Endure; Finding The Limits Of Human Performance | Alex Hutchinson

Alex Hutchinson is a journalist, athlete and author of "Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance". What makes some of us quit while others can continue? Just how much of human performance is dictated by the mind and how much by the body? These are fundamental questions which all of us have contemplated, today we find the answers. Alex takes us through the fascinating research that went into his book. I was blown away by the insights as he breaks down the components that make up "endurance" and gives us some fantastic tools to improve our own. More Things: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sweatscience Endure The Book - http://amzn.eu/d/f19Ihzf - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends, I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year. We are kicking off 2019 with what might be the best episode that I've ever recorded. I know I do say that a lot, it's a running joke, but this one genuinely could be it. Alex Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and an endurance athlete. Recently wrote a book called Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. I think anyone who has ever gone for a run has thought to themselves, what makes some of us quit while others continue? And just how much of human performance is dictated by the mind and how much by the body?

• 0:47Chris Williamson?

  It's a fundamental question which anyone who has ever taken part in a physical pursuit has considered. And today Alex is going to take us through exactly what he's uncovered. I'm absolutely certain that this is going to be a massive benefit to a lot of listeners. If it is to you, please pop it into your gym Facebook group or send it to some friends that you know would really appreciate the insights that Alex gives us. This could genuinely be a game changer for a lot of athletes' performances as we move into 2019. So pound the share button if you would be so kind. Don't forget to hit subscribe if you are new to the channel, it would make me very happy indeed.

• 1:29Chris Williamson?

  And if you're a regular listener, please go and give me five stars wherever you are tuned in. Now let's go and improve our endurance.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  Alex, welcome to Modern Wisdom, how are you?

• 1:57Alex Hutchinson?

  I'm good, thanks Chris for having me on, I appreciate it.

• 1:59Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant, so I'm specifically excited about today's podcast, not least because my endurance sucks. So I am hoping, as I'm sure many of the listeners are, to find some strategies that can improve our endurance. And also I think probably our...

• 2:20Chris Williamson?

  Define and better understand what endurance is because as far as I'm concerned, it's something that I work on quite a lot and sometimes I feel like it's good and then sometimes I feel like I might have never trained before in my life.

• 2:38Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I mean, so I'll confess, I started with a very narrow definition of endurance. I've been a runner my whole life, so I was thinking very narrowly of endurance as kind of how fast can you run a long race. But I've come to think of endurance as a much broader thing. And in fact, I'll jump right in with the definition that I ended up using in the book, which is that endurance is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. So it's something that takes place over time and it can be, you know, we can be talking about mental endurance, physical endurance, you know, at work or during exercise or whatever the case may be. But what I'll end up arguing is that fundamentally, that struggle is the

• 3:22Alex Hutchinson?

  same and the struggle to continue, you know, to keep studying for like an exam or something is actually the same mental struggle that goes on when you're running a marathon and you're trying to force yourself to maintain a pace that is unpleasant.

• 3:35Chris Williamson?

  That's a very artistic definition, I think. Much more artistic than I would have thought.

• 3:41Alex Hutchinson?

  Very artistic, but yeah, it's definitely not where I started out thinking that, you know, my definition of endurance would be, you know, the maximum amount of oxygen that your lungs can transport to your muscle.

• 3:51Chris Williamson?

  That's what I was expecting.

• 3:52Alex Hutchinson?

  Mid-range exercise, but that definition, you know, I didn't just pull it out of, let's say, my head. It's actually from a scientific paper from a guy at the University of Kent who studies endurance. He's the head of the endurance research group there. And that's what he concluded, that this is what the fundamental, you know, bedrock of endurance is, that it's not about oxygen, it's not about muscle fibers, it's about a mental struggle and that ultimately, when you're, whether you're running a marathon or again in some other aspect of your life, struggling to continue against something that's unpleasant, it's how you face that struggle mentally and it's your struggle to continue against that mounting desire to stop that really matters. So that's the scientific definition,

• 4:36Alex Hutchinson?

  even though it sounds like, you know, I was writing a poem about endurance or something.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So where does endurance begin? What did you, what did you first begin to look at and where does the book start?

• 4:49Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So actually, I mentioned that I've been a runner for most of my life and I actually, I competed for the Canadian national team for about a decade as a cross-country runner and track and field runner. So this started as a sort of personal quest for me and actually the place I start the book is a single race that I had back in the mid 1990s when I was a university student, where I was, I was trying to break the four-minute barrier for 1500 meters, which is a little bit shorter than a mile. So it's kind of, it's like a 418 mile. So,

• 5:23Chris Williamson?

  Pretty cool.

• 5:24Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. It's a poor man's four-minute mile barrier, let's say. It's not, it's not as fast as the four-minute mile, but significant. And I actually was stuck at 401 or 402 for four years during high school and then university. So I had the sense that I had approached the true limits of my endurance, that maybe I could run 359, but that was about all that I'd be able to. I'd been running 401 or 402 year after year. And I ended up, I ran a race and what happened is the timekeeper gave me the wrong splits, basically. I was, you know, when you run a track race, every lap, there's a timekeeper who will call out how fast you're going. So you have a sense of whether you're on pace.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:02Alex Hutchinson?

  And, and he was calling out splits that were about three or four seconds off and basically fooled me into thinking that I was running way faster than I was. And so about a third of the way through the race, I, you know, I was having this like, wow, this, this is way faster than I think I'm going. And yet I feel really good. And so I just had this sensation. I was having the greatest day of my life. And so I just kind of went for it. I really unshackled myself from my pre-race expectations and ended up running 352, which was like a, like, believe me, after four years of running the same times over and over again, it was, it was absolutely mind blowing. And, and what then happened is that I was totally altered. I never struggled to break four minutes again. And in fact, I then

• 6:44Alex Hutchinson?

  ran 349 in my next race and 344 in my next race. So all of a sudden, I went from like a mediocre college runner to, you know, running in that summer's Olympic trials. And so that for me was the real foundation of, hang on, the limits of my ability, when I'm up against what seems like physical limits, there's something more there because I, you know, my muscles didn't change, or, you know, and my lungs and my heart and all these other things, none of that changed dramatically over the course of those few weeks. But being tricked somehow unlocked some reserves that were otherwise there. So, you know, I don't want to oversimplify that, you know, and from that moment on, I knew I would write a book

• 7:25Alex Hutchinson?

  about endurance. But it kind of, it kind of laid the groundwork for me of thinking, there's something more to this. It's not, we're not just like cars where, you know, you press down the gas tank and your speed is a function of, you know, how many cylinders you have in your engine and how much gas is in the tank. Instead, it's something much more complex. And I think for anyone who has tried to push their limits in any, in any capacity, you pretty soon realize that it's not just some sort of mathematical thing that I'm capable of X and that's, that's exactly what I'm capable of, that, that there's, there's more to it and that the brain plays a role in dictating, in ways that we're not even aware of, the brain plays a role in setting our physical limits.

• 8:06Alex Hutchinson?

  So that was the start for me of trying to understand what, how does, how do the mind and body work together to, to create what we feel as, as, as physical limits?

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  That's a very poignant way to start your journey, I suppose. It's going to be something that's going to, that's going to really kick it home that you made such a, such a marked difference in your performance purely based on the fact that you had this mental barrier. So what's the, what's kind of the established understanding of the limits of endurance at the moment?

• 8:36Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so, well, it's in flux, I would say. It turns out that it's an exciting area to write about in terms of scientific research because there are a lot of differing views right now. In fact, you know, one of the sort of mixed benefits of the modern world is that you can go on Twitter and follow a bunch of the scientists who are at the forefront of research in this area and discover that they actually really hate each other.

• 9:03Chris Williamson?

  That's amazing.

• 9:04Alex Hutchinson?

  And you can follow their ideas, but also follow their like, their sort of schoolyard insults of each other.

• 9:11Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 9:12Alex Hutchinson?

