UNLEASH YOUR INNER CAVEMAN
TAKE-AWAY DELIVERIES, HEATED CAR SEATS AND TECH CHARTING OUR EVERY MOVE. IN MANY WAYS, WE’VE NEVER BEEN MORE COMFORTABLE. BUT IS THERE AN ARGUMENT TO SAY THAT BY MIMICKING OUR ANCESTORS’ STRUGGLES, WE’LL BE BETTER, HAPPIER, FASTER TRIATHLETES? WE FIND OUT
We have all the gadgets we’ll ever need, but is there an argument to say we need to go back in time to go forward? We find out
Historians out there will know of Leonidas, the Spartan king who held back the might of
the Persian army with fewer than 300 soldiers. Time can distort history, so who knows how accurate or apocryphal the account was, but few societies valued discipline and mental toughness like the Spartans. The Greek city of Sparta grew famous for its warrior-like status. Children as young as seven were enrolled in military training while fasting was common, not through lack of food but to build ‘hunger endurance’ for long battles.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and we’ve perfected the art of comfortability. Want to change channel? Reach for the control. Want to eat? Order a Deliveroo. Feel a minor pain? Pop a pill. The desire and commercial gain in making life easier has made us weaker. But there’s a counter-movement who’ve grown itchy feet from modern life and yearn to push their limits. It’s fuelled by endurance athletes such as Ross Edgley who, in his book Art of Resilience, calls it “healthy hardship” – by leaving behind western ways, we become stronger, live longer and, through a tri lens, race faster.
“It’s the idea of stoic sports science, which was inspired by ancient Greek philosophy,” Edgley tells us. “It’s teaching you to be in charge of your emotions in adverse conditions. It also goes back to Tim Noakes and his central governor model of fatigue. We pull the psychological handbrake to stop us doing harm to ourselves. But we have deeper reserves than we think. Much deeper.”
Triathletes are well versed in making themselves uncomfortable. Now, thanks to cave(wo)men, evolution and physiology, it’s time to sit uncomfortably and be inspired to train harder and race faster in 2021.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST Survival of the fittest is a phrase that
originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory as a way of describing the mechanism of natural selection. In physiological and multisport terms, it’s about perfecting the art of ‘super compensation’. Let us explain.
An overload of swim, bike and run training results in fatigue and a drop in performance. But recovery after fatiguing will lead to improvements in performance that are above your baseline when you return to training. This cycle is called ‘super compensation’. You then induce fatigue further and then, before you’ve fully recovered, train again to induce fatigue further still. Push on with this rewarding cycle and you’ll be chasing down a Brownlee before you can holler, “Fray Bentos”.
The biological processes at play here are huge and worthy of an issue in its own right but, as a snapshot: your lungcapacity grows so you can take in more oxygen; your anaerobic energy system is stretched to boost threshold; and the satellite cells within your muscle fibres fuse together to stimulate growth. In essence, since day one on this planet, it’s been about damage, repair and rebuild.
And when it comes to being human, it’s the heart that’s the main protagonist. “An average person’s heart is around the size of a fist and weighs about 300g; good recreational triathletes measure around 500g; if you’re racing the Olympics, that figure can reach 1kg,” says cardiologist Andre La Gerche, whose research includes the effect of exercise on the heart. “That’s down to a thickening of the walls and increase in chamber size due to training.”
And that’s important because chamber size influences stroke volume, which is the volume of blood pumped from the heart with each beat. The more blood you can pump, the more oxygen you can deliver to working muscles, the faster and longer you’ll race.
Genetics gives us all a maximum heart-size ceiling so the only way to deliver more bang per beat is down to pushing it. “From research we’ve undertaken, the heart’s under greatest strain during long rides at a high intensity. We’ve put an ultrasound on riders after five or six hours of intense riding, including many climbs, and you can see that the heart is fatigued.”
