Human Limits

Today’s post is about how to get the most out of your indoor training.   My motivation is that up here in Minnesota more people will be doing more of their exercising indoors in the winter months.   I am not sure when the shift begins but I hear from studio cycling instructors that class size starts to pick up in October and remains high until March or April.

In the pre-gym, fitness center, and indoor exercise equipment era a few brave souls went outside to run “no-matter what”.   The advent of better protective clothing in the 1980s helped, and I can remember putting titanium screws on the bottoms of old running shoes to improve footing and grip on the ice.  Equipment and clothing for outdoor exercise have gotten better but thankfully I have gotten less macho and am now happy to be indoors most days during the “deep winter” or even the “deep fall”.

In previous posts I talked about the value of interval training for all and also provided some ideas about how to get the most out of your training as you age.  In this post I want to give you some ideas about good ways to maintain your fitness indoors based on what has been described as the “Hickson Protocol”.   It comes from a 1977 paper called “Linear increase in aerobic power induced by a strenuous program of endurance exercise.” 

What is the Hickson Protocol?
The protocol consists of exercise 6 days per week for 10 weeks.   On days 1,3, and 5 the workout is six 5-minutes maximal cycling intervals separated by 2-minutes of easy cycling. On the alternate 2,4, and 6 it is 40 minutes of hard running.  The figure below shows that when untrained subjects first used the protocol they achieved vast increases in maximal oxygen consumption (VO₂ max) over the course of the 10 weeks of training.

Who wants to train this hard every day forever?
The short answer is not many people and when the original 8 subjects were offered the chance to continue beyond the original 10 weeks they all said no!   However, this study does show just what is possible with hard training.

How can I use this data to plan my winter training?
Most people reading this probably already exercise and some of you are competitive athletes and already do at least some high intensity training.   Hickson can help us here.  He did a number of similar training studies and then asked people to reduce their training frequency, duration, or intensity in various ways to see just how much (or how little) exercise was required to maintain VO₂ max at a high level.  He ultimately showed that brief periods of intense training a few times per week were remarkably effective in maintaining VO₂ max at a high level.

“We conclude that it is possible to maintain almost all of the performance increases with up to a two-thirds reduction of training duration. Nevertheless, the data provide initial evidence that all aspects of the endurance-trained state may not be regulated uniformly in reduced training, particularly since VO₂ max and short-term endurance were maintained, but long-term endurance decreased in the 13-min group.”

Summing up.
Clearly there is more to training and competing successfully than doing intense exercise just a few times per week for a few minutes.  However, the winter is a time when many people do a little less and the Hickson studies show that if you do a bit of high intensity exercise every week it will be easier to gear up when the weather gets better and the days get longer.   The Hickson data is also helpful for planning your training when you are traveling or have limited training time.   You can clearly accomplish a lot with 30-45 minutes per day of training, and maintain things with even less.

I want to use this post to present an off-beat assessment on some of the lesser discussed implications stemming from the “decline and fall” of Lance Armstrong who was stripped of his seven Tour de France wins earlier in the week.   Here are some thoughts:

First, Lance had a history of using what might be described as strong arm or aggressive tactics with his perceived “enemies” and subordinates.   So, as more people started to come forward there were all sorts of people willing to share their stories.   A number of years ago I commented in a story on doping in baseball that many hyper competitive elite athletes were a bit sociopathic and that certainly appears to apply to Lance if half of what we are hearing is true.

Second, it has been known for some time by the scientific community that there were a lot of technical holes in the drug testing protocols.   When my colleague Carsten Lundby pointed that the EPO test was “beatable” in 2008 he was vilified by the doping control establishment.   It turns out Carsten was right and he has issued new warnings about the biological passport approach.   I wonder if the authorities will listen to him this time.  He has some good ideas about what to do next.

Third, I had the chance to work with the late Dr. Jim Lipsky who was a leader in Clinical Pharmacology.   Jim could be critical of the pharmaceutical industry, but always pointed out that there was a lot more innovation and development of new compounds via capitalism in comparison to what came from communist countries behind the old Iron Curtain.   I think this also applies to sports doping.   The state sponsored program in East Germany was thorough and comprehensive but it was mostly the same old drugs given to large number of unsuspecting athletes (many of them very young) in a highly organized way.    By contrast, team Lance appears to have developed a number of novel ways to administer low dose EPO to avoid detection and use combinations of autologous transfusions (blood doping) and EPO to avoid detection.   They also seemed to have pretty good ideas about how long they would test positive after taking EPO or steroids and developed clever dosing schemes and other ways to avoid testing.    Designer steroids that are difficult to detect are also products of black or perhaps grey market capitalism associated with sports doping and creative but rogue chemists like Patrick Arnold.   The fact that there is serious money in sports doping is demonstrated by allegations of about 30 million dollars of money laundering that center around Michele Ferrari, the physician in the middle of the Armstrong scandal.  All of this suggests there is a pretty strong link between dollars and innovation in sports doping.

