This episode challenges the "no pain, no gain" fitness mantra, emphasizing the risks of overtraining and the importance of a balanced approach to physical training. Hosts Marjaana Rakai and Paul Laursen share personal experiences of how pushing too hard led to overtraining, highlighting symptoms like fatigue, health issues, and reduced motivation. The discussion stresses the significance of recovery, especially sleep, and the need to differentiate between beneficial challenges and harmful strain in workouts. The episode advocates for training smarter, not harder, using tools like Athletica's "workout reserve" to understand limits and avoid overtraining. Key takeaways include prioritizing overall health, including nutrition and sleep, and the value of professional guidance in training.

We've all heard the mantra, no pain, no gain, but is pushing through that pain really the best approach to fitness? Let's go through why this mindset might be holding you back from reaching your full potential. Marjaana, in the first episode, we talked a lot about how you were overtrained. How do you think that no pain, no gain attitude affected your training?

Oh, it was instrumental. I'm a Post-It girl, so I have Post-Its everywhere. I find a nice motto that I can reflect on, and I'll write it down on a post-it and put it on the wall. And the listeners can’t see this but my bike is in my office so I often bike inside on a trainer on Zwift and I have I look at I'm looking at these Post-Its with different kinds of models or quotes and one of them was no pain no gain push through I would have a chart where I put stars every time I either hit some a milestone mark

Or I struggled, but I pushed through and I would give myself a star because I was tough. Like being tough was my goal. And it was, I think that mindset was the leading cause why I got overtrained because I was always asking for more from my previous coach, who was amazing by the way. Always.

Asking for more, either more harder intervals or more volume, always just like, give me more. So I can really relate to that, no pain, no gain. And it worked in the beginning, it worked. But pushing through and looking back now, I know that was the main reason why I got overtrained.

And it's a tough line to know, you know, being tough and being strong through a challenging workout and then doing too much. Paul, what about you? How has that no pain, no gain mentality affected you in your career? We both grew up in that time where that was the thing we faced in the gym. And when we were out training, how does that affect you now?

Well, I'll start how it used to affect me too, right? Because I was the young athlete as well without any context, without any background. And you follow those that you believe in at the time. And for me, I'm really dating myself, but it was Scott Tinley who had won Kona at one time. And it was Triathlete Magazine was the only thing that we had. The internet wasn't around back then.

But I would read the back of Triathlete Magazine, it was “Tinley Talks”, and it was all about the monumental types of training that he and Scott Molina as well, and these were some of the big guys at the time, and they were just talking about these monster sets they could do. So that was the benchmark that was put out there. So everyone was in the belief that you had to train long, and you had to train hard. You train hard as hard as you can for as long as you can.

So that was, I definitely believed in the no pain, no gain thing. And of course, drove myself like Marjaana into overtraining syndrome as a result of that. And yeah, it's pretty frustrating when you get there. So, and then today, I mean, there's obviously, there's 30 years of seeing this now across other athletes, meeting Phil Maffetone as I mentioned in the last podcast, and recognize that's probably not the best road to Rome. But even like today, like even to yesterday, dealing with a very talented local athlete who is displaying the exact same behaviors as Marjaana just spoke on, where she is, she's a phenom and she is asking me for more training. I can do this, I can still do this, should I do that? And I know you can do that. I know you want to do that, but I'm seeing all the signs of overtraining and, you know, I had to get on the phone with her parents last night and explain to them the situation. This is what both myself, I also have an Olympic, I'm blessed to have an Olympic trainer, a strength and conditioner in town as well. We're both seeing the exact same thing. And we're, but it's like the...

The strength in this young phenom girl to push forward is, if it weren't for two fairly experienced practitioners to hold her back with her parents, she would bolt, this thoroughbred would bolt. So this is not an easy problem that we're dealing with. It's so easy for us to go and say, just don't do it, you know, like just don't believe in the no pain, no gain. But that's… that's out there, it's probably part of a type A personality that's in so many of us. And it really takes a, you know, a pause, a meditative moment to just say, okay, hold on, is that really the best way, the best thing that I should do right now? Or is there, should I do something else? So that's off top of my head, Paul.