  So it's an area in flux. But the way I would frame it is, for most of the 20th century, there was this attempt to understand the human body sort of more or less as a machine. And there was a huge amount of progress was made throughout the 20th century of understanding all the parts of the human machine, how muscles contract, what fuels them, what are the different ways muscles can work, you know, the cardiovascular system. And all of this with this sort of unspoken assumption that if you could understand all the parts of the machine, you would fully understand the workings of the human body. So just like we can, we know how much gas goes into the gas tank of a car, and we know

• 9:54Alex Hutchinson?

  how far that car can go, that you could calculate, you know, and actually, there are equations that sort of were perfected in the early 1990s of if I know what's called my VO2 max, which is a measure of oxygen capacity, and my running economy, which is kind of like the fuel economy of a car, and my lactate threshold, which tells how much lactate, which is a metabolic byproduct, is building up in my body. Anyway, if you take these three quantities, which you can test in the lab, you can plug them into an equation, and it will say, you should be able to run a marathon in so many hours, so many minutes, and so many seconds. And so it's a very deterministic model of like, we know the parameters of this machine, therefore, we know the limits of its endurance.

• 10:35Chris Williamson?

  How accurate has that proven to be?

• 10:38Alex Hutchinson?

  So...

• 10:40Alex Hutchinson?

  In the big picture, it's pretty good. Like, if I take, if you take 100 people off the street, send them to a lab, have them complete those tests, then you'll be able to rank them in order of how fast they're going to run a marathon with reasonably good accuracy. But you're never going to know exactly. So you're going to be able to tell the difference between someone who can run a marathon in 2:30, 2 hours, 30 minutes, and someone who can run the marathon in 3 hours. And maybe even 2 hours, 45 minutes. But when you take a bunch of people who are at a similar level, let's say the field at the Olympics. Everyone there is fit and everyone there has trained hard, has talent. The lab values will tell you absolutely nothing about who's going to win the race.

• 11:24Alex Hutchinson?

  And that's the realization people came to, that there's, once you, once you get rid of the obvious, like, you know that, you know, the guy who's been training his whole life is going to be fitter than the guy who's never run a step. That's, yeah, the equations in the lab tests can tell you the difference between those two guys. But you can't tell, can't tell the difference between a field of relatively equally matched people.

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  I get that. So it's not sufficiently high fidelity to be able to narrow down the, the real sort of very close, close-knit competitors.

• 11:57Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, exactly. So I don't want to dismiss it and say this, this stuff is useless because it's not. It tells you a lot. It just doesn't tell you everything. And, and, you know, where things get, get serious and interesting is not whether Joe Olympian can beat Joe Sixpack. It's, it's who's going to actually win the Olympics or whatever. Or, or am I, or from a personal perspective, am I, you know, in shape to run a new best that's better than I ran last year? And, and the lab tests don't have, like, as you said, they don't have enough fidelity to, to, to see that sort of fine grain. And so it was in the late 1990s that, that people, some scientists started to challenge this sort of orthodoxy. There's a guy named Tim Nokes, who's a South African sports scientist who is...

• 12:40Alex Hutchinson?

  Extremely influential, extremely controversial. He's, uh, these days, he's, he's probably best known that he's, he's become a real advocate of, of low carb, high fat diets, um, and writing some very provocative stuff about how everyone else is, uh, you know, part of the massive conspiracy.

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  Every other is an idiot, yeah.

• 12:59Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, and idiot and a corrupt, paid off idiot. So, uh, look.

• 13:03Chris Williamson?

  If someone's shilling for the pasta companies, all the rice companies are giving backhanders to the, uh, the rest of the endurance researchers to make sure that everyone stays on a carbohydrate binge.

• 13:14Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, you, you're essentially quoting directly from what he would say. That, that is, that is almost exactly what, what, what he says in, in.

• 13:22Chris Williamson?

  I love him already.

• 13:23Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, he wrote a whole book about, uh, the high sports hydration, uh, where he basically called out by name, most of the leading sports nutrition researchers in the world and said they were all paid off by Gatorade.

• 13:33Chris Williamson?

  Amazing.

• 13:34Alex Hutchinson?

  And the thing is, there's some truth to what he says, but it's not, I, I think he takes it too far. I think there, I think the research, anyway, but this, this is a bit of a rabbit hole, but the, the point is, he's very provocative. Um, he may not get all the details right, but he sure as heck forces, forces people to think carefully about their assumptions. And, and so in the late nineties, he started to say, hey, this sort of focus on the body is missing something important. And it's not just enough to say, well, you know, of course you have to be motivated too, or you have to try hard, that you have to think about the brain and the body as one system together. And he proposed an idea that he called the central governor model, which was this idea that no matter how hard you try, you can't push to your true physical limits. Because if you did, if you pushed to the point where, you know, you really couldn't

• 14:18Alex Hutchinson?

  get enough oxygen in, then your heart and, and/or your brain would be in trouble and you'd keel over and die essentially. Uh, so he said, we're hardwired with, with this sort of central governor, a central protective mechanism to always hold back a little bit of reserve, that the brain is deciding where your, where your limits are for your own safety. And whether that's strictly speaking true or not, I'm not sure and I don't think anybody is sure. But what that did is spark a whole kind of revolution and reevaluation of the role of the brain in limits. And so when I got interested in this topic, which was about 10 or 12 years ago, the whole field was in upheaval as people were arguing

• 14:59Alex Hutchinson?

  about this central governor idea, what role the brain played. And that has sort of continued to this day. There's still a bunch of rival theories arguing about how the brain should be incorporated. But overall, I would say, there's a sort of underlying consensus, which is that, yeah, when you go out and if I put you on a treadmill, set the speed at a given pace and say, run until you fall off the back of the treadmill. The moment you fall off the back of the treadmill, or the moment you say, stop the treadmill before I fall off the back. It's fundamentally a decision that you're making. And it's not based on, there's no measurement I can take, whether it's your heart rate, or your breathing rate, or your body temperature, your lactate levels. There's no measurement I can take that will tell me when you're going to fall off the back of the treadmill reliably. But there

• 15:44Alex Hutchinson?

  is one question I can ask you, which is, how hard does this feel? And when you get to the point where you say, this feels like about a 10 out of 10 on effort, boom, you're off the back of the treadmill. And so it's your, it's your, your brain's processing of all these signals from your body, and processing of how you're feeling in general, processing of how you slept last night, and how you're getting on with your partner, and so on. Your brain is processing all that information into one number, which, or one sensation, which is how hard it feels. And that is the ultimate, sort of final answer in terms of where the limits of your endurance are. So that's, that's, I think, it's not universally agreed upon, but I think that's where the field is moving now. In contrast to the 20th century, it's a machine. If we know your lactate and your breathing rate

• 16:29Alex Hutchinson?

  and stuff, we'll be able to dictate your limits.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  I get that completely. I recently did a podcast with some of the coaches from Reebok CrossFit Tyneside up here in Newcastle. And as a part of that, I asked them the question, which essentially you're moving through the answer of now, which was,

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  If I put a bar that is five kilos above your PB in front of you and I tell you that you need to pick it up, there's a chance that you may be able to pick it up. But the difference between you lifting it and not lifting it really lies within your mind. And what I was fascinated by, and we couldn't come up with a solution, but you may be able to give us some sort of, some spotlight on this is what the mechanism is that works on whether or not you pick the bar up or whether you don't pick the bar up, how you, how your brain is able to choose how much of your body's performance gets deployed, if that makes sense.

• 17:22Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, totally. Well, so the first thing I'll say is if, if you put the bar that with five kilos extra on it, and if I don't tell you that it has those five kilos, so that you think it's just the same load that you've lifted before, that's going to raise your chances dramatically of, of, of lifting it. If you believe that, yeah, this is, I've done this before, of course I can do this, then you'll have a much greater chance of doing it.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Is that due to hormonal profile in the body? Is that because of just a psychological bias that we've got?

• 17:51Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I think, well, it's, I think there's a mix of things going on. Fundamentally, what's going on is your brain is sending a signal to your muscles, telling how many muscle fibers should be recruited, which muscle fibers, in what order. And so it's a very, very complex process. You know, if you're doing, say, a deadlift, there's, I can't remember, there's something like 13 different muscles, or 17 different muscles that have to contract in a very specific order. So just, just saying, just contracting more isn't always the right answer, but contracting in a way that, you know, if you don't think you're going to be able to do it, then you're already perhaps contracting in a pattern that is defensive, so that when you fail, you're not going to hurt yourself. But in

• 18:36Alex Hutchinson?

  doing so, you make it less likely that you succeed. Whereas if the neuromuscular signaling is proceeding with the assumption that you're going to be able to do it, you're maybe giving yourself a little edge because you're not holding back with the fear of failure.