We don’t all have the time to train for that long, so the best bang for your buck are intervals. Not only have these been proven to fast-track a wealth of physiological adaptations – including muscle growth and greater endurance – studies show this is a great way to boost mental resilience, too. Your mind literally grows comfortable with being uncomfortable.
BOOST EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE One of the key differentiators between
the elites and age-groupers is emotional intelligence; in other words, the ability to identify and manage your own emotions. Over to sports psychologist Malcolm Frame to explain. “We have three parts to our brains: the instinctive part, the high-reasoning part and in between you have this intuitive brain. This part is about picking up signals from your body and interpreting them accordingly. It’s called interoception.
“I’ll give you an example,” adds Frame. “Haile Gebrselassie used to punish himself in training so that, come the race, he’d be in total tune with his body. His heart would be pounding, his breathing rate would rise but he didn’t fear these. Emotionally, he could interpret these signs in a constructive way. He accepted these feelings were part of the process of improving performance. He could stop but he knew that, while it was painful now, it’d be wonderful in the end. Pain is an emotion. And if you start thinking about it, you struggle with it and slow down. The elites know this, manage their emotions and delay gratification. It’s all down to training the paralimbic region of the brain.”
Frame says this is measurable, both subjectively via psychometric tests or objectively by heart-rate variability and something called cardiac vagal tone. “This is a precise measure between the heart and brain,” he says. “It represents the contribution of the parasympathetic nervous system to cardiac regulation. If you look at top athletes, they have high cardiac vagal reserve.”
Ancestral-cum-modern ways to boost this reserve and interoception include barefoot running and training by feel where you aren’t restricted by numbers. A mix of intuition and training tools is the idea. You can also improve your interoception by mindfulness.
“It’s about noticing your thoughts but not judging them,” says Frame. “As soon as you notice something’s bad, you’re engaged with it and that’s not good. It’s not just triathlon and fatigue – it’s in life that it’s not the thought that inhibits you, but the struggle with the thought. Non-resilient people really struggle to manage these thoughts. They have a much lower level of subjective attention, which can be measured in the brain.” In short, remaining calm when danger is all around – that’s key to caveman survival.
Pain is an emotion. If you start thinking about it, you struggle with it and slow down. The elites know this, manage their emotions and delay gratification”
STAY OUT IN THE COLD Modern life is more comfortable than
ever. The flipside is this makes us weaker. That’s why reaching out to your extremes will strengthen your resolve. Think about it. For millenia, we coped with wide fluctuations in temperature. Muscles, nerves, hormones and fat tissue all respond to outside influences, setting off a cascade of reactions that gear us for fight or flight.
We covered this in detail last month but, as a snapshot, a plunge into cold waters leads to an improved circulatory system, tighter insulin control, improved mood and activation of brown fat. Brown fat’s located in the neck, chest, shoulders and back. Whereas white fat stores energy from food, brown fat is about burning energy for heat. Research by Prof Mike
Symonds of Nottingham Uni discovered that brown fat contains ‘uncoupling protein’ within its mitochondria that, when activated by the cold, helps to generate 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body, becoming a natural way to help you shed weight.
You can heat yourself further by building fitness. Studies have shown that how much heat you generate is linked to your maximum oxygen capacity (VO2max); the higher your VO2max, the more heat you produce. It’s how fell runners, whose VO2max has been measured in the upper 80s, spend winters running over the Dales in a skimpy vest and even skimpier shorts.
“If you’re fit enough, even running for reasonable periods in -2°C isn’t dangerous,” says ergonomist Dr Simon
Hodder. “That said, you might experience issues with the extremities as your body will sacrifice the hands and feet to protect the core. As skin temperature drops, your brain constricts peripheral blood vessels to reduce the amount of heat lost through the skin. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘physiological amputation’, which is great for your core but not so pleasant for your extremities. But, largely on the bike and run, that is all it is – a feeling.”
