The World’s Fittest Humans
Chapter 9: Loris “Maximus” Ferraris (Germany)
In races longer than 6 hours or so such as Ironman, Nemesis and cycling stage racing, maximal lipid power is a major determinant of who wins or loses. If you exceed the speed limit of your maximal lipid power by a wide margin for a big chunk of the race too early or vary effort erratically, you will be forced to slow down at some point long before the finish line. You get pulled over by the metabolic police. It is an unrecoverable error in judgement. All of us know exactly what it feels like as you gradually lose power. With seasoned veterans it is not a catastrophic loss of power quickly but a slow bleed, like you have a flat tire but you don’t. It is energy that bleeds out. Personally, I think it is smarter to go out a little backed off and then gradually pick up the pace until you reach a very fast speed and then mentally lock into that groove until the finish line. In this way you bring your body up to the level of your mind as opposed to having your mind being forced to descend to your body. I also believe it is much less risky in terms of having a poor performance. Rarely have I faded out badly if I started slowly and just built it. You gain a feeling for what you can sustain and what you can’t and you can trust it. You just keep going strong when your mind and body get synched up. This is how I consistently get into that flow state, I mentally roll downhill and relax until flow takes it from there.
— Loris “Maximus” Ferraris
Stuttgart, Germany is called the cradle of the automobile and is home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, fountainheads of sublime engineering and legends in the lore of auto racing. Stuttgart is also the home of the world’s most powerful human in history for one hour. Last year at the Manchester Velodrome in Manchester, England, Loris “Maximus” Ferraris broke the hour record while producing 520 watts of power — that is precisely 7/10 of a horsepower for an hour. Just as frightening is that he averaged 0.57 Newton-meters of torque per kilogram for one hour which is substantially more than than the vaunted 2015 Porsche 911 Turbo S’ peak specific torque of 0.44 Newton-meters per kilogram. That means Loris puts out more torque — pound-for-pound — than a 911 Turbo S. That sounds impressive but is far more impressive than it sounds.
When looking at the specifications for race cars you never hear about force; you hear about torque, power, and energy consumption. On the other hand, with athletes you rarely hear about torque; you hear about force, power, and energy consumption. When it comes to real world performance, however, it is torque (sometimes called moment of force or simply moment) that matters because torque measures the effectiveness of a force to overcome the rotational inertia of an object whereas force is about linear movement only — that is, movement in a straight line meaning there is no axis of rotation or pivot. In other words, torque factors in biomechanics by accounting for the movement of lever arms against rotational resistance whereas force addresses simple, straight linear movement which has little to do with human movement patterns. Force is about linear motion and torque is about forces in rotation. Understand: only rotating movements can be performed by our joints.
The human body is a complicated system of pulleys and levers that actuate around joints and torque quantifies forces that act through these levers as they rotate through joint angles to apply force in the real world: that is what human movement is. There is a reason why the discus throw and rowing are dominated by tall people with long arms and legs. Loris was told that part of his success was due to his very long leg to height ratio. In the deadlift, you want a long torso, long arms and short femur bones. In swimming you want a long torso, long arms, and short legs. And when it comes to gymnastics, well, gymnastics is dominated by radical torque and the body geometries that can produce them. If you mathematically examine the axes of rotation in these sports, you can plainly see the biomechanical advantage of lever systems when bone lengths are optimal but prediction gets even stronger when you account for where muscles attach to the bone because that defines the actual lever arm length. If “strength” were measured by torque output instead of “force” (i.e. the weight of a barbell), there would be a changing of the guard in strength sports. In all sports torque is implicitly a dominant factor in performance and separates — without question — the elite performer from the rest across the entire power continuum from the frontend to the backend. Torque is what makes the world go round. Literally.
In the general population, there is little appreciation of the physics involved in training and competing in endurance sports. The audience hears about race times and sometimes velocities but never about torque and rarely about power and energy consumption and production. What Loris is capable of changed that forever because the multi-disciplinary team of German scientists and engineers responsible for training Loris for the hour record, track cycling’s individual pursuit, and road time trial demonstrated in vivid terms what it means to be the torque king, energy czar and the most powerful human in history for one hour efforts. After all, he is not called Maximus for nothing.
And that was before Team Maximus caught wind of Phenomic Games, a physics bonanza in the realm of sports because the Phenomic 5 was architected that way from the ground up.
Loris was born and grew up in Weil am Rhein, a German suburb of Basel, Switzerland right at that point near the Rhine River where France, Germany, and Switzerland intersect. When he was a young boy he spent quite a bit of time ice skating and Nordic skiing but by the time he was 13 he got hooked on cycling. Both of his parents were school teachers and they would take summer vacations in the nearby Bavarian Alps where they could all mountain bike together. But it didn’t take long before his parents realized there was something very special about young Loris — he not only was fast and could climb well but he could sustain freaky speed. One of the ice skating coaches was also an assistant track cycling coach and once he heard about Loris’ freaky speed he was curious to find out just how freaky.
About an hour drive south of Basel is the Velodrome Suisse, an indoor velodrome in Grenchen, Switzerland. The coach got Loris setup on a makeshift track bike and after Loris learned how to control the bike on the steep track it was quite clear that Loris had a monster aerobic engine of such magnitude that there was no record of anyone at 14 doing what he could without any serious training. Yes, he was a freak. Garden variety 3-σ (3 sigma) aerobic beasts are a dime a dozen compared to Loris, a 5-σ freak of nature that could easily be a cleverly crafted creature paying a visit from outer space. Very quickly coaches from the BDR (Bund Deutscher Radfahrer or the German Cycling Federation) heard about Loris, a German freak that was training in Switzerland. Enough of that. Time to turn him loose.
The BDR pulled the necessary strings to move the Ferraris family to Berlin where young Loris could focus on road and track cycling. In two years, at the age of 16, Loris was German National Champion in the road time trial event in the under 23 year old division and also was World Junior Champion in the 18 year old division and 3rd in the Under 23 year old division. He never competed in junior or U23 categories again.
Team Telekom, a German team that competes in stage races like the Tour de France, Tour de Suisse, and the Giro d’Italia, asked Loris to join the team in 2000 as a 17-year old and he soon discovered the chasmal difference between preparing for a single time trial or a one-day road race and doing stage races everyday including big multi-hour climbs in the Pyrenees and Alps. His off-season training now heavily focused on high volume at low heart rate, always at heart rates below 140 and often not exceeding 130. It will take several years of precisely this kind of training to build his maximal lipid power, which is a measure of how much fat is burned per minute. In stage racing, if you do not have world-class maximal lipid power you will be doomed to fail because you will not recover from day to day and you will run out of gas on long stages. Loris is not a climber at this level and so he is not being groomed to be a rider in quest of the Tour de France’s yellow jersey. The only cyclist in recent times with Loris’ bodyweight and build to contend for the yellow jersey was the great Spaniard Miguel Indurain. Instead, Loris is going to be a specialized domestique for leading out the team’s sprinter for stages where the goal is for your sprinter to win the stage. These are typically flat stages where the peloton hangs back until the end and then all hell breaks loose with a few kilometers to the finish line. But with Loris, this tactic changed.
Most teams in contention for the green, or sprinter’s jersey, use several domestique riders in a sequence that looks like a train with the rider in the front doing all the work breaking the resistance caused by the air whilst the other riders slipstream by riding close to the rear wheel of the rider immediately in front. Then, as the rider in the front fatigues, he falls away and the next rider cranks up the juice at an anaerobic, unsustainable pace faster than a time trial but just shy of a balls-out sprint. At the end, with the finish line approaching, the sprinters duel against each other beyond the redline. But with Loris it worked differently because he could sustain freaky speed for a long time; Loris had a 5-σ aerobic motor in the same league as an unbridled Formula 1 Ferrari. There were several stages where with 10 to 15 kilometers to go Loris and his team’s sprinter would blast off the front and unless another team’s sprinter sniffed it out and got in position it was game over. This tactic didn’t always work as other teams wouldn’t always be caught napping but it was a looming threat and it changed the game because Loris had enough climbing power to use his freaky weapon on stages that had sprint points on mountain stages.
In his last year of his stage cycling career he joined the Italian team Domina Vacanze because it was the team of the best road sprinter of all-time, Mario “The Lion King” Cipollini. The Lion King had such a dominant sprint that he could blast off with 400 meters before the line and not look back — nobody was going to be in his area code. But with Loris and Mario, the biggest aerobic motor in history in tandem with the biggest anaerobic motor in stage cycling’s history, mortal humans need not apply, they just crushed it like a two-stage rocket with Loris being the booster rocket and Mario as the 2nd stage motor carrying the payload. It was after a stage in the Giro d’Italia that Loris was branded his nickname “Maximus”; the deadly duo went off the front with 20 miles to go and opened an increasing time gap from the start of the breakaway — ciao, baby!
When people marveled at the spectacle of Maximus and The Lion King they witnessed one of those flabbergasting synergistic duets like Paul McCartney and John Lennon, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, or Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen — time stands still out of respect for transcendent human greatness.
After four seasons of stage cycling where he accumulated 15 time trial or prologue stage wins he decided to specialize in road time trials and individual pursuit in track cycling. His directeur sportif connected Loris with Elite Performance Technologies (EPT), an athletic performance engineering firm in Berlin that offers a turnkey, multi-disciplinary approach to realizing your genetic potential, a magic kingdom for superheroes. In short, they do performance makeovers on a more supernatural level than imagined by the ghost of Walt Disney. So, you have to ask yourself, what is the outcome when you cross a mutant like Maximus with state-of-the-art, cost-no-object, biological systems engineering at EPT for 10 years?