• 18:49Chris Williamson?

  And that, that probably ties into your story from your 1500 meter run as well.

• 18:55Alex Hutchinson?

  Absolutely. I think there's a big connection. And, you know, like, when we start talking about Muscle strength, it's interesting because obviously lifting something once is different from sustaining something for an hour or for four minutes or whatever the case may be, but there's a lot of parallels and there's a lot of literature. So I have a chapter in the book called Muscle where I try and sort of disentangle, so what does it mean to be limited by your muscle strength? What does it mean is fundamentally what happens when you reach failure is that is it that your, you know, your muscle fibers simply aren't able to contract in a way that completes the motion? And it turns out to be just like with with sort of marathon running, it turns out to be a much slipperier slope to try and figure out what your limits are. So there's there's some famous studies from back in

• 19:40Alex Hutchinson?

  the early 1960s. And in one of them, what they did is that they had volunteers doing a maximum kind of biceps curl contraction once every minute. So they were just supposed to do it all out. Don't save anything. Just once a minute, give us your your maximum curl for a couple of seconds. And and they were measuring the force produced. And then before one of the the lifts, they had one of the researchers snuck up behind the volunteers and fired a gun in their ears, basically scared the crap out of them. And all of a sudden, of course, their their strength, their their maximum strength suddenly goes up by something like eight or 10%. So, and you know, we sort of understand this intuitively as a fight or flight response, like they were completely scared at that moment, a

• 20:24Alex Hutchinson?

  fraction of a second before they were lifted. So bam, they they they're able to produce more force. Now they could get a similar effect by injecting adrenaline or injecting some some stimulants. I think it was ephedrine or something. I'm not, I can't remember what the stimulant was. So so there are chemical ways of sort of altering what's going on in in the in the brain, which in turn changes how much of your muscle force you, you know, if you think in evolutionary terms. At that moment, when the bear is chasing you, or whatever the case may be, then whatever safety circuitry is hardwired into your body, it's good for you if that circuitry is somewhat flexible and can say, you know what?

• 21:08Alex Hutchinson?

  We're gonna disable this.

• 21:10Chris Williamson?

  We need to recruit everything here.

• 21:11Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's not save this for another day. And you see that with pain, too. And the same thing if you're a deer being chased by a wolf, and you trip and break your leg. It's not the time to say, oh, I need to lie down and let this leg get better. You're just gonna keep running even if the leg snaps worse.

• 21:30Chris Williamson?

  Or a break broken. Yeah, exactly.

• 21:32Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so there's these mechanisms that affect both how we perceive what's going on, like pain perception, but also how we send signals from our brain to our muscles. And those can be mediated by emotional responses and by hormones. And also, just by, like we were saying before, deception. And there are studies where they do exactly this sort of thing. They tell you you're gonna lift one weight and you're lifting another weight. Or they tell you you're racing against your own best performance, but really, they have you racing in virtual reality against your own best performance plus 1% or plus 2%. And they find that if you add a percent or two, and you have the belief that you can beat that, you think it's just your own best performance from last time you were in the lab,

• 22:16Alex Hutchinson?

  then you beat it, unless it's changed too much. If you speed up this virtual reality representation of yourself by 5%, then that's too far. And you're trying to race against yourself, but you know something is wrong, and you end up getting discouraged. So it's never like, do all of this, or do... This thing always works. But depending on the context, there are various ways you can tweak what you expect to go on in your brain and use that as a way of doing more than you were previously capable of.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's interesting, there's a funny story. I'm not too sure how much truth's in it, but a couple of my friends are firefighters, and they say a lot of the time, if there's been car accidents and stuff, and mothers have been known to have incredible bursts of strength when they're concerned about their baby in a car, and they've been able to pull handles harder than they would be able to, and move things out of the way because they've got this mortal fear.

• 23:11Chris Williamson?

  Of the situation that they're in and that kind of ties back to the the bear scenario that you'd described. And then the same for anyone who's ever watched a powerlifting competition. If you look at powerlifters before they step up to the plate, they're sniffing smelling salts that take your face off and they're getting their friends to slap them on the back of the the back of the neck. It's like if someone, if you went through that in a normal day to day, like just normal day to day life, you you'd want to go to bed for a little bit. But you know, these guys are electing to do it because they think that it's going to prime their mind into a state where they can recruit more from their body.

• 23:46Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, totally. And so that's one of the things I looked into is this, okay, is it true that, you know, a scared mom could lift a car off their crushed baby? And if you if you look through news archives, you find story after story like this, but it never, of course, it never happens in the lab because, you know, you're not allowed to put a baby under a car in the lab. It's just they just don't don't go for it. But so I was trying to sort of figure this out. And I found I ended up finding a story, probably the most plausible story I could find happened about 12 years ago in Arizona. A guy who was a cyclist was hit by a car and strapped under the wheels. And the guy, the guy who came and so reportedly, according to eyewitnesses, this guy came and lifted the car up so that someone else could pull the cyclist out from under the car. And so it turns out this guy was actually,

• 24:31Alex Hutchinson?

  this, you know, this guy was not a guy who looked like me. He was a guy who actually could deadlift. He had a best of, I can't remember, something like 700 pounds in the gym. He was a

• 24:39Chris Williamson?

  He's a strong old, strong old boy. Then he was the guy that you wanted. If you're trapped under a car, you want that guy.

• 24:44Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, he was the right guy. And so the question, the question is

• 24:47Chris Williamson?

  This is my time. This is what I've been training for my entire life.

• 24:51Alex Hutchinson?

  And in that moment, he undoubtedly did more than he had ever done because one of the cool post scripts to the story is, you know, it all happened. He got they got the guy out. He's driving home later that night. And he realizes his mouth feels kind of funny. He gets home and realizes he's cracked eight teeth or something like that. So he was clenching his mouth so hard while doing this lift. And so you start to do the math and say, so the car was a Chevy Camaro. And it's like, okay, how much does a Chevy Camaro weigh? Well, it weighs something like 1,400 kilos or something, depending on the model year. So that's a lot more than... And then you say, well, what's the world record for a deadlift? Well, I did some digging on this.

• 25:32Alex Hutchinson?

  And so the unofficial record is actually, it was set at the World Strongman Competition in, I think it was 1982. A guy lifted, a guy named Tom McGee lifted, I can't remember the exact numbers, in the vicinity of 1,150 pounds. So like 500 kilos of cheddar cheese. It was in New Zealand. So they had, you can find the video on YouTube. It's amazing. These like, it's just stacks of cheddar cheese. And he lifts it up. And it's like, there's a big gap between 500 kilos and 1,400 kilos. And then you start to do the physics. Well, okay, you don't have to lift the whole car up. You just have to lever it up on its back wheels. So maybe you're lifting a half its weight or a third of its weight. And then there's the shocks. How much lift are you getting from the shock absorbers?

• 26:14Alex Hutchinson?

  So the final scientific answer that I come up with is, I don't really know. Maybe, you know, maybe it could happen. You can, and there's also, I ended up digging into the old Soviet athletic literature. There's some studies from back in the 50s and 60s in the Soviet Union, trying to understand what the ultimate limits of weightlifters are. And they concluded that, you know, a typical person can access about 80% of their maximum muscle strength. Whereas a trained weightlifter can maybe get to 90% in competition. And then that, you know, I had someone, I had a friend of mine who speaks Russian, you know, translate some of these papers for me. But it's pretty obscure where they get those numbers from, whether they're just kind of pulling them out of their ears.

• 26:57Alex Hutchinson?

  But the bottom line is, under the right circumstances, it seems pretty fair to say that you can often find a little bit more strength. You can't necessarily find double your strength or something like, you know, you're not going to be able to lift that car over your head or anything like that. But maybe you're going to be able to get it, get an extra 10, 20% of what you're already capable of. And maybe that'll be enough to get the baby out from under the car, or whatever the case may be.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  So what we're saying is that the brain plays a very prominent role in eliciting as much of your performance as you can?