Training in the cold is a balancing act but daily 1min cold showers; power breathing, whereby you take 30 fast breaths to acclimatise to the reaction of hitting the cold; and simply understanding what’s happening in your body will keep you cold immersed, resulting in greater mental and physical fortitude.
The fasted training concept harks back to huntergathering days where food was scarce and the body – and mind – had to adapt to running on empty
EAT LIKE A CAVEMAN Jonas Colting once swam nearly 400
miles in six weeks, racked up six world and European triathlon medals, and won the Ultraman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii, twice. This comprises the small matter of a 10km Pacific Ocean swim, 421km bike and 84km run. Child’s play. And he achieved this glittering CV by channelling his inner caveman – he went Paleo.
Paleo mimics the dietary strategies of our ancestors before the agricultural revolution brought us carbohydrate riches like grains and potatoes; in other words, fish, eggs, fruit, vegetables and meat. There are many benefits to the paleo diet, including a high micronutrient (vitamins and minerals) content, to boost energy and immunity.
Paleo is also low-inflammatory, as it’s high in omega-3.
So, all good then? Maybe, maybe not. High-intensity training places great demands on carbohydrates, which are hard to come by in sufficient quantities by omitting grains, rice and spuds. Calcium and potassium supplements are recommended, and remember that most meat these days is much unhealthier than days past, so choose organic if you possibly can.
Caveats aside, clearly it hasn’t done Colting any harm. Another age-old ‘fuelling strategy’ – fasted training – has also worked for many triathletes, whether that’s individual sessions to boost fat-burning or caloric restriction as a lifestyle. (It’s usually easier to have a fasted training session first thing in the morning – before breakfast – and simply maintain your energy levels by refuelling on water, but manage these sessions with care). The fasted training concept harks back to hunter-gathering days where food was scarce and the body – and mind – had to adapt to running on empty.
It’s supported by science with a 2018 paper in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition seeing significant physical and performance improvements in recreational athletes who dropped daily calorie intake by 33%. The researchers did, however, recommend micronutrient supplementation and clearly any form of calorie restriction needs to be managed pragmatically and sensibly.
An evening of uninterrupted sleep is a relatively modern phenomenon and is why many of us in the 21st century experience insomnia”
SLEEP LIKE YOUR ANCESTORS When it comes to sleep, no evidence
exists for improving your performance by limiting sleep; in fact, studies show that continuous lack of sleep results in decreased speed and power output, a reduction in reaction times, lower immunity and impaired decision making.
The problem is, modern society is sleep-starved, especially triathletes who train late and can’t drift off.
So, yet again, we can look back for a more energised future. You see, according to historians like Roger Ekrich, an evening of uninterrupted sleep is a relatively modern phenomenon and is why many of us experience insomnia. Ekrich drew on evidence of more than 500 references to segmented sleep patterns in documents from the ancient, modern and medieval worlds and suggests that up until the Industrial Revolution, two sleeps – or biphasic sleep – was the norm.
In Ekrich’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, he suggests individuals would retire a couple of hours after dusk, awaken a few hours later for activities such as chopping wood or sex, and then enjoy a second sleep until dawn.
This routine played to an individual’s circadian rhythm – your natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle – until, that is, electric lighting was invented.
It’s why sleep experts, including Nick Littlehales, suggest triathletes can benefit from a siesta. “A 30-minute nap is the ideal if you’re short of night-time sleep,” says the man who made his name with British Cycling and their bespoke mattresses and toppers. “This is long enough to regenerate without then feeling groggy.”
Many of you might dismiss this idea instantly – sleeping at your desk would probably be frowned upon, although the working from home Covid-boom may have made this more realistic – but Littlehales says you don’t have to nod off. “Just relaxing your mind will leave you feeling refreshed,” he says.
You can also play clever with your nutritional strategy, knocking back an espresso pre-nap. By the time caffeine levels rise in your bloodstream, your nap will be over and you’ll be ready to maximise your training.