After EPT took Loris on a test drive on their cycling ergometer, they were stunned. And after taking apart his history of training, diet, and micronutrition they were even more stunned: Loris still had plenty of untapped upside — Maximus wasn’t maxed out. EPT had battle-seasoned practitioners and deep theoreticians that covered the gamut from strength to ultra-endurance sports and implemented a systems biology approach to performance similar to the diverse engineering disciplines used to design Formula 1 race cars. In Formula 1 you have reliability, systems, mechanical, chemical, aeronautical and electrical engineers and information scientists. At EPT there were disciplines including: exercise physiology, epigenetics, biochemistry, bioinformatics, data visualization, systems biology, electrical engineering, theoretical biology, cardiology, internal medicine, biomechanics, biophysics, sports psychology, chronobiology, physical therapy, biological anthropology, and several breeds of elite coaches spanning strength, speed, and ultra-endurance disciplines along with gymnastics, ballet, and modern dance. In other words, EPT can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but Loris ain’t no pig.
Loris’ goal initially was to focus on the UCI World Road Time Trial event but he also would compete in cross-country mountain bike racing and track cycling’s individual pursuit. These events are in a duration range of 4 minutes to 2 hours which spans Loris’ metabolic wheelhouse. Most elite European stage cycling teams do little or no serious strength training but at EPT that is not the case. He will be doing some basic Olympic lifting but mostly strength-specific movements that directly apply to his objectives. He will also do some cross-training like running, Nordic skiing and swimming in the off-season and as in-season, active rest.
The foundation for training for endurance events that last longer than a minute is prolonged, submaximal endurance training. All world-class endurance athletes know this but this is anything but common knowledge. The problem lies with understanding what “aerobic” means and often gets conflated with “cardio” (whatever that means…). Loris understood what it means in terms of training since he was coached by superb sports scientists on two different European stage cycling teams. But EPT had on staff Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt, an exercise physiologist with a penchant for theory and an encyclopedic grasp of physical conditioning history, who laid it out in a simple chronology.
Dr. Hammerschmidt immediately rolled up his sleeves to look at biochemistry and metabolism. He started with the milestones of discovery in aerobic and anaerobic metabolism which were born from the work of the two German biochemists Gustav Embden and Otto Meyerhof in the 1930s. Their work on anaerobic glycolysis, which is the metabolic target of The Burn and is the 2nd aspect of the 3rd metabolic gear in Phenomic Games, is called the Embden-Meyerhof pathway in their honor. Shortly thereafter, respiration, or aerobic glycolysis which became simply “aerobic”, was discovered and in 1937 Hans Adolf Kreb’s elucidated the citric acid cycle which became known as the Kreb’s cycle. Dr. Hammerschmidt’s first major point was that the output of the Embden-Meyerhof pathway feeds into the Kreb’s cycle. In other words, the output of anaerobic glycolysis is the input for aerobic glycolysis — this is a highly integrated process. All in all, there are three steps in the process of using carbohydrate aerobically resulting in ATP, CO2, and H2O. The 1st aspect of the 3rd metabolic gear and the 2nd metabolic gear of Phenomic Games address the effective power band of aerobic glycolysis.
But this is what Loris learned and it is vital to understand: training to use fat as fuel and carbohydrate as fuel aerobically must be treated by your training design as two independent processes even though — theoretically — they overlap and both are, unfortunately, lumped together as “aerobic.” Part of the misunderstanding was that the biochemistry of fat oxidation, which is called β-oxidation (Greek “beta”) or the fatty acid cycle, was not fully defined until between 1943 and 1948 by the Argentines Leloir and Muñoz and the Americans Lehninger and Kennedy. Ok, so how do fats fit into this? Fats, like carbohydrates, fit into the aerobic metabolism pipeline at the same juncture, they both plug into the Kreb’s cycle as identical inputs (acetyl-Coenzyme A) after pre-processing but they are not used randomly, they are metabolically selected depending upon availability of O2. Dr. Hammerschmidt was quick to point out to Loris that there is a catch, and it is a HUGE catch: O2 is absolutely needed in the final step of aerobic glycolysis called the electron transport chain but is not required for carbohydrate as an input to the Kreb’s cycle. So here is the major point of his biochemistry history lesson: if there is insufficient O2 concentration in a muscle cell to support “fat metabolism” (β-oxidation) AND the electron transport chain then the cell must crossover to carbohydrate as the fuel source. This is where biochemistry and biophysics intersect and there is no escaping this reality any more than you can negotiate with gravity. The paper describing this “crossover” concept was George Brooks et al in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 1994 entitled: “Balance of carbohydrate and lipid utilization during exercise: the ‘crossover’ concept”. The consequences of this are vast and the first researchers to publish this distinction in light of endurance training were John Hawley and Will Hopkins the following year in 1995 in a paper entitled: “Aerobic glycolytic and aerobic lipolytic power systems. A new paradigm with implications for endurance and ultraendurance events” in Sports Medicine.
Now Loris understood why he was told to never allow his heart rate go above 130 beats per minute on his long rides; 130 beats per minute for him was an exercise intensity that represented a crossover point between the use of fats to carbohydrates and occurred as a ramping gradient meaning that as intensity increases beyond 130 beats per minute progressively more and more utilization of fat must be substituted by carbohydrate because of O2 insufficiency. In Phenomic Games, the 1st metabolic gear addresses the capability of the lipolytic power system and the proving grounds are firmly rooted on Nemesis.
So, Dr. Hammerschmidt asked: Why is targeting the lipolytic power system such a big deal? It is huge because the reason you train is to stress a biological system to adapt in a desired way to a specific set of stressors (i.e. “training”) recognized by the organism. In this case, targeting the lipolytic power system and motor control circuitry forces adaptive changes such as:
increase capillary density to allow more O2 extraction from the arterial blood supply;
increase the number of metabolic chains that constitute β-oxidation;
increase the amount of fat stored within the working muscles in the form of intramuscular triglycerides (IMTG);
decrease the activity of the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (i.e. decrease the use of carbohydrate as a fuel source);
increase mitochondrial density;
enhance the intra-cellular regulation of energy consumption so as to optimize for the use of fats instead of carbohydrate; and
increase the efficiency of energy utilization via adaptations in the neural circuitry for motor control.
There is no substitute for low heart rate, long duration training to fully develop the lipolytic power system. It is tattooed into our source code.
Dr. Hammerschmidt also investigated trends in the overall proportion of training time spent at different intensity zones. In the popular press and media it seems like there has been a meteoric rise in the advocacy of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), that prolonged sub-maximal endurance training is a waste of time, obsolete, that it is just logging empty, “junk” miles with nothing to show for it. It turns out that during the last 40 years amongst world class athletes in endurance sports that last from 4 minutes to ultra-endurance, the actual trend in this population, as opposed to weekend warriors and endurance dilettantes, is a large increase in overall training volume in which the lowest heart rate zone has gobbled up the lion’s share of the time. As training volume increased in the lowest intensity training zone, performances in every major endurance sport have improved over the decades. In serious athletes in every endurance sport, he saw that 70 to 85% of the total training time is spent in the lowest intensity zone (60 -70% VO2 max which corresponds to the training of maximal lipid power) with a prevailing trend of decreased high-intensity interval training volume. For Olympic rowing, a sub-6 minute event, 93–94% of training time is high-volume, low-intensity exercise in zone 1, less than the first lactate threshold. As for world-class Nordic skiers, 86–89% of training time is low-intensity (60–80% of maximal heart rate) while high-intensity (>87% MHR) is restricted to only 6–8% of the time. Training volume among elite swimmers is 5 hours a day 7 days a week. The high intensity efforts only factor in as the competition nears — in other words, it is periodized into the program as a peaking tool for maximizing aerobic power (i.e. targeting VO2 max and the anaerobic threshold).
So then, what is the longterm outcome of doing years of this sub-maximal endurance capacity training? Let’s say Loris as a beginning endurance athlete was able to expend 3 megajoules (MJ) of energy per day and be able to recover to repeat it the following day. That would be like him cycling 150 watts for 90 minutes on level ground. Remember, you have to able to do that at low heart rate which the vast majority of people could not do for quite awhile but Loris got there long before he needed to shave. Now, fast forwarding to the peak of his career as a world-class stage cyclist; now we are talking about a daily energy expenditure on long days during peak training volume in the neighborhood of 23 MJ/day. That would represent 260 watts for 6 hours on level ground. To make this into a vivid image, let’s convert the same energy Loris is expending on his bike and put it in a Tesla. A Tesla Roadster travels 2.53 km per MJ of electrical energy. If we take Loris’ 23 MJ of metabolic energy and convert that to 23 MJ of electrical energy in the battery, his daily workout would power the Tesla for 36.2 miles per day! Loris the novice would be 4.7 miles. That is a 7.7x increase in endurance capacity between Loris the novice and Loris the Maximus. You don’t see that kind of ∆P (delta P, performance improvement) in world-class strength athletes; all humans — not just 5-σ Loris freaks — have enormous potential to improve endurance capacity many-fold. You just have to know how to train intelligently and don’t fall into the fatal but tempting trap of substituting intensity for duration.
In the Tour de France, Ironman, or Nemesis, if you do not have a world-class lipolytic power system you will never see the view from the podium.
All of these adaptations are needed to improve maximal lipid power. This is the holy grail of ultra-endurance sports because it means you increase the amount of fat used at any given, low to upper mid-range percentage of maximal heart — you can go faster using fats or use less carbohydrate at the same speed. The other thing that is mission-critical is that the energy storage of fats (called intramuscular triglycerides or IMTG) inside the working muscles (not around your waist) will reach the point over the many years of training where IMTG energy capacity doubles that of stored glycogen in the muscle.
If you fail to understand this you will, instead, adapt in ways to be more efficient with carbohydrate fuel consumption while trading-off the long-term accrual of improved fat metabolism. Loris now understood why greater than 75% of his annual training time was spent going slow (for him, not you!) for hours; that is the precise stress profile to improve maximal lipid power and build the IMTG fuel tanks and — without coincidence — that is what migratory man did as well. Doing “cardio” (whatever that means…) and doing endurance capacity training are completely different critters based on unassailable, evolutionary grounds. When you think it through from the inside-out, maximal lipid power and lots of IMTG fuel, given prolonged environmental circumstances where you must be nomadic, are the precise adaptations to best underwrite survival prospects. Thus, a glowing stamp of approval from Darwin.