• 27:33Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, exactly. And so the important thing is that it's... The brain doesn't turn you into Superman. The brain, so if you're asked to bet on a mentally strong person who weighs thirty kilos and a sort of lazy guy who's huge and with enormous muscles, the guy with enormous muscles is going to be stronger. He's going to lift up more, but even if he's getting less out of himself. But so, you know, mental strength isn't going to allow you, you know, David to beat Goliath.

• 28:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Alex Hutchinson?

  But, but for most of us, the fundamental thing is trying to come closer to our own limits, to, you know, to get the most out of ourselves so that we can, or if you're in competition, to beat people who are roughly on our level, not at six, six levels above. And in that case, that's where the mind comes in, that it determines whether you're going to get ninety percent or ninety-five percent out of yourself, not whether you're going to get five hundred percent out of yourself.

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that makes complete sense. So what during your discovery, during the research for the book, did you discover helps with moving the brain towards a more efficient deployment of the body's capabilities? Because everyone who is listening that trains will understand the concept of progressive overload for muscular training, and although I haven't spent an awful lot of time running, I'm going to presume that the same will be done, that you'll run a long distance, then split that up into smaller distances and move your split forward and have little breaks and, you know, so on and so forth. So is there an equivalent for the brain?

• 29:18Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, well, there are a bunch of different ways you can go, some of which I recommend and some of which I don't. One of the things I tried just for kicks while writing the book, there's something, there's something called transcranial direct current stimulation, which is basically you take a nine volt battery and a couple of electrodes and you attach it to your head and you run some, some current through your brain. It's a weak current, so it's, and let me just reiterate here, this is one of the, just in case there's any doubt, this is one of the things I'm not suggesting you do.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 29:48Alex Hutchinson?

  But, I mean, all joking aside, as far as anyone knows, it's safe. But if you pick the, if you put the electrodes in the right place, you can

• 29:58Alex Hutchinson?

  Moderate or change the activity of the neurons that are responsible for your perception of effort. So you can make a given level of exercise feel a little bit easier. And as we were saying earlier, if it feels easier, you can do it for longer, or you can increase, you can do it harder. Because how it feels is really what matters. So, over the last five years, there've been a bunch of studies showing that this technique, you do about 10 minutes of electric brain stimulation, it changes how your neurons fire for about an hour. So you get this temporary alteration in how hard exercise feels. And as a result, you're able to push harder and achieve more. And there were athletes using this technique at the Winter Olympics this year, the 2018 Winter Olympics.

• 30:40Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Walking around with nine volt batteries attached to them.

• 30:44Alex Hutchinson?

  Well, or using them in training, and there were, you know, there've been professional sports teams experimenting with it. There's a Silicon Valley startup that makes noise cancelling headphones.

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  Halo, I've seen.

• 30:54Alex Hutchinson?

  That's, that's the one I'm talking about. And that's what I tried while, while writing the book. It didn't actually work for me in the sense that I'm bald, and apparently my, you know, the, the, the tough weather in Canada has toughened my scalp to a degree that I, I really had trouble making electrical contact with the, the spikes that are supposed to deliver the current. The controller just kept saying insufficient electrical contact. And I'm like, man, I'm digging these spikes into my head. I ended up with like 24 little red divots on my head for, for the rest of the day.

• 31:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Alex Hutchinson?

  So, so anyway, all of which is, the point here is that there are ways of directly manipulating the brain that alter your perception of effort, and altering your perception of effort improves your performance, which, which is, to me, is a cool principle, because it shows that you haven't changed anything below your, below the neck. All you're doing is manipulating how your neurons communicate with each other, and all of a sudden, your physical limits have changed.

• 31:46Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So, so effort is, is a big mediator there. So when you're doing RPE and you say rate of perceived exertion is a nine, but if the next day you then felt that that nine was an eight, you'd be able to move more?

• 32:00Alex Hutchinson?

  That's 100% it. That, that is, that is the fundamental truth, or at least theory, that, that, that is at the forefront of exercise physiology right now, that, that that RPE, the rating of perceived exertion, is the master controller of what you're capable of.

• 32:15Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Tell us more about that.

• 32:17Alex Hutchinson?

  So, I mean,

• 32:20Alex Hutchinson?

  RPEs, just for listeners who aren't familiar with it, rating of perceived exertion, it's a very simple concept. And there's, you can, it's a, if I, if I'm doing an exercise and someone asks me, hey, how hard is this exercise on a scale of, you can either use a scale of six to 20 or a scale of, of one to 10. So let's just say the one to 10, because it's a little simpler. And I say, that's a seven out of 10. Then they'll say, okay, that's great. And they know then roughly how long I'll be able to continue doing that. And once I get to 10 out of 10, that's it. By definition, I'm done. If I'm saying this is as hard as I can go, then they know that I'm not going to be able to keep going there. Now, when people first hear about this, they, they kind of think, well, that's sort of an imperfect, rough, vague description of how you're feeling and, you know, what one person will call seven out of 10, another person might call six out of 10.

• 33:04Alex Hutchinson?

  And, you know, that's all true, but the fact remains that it turns out to be a really reliable guide to how, how, what you're capable of doing. And, and people are like, well, it's not as reliable or accurate as your lactate levels or your, you know, your, your, whatever else the case, your heart rate or your, your breathing rate or all these other things. Your, your rating of perceived exertion incorporates all of those.

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, it's mediated by all of those things, isn't it?

• 33:30Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, we're talking about a different level of explanation. Of course, your, your heart rate matters, but it only matters insofar as it makes exercise or is associated with exercise feeling harder. And what's, the, the key thing is that, yes, rating of perceived exertion reflects all those things that are going on in your body, but it also reflects what's going on in your mind. And that's what's, or in your brain. And that's why you can alter your rating of perceived exertion using something like electric brain stimulation. And then you're able to keep going or lift more or run faster, even though you haven't changed anything about what's going on in your muscles or your heart or your lungs. And so there've been a number of studies that have demonstrated that to be the case. If you find a way of manipulating perceived exertion.

• 34:14Alex Hutchinson?

  Then you've effectively found a way of changing your physical limits.

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy.

• 34:19Alex Hutchinson?

  It's a super powerful insight because if it's true, then it changes your whole perspective on what are my limits? Because when you feel like you've hit your physical limits, it doesn't feel like it reflects your feelings or your perceptions. It's like, no, I swear to you, my legs could not take another step. And what this research is saying is, yeah, they could have. Yeah, if a lion had jumped out from behind a tree and started chasing you, you would have taken.

• 34:44Chris Williamson?

  It just needed a little bit more motivation.

• 34:46Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, and of course, in some circumstances, let's say it's the Olympic final. Motivation is already pretty near to maximal, so it's not like the people aren't trying hard. But even in that situation, the fundamental determinant is that the reason you stop isn't that your legs are completely incapable. It's that you've reached the point where it's absolutely at your maximum effort. It's as hard as you can push.

• 35:10Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of this. I often think about the very, very granular nature, the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, about just how much more could you have squeezed out? You know, okay, so the lion jumps out and then, oh my God, the lion's attacking your wife. And then, oh my God, then your mom's behind your wife. And do you know what I mean? Like, you just think like, how much more? How much more could we layer on top? I do think about this quite a lot. It's a very interesting thought experiment, which it would appear is actually existing in real experiments as well. So I wanted to talk.

• 35:45Alex Hutchinson?

  I should clarify, they've never actually done the lion thing with the mother or the wife.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  That needs to be done. Alex, we need to get some funding and then it'll be fine. So I want to talk about how some specific factors can define your limits. Because we will get on to some tactics for how you can improve the mind game, so to speak. But there are things that your mind will detect. So pain, oxygen, heat, thirst and fuel, I think, are the ones that you define quite heavily. Is that right?

• 36:20Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a bunch of those. And I think there's maybe a couple of others like heat or, you know. So basically, what I tried to do in the book is. I tried to sort of attack my, this claim that we've just been talking about that it's all perception of effort and say, okay, well, what happens when we really push some of these things that limit us to their absolute extremes?

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  And what are you perceiving as well? You're saying you're talking about perception of effort. Well, what is the perception? It's like, it's not, it's not effort. Effort isn't a thing. It's like, okay, it's a combination of like fatigue and pain and discomfort and like you say, the heat and the sweat and the oxygen and duh, duh, duh, duh. You need to break them down, right? And that's what you, that's what you've done here.