In summary, the ethical issues aside and ignoring the idea that perhaps there is a level playing field because “everyone is doping”, it is pretty clear that the people involved in sports doping are plenty smart and creative.  One of the sad side stories in all of this is that people like Patrick Arnold could have been devising novel drugs to treat patients and alleviate suffering vs. creating designer steroids.    Likewise, Michele Ferrari could have used his intellect and organizational skills to help the world get fitter instead of going to the dark side of professional sport.

I mentioned on Monday that I was at the Integrative Biology of Exercise meeting last week.   One of the topics of hallway conversation was the release of the USADA report on Lance Armstrong and the rampant doping in Cycling during the time he won seven Tour de France races in a row.   It turns out that one of the most popular books my colleagues and I were reading on the plane to the meeting was “The Secret Race” by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle.  Hamilton was one of the world class cyclists who spilled the beans to USADA.

I discussed the ”geopolitics” of Lance situation in detail last summer, but the Hamilton book gives a broader perspective on the problem of doping.   It describes in detail how an earnest and ambitious young athlete gets into the highest level of cycling.   How the super talented find themselves in the middle of the pack.   How a moment or a few moments of truth occur and it is either continue to chase your dreams and dope, or go home and join the real world.   The decision to dope is of course made easier if everyone is doing it,  and who can expect the super competitive to simply unilaterally disarm and simply give up.  The book also describes how it was relatively easy to beat drug testing with a little bit of planning, corrupt doctors, and cash.

As I read to the book I thought back to the time to the late 1970s when I was sometimes running 100 miles per week or more.   Prior to my personal best marathon I ran 522 miles in four weeks before tapering.  Essentially my entire life revolved around training, all my friends and peers were runners, and I was certainly willing to pay a big price to improve.  My only distraction was going to class.   That having been said I wonder if I had been in a corrupt culture with corrupt coaches and big money on the line if I would have doped?    If everyone is doing it, is it really wrong?  I hope I would have said no, but who knows.

As things have emerged over the years it is also pretty obvious that we live in an ergogenic world full of plastic surgery, Botox, Viagra, doping to improve grades, and various anti-aging potions.    Is everyone looking for success in a bottle, a pill, or via a syringe?   Why should elite sport be different than the rest of the world?

That having been said, I recommend two other books for those who want to understand more about doping.   The first is “Game of Shadows” from 2007.  This book details the Barry Bonds case and the BALCO scandal.   In addition to exploring the logistics of sports doping and what motivates athletes to dope, the book raises important questions about what the “authorities” who oversee sports leagues and organizations really want.   Are they concerned with clean competition?   Or, is about brand protection and the appearance of clean competition so that sponsors and general public don’t turn away if things look too overtly corrupt?  Yesterday Lance Armstrong lost most of his major sponsors and stepped down as chairman of his foundation.   Were these acts of organizations interested in doing the right thing or brand protection?

The second book is “Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder” by Sam Fussell.  Fussell was essentially a “95 pound” weakling/intellectual with degrees from several top universities who got involved in bodybuilding and went all in.   The book describes how it is possible for an otherwise thoughtful and intelligent person to descend into an athletic subculture and do just about anything to improve.   It is a cult classic, and I highly recommend it.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the long term health risks associated with U.S. football.  There are two main concerns, the first relates to the long term effects of concussions and cognitive impairment later in life.  The second relates to the long term health risks associated with being “very big”.

It turns out that the neurological consequences of football are more typically seen in so-called speed positions that are associated with high velocity open field “big hits” in comparison to collision positions like the line.   The non-neurological long term health risks of professional football go something like this:

“National Football League players from the 1959 through 1988 seasons had decreased overall mortality but those with a playing-time BMI ≥ 30 had 2 times the risk of CVD mortality compared to other players and African-American players and defensive linemen had higher CVD mortality compared to other players even after adjusting for playing-time BMI.”