Loris was told repeatedly that he could not fool Mother nature which meant you cannot trade-off training duration for intensity. This is a ruggedly uncuttable corner.
Each season as Loris transitioned from the off-season to endurance-capacity base building and then on to hard-core preparation for the road time trial, cross-country mountain bike racing, or the individual pursuit on the track, the training emphasis shifted from targeting the lipolytic power system to optimizing maximal aerobic power. This means an emphasis on aerobic glycolysis while maintaining a large percentage of the functionality of the lipolytic power system. Dr. Hammerschmidt claimed that the basic idea behind maximizing aerobic power is based on measuring the concentration of lactate in the blood and then defining training protocols that increase in intensity as you adapt and blood lactate decreases at a given power output. This training is very grueling. In the words of the great Greg LeMond, 3-time winner of the Tour de France: “It never gets easier, you just go faster”.
In training the lipolytic power system the physiological switching point is rate-limited in terms of O2 sufficiency to support fat metabolism. You must define training intensity in terms of this switching point with an emphasis on staying below a certain heart rate or power level. Now for maximal aerobic power, the concrete physiological switching point shifts to the limiting factor of aerobic glycolysis. If you recall, Dr. Hammerschmidt’s first major point was that the output of anaerobic glycolysis is the input to aerobic glycolysis but the capacity of the anaerobic process can greatly exceed the capacity of the aerobic process to utilize it. That is a big problem.
So how and why does lactate fit into this? The output of anaerobic glycolysis is pyruvate but if too much pyruvate is produced the aerobic process cannot handle it and pyruvate is converted to lactate. Lactate can be used as an input just as easily as pyruvate but at some point lactate builds up and leaks out of the muscle into the blood. Lactate accumulates as an acid — lactic acid — and the pH inside the cell declines to the point where the enzymes responsible for producing ATP cease.
Dr. Hammerschmidt once again taught Loris the historical milestones for the training process. It all begin with a paper published in 1964 by Wasserman and Mcilroy titled: “Detecting the Threshold of Anaerobic Metabolism in Cardiac Patients during Exercise” in the American Journal of Cardiology. It was they who coined the term “anaerobic threshold” which is the progressive shift from oxidative (aerobic glycolysis) to anaerobic glycolysis. This, however, was a medical study, not exercise physiology for elite athletes. The paper is about what happens if the heart cannot pump enough O2 to the working muscles in the cardiac-challenged patient. But would this apply to world class athletes?
What this means is that if the exercise intensity exceeds the limit of aerobic metabolism, then there is progressive reliance on anaerobic metabolism to increase energy production. It cannot come from anywhere else whether you are a barely ambulatory cardiac patient or the world record holder in the 5K. Loris learned that maximal aerobic power is rate-limited by O2 availability (but at a different O2 concentration than what rate-limits the lipolytic power system) or by the function of an enzyme called the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex or PDC. The work of Wasserman and Mcilroy was then used by Francesco Conconi as the theory behind the assault on cycling’s hour record by Francesco Moser in 1984 at Mexico City. This became world famous as the Conconi test, a means of graphing blood lactate levels versus heart rate and how this relationship changes as you progressively train in a range between the lower-bound aerobic threshold (where lactate rises above resting level) and the upper-bound which is called the onset of blood lactate accumulation (OBLA) or anaerobic threshold. Loris has done quite a bit of lactate testing over the years and deeply appreciated finally learning at least the basic theory behind the methods.
From the early work of Conconi, Conconi’s two protégés, Michele Ferrari and Luigi Cecchini, further refined these methods as they were in the employ of many stage cycling teams and Tour de France winners in the 1990s. The most significant published work on lactate training, which now redefined the training approach to multiple sports, was the work of Dr. Peter Janssen in collaboration with the new ECG-accurate wireless heart rate monitors by the Finnish company Polar Electro Oy (“Polar”) as this hardware became the first mission-critical wearable electronic device for sports applications to go mainstream. Heart rate monitors became the instrument for both training the lipolytic power system and for maximizing aerobic power since both use heart rate as a proxy for calibrating metabolic intensity of the two switching points:
1. lipids ⇔ carbohydrate in functionally-distinct aerobic capacities, and
2. aerobic ⇔ anaerobic glycolysis.
Janssen published a milestone book in training history called Training Lactate Pulse-Rate in 1987 with the latest edition in 2001.
Dr. Hammerschmidt then brought the discussion up to the current state-of-the-art. In 1994, 5-time Tour de France winner Miguel Indurain broke the hour record with an estimated power output of 509.5 watts, the highest power level to date. In 2000, in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Padilla et al published a detailed paper on Indurain’s testing, training, and physiological measurements entitled: “Scientific approach to the 1-h cycling world record: a case study”. Loris, after working with EPT, used all the training research at their disposal along with different dimensions of improving adaptive yield to garner even greater ∆P for his target events. Loris was excited to push the needle beyond the old Maximus. He didn’t just want to go as fast as possible, he wanted to go impossibly fast. Is he an E.T. just visiting from outer space or what? Damn it, Maximus!
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann, co-founder of EPT, is a systems biologist who specializes in bioinformatics, with particularly keen interest in metabolomics, physiomics and metabolic networks. That is a mouthful! He always had difficulty getting people to understand what he did for a living. His world is about applying hardcore engineering from many disciplines along with network theory to how the body adapts to stress from a metabolic perspective. The long and short of it is that Dr. Zimmermann’s approach has completely replaced the long-in-the-tooth field of micronutrition and a daddy-sized chunk of macronutrition to boot. Micronutrition’s core idea today is still founded on the paper written by Polish scientist Casimir Funk in 1912 entitled: “The Etiology of Deficiency Diseases” who then wrote the classic book The Vitamines that same year. In Funk’s own words:
It is now known that all these diseases, with the exception of pellagra, can be prevented and cured by the addition of certain preventive substances; the deficient substances, which are of the nature of organic bases, we will call “vitamines”; and we will speak of a beri-beri or scurvy vitamine, which means, a substance preventing the special disease. As regards the classification two different groups present themselves: the beri-beri group and the scurvy group.
Understand that the biochemistry of metabolism and molecular biology did not exist in 1912; this is a scant 12 years after the work of Mendelian genetics with pea plants became known. His concept was that there were chemical compounds that the body could not produce itself that were responsible for the prevention of many diseases and he coined the term “vitamine” (“vita” for life and “amine” for an organic compound of nitrogen that is derivative of ammonia) as the antidote in his theory of deficiency diseases. His theory was correct, it works quite well despite his having no understanding of the molecular mechanisms. He became the first vitamine hunter.
Funk did not quantify the required amounts of “vitamines” which had to wait until 1941 with the concept of recommended daily allowances or the RDA, which, for all intents and purposes is the same as today (now it is called % Daily Values or %DV). Why 1941? The driving force behind the quantification of vitamin requirements was the fact that a significant percentage of potential U.S. soldiers were unfit for duty during World War II due to malnutrition. One A Day brand vitamins from Miles Laboratories (acquired by the German company Bayer AG) capitalized on this effort and began marketing their multi-vitamin product in 1940 in the same time frame as the government publication. The theoretical foundation of the micronutritional paradigm has not changed one nanometer since then.
The quantification question was framed around the minimum amount to prevent these diseases, it had nothing to do with optimal function or having instrumental value in redefining the human phenome as it pushes the performance envelope — objectives like that were beyond the horizon of both imagination and knowledge in the 1940s. Dr. Zimmermann’s light bulb came to life: why is micronutrition in 2016 still using the same paradigm as in 1912? Haven’t we learned something about molecular biology, physiology, genetics, and many, many other fields in the last 100 years to throw that out the window and start from the ground up? One year later he founded EPT because he had a better idea.
Dr. Zimmermann was no vitamin hunter. It is well understood why certain biochemical compounds such as vitamins as well as minerals fit into our metabolic pathways as essential nutrients in the vast task of maintaining life, of performing homeodynamics in the face of perturbations to our biological milieu. They play a small but vital role in adapting to the stress of life given an organism’s duty of survival and reproduction — but is that all there is, all that can be accomplished by the massive palette of micronutrients available to mammals? Has anyone ever seriously addressed that question?
Dr. Zimmermann saw things quite differently. He not only looked at the big picture but looked at how an organism responds to stress from the inside out: what is it thinking, what could it do if it had more molecular tools to work with at any given moment? He began to profoundly think about the essence of biology on a much deeper level than shallow biological disciplines like nutrition, biochemistry, and exercise physiology; deep biology explores the realm of energy and information, shallow biologies are derivative of this and can never bring more to the table. If you want to redefine biology, that is where you need to setup shop.
He asked: what does being alive mean to your body? The essence of all biological systems is the perception and control of the flow of energy and the integrity of information; energy and information are the native tongue of living systems. Just beneath the organism level of complexity, the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems act as an integrated but distributed whole to perceive billions of input signals and then make decisions in the form of output signals like nerve impulses, immune responses, and hormonal signals — these three independent systems viewed through a reductionist’s lens from medicine’s perspective are an integral, indivisible unity from the organism’s perspective. Since the inputs are very complex, diverse and often contradictory, the outputs are very noisy.
Fortunately, biological systems are not only extraordinarily tolerant of noise but their stability in the face of constant disruption depends on it — chaos is just as essential as vitamin C. This management of the stresses of life is called homeodynamics: a living system is in a constant state of change but the overall integrity of the structure and function of the organism is maintained by an integrated, signal-processing network that is distributed throughout the organism. So how can micronutrition be treated as a tool to optimize biological function given diverse stress profiles? What will an organism do differently in the face of stress if you alter the diversity and concentration of a radically-broad spectrum of micronutrients, present it with something it hasn’t witnessed since, say, the first amoeba — or ever? That is what he aimed to find out.