Yeah, yeah.

totally relate to that. And that's where the mindset comes in, like you with your wisdom and your experience, like having the courage to, you know, pull the athlete back when the tribe is so strong. It, it's, it takes courage to say, hey, you know, like you have so much time in front of you, like, you don't have to hurry.

you know, but for older athletes, age group athletes, not that I'm super old, but I see the end is coming. But yeah, it's the mindset of, you know, we all expect pushing through and then we're asking ourselves if we're not feeling well,

Am I being lazy? You know, like on those days you're not, you haven't slept well or you're not feeling well, like you had a heart session yesterday and you're not fully recovered and then your training plan is asking for something else and you're like, ugh. So there you are, you're asking yourself, am I just lazy or is my body actually sending me a warning sign? You know, I'm pretty sure everybody has been there.

Yeah.

So what do you do then? And it's so valuable to have a coach or a training platform like Athletica to give those little warning signs to you if you haven't learned to listen to your feel. That say, hey, today could be a good idea to go for a nature hike because the magic of being in nature is so valuable.

for, you know, recovery.

If I can just, what, it's an interesting point also that you made, Marjaane. I think it relates to the different personalities that are in all of us. We're just so diverse, right? Because you can have the complete opposite personality too, and there is still the individual that might need that motivation. And maybe no pain, no gain works for...

for them to get them moving, right? Like we're talking, you know, couch to 5K or something like that, right? Like that personality still does exist. There's some of us still need a little bit of help with motivation. So there is just completely, everyone is an individual and it's again, probably reaching into that field. Where do I, you know, where do I sit? Now we have a forum on Athletica and I'm reflecting actually to-

Mm.

We have a user, I'll just, username is Jesse. And Jesse's posting all the time on the long training thread, right? And I love how he just, he puts his real feelings in there and you know, like he just gave a great post the other day on how he just, he really was having a hard time getting motivated and to get out the door. And, but you know, he did see the plan in front of him and he was really happy that he did it after. So.

I think you just, you have yourself, Marjaana, where you were, you have the athlete, the young phenom athlete that is just wired to be a thoroughbred and train forever as much as they can. And then you've got individuals that might struggle. So it's, again, where am I sitting, right? So how can I pause and reflect on my situation in the moment?

You know, I talked in the first episode about my heart giving me those warning signs that I ignored for a long time because I had that same personality type. And I also have always had this sense that I need to race in order to prove myself as opposed to racing to enjoy the moment of challenging myself.

And I also think about, you know, Paul, what you, your example of your phenom, you know, I have a 13 year old that I'm working with. And he, if left to his designs, he would do nothing but ride his bike all day long, all the time and as hard as he could. And it's been more of a getting the reins on this kid rather than letting him go. And he just wants to run. He, it's.

I exactly, exactly. I've got a 14 year old, same exact personality.

Yeah, it's, I mean, I love that he loves, I love that he loves cycling, um, and that he loves to train, but it's all a matter of just trying to corral some of that energy.

Totally.

one of the things that I was reflecting on was when that drive and motivation starts to go downhill it's really good to have a coach who sees that and kind of can see okay so she and he they've been super keen on putting in more work harder work but hey what's happening now like

Hmm

they show up to a training or they mentioned something that they didn't feel as motivated. And one of those, one of those warning signs is the lack of motivation before overtraining. Like that is so important to recognize as an athlete.

myself, okay? Where's my motivation? Because sometimes it happens and then I look go back and look at my training diary and like, okay, what is what has happened? What's the overall life stress also because that all plays in, you know?

100% motivation is one of the key, motivation to train is one of the key factors. So if I can just say Mark, our CEO, he's on my coaching platform. And I can see sometimes he expresses a lack of motivation and buddy he's learning to listen to that little boy inside his head.

and follow accordingly. And he knows now when he needs to rest. He makes good decisions now.

But that's not easy to recognize as a driven athlete. It is so hard to have the courage to recognize, OK, my motivation is not there today. Is it OK to say that I'm not motivated? You know, it is a sign of like…

is a sign of weakness. No, it's not. It's not about honesty.

But it took me so long to allow myself to say, hey, today I'm not motivated. It's not easy.