Some of these concerns were highlighted in a piece by the columnist George Will who summarized it this way:

“Decades ago, this column lightheartedly called football a mistake because it combines two of the worst features of American life — violence, punctuated by committee meetings, which football calls huddles. Now, however, accumulating evidence about new understandings of the human body — the brain, especially, but not exclusively — compel the conclusion that football is a mistake because the body is not built to absorb, and cannot be adequately modified by training or protected by equipment to absorb, the game’s kinetic energies.”

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT?

The first thing to remember is that the modern game of football emerged after deaths in college football in the early 1900s led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand that the game be reformed or banned.  So, the safety of football is not a new issue and in that spirit I make the following suggestions:

1. Limit substitutions.   If players had to play both ways my bet is that the premium on very large players (300 pounders) would be replaced by a premium on big but not huge players who had the athletic skills to do more than one thing and also the stamina to play for longer.   When teams go to no huddle offenses frequently their defenses complain about the lack of rest caused by an offense that gets off the field too fast.  So, there would be a new emphasis on conditioning.
2. Shorten the time between plays.  If there were a 20 second clock between plays the game would be more continuous and that would make conditioning even more important and limit the utility of really big players.  It might also limit the likelihood of pre-planned, high speed big hits.
3. Get rid of some of the protective equipment.    It is unclear if the protective equipment is in fact that protective.  Perhaps it gives the players a false sense of security and encourages them engage in high risk, high impact hits.

Some of the ideas above would make U.S. football more like rugby so I bounced them off four outstanding physiologists from rugby loving countries:  Danny Green and Bob Callister from Australia, Tim Noakes from South Africa, and Peter Raven originally from the UK.    All of my colleagues agreed the ideas above had merit.    Dr. Green sent me a fascinating paper about body size in rugby and how it has changed over the last 100 year, and it is unusual for a top class rugby player to be much bigger than 110kg (about 245 lbs).

In closing, I doubt the ideas above will ever be adopted wholesale, but various forms of football have existed for centuries and perhaps the game will evolve in the ways I have outlined above.  If so, I bet we will end up with a safer game to play and watch that is equally exiting.  Watch a clip of the 7 on 7 version of rugby that will be coming to the Olympics in 2016 and see wide open game.   Add the forward pass and imagine what would be possible.

I want to follow up on Friday’s post on Lance Armstrong abandoning his legal challenges to United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) case against him.  Armstrong has a “take no prisoners” reputation and the question on everyone’s mind is why the ultimate no quit person, quit?  Here are some thoughts:

• Once his legal challenge in U.S. federal court was rejected he could no longer play offense and essentially put USADA on trial.  This means that he could no longer control the process and expose the limitations of drug testing and use the idea that he was targeted for extra testing to his advantage.

• Cycling has had a doping problem for a long, long time and at some level he likely believes that all he was doing was ensuring he and his team had a level playing field.  Here is a link to a graphic on recent doping bans in the Tour de France.  Lance was not alone, and I bet he feels like whatever he did it was more than justified.  It reminds of a quote by Vito Corleone in the Godfather:

• Bill Katovsky sent me a something from Slate.com about how Lance can continue to be outraged and point to the many drug tests he passed and the fact the Feds did not indict him after a two plus year investigation.  Again, who cares what USADA says, he controls the story.

• Battle fatigue associated with constantly being investigated.  Mitch Jackson an attorney from Southern California sent me this e-mail and also commented on Friday’s post:

“Litigation can be a nightmare… even for those people who have done nothing wrong. I have no idea what Lance did or didn’t do but even though I have 27 years of successful litigation experience under my belt, I think the last thing I’d want to do is try and defend myself overseas in this particular arena on this particular issue.”

• Lance looked at it objectively and figured a small percentage of people really care about the details of what did or did not happen with doping in his tour victories.  The average person looks at it a bit like professional wrestling and all they care about is the uber narrative of Lance as heroic cancer survivor.  In the long run his brand depends on this and he can go on being rich and famous and doing good things for the world at large no matter what USADA says.  The support shown by his sponsors is consistent with this interpretation.  So the smart move was to punt.

• The sportscaster Seth Everett sees the whole doping story in the context of brand protection by the leagues and international federations and likens it to the speed limit.  Without drug testing everyone is trying to go 80 when the speed limit is 65.  With doping control most people go 65 and a few can get away with going a few miles an hour over the speed limit.