• 37:02Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, well, and what is effort? Is that actually a deep question that maybe we can, we can swipe at a little bit. There's, there's lots of arguments about this and, and, and there's researchers who argue very strongly that it's different from pain and it's different from fatigue. And what it actually reflects is how hard your brain is working to send signals to your muscles. So the harder your brain has to work, you perceive this as a struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yes.

• 37:31Alex Hutchinson?

  And when, and so it's a distinct, so there's studies that try and separate pain from effort. So they, they, they first they, they have you get a sense of what pain is. They force you to dip your hand in an ice bucket.

• 37:42Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 37:43Alex Hutchinson?

  And, and until you can't, and you say, when you can't, when you pull that, your hand out of the ice bucket, they say, okay, that's 10 out of 10 pain. Now I want you to think differently about, so pain versus just effort. How hard is it to keep pedaling that bike? They put you on your bike, they have you pedal to exhaustion. And what they find is at the moment you give up, what people tend to be saying on average is, yeah, oh, this really hurts. It's a pain of like six or seven out of 10. But my effort is at 10 out of 10. So you're giving up. It, it does hurt. Six or seven out of 10 pain is bad.

• 38:12Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 38:13Alex Hutchinson?

  But it's not 10 out of 10. It's the, it's the effort that reaches its peak, which is something different depending, you know, defining it as something distinct from, from pain. So anyway, that's a bit of a rabbit hole. I don't want to like belabor that point, but it, but the question of what effort is, is an interesting one and is not obvious. It's something that people are arguing about. But to actually answer your question, so yeah, what are all these things that go into? To creating the perception of effort.

• 38:39Chris Williamson?

  It's creating the perception of limit as well, isn't it?

• 38:41Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  What defines your limit within these contexts, within different contexts, I suppose.

• 38:46Alex Hutchinson?

  And of course, you know, I've been rambling on about how limits are all just sort of a sort of creation of, of, you know, your perception of effort. But of course, look, if I don't, if I lock you in a room and don't give you water for a week, you're going to die. And that's, that's not a figment of your imagination. You're, you're actually, you're going to run out of fluid.

• 39:04Chris Williamson?

  I'm very dead.

• 39:05Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. And far earlier than that, you know, if you're running a marathon and you don't, on a hot day and you don't drink any water, you're not going to die, but you're going to be probably performing suboptimally because your blood's going to be getting a lot thicker because you've lost so much fluid to sweat.

• 39:22Chris Williamson?

  Regardless of how hard you want to push.

• 39:24Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah, it doesn't matter. You can, you can be the, you know, the toughest guy in town, but if you don't, or similarly, if you, let's say you don't eat any breakfast, you don't eat, let's say you don't eat for 24 hours and you're trying to run a marathon. Well, you're going to be out of gas in the same way that a car can run out of gas. And it doesn't really matter how tough you are. Your, your performance isn't going to be as good as it would be if, if you had a full load of fuel. And similarly, you know, if, if it's, you know, 35 degrees and sunny, you're not going to run a marathon as fast as you would if it was 10 degrees and overcast. And again, nothing to do with mental toughness. So, so those are the sort of counter arguments that you have to think about and say, okay, but Alex, before you write a book that, that claims that the limits of endurance are all

• 40:08Alex Hutchinson?

  in your head, what is, what do all these other things tell us? These forms of limits? What happens when you run out of oxygen if you're freediving or climbing a mountain like Mount Everest?

• 40:19Alex Hutchinson?

  And so, let me just give you the broad overall conclusion, which is that all those things are capable of slowing you down. But in keeping with what we've been saying, the way they slow you down is that they make... Things feel harder. They give you basically, I don't know if in Britain you think of, is it orange lights and red lights or yellow lights and red lights?

• 40:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Red, orange and green, yeah.

• 40:44Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so let's call it, they give you orange lights. They are cautioning you that, "Hey, you're gonna get in some trouble if you keep going without drinking." And so, "We're gonna make this feel harder." Even though your body isn't failing yet, we're gonna make it feel harder to try and force you to slow down so that unless you take some fuel or get some water, whatever the case is, the thing is that you're missing. So, these things do slow us down, but the way they slow us down is not because you're out of water and therefore your body isn't functioning right. It's because your brain is perceiving the short, you know, the increase in body temperature or the reduction in fluids in your body as a potential problem and it's raising your perception of effort.

• 41:28Alex Hutchinson?

  Now, if you persist and ignore the orange lights, then yeah, you're gonna hit a red light. You're gonna, you're gonna run out of fuel. You're gonna, or you're gonna overheat and have to stop, or whatever the case may be. But those red lights are only hit if you ignore the orange lights and the orange lights are mediated by, again, by your brain. So, yes, there are real physical limits, of course. You know, of course, if you don't drink or eat anything, you're gonna, you're not gonna be able to perform the same as if you do. But the way, in most cases, the way those, those limits act is by acting on the brain rather than by making your muscles stop working or whatever.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  So, it's acting on the RPE again, essentially?

• 42:09Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly.

• 42:10Chris Williamson?

  It's so, it sounds so stupid that I didn't think about this before, but that the rate of perceived exertion or how much effort you feel you're putting in is this macro figure which collates all of the different inputs that your body is feeling. So, like you say, you know, you've come in, you had an argument with the wife last night, but you had a good night's sleep. Well, but you didn't drink enough, but you ate enough. And, you know, all of these things are collated into your body determining what is the current, what is the current status quo inside of me at the moment? And therefore, how much, how difficult or easy am I going to allow this particular

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  level of discomfort to feel as I move through or this particular exercise to feel?

• 43:00Alex Hutchinson?

  That's exactly it. And to me, it's a really powerful way of thinking about things.

• 43:04Chris Williamson?

  So powerful.

• 43:05Alex Hutchinson?

  I want to do the obligatory step back and say, there are plenty of scientists who will say that that's a bunch of crap. There's still lots of debate. And some who still would say, no, the body is a machine, the mind doesn't matter. So it's an area of research. But to me, that's a very convincing explanation. It makes intuitive sense. And there's also some really fascinating research that kind of backs this up and says, no, this is what's happening. One of my favorite examples is they had cyclists do an endurance test, and they flashed pictures of either smiling faces or frowning faces on the wall in front of them, but only for 16 milliseconds at a time, which is like a tenth the length of a blink. So the cyclist didn't even know there were faces flashing on the wall in

• 43:49Alex Hutchinson?

  front of them. But it was just enough that they could perceive it unconsciously. And it sort of changes your mood. You see someone smiling, unconsciously makes you feel a little bit happier. Or if you see someone frowning, it makes you feel a little less happy. And what they found is, in a very subtle way, that changed their reported perception of effort as they were cycling this endurance test, and changed their performance by 12%.

• 44:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my God.

• 44:11Alex Hutchinson?

  And so it goes back to this idea that it's this, your perception of effort is integrating everything that's going on. It's not just integrating what your lactate levels are and what your body temperature is. It's also integrating how you're feeling about the world. And so you're asking yourself the question, can I keep going for another 10 seconds? If you're feeling a little bit better about things in general, the answer is yes. So this is the kind of thing that I'm a sort of very skeptical guy by nature. And I sort of have always ignored sports psychology and not really put much stock in it. But when I started to look at this research, it made me think, oh, wait, you know, this, these are, these are results from scientific labs, really quantifying the fact that what's going on in your brain matters.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Everyone at home who has ever done a workout which has got to push them towards their limits will know that some days it goes in and you can go into the gym and it feels everything just clicks. For whatever reason it is, your rate of perceived exertion, it's like the ceiling's just been lifted. And then there's other days when you go in and like, gravity just feels so much heavier than it should do. And I think working off that rate of perceived exertions, it makes so much intuitive sense to me. I really like it as a concept. So I wanted to talk, one of the things that I certainly

• 45:33Chris Williamson?

  thought would have been a big impact would have been pain and discomfort, I think.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  Did you look into pain and discomfort and such?

• 45:45Alex Hutchinson?

  I did. In fact, there's a whole chapter in the book on pain, when it was a fun one. So, yeah, so again, I know I'm sort of saying this over and over again, but I'll say that there is disagreement among scientists. And in fact, this is one of my favorite examples of disagreement, because there's two guys at the University of Kent, a guy named Samuel Markora and a guy named Alexis Major, who are colleagues. And Markora is basically the leading advocate of effort is the be all and end all. And Major is the leading researcher on the role of pain in exercise. And so they have totally, you know, different views on what is more important.