No, but it's necessary.

Yeah, I agree.

This is the pause that is important. This is the reflection. It's important. And we all need to take that, yeah, to make the right, have the right look at our compass to move forward. Yeah.

Yeah. So maybe at that moment when you're having that pause with yourself and sitting there, hey, am I motivated to do this session? Maybe that is a day that you can actually opt for going for yoga, or taking your dog for a nature walk a little bit longer than what you normally walk your dog. It is

Mm-hmm. Well, go for it. Yeah, go for a walk. Again, back to my 14-year-old phenom girl. And she, you know, I've got walks prescribed for her. And she thinks it's so, why am I walking? Why am I walking? And now I have to educate her and I have to explain to her that,

Hehehe

you know, the power of walking, of going for a walk outside, it kind of gets went back to the first podcast we spoke about when we talked about having these sorts of balances and whatnot and how it resets you. It gets, you know, I think in, you know, I think both, you know, Paul's 13 year old young man and my 14 year old girl here, I think they have monkey minds probably like all of us, right?

And the meditation almost that you get when you're going for a walk, you don't get it right away, right, and it seems awful when you first, that first five minutes, but then you slowly kind of get into it and you're in there with nature or wherever you are. And then, you know, I also have to tell her that, you know, Andy Boucher, who's the, if you look at Athletica and you look at all of the, the pictures of the athlete that's on it, well, that's him and he's, you know, a multiple Ironman champion. And in our coat, you know,

our work together, repeated walks were instrumental in his preparation. So he was walking almost every day for anywhere from 30 to an hour, 30 minutes to an hour. Now you'd ask yourself, well, how on earth does a, you know, an Ironman champion like Andy Buescher go, how does he have time to go for walks? And what would that...

create for an Ironman athlete. Doesn't make any sense, does it? Not at first until you recognize that health is first. And it's because it facilitates so many things. It cures his monkey mind. It resets him. It allows you to burn more fat actually, right? So when you reset your mind,

We spoke about last podcast, we talked about the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. It's a big long word, but it's the integrative center in your brain between your nervous system and your endocrine system. Marjaana was talking about how going, she went to an endocrinologist, right? So if you reset your mind, it links back to all the hormones, which causes you to change your body composition, say for example, you just all of a sudden fat starts being released from all of your adipocytes in your, and you burn it as energy. And it's again, it's just, that's just one thing. You sleep better. It's just like everything is related. So yeah, and so trying to teach this young woman that

It's okay. And I'm asking you, I'm prescribing you to go for a walk. It's an interesting battle right now, but yeah. Yeah.

I can totally see the puddle because when we started working together I was doing walks. Like you got me to do walks and I'm like walking there and I... Okay I have Ironman to do in a couple of months and I'm doing yoga. He's prescribing me to yoga and walks. What am I doing? But it all worked out. But yeah, it all worked out.

Didn't it? But yeah, you questioned me though, didn't you?

I had some thoughts like is this really going to... So, not bad, like when I crossed that Finnish line at Ironman Finland at 11.18, I'm like, oh my god, yeah. So this is perfect segue to what we want to talk about next, how mindset is a really powerful tool.

Thank you for not firing me, man.

to achieving greatness, but it can also work against us. Paul wrote an article together with Dr Maffetone called Athletes Fit But Unhealthy back in 2016 about overtraining and dysfunctional HPA axes.

weight gain, especially in the midsection, which I didn't understand at all. And it was, it was very depressive because I'm working really hard and I'm gaining weight. And nutrition was of course part of it. I had symptoms like I was doing virtual, this was COVID time, so virtual Ironman racing.

And I saw huge cardiac drift, like 30 beats. And my heart rate just stayed elevated, like crazy high. While I wasn't performing any.

any good, like I had higher expectations for my performance. And repeated injuries and like totally, they seemed even like relevant to what I was doing. Like I had plantar fasciitis. Couple of months later, I had Bell's Palsy, like the inflammation of a facial nerve. That was scary. And

some weird symptoms like skin condition. Like I've never had acne or anything, but during my overtraining, like my skin was really bad. So I just couldn't, like they were so random that I couldn't like connect the dots until I really realized that I was overtrained. So

Prof, can you talk a little bit more about the overtraining and HPA dysfunction that you've seen with overtrained athletes?