• About my idea that a “Truth Commission” might used to change the culture and get to the bottom of the doping problem, reaction was mixed.  Gretchen Reynolds gave it a positive Tweet, but George Brose who runs a great website on old time track and field felt that Truth Commissions were best used in situations associated with true evil like Rwanda.  I still think a Truth Commission should be explored.  The current system is not working and until someone gets to the bottom of the doping culture, the cat and mouse game will continue.

I think the seven points above cover most of what has or has not been said about the Lance situation.  Life will go on for us all, the doping circus will continue and from my perspective a number of things that could have been done to make things better and learn from this and other doping situations have not been done.  Next week, the plan is to refocus on issues related to exercise, health and how to make life better for the rest of us.

I had a great time today participating on a Spreecast with Seth Everett to discuss the recent news on Lance Armstrong.

http://www.spreecast.com/events/lance-armstrong-what-really-happened/embed-large

Who would have thought that Lance Armstrong would throw in the towel in his drug case?   Last month I briefly reviewed the pros and cons of the case and I was waiting for things to heat up in the next few months before I commented again.  The pro Lance arguments go:

• He passed a gazillion drug tests.
• The federal investigation of him was abandoned making many people think there was no clear money trail that could be followed to support allegations of doping.  Systematically beating doping control with blood transfusions is logistically complicated and can’t be cheap.  So if the feds could not find a money trail maybe there wasn’t one.

The anti Lance arguments go:

• The drug tests are beatable (ask Marion Jones).  So passing drug tests proves nothing.
• How could he dominate for so long and in many cases so decisively in a sport where a high percentage of the people he was beating were actually caught doping?
• Some of the power outputs that top people were doing during mountain stages in the Lance era are at the edge of what might be physiologically possible and are probably physiologically impossible.
• Rumors, rumors, rumors, rumors and would a guy like Lance ever “unilaterally disarm” if he thought the rest of the world was doping? 

Here is what I thought might happen that did not.  I expected a federal judge to rule that United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) was essentially an arm of the government.  As an arm of the government USADA needed to follow certain standards of due process and that they were not.  Lance then gets USADA in court and forces them to admit the limitations of drug testing and that he passed a bunch of tests even though he had been targeted for extra testing.  There are also a number of credible expert witnesses who could easily have shot holes in some of the blood count numbers that USADA had deemed suspicious.  

So then it would have been about what his ex-teammates were willing to say and how all of it sounded to a jury.  A good lawyer could have had a field day.  A star struck jury buys the arguments Lance and his team make and it is Lance 1, USADA 0.

For the younger people reading this post I thought of one precedent, Tarkanian vs. the NCAA, and have been surprised that no one in the mainstream media has made the connection.  The basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian was in essentially a 20 plus year range war with the NCAA about claims of recruiting and other violations in the high profile college basketball programs he ran.   He sued using some of the rationale I outlined above and eventually the case went to the U.S. Supreme court.  Tarkanian lost there, but he was never banned from coaching and won a settlement from the NCAA based on claims that they were persecuting him.   A lot of parallels with what might have happened had Lance pressed on.

Another issue that has been largely ignored by the mainstream media is how the whole issue of doping in sport, especially cycling, might have been handled differently.  One idea is that there should have been a truth commission.  In other words let everyone come clean, tell what they did, name names, and try to learn everything there is to learn about both the technical and cultural aspects of doping.  Don’t strip anyone of medals or titles but get the truth out and improve the testing and compliance programs.  Only go after the people who refuse to come clean.

The truth commission approach has been used to promote social reconciliation in places like post apartheid South Africa.  Maybe it could have been used to clean up high level sport as well.    

There is more than one way to define a level playing field, and in this era of rampant doping the athletes and those around them have been trying to define it themselves.  Failing to use the truth commission or a related approach means that the cat and mouse enforcement games go on and that it is just a matter of time until there is another Marion Jones or Lance Armstrong.   I believe the athletes want clean competition and that the key to this is fixing the culture which will require more than better drug tests.

Today we have a guest post from my colleague and research collaborator Jason Carter, Ph.D.  Dr. Carter is the Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Kinesiology and Integrative Physiology at the Michigan Technological University.  We share a passion for our research, but also for sports!

1992 Dream Team vs 2012 Olympic Team:  Who Wins?

In early July, Kobe Bryant created a firestorm with his comments that the 2012 Olympic Team could “pull it out” against the 1992 Dream Team. While Kobe backed away from the comment in subsequent weeks, it led to a variety of comparisons.  Kobe vs. Michael? Magic vs. Paul? People love those direct comparisons, and everyone was willing to give their opinions prior to the actual games being played. Now that the games are done, and Team USA has won the gold, let’s break this down a little more with actual numbers. Basketball is a team sport, and hypothetical player to player comparisons only get you so far.

