The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

Unlocking Peak Performance: Heat Training Science with Lindsay Golich (EP #214)

• CTS • Season 4 • Episode 214

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Can heat training be the secret weapon in unlocking peak athletic performance? Coach Adam Pulford talks with Lindsay Golich, a senior sport physiologist at the US Olympic and Paralympic Training Center. Lindsay reveals the preparations undertaken by Team USA for the Paris Olympics, detailing how they managed heat stress in extreme conditions. From sustainable designs in the Olympic Village to using core temperature pills for gathering data, learn how innovations help athletes excel on the world stage.

For everyday athletes, Lindsay and Adam discuss practical aspects of heat training, how athletes should balance heat exposure with other training priorities, how long it takes to acclimate to the heat, and when to start your heat training prior to important events. 

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GUEST
Lindsay Golich is a senior exercise physiologist for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. She has also been a CTS Coach since 2003. Currently, she manages the USOC's Athlete Performance Lab and the High Altitude & Environmental Training Center at the Olympic Training Center. Lindsay has developed protocols for laboratory and field testing, and has coached more than 15-National Champions and multiple Olympic and World Championships medalists.

HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Speaker 1:

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now on to our show. Welcome back, or welcome to the Time Crunch Cyclist Podcast. I'm your host, coach Adam Pulford.

Speaker 1:

Heat training has been quite the rage this year, with some of the hottest temps on record worldwide and athletes competing in the heat, like at the Olympic Games in Paris. On top of that, there's a summer that seems to be lasting forever here in North America. Even NPR has been pushing me articles and short podcasts about how humans can actually train their bodies to prevent heat injury and to help you perform better in hot conditions. It's definitely gaining attention in the masses, but in sport, we've known that heat is a stressor for some time. Heat training strategies has evolved since we've been competing and some of the common questions I do get from the general athlete population on this topic include what is heat training?

Speaker 1:

What are the real benefits of it? Will it actually improve my performance? Who should do it? How do we do it of it? Will it actually improve my performance? Who should do it? How do we do it? So we'll answer all of these questions and more over the next two episodes on this podcast. To help me do that best, I've reached out to CTS coach and senior sport physiologist at the US Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, lindsay Golich. Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me, Adam Very excited to be back. Yeah, it's going to be great. I love talking about heat and ways that we can optimize our performance in any and all aspects.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's what we came here to talk about, and I should have said welcome back, because I think it was just before Tokyo that you and I spoke last about some heat training and some other stuff. So, since Tokyo, what have you been up to?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean it's amazing that it's already been three and a half years or since we last spoke. Um, it's gone by really quick. Uh, and I know, going into Tokyo, we did a big push at the Olympic and Paralympic training center as Tokyo was going to be, or had the ability to be, the hottest Olympics at record, and we lucked out. It was hot, but not maybe the extreme on every day. And then, as we prepared for this last Olympic games in 2024, same thing big push, as we know, it's been hot worldwide. Paris had the ability or opportunities to be quite hot and it did have. We did have some really hot, challenging days across the board, but in that timeframe, three, three and a half years has just flown by. It's been a whirlwind. I don't even know. Life has happened. Families, work, you know comings and goings and nationally governing bodies that we're working with and just new initiatives. Um, but yeah, it's, it's been just pretty crazy. Um, we've learned a lot in support sciences and, as always, there's even more to continue to keep learning.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that's it. You've learned a lot and it shows because, uh, with the nation with the most medals coming out of Paris, I'd say that's a, I'd say that's a huge, huge performance boost, and you're part of that team. So congratulations to you and Team USA on that one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I mean I'm one tiny cog in the big picture of everything, but yeah, I think it was really successful for Team USA.

Speaker 1:

No-transcript going to be cooling down anytime soon either. So um, so for for an Olympic games in in. In the context of this conversation, we really just want to dive into heat, but there's a lot of environmental considerations to think about. So tell our listeners a little bit of how you framed it up for Paris and maybe how you identified, or why you identified, heat as a kind of a primary thing.

Speaker 2:

Sure. So for anyone that has been to Europe or at least seen in the news, it's quite hot in the months of July and August throughout Europe and even in France A couple of years before the Games. France experienced one of its most significant heat waves during the end of July that it had on record, and so that really created a increased our initiative as a operating Olympic organization to say heat is still critical. It's still a critical aspect of athlete performance recovery that we want to make sure we're not overlooking and that we've just become compliant with as saying, yes, we've been doing this the last couple Olympic cycles and we have it in motion, but you know we have new athletes every year, every Olympic quad, that things that we think are should be standard part of our training plan, but it's not for every athlete. So internally we always kind of take a look at us saying what is going to be the limiting factors of performance outside of you know what areas that we can't control and we know the environmental conditions are always going to be challenging.