Yeah, for sure. So it's, I think we've actually the start of the interview with Paul and I and our athletes is the perfect starting and yourself as well, Marjaana, just how we are kind of wired for this no pain, no gain, right? Or a lot of us are. And then you, you know, the perfect storm is to have the high glycemic or processed foods, right? A lot of like sugar is a real big co-founder in that, right? And that's just so part of today's diet, sadly. But you add in the personality type, the high intensity training, the stress, and then that food sort of factor as well. And we'll link to the article. It's open access. It's published as Maffetone and Laursen 2016, Sports Medicine Open. We'll link to that. But there's a central figure too. And if we can include the figure also as a graphic, that would probably be good too, because we can kind of, we sort of see how the perfect storm evolves, right? So we got the brain motivated by the no pain, no gain mentality that is in so many of us, and then inappropriate volume and high intensity training that's in there as well without adequate recovery, right? You do training, but you've got to recover from that training.

and then throw in a fuel supply or stress factors like we've been talking about and perfect storm, metabolic substrate imbalance, all the things you were talking about, like the organs, the skin's your largest organ, right, Marjaana? So if you're seeing signs and your skin isn't good, you're talking about all these nervous systems. So plantar fasciitis is attached to your nervous system, right, so your nervous system's angry.

And it's basically, you're just seeing all of these signs that it's real angry. And then you're talking about the fat deposition in the abdominal cavity as well, right? Well, you're seeing that. And that's a classic just sign of, your body isn't able to get rid of the stored fat because you're in that stress state. Always in a stress state, cortisol is always high. Cortazole glucocorticoid, that's how it's defined. So it's a glucose kind of anabolic element, right? So it's everything you're in storage, your body's protecting itself and it's trying to store it. You don't want that. You want to be releasing that energy from it so that you can use it in your activity.

And Marjaana, I know you've talked about just how free some of the training you've been doing lately when, you know, when you've realized that, right? You just can't believe how free it is and how much performance has kind of come up, right? Like it's, I hope you'll talk about that one day. So for us, but yeah, that's that. And anyone that's listening, that's any of this stuff is resonating. I think Marjaana sitting in front of us here is a classic example as a beautiful story of how you can, it's all, it all can reverse and go the other way.

You know, Paul, in the article, you were talking about health and fitness and athletes being fit, but unhealthy. How would you describe the differences between being healthy and being fit?

Yeah, so it's a great question, Paul. So just being fit, I think we're just talking about, you can get on your Zwift bike and you can crank out an awesome FTP test, say for example. You can crank out big power and you can demonstrate that. And that's, you're badass, awesome. Or you can go onto a VO2 max test and you can crank out a big VO2 in a laboratory, et cetera.

doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthy. So being healthy is being able to recover from that, that stress and then, and even continuing to make, make bigger gains later on down the road. If you just like, like fitness is just a, it's a one time off, it's what you can do today, but it's not, it's not really a sustainable, it's not necessarily, it could be, you mean they do, they do go hand in hand, but it's just.

You can be fit but unhealthy, but you want to be fit and healthy. That's the longevity one. So, um, they're just kind of two different things. And we, we don't necessarily in society with, uh, media and whatnot, you don't necessarily see, you never necessarily see the health, you only see the fitness. So we can see even some of our, and some, you know, some, some athletes with, with egos as we're all, as we all have.

That's all they care about. But it's just we want, eventually we want to have longevity and wellness. Those become more larger priorities in our lives, right? So yeah, so that's what we want to move to next.

You know, you also talked about how the diet or training trauma can cause chronic inflammation. Marjaaa talked about how her skin develops some acne, but how does that chronic inflammation present itself if we are training and we are chronically inflamed?

So many different ways. So that's just, it can just be, this is the crazy thing about it, right? Is that there's no one thing that describes it. It can be, and that's unfortunately, there's just like, it can present, it's wherever your weak point is. It can, so it could present as, you know, your inability to, you know, get to the body composition that you feel comfortable with, say, for example, that you desire. It could present as a skin issue. It could present as a nervous system issue. You know, Marjaana described Bell's palsy. She described plantar fasciitis. There's like a hundred or a thousand different neurological issues.