One thing Dr. Zimmermann knew implicitly: optimization is not classical science, it is engineering. Performance enhancement is all about optimization of a model, it is about fine-tuning feedback loops, not about clinical laboratory environments isolated from the nasty hazards of the real world. No one ever set a world record in a lab. Because EPT’s mandate is to discover new, revolutionary means to enhance performance for their world-class clients as opposed to publishing hypotheses and scientific testing of said hypotheses, Dr. Zimmermann’s team worked from educated guesses or hunches, really, and would see if they work with a very rapid guess-and-test via trial-and-error. Then, based upon real world results and inputs from a staff of propeller-headed truth seekers in a plethora of niche specialties, EPT developed out-of-the-box means of extending adaptive response, more talent at squeezing ∆P out of a turnip. They then cloned the process with more clients improving the veracity and reliability of the new training and recovery protocol. In the real world of engineering, the use of multi-disciplinary teams to accelerate the learning process of innovation in a stepwise-refinement framework has become standard practice with technology companies on the leading edge. Fail fast = learn fast. Googlers do it. Formula 1 Teams do it. America’s Cup boat designers do it. Stefan Thomke, a professor at Harvard, wrote a book on the role that experimentation plays in the innovative process called Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation in 2003. Innovators do not have time to follow.
Dr. Zimmermann dismissed Casimir Funk and his century of followers and brigade of vitamine hunters and started building a brave new world based on the structure of metabolic networks. The social graphs of Facebook, the structure of the global networks of airports, neural networks, epidemics (e.g. “going viral”) and metabolic networks in every cell of your body as well as an amoeba’s are pretty much the same thing when you mathematically examine the relationship of connections to nodes. When it comes to the construction of networks by an evolutionary, organic process, a common design blueprint emerges that is the signature of robust and error-tolerant scale-free networks. What you find is that no matter how complex the network, what it is composed of, or how physically big or small it is, the structure remains the same, that is, it is scale-free: network properties scale and that is really important to internalize if you want to put a dent in the universe of sports.
What he found is that when you take apart a metabolic network, which is composed of enzymes as edges (“links”, like the PDHC complex which is that edge in the metabolic network that is a bottleneck for aerobic glycolysis) and the nodes being metabolites (like pyruvate or glucose), is that the average number of edges of the set of the shortest paths between every pair of nodes in the entire network is 2.56. That means, at least on the surface, that metabolic networks are highly interconnected but there are chinks in the armor which are vulnerabilities to the network but, at the same time, are opportunities for Dr. Zimmermann to leverage adaptive response — they are low-hanging fruit of ∆P to exploit. Why? Because the average path distance of 2.56 is the average, not the distribution. It turns out some linkages are over 12 steps apart. What that means is that some metabolic pathways instead of being next door neighbors or 2.56 doors down are way across town.
But it gets worse: the ease of moving from one node to another are not created equally. Some enzymes require a relatively rare molecule to be present in order for them to work at all. This is like being at a door but you can’t open it because you don’t have the key. Guess what: “vitamins” and minerals play this precise role in metabolic networks, they are like keys to enzymes but the body cannot make those keys, they must be in the diet, or, say, in a One A Day pill. So much for micronutritional theory and vitamine hunters: the last century of said theory is just a minuscule piece of a much bigger puzzle if the puzzle is viewed in terms of network theory. Dr. Zimmermann, however, saw this as the tip of the iceberg because the deficiency theory of micronutrition never asked questions about improving adaptive yield for humans pushing the performance envelope for mind or body, for discovering new sources of ∆P.
This even applies to cognition, which is a huge multi-level, neural network, a connectome which just happens to have 100 billion nodes called neurons, each of which has metabolic and gene-regulatory networks embedded inside each and every one of them. Dr. Zimmermann then made the cosmic connection that the metabolic machinery of every neuron in your brain is identical to what each muscle cell in your legs use to power a time trialist during The Climb: aerobic glycolysis. He pondered: if you can change the performance of energy production in slow twitch muscle via sophisticated micronutrition then, concomitantly, aren’t you affecting that identical metabolic process in neurons and what, exactly, are the consequences of that? Muscles use aerobic glycolysis to produce ATP to cause bones to move in space via muscular contraction. Neurons use aerobic glycolysis to produce ATP to process signals and make binary decisions in the form of triggering electrical action potentials (“spikes”) between neurons — that is how they communicate. If you lift up the hood here, most of the energy needed by neurons is to perform the unsexy but vital task of operating ion pumps; it is ion pumps that make these electrical spikes of communication possible. As you can imagine, they have extreme demands for energy. In fact, the signaling-related energy use in the human brain (in ATP per gram per minute) is equal to that in human leg muscle running the marathon. Food for thought — literally — eh?
So, what does all this mean in terms of cognitive performance, ameliorating mental fatigue (…flagging ion pumps) and, perhaps, the manifestation of latent, adjacent-possible, cerebral faculties right on the cusp of emergence? All of that is on the table because network effects are the workhorse of biological evolutionary process and metabolic and gene-regulatory networks are the sun in that solar system — network effects are butterfly effects and underestimating their emergent behavior is felony ignorance punishable by death by pillory.
Dr. Zimmermann knew he was on to something with the transformative impact of an awakened San Andreas Fault. He was well aware that the current — albeit threadbare — micronutritional paradigm only addressed what was required in minimum quantities to plug the metabolic dike of scourges like scurvy, beri beri, pellagra, and rickets — this has nothing to do with optimizing or fine-tuning a network to achieve novel, high-performance outcomes. The entire modern world is governed by network effects from: communication networks, neural networks, the power grid, transportation networks, epidemiology, to gene-interaction networks. What can Dr. Zimmermann and EPT do to apply this knowledge to metabolic networks?
Metabolic networks are the heart and soul of life; as they go, so go you…and Loris “Maximus” Ferraris as well as his fellow Phenomic Games competitors. Dr. Zimmermann drew four parallels based on network theory:
- Essential nutrients that are not available to a metabolic network have catastrophic consequences because specific enzymes fail to function causing downstream activity connected to that enzyme to cease (prevention of deficiency diseases remedied by a One A Day approach).
- Pharmaceutical drugs, PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) and poisons/toxins manipulate the function of metabolic networks by inhibiting (i.e. bonding to an enzyme to decrease its activity) or activating (i.e. bonding to an enzyme to increase its activity) of targeted enzymes which impacts downstream function connected to that enzyme or affecting receptors (e.g. hormone receptors) by causing gain-of-function or loss-of-function by up- or down-regulating receptor activity.
- Under conditions of stress to the organism, conditionally-essential nutrients if under limited supply cause sub-optimal performance of metabolic networks resulting in poor adaptation to stress and impaired performance.
- Metabolic networks can be fine-tuned to improve adaptive yield to stress (“training”) by making available in real-time to a metabolic network a fully-comprehensive array from multiple classes of micronutrients with sufficient concentration that are of scalable dose to minimize metabolic bottlenecks and network chokepoints. This, in concert with stress (“training”), impact gene-regulatory networks and their subsequent regulatory effects on metabolic networks including self-modification of the metabolic network structure itself.
Dr. Zimmermann made the following analogy: metabolic networks in their major role of adapting to stress are extremely robust — adaptations occur even under severe and prolonged stress of sufficient degree to facilitate survival. Evolution made them so. There are redundancies in the system in the form of plan A, plan B, plan C, and plan D if the preferred plan A cannot execute due to lack of key nutrients. What he accomplished with his experimental micronutritional profile was to assure plan A metabolic network performance to the highest degree possible. EPT is still refining it based on real world performance by world-class athletes. He laid out a cursory sketch of this approach:
SYSTEMS BIOLOGY (Levels of Complexity)
MOLECULAR & INTRACELLULAR LEVEL:
experimental micronutrient profile → ∆P of metabolic networks ← effect of cellular signalling caused by stress profiles (“training”)
⬇
CELL, TISSUE, ORGAN, LEVELS…
⬇
ORGANISM LEVEL:
+∆P of metabolic networks at the intracellular level → +∆P of organism* (functional changes in phenotype) → evolution of the phenome (expansion of set of realizable phenotypes)
* ∆P of organism (e.g. sports performance, cognitive enhancement, healing response) are only three of many classes of functional change at the organism level of complexity because all cell types are impacted
Loris wasn’t the first athlete at EPT to up his game using Dr. Zimmermann’s approach. His recovery improved significantly particularly morning stiffness in his joints after long rides as well as strength in basic, functional movements. The biggest change was his maximal aerobic power for one hour; it improved from 490 to 520 watts, a significant 6% boost. No, not a daddy-sized 1-σ jump in ∆P but a nice chunk of the way there — at this level, 30 watts is a godsend, Loris put that on his physiological credit card. He noticed improved cognition and faster motor learning of novel exercise movements. What Dr. Zimmermann could not overemphasize was the difference between measuring benefits in ∆P between beginners and non-elite performers versus world-class performers. It is faulty logic thinking that significant improvement in ∆P in a population of middling amateurs or students from some study in a lab will translate to world-class performers (who are scarce as hen’s teeth) whereas the converse most certainly is true. For this reason EPT only develops technology in-house on elite performers using a step-wise refinement model based on principles of optimization.
Dr. Hammerschmidt heard about Phenomic Games a little over a year before Whistler and nearly came out of his skin, wildly excited, apeshit is the precise Oxford word. What a great idea for a competition! Finally something for EPT to fully stretch its legs and go for it in all dimensions of sport. They brainstormed about the possibilities for Loris doing the Phenomic 5 and quickly honed in on his weaknesses: the clean and jerk and Nemesis. Loris was totally onboard and abandoned his previous annual plan for this coming cycling season while the EPT Team put together a new one starting from scratch.