Speaker 2:

So heat, not just for walking around heat, but competing and training in the heat, and then also one of the interesting factors for Paris was going to be the Olympic Village.

Speaker 2:

So the Olympic Village in Paris was amazing.

Speaker 2:

They had a big initiative of sustainability and that meant they had this new building structure through engineering projects that it kept the rooms and a lot of the areas about 10 degrees cooler the rooms and a lot of the areas about 10 degrees cooler than what you had previously experienced of just being around in buildings.

Speaker 2:

But, coming from the US, we love our air conditioning and that was not created in the village. So we knew not only was heat going to be a factor for training, the competition and just walking around, but even making sure that we had athletes acclimatized to be ready for hot conditions that they might have faced during sleep. It fortunately became a non-issue that we were able to outfit all of Team USA athletes in their rooms with kind of like a window air conditioning unit, but that didn't really come through until the final hour, so to speak. So it kind of added another layer of saying not only do we need to make sure that we're ready for competition, but while you're sleeping and hanging out in your room or your suite for hours on day, that you're not just melting and minimizing your recovery tactics in between training and competitions.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so the strategy is really global. It's, it's, it's 24, seven, because heat has a stressor If you're in it, it's going to be all around you all the time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I mean heat. We know um can be one of the biggest impairments of performance, and, whether it's in the performance itself or the recovery, if you have to compete multiple times in the day or over multiple days or weeks, depending on your event. And so it is something that we know, we can acclimatize to, that we can train for, and we may not know exactly. You know, if one person is going to acclimatize by 1% and somebody else could acclimatize by 8%. But if I can give an athlete, at the minimum, a 1% improvement by not changing the outcome of their training, so to speak, or having a huge invasive approach, I'm all in and I think we know that the outcome of that can be amazing and huge. And I do think we had a lot of athletes through Team USA and a lot of different sports and more so than just our traditional aerobic sports, meaning cycling and running and triathlon that really utilize some heat acclimatization strategies and even cooling strategies once on the ground.

Speaker 1:

So let's talk about heat training. What are the desired outcomes? What are the benefits to the athlete? What should they experience if they do heat training? And then we'll talk about um the heat training strategies that you used with your athletes.

Speaker 2:

Sure, yeah, I mean, I think with heat training, uh, heat acclimatization, however you want to call it is, I mean, the biggest thing is you're trying to create this balance between the stress and the strain of the factors that are being put against you. So we have the stress of the temperature and humidity things that are outside in the environment versus the strain of what's happening to your body, so increased heart rate or increased perceived exertion, sweat rates, the thermal load, all the different things that are happening. And we're trying to find that balance of, or at least improvement of, that balance. And the heat acclimatization is one of the easiest ways to begin that process.

Speaker 2:

Now there's a lot of different ways to tackle heat acclimatization and how to do it, how to maintain it, how not to maintain it, when to incorporate it, and that becomes the science and art of coaching, if you will, across the board for everybody, of trying to find that balance of it. But once you do find that balance, the main things that we know is that we can better acclimatize to those extreme conditions, or moderate conditions, if you will, meaning that your thermal effect, that your perception of the heat or humidity in that environment goes down. We also have physiological responses, meaning your heart rate can be lowered, come back to more of a normalized area, power output might be able to be sustained for longer periods of time. Sweat rate and hydration are all factors that we have to utilize to find that balance. But they all go together. They all work together to really hopefully make something pretty easy on race day. So it becomes more of a maintenance in your process than these brand new things also on race day or competition day.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I got you In part two coming up. We'll be really specifically focused on the time crunched athlete and weekend warriors, people out there competing that doesn't have environmental chambers and things like that at their fingertips. But I am kind of curious, and probably some listeners are too, of how Team USA did it for the games. Did it for the games Like, can you talk, walk us through maybe one example of a of a timeline when you started it, how you maintained it, what you did for the actual heat stress exposure? Um, kind of start telling that story if you can.

Speaker 2:

Sure, yeah, and I'll give, uh, some examples of groups that I work with. So I work closely with our bikes and boats type of sports, Um, but I do oversee all different, uh sport groups that come through, meaning boxing and wrestling and working with, you know, gymnastics and basketball. There's a whole plethora of sports out there, but within cycling, one that this hasn't been a new initiative, that we know. Let's say, we're looking at the men's and women's road races that they're very long races. Tokyo, they were very long races. Paris, it was not any different Six hour day for the men, a little over four hours or close to four hours for the women. So we've known these are going to be long events and so we've had, you know, three years to get ready for the actual event itself. And so for some of the cyclists on the endurance side, we started this process about a year and a half to two years out from the actual point of competition and some of the things that it looks like initially is using core temperature pills during actual competition or racing events. So we can just see what those athletes baselines are and a core temperature pill.