• 46:25Chris Williamson?

  Working out of the same university as well.

• 46:27Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. And what's great, and what I think is really, really wonderful and speaks well of both of them, is that they collaborate on studies and they do them together. And you know, they may disagree about the interpretation of the results, but they're trying to tease apart the relative role of pain and effort. And so my reading of it is that pain matters,

• 46:48Alex Hutchinson?

  definitely matters. The more unpleasant something is, the worse you'll do at it.

• 46:54Alex Hutchinson?

  But that pain is subordinate to effort. Pain mostly matters because if something is painful, it'll influence your sense of effort and you'll feel like it's harder. But In a sense, it doesn't matter what's subordinate to what, because the point is, since pain contributes to that feeling, how you handle pain will influence how you perform. And there's some really interesting research showing the difference between athletes and non-athletes in terms of how they manage pain and how that affects their performance. So there've been a lot of studies over the years that show that athletes have a greater pain tolerance than non-athletes. So you take some arbitrary way of inflicting pain, whether it's with blood pressure cuffs, or ice baths, or pressure poking people,

• 47:39Alex Hutchinson?

  or whatever the case may be. What you find is that, first of all, what you find is that their pain sensitivity is the same. Athletes and non-athletes, it's not that athletes have some sort of magical way that they don't feel pain. And so the threshold at which they say, "Hey, that hurts. Stop that, you bastard," is roughly the same. They feel pain the same. It's just that the athletes are willing to sit there and endure it for much longer. They'll say, "Okay, keep on going. Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. It hurts, but I can tolerate it." And their maximum threshold is much higher. So the next question, then, is, is this because the people who become athletes are those who are born with a high pain threshold? Or is it by being an athlete, you learn to have a higher pain threshold?

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Which way is the arrow of causality moving here?

• 48:25Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, and my default answer in these cases is that it's probably a bit of both. But I think the strongest evidence is towards the second idea, which is that by training on a regular basis, you increase your pain tolerance. And again, this isn't because you stop feeling pain, it's because you learn to cope with it. You develop psychological coping mechanisms. If you go to the gym every day and put yourself through some discomfort, you gradually get better and better at various things, like distraction. You get better at thinking about something else, instead of just thinking about how much this exercise hurts. You also get better at interpreting pain as information. So taking away the emotional response, not like, "This hurts. I hate this. This is a disaster," just thinking, "This

• 49:08Alex Hutchinson?

  hurts, therefore, this gives me some information about how hard I'm working and whether I can continue." So it's almost related to sort of mindfulness, which is, of course, a big buzzword these days. But one of the definitions of mindfulness is nonjudgmental self-awareness. And by exercising on a regular basis, you start to be able to be nonjudgmentally aware of pain. It's just information. It's not a signal that you're about to die.

• 49:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people, especially when they get into pain, if they're not used to training, they will begin to either push it away or identify with it quite heavily because it's such a foreign sensation. But the same as with anything, if you are acclimatized to it and you've been here before, wherever here may be, then you'll be able to deal with it more comfortably.

• 49:59Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, and I think, you know, everyone understands that, let's say you're a sedentary person who's never, who doesn't do any exercise and you decide you want to run a 5K with your friends in six months. And so you start a sort of run, walk program, do a little training. Everyone understands that in six months, your body will have changed, that you will, your lungs will be more powerful, your heart will be stronger, your muscles will be more efficient. What people don't realize necessarily, or I don't think give enough credit to, is that their mind will have changed a lot too. So when you start, you know, and you're not familiar with running, you go out and do a bit of running, and pretty soon your legs start to burn and you're panting heavily. And all sorts of alarm signals are going off in your brain and you're thinking, oh my God, this hurts so much. I'm, you know, I'm gonna put myself in hospital, I need to slow down and stop. But the more times

• 50:44Alex Hutchinson?

  you kind of hold your finger near that flame, the more you realize, oh, I can hold it there and I'm not going to die. So I can hold it a little bit closer next time, or hold it there for a little bit longer. And over time, you're actually pushing your body much harder, even relative to your fitness. So you're getting fitter, but you're also pushing deeper into the well with experience. And one important thing about that, there was a classic study in the early 80s with Scottish, the Scottish national swimming team of all, of all places, where they, they measured pain tolerance, not just once, but throughout a season. And what they found is with these elite athletes who'd been, you know, training hard for at least a decade in most cases. Their pain tolerance waxed and waned throughout the season.

• 51:27Alex Hutchinson?

  So their pain tolerance was highest right before their most important competitions. Then it was lowest in the off season when they weren't training. So these were very experienced athletes. They'd spent plenty of time in the pain cave. But it still wasn't a question of just like, once you learn to handle pain, that's it. You now know and you've mastered this trick and you never need to think about it again. It's something that you have to constantly work out every day to remind yourself, or not every day necessarily, but on a continuing basis, you have to keep teaching yourself how to handle discomfort. And if you, you know, if you take a month off, then your body gets a little softer and so, but so does your mind.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that there'll be a lot of CrossFitters that are listening and some powerlifters and strength athletes as well. And I certainly think that of all of the signals that our brain is receiving, which is influencing our rate of perceived exertion, pain will definitely be one of the ones that's at the forefront. You know, not enough oxygen manifests itself as a painful breathing and a discomfort. And a lot of people would probably confuse that being out of breath with pain and the muscular burn and the leg burn. And you know, all of these things manifest as pain. It sounds like pain would probably be a pretty big gatekeeper to a lot of performance.

• 52:42Alex Hutchinson?

  For sure. And I think it's sort of like, I don't know, being a wine lover, a cheese lover or something. The more sophisticated you get, the more you can distinguish between the subtle flavors of pain.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 52:56Alex Hutchinson?

  That when you start out, it's just like, holy crap, this hurts.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  Overwhelmed.

• 53:00Alex Hutchinson?

  Everything hurts and it's all the same. It's all just one big pain. You know, whereas once you've become accustomed to it, it's like, ah, I feel that my, you know, I feel the lactate in my legs. Oh, and I think I'm going a little bit hypoxic. I'm running out of oxygen and ooh, I think I detect a subtle undertone of, you know, muscular fatigue or whatever. So you have to appreciate all the nuances of pain.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  I totally get that. I mean, anyone who's ever sat on an assault bike and tried to slow down their breathing as they're going maximally will know that you can actually control your breathing quite well. You can focus on breathing in and out rhythmically, breathing deep and controlling that. But the pain in your legs doesn't stop, but the pain in your lungs oddly does. So you can actually, if you know, if anyone is sitting on an assault bike tomorrow, I urge you to try it. Do warm up and then do 30 seconds of max cows, but focus on breathing in for two and out for two as deeply as you can. And you'll notice that you can control your breathing up until the point in which you need to start to pant. You can control your breathing quite nicely, but the pain, the pain in your legs doesn't go away. But

• 54:05Chris Williamson?

  you've been able to isolate the two as opposed to, like you say, this kind of nebulous coating, this glazing of just discomfort that goes everywhere.

• 54:15Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. And with familiarity, with familiarity, as we begin to isolate and get familiar with them, they're less scary. It's just, it's instead of this one big sort of unpleasant feeling, we have all these different sensations that we can, like you said, we can control or move up and down as desired. And yeah, then you're willing to handle it for a little longer, for a little more.

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Brilliant. So let's get on to some of the, I'm going to call them solutions, but I guess that they technically aren't. Some of the tactics and some of the tools that you discovered, which can aid people with regards to their endurance.

• 54:56Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So I mean, there are a bunch of techniques. And I mentioned a while ago, the electric brain stimulation and there's that, there's that sort of approach. But I think, and you know, like, we could spend a lot of time talking about the pros and cons of various different tools like that. But to me, the underlying most important thing, if you want to get the most out of yourself is actually to manipulate basically your belief, your self belief that, and this goes back to what we were saying, right? You know, right at the start of the show, that if, if you believe you're capable of something, it will change fundamentally the way you go about doing it. And it will change your experience of whether you think you're capable of it. It will change your perception of effort. And so how do you change your belief? Well,

• 55:44Alex Hutchinson?

