@chad has a great ability to take complex biology and break it down into digestible presentations. Having sat though many dry scientific lectures over the years I find these refreshing and informative.
I REALLY wish they would take deep dives on the massive amount of information at their fingertips. It’s hard to translate data from a rat or a study with an N of 8 beastly 20 year olds to the average TR subscriber. Just as some of the best data available to physicians comes from large population based studies, a report to subscribers on what has been learned from the TR dataset would be welcome.
I think @Nate_Pearson said some months ago that Coach Chad’s focus/interest has shifted from training plans more towards biology/nutrition…or do I remember wrong? And my take was that the podcast topics reflected that.
I’m happy with deep dives of any kind because I like to learn about things that often in retrospect I wouldn’t have thought I’d like.
@Jonathan The podcast is unique in its own way…especially hard when you want to get the beginners on board as well as please us experienced forum members. As time permits I listen to old episodes and you all have come a long way. Kudos and keep up the good work!
@Jonathan: As requested here a number of times (see below) I’d also like to hear more takes on polarized. After a season of 2x SSB-Build I now use TR for a polarized progression (after doing the first 4 week block of traditional base 1 MV). Could you find one employee of TR who is training polarized with TR and let him/her share the experience on the podcast?
@Nate_Pearson I’d love to hear you talking secret features / road map on the podcast but I assume strategic reasons just allow for forum teasers
I really hope that adaptive plans don’t mean just planning back the existing plans from a future A race (only using SweetSpot approach) but more using different approaches (polarized) and taking user feedback into account for live adapting next training. Think of Xert.
Smart as you are, I guess you have even better ideas and looking forward to these.
The ultimate solution would be choosing the plan re overall philosophy.
Essentially, at the very start you have the option of selecting the sweet spot, polarized, fat max, etc plan. That way a user could pick the overall training style that best suits their targets and physiology.
It’d be a ton of work, but ultimately an incredible resource to compare results of various styles of training.
I’m sure Seiler, Neal and others would love to be involved.
Sample size has always been a primary concern of mine. Whilst there is a public hunger for the science which is good, I don’t think there are the data points to back it up - eventually data gathering services like TR, Apple Health, Strava may provide more reliable studies than half a dozen volunteers in a university campus lab.
I really appreciate the deap-dive ones and learn lots from them. There is always the back catalog for the newbies. My poison is ultra-endurance gravel - shall I flame the crit/MTB/triathlon minutes?!
If you are looking to train optimally without understanding the why, then i think you are missing out. Understanding how you work allows you to understand why training is working/not working for example.
Music to my ears! Hopefully that means fun new things will start filtering in soon.
Otherwise, just chiming in as another voice about how much I love the podcast, from deep dives to anecdotes and everything in between. It’s really fantastic, and the only podcast I tune into whenever a new episode comes out.
The deep diver supporters club seem to have a clear majority. For me, there is too much info to digest on a simple listen. Accept the option is there to rerun and listen again, but for me, a more limited précis approach to the subject emphasising key points with subsequent links to the relevant articles or Chads notes, would work better for me. Nevertheless, we are all different, with the common theme coming thro strongly of appreciating the effort the team put into the podcast.
PS.
I am a fan of the personal anecdotes and the guest contributions. All good.
I would say that personally, of late, I’ve been skipping large chunks of the podcast because either I’m not particularly interested in certain topics or not engaged or whatever, but hey, it’s a free podcast and I’ll take what I want from it and be grateful!
However, I think it would be better, if you’re really going to go down the rabbit hole on a certain topic, to bring in an expert guest or two on the subject to discuss things more so it’s not just Chad talking. This would allow a bit more discourse and could be more engaging. I recognise that it wouldn’t be possible to have someone there in person all the time - you’d have to find a way round it. Maybe that would require altering the format of the podcast - having the deep dives as prerecorded segments that have been edited to keep them more concise.
Anyway, I’ll still keep listening (and fast forwarding where necessary) whatever!
I haven’t listened to many of the podcasts lately (I used to immediately listen to them when they came out, sometimes twice). Something about them changed, just not hitting the same way lately with me. Maybe it is the biology thing? Possibly save all biology topics for one podcast every 5 episodes? The info is still great, but I’ve found I’ve been skipping through the podcasts that I have listened to in the past couple of months because they go for long spurts / tangents about stuff that just really isn’t interesting to me.
Yes, I agree. I think it would be a good idea for Chad to give a BLUF (bottom line up front) before he goes into the deep dive. Sometimes the question is really interesting and I want to know the answer or hear the response, but I find myself tuning out as I can’t understand his deep dives. I get lost and confused and frustrated. I start judging myself as stupid because I can’t follow the biology. I’m sure I’m not the only one ? (Maybe I am??).
@Nate_Pearson - can the times of the different topics be added to the podcast show notes? It’d make it way easier for us to skip to topics we’re interested in then.
I believe you already do this on the YouTube vids.
I am pretty sure they add the times and jump points in Soundcloud a bit after publishing. I presume this happens in the other podcast locations as well. It just takes a day or two for them to show that way.