Speaker 2:

It's available to a lot of different people. They're not as expensive as they used to be the system itself. You can get this little receiver in these pills that you can swallow. It probably costs about $1,500 to get up and running, but in the grand scheme of things it's not that expensive. Each pill is about $75 to $85, depending how much you're ordering. They are single use. I think I might've touched base on this in a previous podcast many years ago. That technology hasn't changed so much, but what we're getting out of it is great, and now there's also devices that you can wear on heart rate monitors that give you some guidance as well. There's some discrepancies, but if you use it frequently, you get a lot of good information out of it.

Speaker 1:

It's about as expensive as a, I would say, good wheel set and a good tire every so often. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, like anything you know, it's an investment into your ability to perform Right. Um, and it's fun. I love science, I love all the sciencey things and getting numbers, so you can't go wrong with that. But again, with our athletes pretty much quite a few athletes, we had them utilize these core temperature pills in training and competition multiple times to get their baseline in environments that might be hotter than what we expected, similar or maybe even cooler, because sometimes we're also tracking what's happening to their thermal or circadian rhythms.

Speaker 2:

After a big international travel, how long does it get them to come back to baseline?

Speaker 2:

So it's not only just the competition but figuring out the things that go into it prior to the competition of areas that we can do better.

Speaker 2:

And then as we get closer, as athletes get named to the team, then we can begin to fine-tune exactly what's going to happen.

Speaker 2:

You know, once courses are released and we can figure out, okay, it's going to be you know this hot or possibly this much wind up this climb or through this section, or you know through the city section it's going to be really hot compared to out in the country, or whatever it might be, to figure out the timing of what additional stressors that temperature and humidity the athletes are going to be faced against.

Speaker 2:

Work with our nutrition team to optimize hydration during and thermal just consumption of foods and other fluids during events really ways to find that best balance of how we can optimize performance. And, as you know, as a coach you put this amazing plan together and maybe an athlete utilizes 75% of it on competition day. But, um, in my mind that's still success because I know then that that was a not or hopefully that's not the limitation in their performance of why they didn't achieve their goal, whether it's winning or being in the front group or getting their teammate across the line first. Whatever the outcome is, hopefully we've done our due diligence over the last six months to 18 months to really get that athlete or that group of athletes where they need to be where they need to be.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's. These are all really good points, because I mean so far, like the two important thing I think for our listeners is it's it's not just in competition, it's global. It's, you know, pre-race, during race, post-race, sleeping overnight these are the stressors that we're trying to mitigate and then, in the way of how to actually increase performance, get data before. So it's almost like, you know, we're rolling off summer here in North America, and if a listener had a big Ironman or a huge Gran Fondo that were like, oh, I just died in the heat, it's like go back, look at the data, take some good notes, like, kind of like, get that in your brain right now so that you can compare and contrast some of the you know strategies that we'll talk about in episode two to slowly increase that performance or mitigate the internal stresses and strains going on.

Speaker 2:

So that's just kind of a athletes that will have never be able to experience what their end goal is. Let's say, you qualify for Ironman World Championships in Kona. You're not going to have the opportunity, or you may not have the opportunity, to go there and compete or train in that environment. That's OK. Part of this too is a learning curve, is that you can set up your own situation in your own home or your own local training camp. And, yes, your fitness might not be matching or rivaling where you want to be at peak, but you're going to learn a lot about what happens when you prequel, when you acclimatize, when you don't acclimatize, the timing of your hydration. So, even though the numbers might not be one-to-one, there's also a huge learning curve of just seeing what those numbers are just like you are, like you do when you look at your heart rate file or your power file after training session is you learn a lot and hopefully you make changes or stick with the changes that you have previously made again to get that optimal outcome.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, it was super important. So in this way, I mean, did you have, like, when did you start the actual heat training protocols for athletes going to Paris? Like what did that look like, or was it? Yeah, we just we got them heat trained up and then we just maintained it all the way through. Walk us through a little bit of that process.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I wish it was as black and white as saying oh, we start exactly three weeks out or six weeks out. It's really individual for each athlete and each governing body. I'll use an example Boxing, USA, Boxing their resident program here in Colorado Springs and they have access to our environmental room, which is great, and but they've been incorporating it into their training really quite consistently over the last year and a half to two years. So they're kind of in this consistent maintenance program and that might look anywhere between one to two times a week and when they do a more intensive period it's going to bump up to two to three times a week. Compared to some athletes I work with in cycling, the long team is typically not named until about three months out from the Olympic games and then the Olympic team is named about six weeks out to the games and that's similar to track and field and swimming. That timeline is that we can do a lot of things leading up to a qualification period or a qualification event, but once an athlete is named from a team then we have to figure out, working backwards of saying what's going to be the best process for that individual. Um, and so some athletes we started, you know, again six weeks out and it became more of just a routine maintenance for six weeks. Other athletes we had a period of time where we kind of went all in for maybe doing that 10 to 12 day every day period and then a maintenance of a few weeks leading into the games.