  You can have a situation where the timekeeper gives you the wrong time in a race and tricks you into thinking that you're capable of more than you are. But that's not something you can control. So how do you do it in a controllable way? Another classic example is, you know, one of the stories I tell in the book is from a mentor of mine named Ambie Burford, who was a former Boston Marathon champion. And he said, "The single most important or most powerful workout you can do as a runner is, let's say you do five times a mile as hard as you can with two minutes break. And when you're finished, that's a very hard workout. When you're finished, lying there on the ground, you know, as a broken man.

• 56:26Alex Hutchinson?

  If your coach then says, 'Okay, get up and do one more at the same pace.'" And you'll say, "But I can't. I just went all out." And the coach will say, "Get out there and do it." And you get out there and discover that, "Oh, wait, I can do it. It hurts, but you do have one more rep in the tank." And what Ambie Burford says is, "From that, you'll discover that you're capable of more than you think you are. And that's the single most important lesson you can learn in running." So I think that's powerful, but it's, again, an example of something that's, you know, it's not something you could self-administer.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  It's not super-controllable, is it?

• 56:59Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. You know, even if you have a coach, which most, many of us don't, who's willing to do something like that, it only works once, you know?

• 57:07Chris Williamson?

  And he's not going to be your friend after he does it either.

• 57:10Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly. And so you have to, you want to try and find techniques that are a little bit more under your control. And so for me, the number one thing is a technique called motivational self-talk, which is basically just becoming aware of the internal monologue in your head and ensuring that it's positive. So if you're someone like me, then if you go and run a marathon, the thoughts going through your head tend to be along the lines of, "You know, this sucks. I hate this sport. Why do I do this to myself? This is a disaster. I'm going to fail." You know, when you're doing something that's frankly as unpleasant as running a marathon, it's pretty normal to have those sorts of thoughts running through your head. But those are basically the equivalent of the subliminal picture of a frowning face

• 57:55Alex Hutchinson?

  on the wall in front of you. They're altering your mindset such that everything feels a little bit harder. So you're hurting your performance. And so you want to be able to stop that negative self-talk and replace it with positive self-talk, like, "You know, I've trained for this. I'm ready for this. I can do this." And that sounds really easy. It sounds almost too easy. Of course, it is challenging to,

• 58:19Alex Hutchinson?

  you have to make that become automatic. You have to really find words or mantras that work for you and you have to practice them so that they become automatic.

• 58:26Chris Williamson?

  Like you say, it sounds super easy, but me and you are sat down in the comfort of our seats, speaking into microphones and the listeners at home are got their headphones in, maybe driving to work and chilling out. Like, do that after the five by one mile workout, like trying to remind yourself that, no, I can do this. And you know, like, I'm on the floor, dying, breathing, gasping for air. The situation has changed.

• 58:50Alex Hutchinson?

  You have, so you have to have done it a thousand times in not too unpleasant circumstances, you know, in training before it can become ingrained enough that you'll actually be able to summon it successfully in competition. Now, this is, I should emphasize, this is not a new idea, right? Like, when, again, when I was in university in the 1990s, we had a sports psychologist working with the track team who basically taught us exactly that. And we totally laughed her out of the room. We thought it was ridiculous. We just didn't, didn't give a hoot about, you know, these, these tricks, or what we, what we saw as, as, you know, just ridiculous mental games. And it's, so it's only been sort of, in the process of the sort of journey of trying to

• 59:32Alex Hutchinson?

  understand the limits of endurance, I've started to take this more seriously. And then in the last few years, there've been some studies that really rigorously try to assess motivational self-talk. And, you know, bring a bunch of cyclists into the lab, have them do a endurance test, give half of them motivational self-talk training, half of them, give them some other sort of control, mental, mental skills, training, bring them back to the lab and you find that, yeah, the ones who got motivational self-talk have improved their performance. And not only that, we can measure what's going on in their bodies and we see that their core temperature, they're able to push it higher. So in other words, they're, they're digging deeper into their physiological reserves. And yet their sense of effort is still the same. So by changing the words in their head, by changing what they're saying to themselves during the, the exercise, they've actually changed

• 1:00:16Alex Hutchinson?

  their relationship between how hard their body is working and how hard it feels in their minds. And that is, to me, I saw that result and I was like, oh, man, I wish I had a time machine and I could go, go back and take this seriously when I was competing. Because this is real. It's real and I should have taken it seriously instead of laughing that poor woman out of the room.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  I totally get that. So were there any other techniques? We've talked about the motivational self-talk as one of them. We're not going to strap nine-volt batteries to our head. This is not medical advice. Please do not, please seek a physician before you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Disclaimer, disclaimer. Were there any others that could supplement?

• 1:01:01Alex Hutchinson?

  You know, I almost hate to mention the buzziest of buzzwords, mindfulness training. But there's some pretty interesting research, there was some interesting research at UC San Diego. I visited some researchers there to see their work, doing brain scanning on, basically, they look at elite performers. So they've, because they're in San Diego, they get a bunch of Marines and Navy SEALs into their lab, and also they bring in elite athletes like adventure racers. And so these people have tremendous resilience.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Pretty hard people.

• 1:01:35Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've been through a lot. And so it's pretty fascinating. One of their protocols is that they put you in a brain scanner, which is like a, you know, a big sort of claustrophobic tube. And you're, while you're in the brain scanner, you're doing these cognitive tasks on a computer. So they're testing your responses. And you're breathing through a mask. And every once in a while, the flow of oxygen through the mask is restricted. So it's like you're suddenly like you're breathing through a straw.

• 1:02:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Alex Hutchinson?

  This is not a pleasant scenario when you're locked in this giant magnet. And so for most people, when that happens, you know, at best, they get stressed out and their performance on the cognitive test suddenly goes down. At worst, they panic and they have to be pulled out of the scanner. For the, for the elite performers, so for the Navy SEALs, for the elite adventure racers, the opposite pattern has happened. Not only do they not panic, their performance on the cognitive test actually gets better when they're being stressed out by this, by breathing through a straw. So they respond to stress not by getting worse, but by getting better, by rising to the occasion. So obviously, that's, that's a really desirable thing. It's like, oh.

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I want that. I want, I want to become Nassim Taleb's definition of anti-fragile, please.

• 1:02:44Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly. So. You know, and they're doing brain scans to figure out which areas of the brain are responsible. And what they find is that the elite performers, they're constantly monitoring how their body is feeling. So they have a low level, low level self-monitoring going on at all times. And then that when something, you know, when the breathing goes wrong, when it all gets stressful, they just keep that same level of monitoring. They're always in touch with how they're feeling. Whereas most of us have kind of have the self-monitoring turned off. When everything's fine, we're not even paying attention to how we're feeling. And then all of a sudden, when things go bad, we over-monitor, we ramp up to panic levels. So we overreact to the stimulus. So, and you can see which areas of the brain are responsible for that. So then their question is, okay, we know what the quote unquote

• 1:03:29Alex Hutchinson?

  good brain, pattern of brain activation is. How can we help other people develop that? And the most effective tool they've found so far is eight-week training courses in mindfulness. And so they've been testing it out with US Marines being deployed overseas, giving them this eight-week training beforehand to see if it reduces instances, for example, of PTSD. Because if you're able to respond calmly to stressful situations, that may reduce the risk of post-traumatic stress. So that stuff is still up in the air and research is ongoing. But the, but it is interesting, they've found that you can sort of generate these elite-style brain patterns with mindfulness training. And when you think about what mindfulness training is, it's you're trying to have nonjudgmental self-awareness. So you're trying to be aware

• 1:04:14Alex Hutchinson?

  of, hey, is, am I feeling pain? Yes. I'm not denying that I'm feeling pain. I'm aware of it. I'm acknowledging it, but I'm not overreacting to it. And so that's kind of what they're, they find is the hallmark of the elite performers. And I think it has a lot of application to whether we're talking about endurance, or whether we're talking about, you know, CrossFit, or whatever, whatever the context. I think there it's not too big of a leap to say that would that would be an effective way of enhancing performance. Now, I should say, I'm I'm sitting here again, as you said, I'm sitting here with my comfortable chair, saying that's what I think would be a good idea, based on the research. I haven't done an eight week mindfulness training course. So, you know, I can't I can't speak from personal experience, but I think that's

• 1:04:59Alex Hutchinson?

  an avenue that I would say is worth exploring.