They met with the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund (German Olympic Sports Confederation) and were granted any resources they wanted for Loris’ training for Whistler. Loris was already well known throughout Germany and Europe and a stellar performance at Phenomic Worlds would gravitate his aura to a stellar orbit. They brought in a German Olympic weightlifting coach and an elite cross-country trekker that specialized in day hikes with large vertical gain. The re-tooled training plan was humming along and one day Loris got a Facebook message from Dr. John Beasley from the London Herald. He requested an interview and they scheduled a day when both Dr. Hammerschmidt and Dr. Zimmermann would be available.
Dr. John Beasley and his cameraman Ralph Towers drove up around 1 PM to the EPT lobby and Loris stepped out to greet them. John had heard of the cycling prodigy years ago and was thrilled that the now 32-year old Loris was stepping up to the Phenomic stage.
“Loris, I have heard so much about you. Must be magical for someone of your caliber to be working with Elite Performance Technologies for Phenomic Games. Looking forward to our interview. This is Ralph Towers, my assistant.”
“Glad to meet you, Dr. Beasley. My pleasure, Ralph. We have everything you need inside. Dr. Beasley, I have seen your interviews so far. Pretty exciting to be part of this year’s Games. We got it all set up in our studio. Everyone speaks English pretty well, perhaps the accent gives us Krauts away but it will work. Let me get Damien and Jürgen. In 30 minutes sound good?”
“Sounds good to us. See you inside.”
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June 20, 2015
Emailed transcript to the LONDON HERALD for the weekly column:
Portraits of The World’s Fittest Humans: Preparing for The Phenomic Games
Loris Ferraris, 5-time Men’s UCI Road Time Trial World Champion (2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014), Current holder of the Hour Record (track cycling), Manchester, England, 2014
Dispatch from the Elite Performance Technologies Training Center in Berlin, Germany
— — — — — —
by Dr. John Beasley, PhD
Scientific Journalist
My mission is to track down the leading contenders for next season’s Phenomic Games World Championship in Whistler, Canada and bring their dreams, beliefs, and training approaches directly to you every Saturday.
Who are the world’s fittest humans?
What do they do to prepare?
Why do they do it?
__________________________________________________________
Loris Ferraris
Phenomic Human Ranking: unranked
Age: 32
Height: 6–1 (1.85m)
Weight: 173 lbs. (78.6kg)
Birthplace: Weil am Rhein, Germany
Education: University of Stuttgart, B.A., Economics, minor in Sport Science
Occupation: professional cyclist
Background: 5-time Men’s UCI Road Time Trial World Champion (2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014)
Men’s Olympic Road Time Trial, Gold Medal (2012 London Games)
Current holder of the Hour Record (track cycling), Manchester, England, 2014
15 stage wins (time trials, prologues) in the Tour de France, Tour de Suisse, and the Giro d’Italia between 2000 and 2004
1st place in the World Individual Pursuit at the 2013 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Minsk, Belarus
Started training for The Phenomic Games in 2014
Favorite event: The Climb
Most challenging event: Clean & Jerk
Favorite exercise: track intervals at the velodrome
Coaches: Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt (head coach)
Diet: omnivore
Favorite food: Duck and Knödel (dumplings)
Status: single
Current residence: Berlin, Germany
Nickname: Maximus
Interview
Dr. John Beasley: Hello, today my travels for Phenomic Games bring me to Berlin, Germany in the studio of the athletic performance engineering firm Elite Performance Technologies. With me is five-time UCI Road Time Trial World Champion, Olympic Gold medalist and the most powerful human for 1 hour in history, Loris Ferraris. To his immediate right is co-founder of EPT and systems biologist Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann and to my right is exercise physiologist and Loris’ head coach Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt. Loris, when did you know you were going to the most powerful man in recorded history?
Loris Ferraris: John, it kind of snuck up on me. Every since I can remember I was always fast on my bike. I pedaled harder and I just went faster without feeling fatigued. Only when I cranked it did I start ventilating heavily. When you are a kid you don’t think about power or torque, you just ride and have fun. It didn’t dawn on me that there was anything special about me until I started competing against kids several years older with more riding experience. I had no problem keeping up and quickly realized I could drop them off my wheel if I went hard.
Dr. John Beasley: So you ice skated and Nordic skied in grade school and then discovered cycling?
Loris Ferraris: Yes, I loved skating and being out on the rolling hills on my skis in the winter but once I started mountain biking with my parents in the Bavarian Alps I wanted to get into cycling. Fortunately for me, an assistant cycling coach had heard that I was freaky fast on a bike and he took me to the Velodrome Suisse, an indoor velodrome in Grenchen, Switzerland about an hour south of where I lived. Within a short time I knew I wanted to be a pro cyclist. I didn’t know what that meant or had any inkling of how hard it is to be a pro cyclist but that is what I wanted to do. My parents backed my dream.
Dr. John Beasley: Then the German Cycling Federation got wind of your freakiness and opened the door to your cycling career?
Loris Ferraris: Pretty much, yes. I finally started to train seriously at 14 and by the time I was 16 I was German National Junior Champion and 3rd in the world in the under 23 division in the road time trial. Then everything moved up to a completely different level when at 17 I was asked to join Team Telekom, a professional stage racing team sponsored by the German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom.
Dr. John Beasley: What were the big changes once you joined Team Telekom?
Loris Ferraris: The training mileage at low heart rate! I had been doing it for several years already but nothing close to that kind of mileage and discipline. But without it, there is no way you can perform in a stage race. You have to not only be fast but you have to be able to go fast using fats. When it comes to serious endurance events like the European stage races and races like Ironman triathlon, each training season is like putting a ring on a tree. You build out serious endurance capacity and maximal lipid power one ring at a time until you are like an oak tree. Eventually you can go fast without drawing down on your precious glycogen reserves [Ed. carbohydrate stored in the muscle]. You need glycogen to go really fast, when you need maximal aerobic power pedal-to-the-metal.
In races longer than 6 hours or so such as Ironman, Nemesis and cycling stage racing, maximal lipid power is a major determinant of who wins or loses. If you exceed the speed limit of your maximal lipid power by a wide margin for a big chunk of the race too early or vary effort erratically, you will be forced to slow down at some point long before the finish line. You get pulled over by the metabolic police. It is an unrecoverable error in judgement. All of us know exactly what it feels like as you gradually lose power. With seasoned veterans it is not a catastrophic loss of power quickly but a slow bleed, like you have a flat tire but you don’t. It is energy that bleeds out. Personally, I think it is smarter to go out a little backed off and then gradually pick up the pace until you reach a very fast speed and then mentally lock into that groove until the finish line. In this way you bring your body up to the level of your mind as opposed to having your mind being forced to descend to your body. I also believe it is much less risky in terms of having a poor performance. Rarely have I faded out badly if I started slowly and just built it. You gain a feeling for what you can sustain and what you can’t and you can trust it. You just keep going strong when your mind and body get synched up. This is how I consistently get into that flow state, I mentally roll downhill and relax until flow takes it from there.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: What Loris is talking about are the two major capacities a world class stage cyclist must demonstrate: maximal lipid power and maximal aerobic power. You can have a high maximal aerobic power without a high maximal lipid power or you can have a high maximal lipid power without a high maximal aerobic power. They are distinct metabolic switching points. Someone who is a world class track cycling pursuiter or a 1500 meter runner can be the first type and most domestiques in stage cycling are in the second category. To be an athlete competing for the yellow jersey you need not only both of those capacities but also a high power to weight ratio for sustained climbing. Loris has a maximal aerobic power that is the best of all time coupled to an excellent maximal lipid power. On level ground he is a dragon slayer. Even in long climbs only a few guys, which I call spider monkeys, can beat him.
Dr. John Beasley: Why spider monkeys?
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: Because they are built like them! Skinny arms and legs and huge lungs. If they were a gas they would be helium.
Dr. John Beasley: Damien, in Phenomic Games, how do the events relate to the metabolic gears? You are the perfect person to clarify the Phenomic 5 in metabolic terms.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: Nemesis is just like what you need to bring to the table at Ironman but is geared for multi-hour climbing power. At Nemesis or Ironman, you don’t need a high maximal aerobic power. That is not what is being targeted. So Nemesis defines the 1st metabolic gear, which measures a competitor’s maximal lipid power to weight ratio similar to a super long, time-trial climb in the Tour de France if there were one for 12 hours — but there isn’t. Nemesis stresses the horizontal, vertical, and temporal dimensions of endurance to their limit — it is this that is the foundation of human fitness. Other facets of fitness build on top of this if you want 360 degree fitness. You start there.
In The Climb you don’t need a high maximal lipid power but you need great climbing power which works out to a high VO2 per kg of bodyweight. It is a 2-hour climbing time trial. It targets the 2nd metabolic gear which is about a high VO2 for 2 hours that maxes out your ability to use carbohydrate as the primary fuel source. The difference between the 1st and 2nd metabolic gears are the sources of fuel for aerobic metabolism: the 1st gear is lipids and the 2nd gear is carbs. The 1st gear is not dependent on a high VO2 max whereas the 2nd gear does depend on it but not to the extreme degree as the 1st aspect of 3rd gear which places the bull’s eye on VO2 max. 1st gear sports do not depend on the anaerobic threshold whereas 2nd gear sports do. In a 2nd gear sport you can get away without a super high VO2 max by being able to sustain performance at a high anaerobic threshold relative to your VO2 max. In other words, setting aside the complexities of lactate, in a 2nd gear sport such as The Climb you want to be at a pace that is as high a percentage of VO2 max as you can for 2 hours without fading due to running out of glycogen.
The Erg is one metabolic intensity gear higher. The Erg requires maximal aerobic power but because it is ranked by specific power that means a very high VO2 max per kg of bodyweight, you can’t just be a big guy with a big motor. The Erg targets the 1st aspect of 3rd gear which is the production of power in the intensity zone where the relationship of lactate production and VO2 max are both supercritical. In The Erg, how well you metabolize lactate and how high your anaerobic threshold is are a very big deal. If you consider running the mile versus the marathon, the mile pace is limited by VO2 max and is past the lactate red line; fuel capacity is not an issue, blowing up is. Blowing up is where you accumulate too much lactic acid and that impairs aerobic glycolysis because the enzymes in metabolism only function in limited pH ranges — you went too hard too early and shut down. The marathon is at a slower pace, lactate production and its consumption are non-factors, whereas fuel capacity — glycogen — is the dominant factor in the ability to maintain speed to go the distance.