These are just like all signs, you know you know, any others, inability to sleep properly through the night. All of these different things are signs that your stress isn't necessarily ideal. You're you're not absorbing the stress that you've had during the day. So sleep is a big one. So we had on the train on this. The parent podcast of this one is called the training science podcast. And one of our colleagues is Alistair Brownlee, two-time Olympic gold medalist. He told us on that podcast that the most important thing for him in all of his career in getting those gold medals, et cetera, et cetera, is sleep. He said that recovery for him is 90% sleep and 9% nutrition and 1% everything else. So he nailed his, right? So he's, but he is just like.

That was the one thing that he always took with him was his ability to sleep. He could sleep like a champion. And that helped make him a champion. So sleep is one of the big ones. So it's one of the things that I continue to try to focus on as I go through my aging and stuff. And I find that when my sleep is solid, everything else kind of also takes care of the rest of the package too.

You know, one of the questions that I had, Prof, was, you know, in this article you talked about that we can train too hard and then not recover, but how do you balance that unhealthy part of training with still getting an adequate training stimulus? Like why not crush ourselves when we're doing intervals? Doesn't that bring more training stimulus?

So this goes back to some of, if there's any hobbyists out there in the exercise science world, you might come across Prof. Steven Seiler, who's a colleague of mine. And he talks a lot about the polarized training philosophy that you want to have about 20% of your training hard and 80% of your training easy. This is how good athletes kind of train, right?

And the reason is, generally speaking, is because all of our body and all the different systems, it reacts to a stimulus or a signal. Actually, there's actually like a molecular signal that actually happens in your muscles when you do this type of work. So when you do high intensity work, there's kind of a different signal that tells your body to adapt to that compared to when you're doing the easy work.

So you, and you want to have a bit of a mix and a balance of both. So, um, and, and what's kind of been discovered with this polarized training, this 80 20 formula is that it tends to be the formula for balance in your life. And you, and that's, that's the, that's the formula for how good athletes train. And this is, if you're familiar with the endurance world, Marjaana will definitely know the Norwegians are just so.

so strong. The Norwegians tend to have really been the dominant force of teaching us about the 80-20 formula. What's funny about that is that Steven is a Texan. He always talks on his podcasts and YouTube channel with his Texas drawl. He's living in Norway and whatnot. It's always pretty funny. But he's had both experiences. He comes from the U.S.

He comes from the no pain, no gain philosophy. But then he went to Norway and they taught him when he went over there about the 80-20 sort of formula. And so he's always been about that. So this is one of many methods to get us towards that balance that we want. So, yeah.

You know, and Paul, you are the, you know, the, you're the co-founder of HIT science, you're a renowned expert in the area of high intensity interval training. You're also the founder of, of athletica.ai, an adaptive training platform that Marjaaa and I are both coaches for. Um, the slogan of Athletica is Train Smarter, Not Harder. Can you explain where you got that slogan from and why you use it?

Yeah, pretty much because we eventually realized that the no pain, no gain philosophy wasn't going to get us to where we wanted to go at the end of the day. No pain, no gain philosophy only gets us more over trained athletes. We need to, we can do better if we train smarter. And this came both from research, but also from empirical findings too, right? Like people like Andy Boucher, you know, coaching these athletes.

Kyle Buckingham, like helping them be healthy athletes was, is what got them to be successful. So that's really just the mantra of Athletica is to train smarter, not harder. And everything that we build on Athletica is a tool to allow athletes to train smarter, not harder.