Let me preface my comparisons with a brief background. I played basketball my whole life, and was fortunate enough to play college basketball at a small DII school. I followed that experience up with 7 years as a high school varsity basketball coach. I love the game, and appreciate the complexity of the game. That said, my playing and coaching experiences have led to a simple philosophy that while hot shooting can throw a wrench in any game, winning and losing consistently boils down to number of scoring opportunities and quality of those scoring opportunities.  When I coached, we focused on creating extra scoring opportunities by three simple goals: 1) limit turnovers and always have fewer than opponent, 2) force the opponents into poor shot selection and maximize our shot selection, and 3) control the boards by maximizing our offensive rebounds and limiting the opponents.

So how does the 1992 team stack up against the 2012 team in extra scoring opportunities?  One might assume that the 1992 team would get more shots given the scoring and average margin of victory, and that this would bury the 2012 team. However, let’s break the numbers down a little more and see what they tell us. In 1992, Team USA shot 52.1% (638) of 1,224 total shots taken in the 8 games played. In 2012, Team USA shot 53.9% (629) of the 1,166 total shots taken in the 8 games played. So a case could be made that the 2012 team was slightly “better with the ball” by a margin of ~1.8%, and that this would translate to a few extra possessions for the 2012 team in a direct match-up with the 1992 team.  Let’s assume a contest between 1992 and 2012 teams would result in a total of 155 total shots taken in the game (reasonable given the number of game shots for the 16 USA Olympic games played by these two teams); if the 2012 team was “better with the ball” by ~1.8%, this would result in ~3 extra possessions (155 × 0.018).

Prediction – The 2012 team is slightly ‘better with the ball’, resulting in 79 shots compared to 76 shots by the 1992 team.

Ok, so let’s agree that the 2012 team gets a few extra key possessions due to turnovers, steals, blocks, and rebounding; how do those extra key possessions translate to points?  Let’s assume free throws (FT’s) are a wash — each team shot a similar number of FT’s (201 vs. 191) and similar FT% (73% vs. 72%). Where differences exist is in overall field goals (FG) attempted and made, as well as 3-point FG’s attempted and made. The 1992 team pounded the ball inside way more; 79% of their shots were 2-pointers (often times transition layups). The 2012 team was much more perimeter oriented, with only 53% of their shots coming inside the arc.

Prediction – Of the 76 shots taken by the 1992 team, 16 are outside the arc. Of the 79 shots taken by the 2012 team, 37 are outside the arc.

Now here comes the hard part– how will these two teams shoot against one another?  Presumably both teams would likely shoot lower %’s than they did against their international counterparts. The 1992 team’s overall FG% was 21.3% higher than their opponents (57.8% vs. 36.5%), while the 2012 team’s was 6.9% higher than their opponents.  So a case could be made the 1992 team was more efficient on both offense and defense by ~14%. Let’s play it safe and say the difference is only ~10% in this match-up; reasonable given the higher % of shots within the arc and lower opponent FG% for the 1992 team. For 3-pointers, the 2012 team was ~11% better than their opponents while the 1992 team was ~10%, so let’s call it a wash and conservatively estimate that both teams shoot ~38% against each other’s more athletic matchup.

So here’s the breakdown–

My Conclusion – The 1992 Dream Team wins 108-104.

I attempted to analyze this matchup using objective team statistics and what I consider ‘reasonable’ assumptions. I avoided the player-by-player matchups because that’s 80% of what is out there already, and it is incredibly difficult to quantify such comparisons.  We could debate all day the MJ vs. Kobe matchup, and who would finish better down the stretch (let the record show my money is on MJ)… but those are subjective comparisons with obvious biases (I grew up wanting to “be like mike”).  That isn’t to say my ‘reasonable’ assumptions above don’t have flaws, and I’m certain others will be happy to point them out.  One could make the case that there’s no way a 10% total FG spread will exist in this game. On the other hand, one could counter that argument by saying that there is no way the 2012 team will be able to get up as many 3-pointers against the lock-down defenders like MJ and Pippen.  That is the beauty of this debate!

All in all, I really can’t blame Kobe for saying they would have a chance; I think they would.  But in a 7 game series, my money is with the 1992 Dream Team.

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