Now if we go one notch higher in intensity to the 2nd aspect of 3rd gear, we have The Burn. The 2nd aspect of 3rd gear terminates at the transition from pure anaerobic metabolism to the onset and steep ramp up of aerobic glycolysis. The Burn has a significant VO2 contribution only after the first 35 to 40 seconds and aerobic glycolysis is ramping up like a Chinese rocket but then the race is over. Aerobic properties barely factor in, The Burn is all about measuring anaerobic capacity and producing maximal sustainable torque in a time span from 0 to 50 seconds or so. The Burn is like the 0 to 60 [Ed. mph] time for a car and is very exciting to watch the human drag race. The effect of massive lactic acid production is a big factor in the last 20 seconds which is an eternity under those conditions. The capacity to buffer lactic acid plays a big role in the 2nd aspect of 3rd gear performance.
But when it comes to Phenomic Games, it is not quite that cut and dry, not so academic when it comes to the backend.
Dr. John Beasley: How so?
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: The Climb and Nemesis are not really isolated events. Let’s look at the second day of competition. In the morning you have The Erg. In that 6 minutes a big chunk of glycogen is going to burnt and it will not be replenished by the start of The Climb in the afternoon. That is a big problem. If you lack a sufficiently high maximal lipid power then it is unlikely you will completely recover for Nemesis. That will weigh in heavily in the last several hours of Nemesis and seriously hinder your prospects of a great performance especially considering the elite competition while you are fading out. You must be able to go fast for the entire distance. You cannot fade out. In The Climb the freaky people will be close to 85% of VO2 max for most of the 2 hours but even they may have to take a little off because of the havoc caused by The Erg. Don’t underestimate The Erg! It creates a domino effect for the backend. The Climb is going to empty the glycogen tank like a marathon except you must produce 2 hours of big torque. That will take a toll. Imagine elite marathoners having to do an all-out 2000 meter row 6 hours before the start. I guarantee that will impact their racing strategy and their finish time. The backend of the Phenomic Games requires phenomenal conditioning. The sequencing and timing of the Phenomic 5 events is diabolical.
Dr. John Beasley: While we are on the topic of the metabolic differences of the Phenomic 5, how about in terms of physics?
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: Wolfgang is not here today, he is our resident biophysicist but I will be happy to briefly explain the differences between the events. I will rank the Phenomic 5 in terms of torque, power, and energy beginning with the clean and jerk. I won’t factor in bodyweight. The clean and jerk is an event that is best described as spiky. The torque is a series of transient spikes of extremely high magnitude but of duration in the sub-second range. Power and energy expenditure are of similar scope — spiky. The athletes that produce the greatest torque, power, and energy in the sub-second to a couple seconds portion of the time continuum are Olympic lifters or field athletes like shot putters. These extreme values for short bursts are underwritten by the 4th metabolic gear which is alactic anaerobic metabolism which features creatine phosphate and free ATP, the CP-ATP system. There is no production of lactic acid.
Moving out one metabolic gear we have The Burn which has substantially less torque and power than the clean and jerk but energy expenditure is much greater because energy equals power times time (Ed. E = P x t). The most powerful man in the world for 1 minute can produce over 1.1 kilowatt of power for 1 minute which is an amazing 1.1 kW-min of energy production. This is powered by the 2nd aspect of the 3rd metabolic gear which in The Burn measures an athlete’s anaerobic capacity and ability to buffer lactic acid. The first two events comprehensively evaluate the performance of anaerobic capabilities.
Next we have The Erg and the same trends in terms of physics continue. The torque and power are less but the energy expenditure increases. The Erg is about aerobic power close to VO2 max and at the anaerobic threshold and defines the 1st aspect of 3rd metabolic gear. Strength still plays a significant role in rowing performance even though it is a VO2 max event because of the rate of muscular contraction is low and it is performed bilaterally mandating a high strength reserve, in other words, the torque curve has a spiky shape with a peak. Thus, overall, The Erg is a 50/50 contribution of strength and endurance properties.
Next is The Climb and torque and power once again decline but the energy expenditure is now large because P x t includes a duration of 2 hours as opposed to 6 minutes, 1 minute, or 1 second. This is the 2nd metabolic gear and is about the ability to maintain a very high percentage of anaerobic threshold for a duration that will deplete glycogen storage near the end of the event similar to the marathon except there is a significant vertical endurance challenge. The metabolic engine is aerobic glycolysis with some energy coming from the lipolytic energy system, or fats, but not much at this intensity.
Last, is Nemesis. Nemesis has a big drop in torque and power compared to The Climb but the energy expenditure is massive. While the clean and jerk is about producing peak torque, Nemesis is about expending prodigious amounts of energy from the oxidation of fats thus these two events occupy the metabolic poles. Nemesis defines the 1st metabolic gear and evaluates maximal lipid power.
So, in terms of time across the entire human gearbox:
Clean & Jerk: a few seconds
The Burn: ~1 minute
The Erg: 6 minutes
The Climb: 120 minutes
Nemesis: 720 minutes
all of which map to evolutionarily significant metabolic switching points, capacities and events that trigger instrumental elements of adaptive response. Additionally, each event addresses limits in terms of two critical energy properties: the rate of energy production and/or the depletion of an energy capacity. As you would expect, wherever you have large energy events in a living system, you will also have large informational events in terms of signalling gene expression for adaptive response. This is the essence of not just Homo sapiens but of living system in the broadest terms; it nails down the core principles of deep biology.
At EPT, we live and breathe for locking horns with awesome perplexities like this and love the idea of having one athlete to face off with the entire metabolic continuum and, also, to compete with others dealing the same difficulties.
Dr. John Beasley: How about you, Loris. Are you ready to face off with the Phenomic 5? Excited to lock horns with The Climb and Nemesis?
Loris Ferraris: Nemesis is metabolically in my wheelhouse but not biomechanically. I have my work cut out for me to be competitive with the big dogs on Nemesis. In fact there are two sports I have to address biomechanically, Nemesis and The Erg. Well, of course the clean and jerk, but that is not a motor conversion problem.
Dr. John Beasley: Loris, Dr. Jan Edelman, a sport scientist from the UK who is coaching Ellie Murray, worked out a solution for The Erg. Being that she is your girlfriend I would think you compared notes.
Loris Ferraris: How observant you are! Damien has been in touch with Jan and we are doing the same conversion protocols. They worked out the kinks on the conversion of a cyclist to a rower.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: Making a conversion like that is not as simple as it seems. The motor isn’t the big problem, it is the motor control and getting the biomechanics right. In other words, both Ellie and Loris are world-class cyclists but have never rowed. How do you capitalize and leverage their years of training to make the transition as smooth as possible? We did a little technology exchange. We exchanged micronutritional technology that addresses enhanced adaptation to motor control function for their conversion training tech. Jürgen?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Yes, that’s right. When it comes to the use of micronutrition in the role of enhancing performance, that is, in improving adaptive yield, there are four, functional physiological sub-systems you can modify: aerobic power; strength and anaerobic capacity; connective tissue repair and maintenance; and cognition and motor control.
Dr. John Beasley: So, by micronutrition, are you referring to vitamins and minerals, or what, exactly?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: That is a very old way of looking at micronutrition based on classical Descartian reductionism and the deficiency model which is early 20th century nutritional theory. We don’t do that here. What I do at EPT is apply network theory to metabolic and gene-regulatory networks and develop models how they influence adaptive yield. In short, I tap into all the classes of micronutrients from all over the world and create a profile of nutrients that influence the performance of metabolic networks. As it turns out, metabolic networks through evolution are great at keeping an organism alive but it comes at the cost of high performance. Survival — reliability — trades off with high performance which makes sense just like a Mercedes diesel versus a Formula 1. High performance in indigenous environments is unavailable, totally out of reach. Very rarely are the concentration of say even 10 or 20 given nutrients going to be available 24/7 to change the performance of a metabolic network in any meaningful way let alone 60. The potential is there but potential is not reality. But it can be. What I mean is that in nature, metabolic networks have to keep an organism alive long enough to reproduce and they have to do it well enough with their shoelaces tied together and their hands tied behind their back or else they prematurely perish. However, once those constraints are removed the network reconfigures into a different structure over several months to fire on all cylinders. The majority of the human race will never experience what that means to their quality of life.
Dr. John Beasley: You mean you can tune a metabolic network like you can a social graph, similar to six degrees of separation? You know, where any one person is no more than six people away in their social graph from the Pope?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: It is like that in terms of the network structure, called a small world network architecture, but what I do is examine the metabolic network and look for the pathways I want and look for bottlenecks. Sometimes three nodes away is a network edge, an enzyme in the case of a metabolic network, that is limited by the concentration of a nutrient or metabolic intermediary. If you increase the concentration then you increase the activity. Then you find the next bottleneck. But this doesn’t always work in practice.
The bigger picture process is based on an experimentation model or rapid-prototype process where a profile of nutrients that make sense on paper is then evaluated under real world conditions with high level athletes. What that means is we avoid scientific protocols and their lab settings and their use of regular people, what I call 0- or 1-σ people (Ed. 1-sigma, a measure of standard deviation from the norm). That means they perform close to the mean of the general population. I also need to make a distinction here: by the use of 0- and 1-σ values I am referring to beginners and intermediates, not people that have trained intelligently for years but lack potential. For example, a world record holder in an ultra-endurance event is going to be a minus 1-σ athlete in strength events no matter how long they train. Instead, I am talking about a random population of relatively untrained people compared to rare specimens like Loris.