• 1:05:02Chris Williamson?

  I guess that that sort of stuff would work across so many different domains as well for traders, Wall Street traders in very, very high pressure situations and stuff like that. You talked about the fact that this endurance is not not merely relating to physical activities, but to all activities.

• 1:05:21Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, exactly. That brings us sort of full circle back to this idea of endurance as a very generalized struggle to continue is continue against the American desire to stop. And again, I want to emphasize that I didn't start out this book trying to make endurance a general concept. Really, all I cared about was trying to understand, you know, the sort of mysteries of my running career and why I didn't go faster than I did. But but that's where the research led that to suggest that it really is a generalizable concept. And then if you if you can learn to endure, and I think it's interesting that, again, you look at the data, for instance, on pain tolerance, that athletes who are enduring a specific kind of pain in training, doesn't matter what kind of pain tolerance test you give them, whatever pain tolerance test you give them, they're better able to

• 1:06:06Alex Hutchinson?

  tolerate. So it's tolerated. So it's very generalizable. You're able to apply these skills you learn while pushing yourself physically, you're able to try apply those in other areas of your life, too.

• 1:06:17Chris Williamson?

  So it really is a bit of a superpower. When people talk about there being benefits from a physical practice being mental and a mental practice crossing over into physical, it seems like there's some real, some real good evidence for that to be the case.

• 1:06:33Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I think you'd have have trouble finding any dedicated exerciser who doesn't believe it's had far reaching effects on their on their lives. And I think, I think the research, you know, backs that up as far as I can tell.

• 1:06:45Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. So before we go, I want to very, very quickly nerd out about the Nike Breaking Two Elliot Kipchoge thing, because I want to know whether or not you think that the two hour marathon barrier will be broken, and if so, when it will happen.

• 1:07:01Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so you know, my, my record of prognostication is not great.

• 1:07:06Chris Williamson?

  Did you predict, did you predict the Berlin Marathon smash?

• 1:07:11Alex Hutchinson?

  Well, in a way, so let me, let me back up slightly and say in 2014, I, Runners World had me do a big 10-page report on the physiology of what it would take to run a two-hour marathon. And so I spent all sorts of time talking to every expert I could find. And in the end, at the end of those 10 pages, I made this prediction that I thought the two-hour marathon, two-hour marathon barrier could be broken, and it would be broken in 2075. So that's a long time from now. And so then, you know, two years later, I got this, we got this call from Nike, you know, basically saying, we're going to try and do it next May. Do you want to come along for the ride and, and, you know, report on it? And, and so my, you know, my initial thought when that happened was, oh, man, one of us is going to look really stupid.

• 1:07:54Chris Williamson?

  That makes my, that makes my article look really silly, or it makes Nike look like idiots. Yeah, one of the things.

• 1:07:59Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly. It's, one of us is going to look bad. So, so take, take my predictions with a grain of salt. But so what, what, then what happened with the Breaking Two project, which was this multimillion dollar, multi-year attempt to sort of engineer an ideal marathon, is that Elliot Kipchoge ran two hours, zero minutes, 25 seconds, which was not sub-two, but was faster than the official world record by two and a half minutes. So, and it was, didn't count as a world record because he had pacing all the way through, which isn't allowed. But, but still, it sort of showed that a human could run that fast, which was really shocking. So after that happened, my prediction, here's where my predictions get a little better. So that was in May of 2017, Breaking Two happened.

• 1:08:40Alex Hutchinson?

  So I said, Elliot Kipchoge just ran this almost two-hour marathon. So I think in an official marathon, even though he won't have all the same benefits that he got from the Breaking Two race, I think he's going to run 201 something, which would be more than a minute faster than the, the, the official world record. And so I made that prediction in a big New York Times op-ed just before the Berlin Marathon in 2017.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  That is called putting your balls on the line.

• 1:09:05Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I said, it's gonna, it's gonna happen. And then what happened was, it rained in Berlin. And so he ran a great race, but you know, in the rain, it was slow. He didn't break the world record. He didn't, you know, forget 201, he didn't even break 204, or 203, rather. And then, so his next marathon was in London earlier this year, in early, early 2018, and he It was the hottest London marathon in history. So he ran a great race and he won again, but he didn't run under the world record. And so at that point, I thought, oh, man, first I predicted 2075, then I predicted 201 something and they're both going to be duds.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Alex Hutchinson?

  But then in September 2018, Kipchoge finally got a decent weather day and he ran 20139, which was a minute and 18 seconds faster than the world record, which is a huge, huge, it's the biggest.

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  Margin in 50 years or something, isn't it?

• 1:09:55Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly. So a huge, huge, huge improvement. And I got to say to everyone, I predicted a 201 in Berlin. It was last year, but still.

• 1:10:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was wrong by 365 days. Give me a break.

• 1:10:07Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, it's close enough, close enough. So, yeah. So what happens next? It's hard to know. It's because there's, there's all these questions about, so how much of this is Elliot Kipchoge being a once in a generation talent? How much of it is these got these new shoes from Nike, which are, have a carbon fiber plate in them? They're supposed to people make people 4% faster? How much, you know, what are all the different ingredients that make, made up his world record? And nobody knows for sure. I don't know, you know, nobody knows for sure. So the question is, will someone else follow Kipchoge into this sort of 202 or 201 range? Or is Kipchoge going to be a guy whose mark stands for 15 years? But if I had to predict, I'm going to say now that we're at 201, I think the

• 1:10:50Alex Hutchinson?

  chorus of voices who would have said even three years ago, who would have said two hours will never happen in our lifetime. You guys are all morons. I think that chorus is, is just hearing it. Instead now, I don't know, I still think probably 10 to 20 years from now.

• 1:11:05Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:11:06Alex Hutchinson?

  But boy, I, you know, I, I would not put any money that I wanted to see again on any prediction because I just don't know what's going to happen. So I, you know, I wouldn't bet against another big improvement. I also wouldn't bet against it sort of stagnating for a while.

• 1:11:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's bizarre, isn't it? When you think over such a long distance, over two hours of running, that we're talking about shaving off 25 seconds and that that margin feels like such a huge mountain to climb. And it's obviously because, you know, anyone who hasn't, I urge them to watch the Breaking Two documentary. It's on YouTube and it's absolutely fascinating. But Elliot Kipchoge lives this monastic lifestyle, very, very simplistic guy, seems super calm all the time. And he looks like the sort of person who has dialed every singer. He looks like someone that was born to run.

• 1:12:03Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I would, I would 100% echo the encouragement to check out that National Geographic documentary on Breaking Two because it really gives a taste of not just what sort of science and tech was involved in this race, but Elliot Kipchoge's personality. The guy has become, and I, you know, I say this as a journalist, I'm supposed to keep my distance, but the guy's become my hero, like his, my sort of life model in terms of his approach to life. And I really sincerely believe that his mindset, his self-confidence and the way he has nurtured it is in his own way accomplishing everything that I have written about in my book, everything that we've talked about today, like motivational self-talk. None of that has anything to teach Elliot Kipchoge. It's the other way around. We're kind of, we're trying to be, figure out a little bit

• 1:12:48Alex Hutchinson?

  of what makes him so magic and how the rest of us can, can learn to push ourselves a little more like he does. But to me, he's the, he's the Zen master.

• 1:12:56Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. What a, what a beautiful note to finish on, Alex. Today has blown my mind. I'm sure it will have made a lot of the listeners at home think very differently about the way that they look at their endurance and, and their mind and body connection during training and in other pursuits as well. Would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online? I'll make sure the link to the book and all of your socials are in the show notes below, of course.

• 1:13:23Alex Hutchinson?

  For sure, thanks, yeah. So, probably the best place to find me is on Twitter. My handle is @SweatScience, all one word, and that's where, you know, recent articles and anything I find interesting, I post. I do have a website, alexhutchinson.net, where you can, you know, dig into my sordid past, but, uh, yeah, Twitter's a good place to find me.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Alex, I really appreciate your time. Today's been awesome.

• 1:13:43Alex Hutchinson?

  Thanks so much, Chris. This was really fun to kind of dig into some of the deeper stuff.

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much. Catch you later on.