And I mean, like I've been thinking about the whole time, actually, we've been chatting about this here and we have this incredible feature and this was invented by one of the scientists in Athletica, Dr. Andrea Ignoli. It's called the workout reserve. And it's ultimately, you use this in Athletica too, it's like your battery. But every time you see this little marker in in your session analysis. It's colored green currently in terms of the marker. It's in every single session analysis of a running, if you do a run or you do a bike, and it really relates to your history because we're always looking at what you're doing. And as soon as, relative to your history, if as soon as this number in the session analysis dips down,

towards a zero mark, that's pretty much what you've done in the past. So we know, you don't, and you don't wanna go too much deeper than that. You can, but if you go super deep in this little marker, it's telling you that you're dipping into the no pain, no gain area. And you wanna, we always wanna hit that signal. We wanna hit the signal and then we wanna walk away, right? Back to Steven Seiler, you just wanna. We don't want to do the no pain, no gain, but we do want to train. We want to hit an appropriate stimulus that's just enough. And then we want to walk away and do it again. And we have to talk about this important factor as well. The reason why all of this is important is because it's actually training consistency. That is the single most important factor that leads to your success and your trajectory towards the better you.

Right? The more you can consistently train day in and day out without getting into over training, the better you're going to be off. So our workout reserve helps keep the guide rails on your on any given day's training, because the most important session is the next session. Right? The most important session is the next session. You need to get that in your head. That's a better philosophy. Train smarter, not harder.

The most important session is the next session because training consistency is what it's all about, Paul.

And if I may add to that, with the workout reserve as an athlete, age group athlete, everyday athlete, you can kind of start like developing that feel that Paul has been talking about and teaching his athletes, myself included, to know when you're hitting the zero.

I think one of the athletic athletes, Jesse, was commenting on the forum that he wanted to see if that reserve actually knows what it's talking about. And sure enough, he started to feel fatigued at 30 minute mark. And then he went back.

to you, to check out his analysis. And sure enough, workout reserve was dipping around 30. And I've experienced that myself, uh, on my training. So it's a really amazing tool to help you develop that feel. When am I approaching my limit? And for everybody, it's a, it's a different time frame, it's a different intensity frame, it totally depends on the person and it might even vary a little bit based on what else you got going on in your life. So we come back to the stress that we've been talking about in your lifestyle, nutrition, health. Did you sleep well?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can't tell you how many times like this, this feature in Athletica, I'm so excited by it, honestly. But it's just, it's brand new. It's, it's just been released, but I'm just anecdotally, I'm seeing so many positive experiences with it with just people reflecting on just like Marjaana said, feel is relating to the, the workout reserve kind of getting towards that, that zero mark.

And that's when they almost, and when they've got the feel in relation to that, that's, that's really super powerful, right? Like they can start to trust in their training and, and know when to pull back. Uh, and I'll just add where it's super in development, we're actually, um, we're actually developing a Garmin app that's going to be, to give you real time access to what your workout reserve is. So keep it, keep, yeah, where it's, it's getting closer and closer, but it's.

Wow.

You can just imagine that on your, you know, Paul for your, your head units on your, on your cyclists that you want to train and, uh, Marjaana for your, for your triathletes, you know, you're just having that in your, um, on your, on your, uh, running head, uh, with the, you know, the Garmin is just going to be sweet.

That's awesome. Hey, let's clip this out. But I have developed my own feel sensor and it's I get goosebumps here in my arms when I'm reaching zero. When I know like 4 by 1 K, if I'm pushing it too hard, goosebumps.

Wow.

We're not editing that out. That's brilliant. But think about that. That's your nervous system kind of speaking to you. That's perfect.

Yeah, yeah, I don't need tech for that.

That's brilliant. It's brilliant. It's great. You got your own Garmin unit. Yeah, you got your own Garmin app. Skin goosebumps.

Paul Warloski

So here are my takeaways or compass coordinates about the the health and fitness discussion we've been having today.

Number one, Reframe the idea of pain when it comes to fitness, there is a difference between a challenge. And too much strain in our workout and it can be harmful so embrace that that idea of a smart challenge.

Number two, Your health matters. Your health is the most important thing. Um, nutrition sleep. Prioritize the the well-being influences. Um, that help our performance in sport and work and relationships.

The number three, we go back to the the motto of Athletica and what. Dr. Paul was saying is that Train smarter not harder. There's an element of strategic planning and recovery listening to your body. Um, paul said, consistency is the most important thing that we can do and if we can be consistent in our training, that's where we get the most benefit.

Thank you for listening today and join us next time, on The Athlete's Compass, where we are going to start talking about our training principles and about the ways that we train best and trained smarter. So check out the show notes below and we'll see you next time.