Ok, given that assumption, we run our protocols doing the exact opposite of what scientists do: we use real world testing grounds with 5-σ, world-class athletes like Loris and do it with 60 independent nutritional variables plus a myriad of environmental variables, not just a single variable. In other words, we look at worst case scenarios under competitive settings, not a big sample size of people with a lot of untapped upside in controlled settings. We have been doing this for over 10 years before Loris arrived.
Dr. John Beasley: So your sample size is tiny.
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: If we were doing a scientific paper for publication that would matter but we don’t care about that. This is engineering, not science. Engineers are only concerned about what works reliably under real-world ugly conditions. Competition proven and being time-tested under really bad conditions are the gold standards. That means it is not “scientific”. It also means no control group, no single variable under evaluation based on statistical differences, and the placebo effect is irrelevant. Classical science only comes into play here in the discovery process of new nutrients to test, not on the level of field testing 5-σ athletes in competitive settings. At EPT we develop technology in-house to give our clients a definitive edge. This is a business, the athletic performance engineering business. We adopted and formalized a prototype mentality, that is the essence of a stepwise-refinement process. We have a nutritional profile that just gets better over time like a fine wine. It evolved from theory to tweaking a block box. It answers the only question that matters: if you are going into battle where you can possibly encounter any stress profile under the sun, what nutritional profile are you going to use to win and come back alive?
Dr. John Beasley: But doesn’t the small sample size and the messiness of the real world make the results sketchy, noisy?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: John, instead of thinking of it in terms of textbook science think of it in terms of the extreme difficulty of improving adaptive yield in world-class athletes that are limited due to zero marginal returns. There is no more phenotypic plasticity to squeeze out of their phenome, they are tapped out. They train their asses off in an extremely disciplined manner, dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s but do not improve. That is the problem we solve, that is why people come here. To solve precisely that problem. Any average coach or trainer can improve a 1- or 2-σ athlete most of the time. But once you get to 3-σ and beyond there is no more low hanging fruit or cheap tricks. It takes a lot of expertise to elevate a Loris to the next level. If we can’t do that, then we are no better than anyone else. We aren’t just the best at what we do, we are the only company that does what we do. We use a systems approach based on real engineering principles and we are multi-disciplinary.
Dr. John Beasley: What happens if you apply your technology on 1-σ athletes?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: John, it’s a beautiful thing. Let’s just look at micronutrition for now, nothing else. If you can create a modification to metabolic network performance in just a couple of world-class performers that results in +∆P on the organism level, then that carries much greater weight than a large-sample size, conventional study using 0-σ performers because of the vast difference in their performance envelopes and potential for phenotypic expansion. One group is on the threshold of negative marginal returns and spinning its wheels and the other is still experiencing sizable positive marginal returns with many independent avenues for upside. In other words, it means little to demonstrate a statistically significant change in a population of 0-σ participants but to have any change at all in ∆P for just two 5-σ participants changes everything. So, of course, if you apply technology that changes ∆P in 5-σ athletes, then, of course you are going to get ∆P gains in 0-σ athletes. Not 100% of them, but the ones who fail to respond are going to be true outliers. You can bet on it striking pay dirt in the belly of the bell curve.
Dr. John Beasley: Jürgen, I see what you are saying and I totally get it because I have a PhD in phenomics and this makes perfect sense given my understanding of phenotypic plasticity and adaptive response. The ability of an organism to respond to stress and have a positive adaptation means there is an adjacent possible phenotype in your phenome to manifest the adaptation. If there isn’t, then you hit the wall, ∆P = 0. What you are saying that micronutrition, when viewed as a means to affect the performance of metabolic and gene-regulatory networks, can allow an adaptation to occur that otherwise would not. The adaptation could be a change in signalling, it could be the means to create a new structure, it could be a change to the network architecture itself. Any adaptation is fair game.
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Any biological network — and there are several — have bottlenecks and chokepoints. And yes, the networks are very plastic, they change on the fly. They are extremely dynamic, always in flux, many variables impact their behavior. They are homeodynamic which means they have attractor basins that can be disrupted and reconfigured to a different attractor basin that leads to +∆P. The center of gravity of your thought evolves to changing the configuration of attractor basins and then stabilizing them until they become a set point, a shift from a fragile handhold to an entrenched foothold in theoretical biology parlance.
Dr. John Beasley: Jürgen, biological networks adapt to their environment with the same wide-ranging flexibility as any other living system, wouldn’t you say? After all, they are a product of gene expression given that the edges of the network are proteins, derivative of DNA and RNA, and that is the driver of cellular signalling events.
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: John, excellent point. Absolutely. When we think of fitness in classical Darwinian terms we are talking about the dynamic interchange between a species and its environment; as the environment changes, say the climate gradually changes, the species changes to accommodate the changes. Now looking at an individual organism, the environment affects changes in the phenotype via gene expression from the genotype which then impacts metabolic networks which are the ultimate workhorse of adaptive response to the phenotype. You have a similar relationship in the large bowel with bacterial strains adapting to dietary components; the different populations of strains varies dynamically with the micro-climate.
Now looking at the intracellular environment, you have nano-climates, so to speak. As the concentration of enzymes that compose the metabolic network change, the functionality of the network changes as well. Training stress signals gene expression and the metabolic network is continuously and dynamically changing its components and enzyme activities to promote the desired adaptations to stress. When you introduce a dramatically different micronutritional profile that is precisely aligned with what the organism really wants to do, well, it gets it done much more effectively by not being hogtied by a woeful micronutritional pool to draw from. No practical diet can possibly supply the concentration of the nutritional profile that is optimal. It will be shy by 10 to 50x, not by 20%.
Dr. John Beasley: If that’s the case, in your universe, how do you draw the line between macro and micronutrition?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Macronutrition, although it has informational influence, is largely an energy source. Micronutrition, however, is a very large information toolbox that influences a network of catalysts in the service of homeodynamics. Macronutrition is about bites while micronutrition is about bytes. Think of micronutrition as a metabolic Swiss Army knife: it extends way beyond vitamins and minerals and includes conditionally-essential nutrients, nutraceuticals, botanicals, and structural components and with all being in the most bioavailable forms possible, not the junk you see in dubious over-the-counter supplements. We introduce a broad array of nutrients from all nutrient classes that are sourced from all over the world. Only the best-of-breed make the roster. Our objective is to impact a metabolic network so that there is a change in some capacity on the organism level that otherwise would not manifest.
Look at it this way: most of the time an organism responds to a stress with a plan B or C response because something is not there in the cellular milieu to allow for the optimization to occur which constitutes a plan A outcome. The potential for plan A outcomes is there but they do not occur because something is always missing like two ships passing in the night. This is an AND logic problem, not OR logic. Most adaptations occur in small time windows so the concentration of the nutrient profile must be at a minimum threshold for the plan A adaptation to happen 24/7. If not, it won’t. A micronutritional profile can be horrible and you will survive because evolution has optimized network performance to be resilient to multiple inadequacies. In other words, plan D and plan E and plan F are built in and get used a lot. Plan A, however, requires all the planets to align just right if you live in the wild foraging on what’s available. What we do is make sure all the planets are aligned all the time and training is precise and synced to all the other aspects of adaptive response.
And, of course, like I said earlier, a metabolic network over time adapts to its environment and if that environment is tuned for plan A outcomes given the training stress, then the network will self-modify to optimize at a higher performance level. The lowest common denominator, whatever that may be, we elevate it and raise the bar and keep it there. The structure and function of these networks is much more constrained by the intracellular environment than by the genome. It is no longer hogtied to mere survival mode; what would be a transient luxury in the wild is our 24/7 baseline at EPT. Your genetic potential is limited by gene expression and this process opens the floodgate to optimal gene expression which is what a plan A adaptive response is. When it comes to adaptive yield we want to eke out all that is theoretically possible after a training session and that will not happen if plan C is the norm and that is what you are forced to deal with if you are ignorant of this. That is precisely what Loris was facing when he got here. In other words, we are relaxing the critical path which opens a door to further adaptive response into virgin territory of the phenome by leveraging micronutritional profiles.
Dr. John Beasley: I have read about something like this with plant phenomics. If you have a bunch of plants with the same genotype, meaning they are genetically identical, and subject them to different lighting conditions and different nutrient profiles dissolved in hydroponic solutions, you get different structural outcomes over the course of plant development.
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Good analogy. Imagine you have 20 Loris clones and they get the same training and macronutrition but I vary the micronutritional profiles with some having essential nutrient deficiencies; to some getting best-of-practice conventional testing for deficiencies with proper remedies; to some receiving different fully-comprehensive arrays with variances in doses. What you will find is that our latest profile, the one that has been iterated to death for over 10 years under worst-case, ugly circumstances will outperform all comers. But here is the most important message to take home about this: the impact on ∆P on accrual of plan A vs. plan B or plan C yields over the course of a career is huge, it boggles the imagination. It is almost like the concept of compound interest to a point but then, even with what we do to produce plan A outcomes, progress tapers off to zero…
Dr. John Beasley: [John cuts Jürgen off] And that is because there is no more phenotypic plasticity to be had through manipulating the micronutritional profile. You pushed the performance envelope out through accrual of plan A vs. plan X scenarios but there is always some new limit that will stop you cold, you are always limited by the weakest chain, the lowest common denominator. But what you accomplished is the athlete is that much closer to that elusive, asymptotic ceiling: your potential.
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Exactly. Couldn’t have said it better. Or, maybe we haven’t found a better one yet. But not for lack of trying!
Dr. John Beasley: On a theoretical level, what factors influence what nutrients make the roster and what about dosages?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: That is where systems biology intersects network theory. By systems biology I mean looking at system function at the organism level and then mapping that to functional sub-systems like aerobic power, strength or force development, connective tissue repair, and cognitive and motor control function. What I look for are what are called degenerate pathways. Degeneracy, a term coined by immunologist and neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, means a given function can be served in different, discrete ways. Different processes can perform the same function as opposed to redundancy where you have multiple, identical parallel processes. Degeneracy is a ubiquitous architectural feature throughout biological systems and is analogous to the plan A/plan B metaphor I made earlier. What I do is identify what those processes are for the sub-systems I want to optimize. Then I look at the metabolic network and see what pathways are involved and examine the nutrients involved and beef them up. In many cases the nutrient profile impacts multiple degenerate pathways. This increases the likelihood of success because there is more than one road leading to Rome as opposed to just adding more lanes to the Appian Way, the equivalent of dose, ergo, I place big bets on all of them to assure the best odds of maxing out adaptive response.
