Origins of Stress     Stress. Even the work itself evokes feelings, perhaps even emotion. Thoughts, mostly negative, enter our minds about how stress impacts our…

In 1915, a young Harvard Physiologist named Walter Cannon described “the necessities of fighting or flight” in his now classic book, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage[i]. With the turn of a phrase, Cannon began the process of ingraining the now famous “fight or flight” instinct into our consciousness. As often occurs with…

Should we predict development? “Did you know the average age of medalist is 26 in running events, but in the throwing events it’s much older?” That’s how the conversation started, before progressing towards how we needed to center our development and funding models on this data. The underlying message was a simple one, we can…