Dosages? Sometimes due to synergy between different nutrients the dose levels can be kept fairly low. Also, I strongly adhere to the medical canon from the Hippocratic Corpus: “First do not harm”. We stay well below toxicological limits. The major point about dosage is taking a page out of the pharmaceutical industry where they use a scalable dose based on lean body mass. It makes no sense to give a 100 pound female that is inactive the same dose as a 350 pound NFL nose tackle. That is circa 1940 thinking but is still standard-of-care today.
Dr. John Beasley: Me too! That has always seemed absurd but is still what is done without question. Other than children or lactating females, everybody gets the same dose. What’s up with that?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Besides lean body mass, activity level is a factor. Someone like Loris riding 800 miles a week and strength training is going to need more than when he is doing 100 miles a week. There is a large difference in metabolic throughput that is going to cause massive oxidative stress to delicate intracellular structures and, of course, increased demand for healing of damage to connective tissue from chronic mechanical stress. The dosage scales up to an upper bound defined by a large safety margin for potential toxicity. Mega-dosing is not an answer, tapping into network effects is. Synergies are a subset of network effects and we really tune into synergistic combinations. Ideally, adaptive response linearly scales with training stress but in reailty it doesn’t and when those two curves diverge the risk of overtraining looms large especially in the case of 3-σ talent and beyond. That is where all the recovery technology comes into play to keep those two curves as close together as long as possible. To do that is not cheap or easy. Micronutrition is just one arrow in that quiver but if you get micronutrition wrong you will be dead in the water long before you should be. In other words, you will toil for not. Think Sisyphus. Most athletes will end up in this infinite, circular loop sooner or later.
Dr. John Beasley: What else do you have in that quiver?
Dr. Jürgen Zimmermann: Maybe we can get to that another time, John.
Dr. John Beasley: Loris, what is your approach to Nemesis?
Loris Ferraris: Nemesis we are treating as a conversion problem just like with The Erg. We have the protocol down for cycling to rowing. Then we put together an approach for conversion from cycling to trekking. I have put in the mileage for multi-hour events using my lower body for years and now we are seeing how much is in common between cycling and trekking for biomechanics and muscle engagement patterns.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: There is one very important consideration in a conversion from cycling to trekking versus running. Cycling to running, like the transition in triathlon, is not easy. Cycling has a torque curve that is heavily damped while running is spiky. At the same oxygen consumption rate, cyclists have higher carbohydrate to fat utilization ratios than runners. In other words, at any given percentage of maximal oxygen consumption, there is greater recruitment of fast twitch muscle fibers — that is, type IIA fibers — in cycling than running. Also, cycling is 100% concentric contractions while running is not. But Nemesis is only part running biomechanics, it is mostly going vertical which is hiking in climbing mode. This is much less spiky with no plyometrics and is more of a slow pull using a lot of soleus, hamstring and glutes. Biomechanically-speaking, that means plantarflexion, leg flexion and hip extension are where the recruited muscles are loaded up, that is what you need for Nemesis. It is not just old school, it is the primeval test of culling the stragglers: you, gravity, and time. Out of those three, which endures?
Dr. John Beasley: Loris, how is it going so far?
Loris Ferraris: It was very difficult at first. Even with all of my out of the saddle climbing work over the years there are muscles in trekking that are used differently than cycling and they are the weakest link and they just get hammered. Also, down hills with all those eccentric contractions on the quads make my muscles sore but that has improved. I am working with a world-class day trekker and he kicked my ass for several months but I am closing in. By the time of Continental qualifiers I will be pretty fast and by Whistler I will be ready to hold my own barring any setbacks.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: For Loris it is all about getting motor control smoother for the biomechanics of trekking, training those muscle for ultra-endurance that cycling doesn’t engage, and connecting that huge aerobic pump he has to deliver oxygen to the muscles needed for Nemesis. It is getting better, his lactate levels are coming down nicely as we get closer to projected race pace. He will get there. To improve his gait mechanics he will be doing some 800 and 1600 meter work on the running track with racing flats to smooth everything out. And lots of flexibility work to reduce internal resistance.
Dr. John Beasley: So my interpretation of your strategy is to manage the clean and jerk as well as possible and push hard to be competitive on Nemesis. Attack the pole events.
Loris Ferraris: You got it. I know the middle three events will be my strong suit. The clean and jerk will always be my weakest event but over time Nemesis will be a strength.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: When it comes to gifted endurance athletes like Loris the trade off for incredible aerobic power is a lack of explosive power in the muscles needed for the clean and jerk. When it comes strength training you need to look at four factors: the motors, motor control, biomechanics, and mental conditioning. In the case of Loris, there is only so much we can do for the motors, he is a slow twitch monster and you can’t change that. The other three factors we attack with full force. I think muscle recruitment patterns can improve substantially meaning make the motor units fire simultaneously for more rapid force development. We will get his biomechanics as perfect as we can. He will execute whatever peak torque he can muster biomechanically like a machine. Mentally he needs to develop the skills to marshall explosive efforts. If we get those three elements to a high level we can manage the clean and jerk.
Dr. John Beasley: Do you think Loris has the best genetic gifts to win Phenomic Games?
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: I do. Let’s assume biomechanics is a constant. Genetically there are three relatively independent functional archetypes: explosive fast twitchers, slow twitch monsters, and cardiopulmonary freaks. A slow twitch monster doesn’t necessarily mean being a cardiopulmonary freak — one is about muscle fiber type populations, a local function, and the other is about oxygen transport, a systemic function. Those are starkly different. The sub-class of genetic freak that will end up being the world’s fittest human is the guy who has freakish systemic cardiopulmonary capacity that is coupled to slow twitch monster muscles so you end up with the potent synergy of great ultra-endurance coupled to a sky-high VO2 max. If you have both those genetic gifts to work with then it means you will dominate The Climb and Nemesis, the backend. With The Erg you will need to develop enough torque to fully harness the huge VO2 and/or increase the stroke rate to reduce the torque curve. The Burn can be pretty strong by focusing on maxing power output in the last 20 seconds during the aerobic glycolytic ramp up because lactic acid accumulation won’t be a problem for a slow twitch monster. The only permanent weakness is the clean and jerk but +∆P in the clean and jerk will provide synergy for The Burn and The Erg because of significant increases in peak torque and strength reserve. Overall, I just described the magic formula to becoming the world’s fittest human.
Dr. John Beasley: So you are saying if someone is a pure strength athlete then they are going to have an uphill battle.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: If they are a pure strength athlete or a slow twitch monster without the O2 pump they are going to have a tough time. If someone were a freaky strength athlete with a great O2 pump that still wouldn’t get it done. I have never heard of such an athlete… now that would be an odd genetic combo! No synergy there.
Dr. John Beasley: All three genetic properties are rare: strength, ultra-endurance, O2 pumps. But the winning combo is O2 pump plus the slow twitch monster because that cuts your losses to the extreme frontend while giving you a great backend and a good shot at killing it in the middle.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: Yes, that is my opinion. Other physiologists may argue with that but that is why we have Phenomic Games, you can’t just write it in. I am putting my money on Loris. You need to suit up and play it out to see who is the world’s fittest human. The mind, after all, could end up being the Achilles’ heel.
Dr. John Beasley: Loris, Damien is backing you. How do you feel about that?
Loris Ferraris: I still have to back it up and the competition is fierce. I know I have weaknesses but everyone has them. It may seem strange coming from a road cyclist but I enjoy my weight training. I really appreciate the precision of the movements and I am being instructed by Andreas Leuzinger, a coach on our German National Team, a real technician, a perfectionist. He points out every little flaw and that is what I need. I really look forward to seeing how I do in the clean and jerk at Whistler. I know that sounds crazy but I want to tap into everything I can to do my absolute best. I am having fun with it. Plus it will benefit not only The Burn and The Erg but my cycling as well.
Dr. John Beasley: It would be lights out for all humans if you kicked butt on the frontend.
Loris Ferraris: Weightlifting is not new to me. I lifted when I was a kid. If I improve in every way I can then who knows? I am highly motivated and it is fun.
Dr. John Beasley: Loris, you are beginning to scare me.
Dr. Damien Hammerschmidt: Loris has been incredible to work with all these years as a champion time trialist and it has been a splendid experiment to see how he adapts to the brutally challenging world of training for Phenomic Games. Speaking for everyone in the world training for Whistler, I can just say it is all new for us and the difficulties are far greater than we anticipated despite having a great team like Elite Performance Technologies dissecting and brainstorming it. Loris is more than a rare talent, he is a great person as well. He is very soft-spoken but commands respect with his ebullient mojo. No matter how gifted you are, to excel at something like this you have to bring a great attitude to the sport and he brings it. He has responded commandingly to every new surprise popping up around the blind corners and that happens a lot. You know, “In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men”.
Dr. John Beasley: Yeah, I totally get that. Well, Loris, Jürgen, and Damien, this has been a terrific experience for me to meet you all and understand your approach to the Games. Loris, I am sure your fans know a lot more about what makes you tick. See you all in Whistler!
<end transcript>
The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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Next up is American rookie Rebecca “Mako” Samuelson hailing from New York City.
Mako was a policewoman in the Bronx and now is on SWAT. She competed in Mixed Martial Arts as an amateur and pro, was close to making the US Olympic team in weightlifting, and early on was 2nd at CrossFit NE Regionals. She is as tough as they come and approaches life head on and never takes prisoners. John visits her while in the heart of her preparation at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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