Speaker 2:

And I think again, maybe this is in part two, but trying to figure out what that athlete needs, not just in heat acclimatization but in their actual training. So do they need more, just the raw training to make sure they're really ready for competition? Then the heat acclimatization takes a secondary approach is that number one in any competition is get as fit as you can, no matter the circumstance, whether it's hot, whether it's cold, whether it's altitude. You're going to have a better way to perform. Once you do that, then let's go to heat acclimatization, let's do the altitude. Those are all kind of secondary items. As long as you've done the fundamentals of get fit, get ready, do your training.

Speaker 1:

There is. There's a trickle down uh aspect to it in that way. But I think, like for a lot of the information I even give on this podcast, is like it's like some of the really nerdy stuff. It's like, okay, get super fit, get good sleep, optimize body composition and you will be, you know, equipped for a very good competition. All this other uh stuff. It's it's things not to overlook, right, but it's also don't skip your intervals just to do heat training for, for example. So yeah, we'll get into that. So I guess, in that way, as you are, let's just take like a, like a road cyclist Once they were identified as as part of the long team and you knew that they were going to the competition like when would you turn on the heat for them if? If, they needed heat?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, Um, let's say they didn't have all these other races like the tour or the sorry, these are really hard questions for Liz because it's just like it's so nuanced and individualized, which is why I'm kind of like laughing after I asked them.

Speaker 2:

But yeah, I mean, you know you work with some of these athletes, right, the like, the craziness of their schedule of going into the Olympic games is really not ideal or optimal at all. You're just trying to like, minimize decreases in performance, almost, you know, until they get to the start line. It's just, it's so crazy. Um, yeah, it is, but I think um one, as a sports scientist, I always want to have something that's measurable. So, while heat is not anything new, um, in the U? S, you know we started doing huge heat studies around World War II and the Vietnam War. Those are times when we learned a lot as a country and then, many years later, we started bringing this into elite athletics. So we know it's important, but I always want to have something that's measurable, and so I want to make sure that we're not again adding something where it's taking away from something, meaning I don't want to add. You know your ability to feel better in the heat, but now we've reduced your power output by five Watts. So are those those things balancing, trying to really figure out what that looks like? Um, so, a lot of ways of just again making sure that you have a power meter or heart rate or some pacing distance, however you want to. However you're doing it, um, that you have something that's measurable to say. Not only do I feel better on my perceived exertion, but there's a, there's a measurable outcome to it.

Speaker 2:

Um, but my process is I work directly with the individual athlete and their individual coach and then the national team coach and we really look at you know when do they need to be peaking for their day of the event, or multiple days, and where are they going to be over those six weeks Because, again, they're probably going to be in two or three different countries during those six weeks leading up to their Olympic Games and figuring out you know when is the best time to do these different heat strategies and incorporate them.

Speaker 2:

And my role again, I think, is to optimize performance. So finding that balance of making sure that we're not doing more for the sake of doing more, or on days that we have to do more, that there's a known fatigue or stress, you know something that's going to happen on the back end and that we've got to have a little bit of a budget for a few days of additional recovery to make sure if we over, we're overconfident in what we can do. And you know the athlete, you know something else happened, meaning, like just the stress of it all kind of caught up with them, that we have ability to budget for a bit more recovery going into those final days.

Speaker 1:

So what I'm going to do for all the listeners who don't know we have a YouTube channel is I'm going to put something up as a visual and I'm going to have Lindsay talk about some of the time courses of heat acclimatization here, and this I actually just stole from one of her presentations that she gave at some point I have no idea when, but I'll turn it over to her, but I think that visuals are really strong. But I'll turn it over to her, but I think that visuals are really strong. So for anybody who's just listening, I'd say, just put a little mental note to go check us out on YouTube, because the heat acclimatization timeline that Lindsay's about to share is really helpful and useful for you to potentially understand, implement into an upcoming race, whether it is Kona or something when it's going to be hot next year. So, lindsay, what are we looking at here?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, cool. So this is just the timeline to heat acclimatization In sport. We can think about periodization. This is, I guess, a similar process to what happens over the time course of a heat acclimatization process. Again, there's nothing new. We know that really, within the first couple days we almost see about 60 to 70% of our heat acclimatization begin to take place.

Speaker 2:

Now, they're not long-term adaptations, but our body is adapting quite quickly and I think the most important things that we're seeing is that your perception, or the cause and the effect of what's happening around you begins to decrease. So on this visual there's a purple line and it says it starts at 100% with fatigue. By day four or five it's dropping down to about 85%, at that heart rate, if you will. So it's saying that about four or five days in, at that same workload, your heart rate is decreasing to produce the same amount of work in that hot or humid environment. So that your body is adapting quite quickly. And that's really important because heart rate is a effect of the work that's happening. So if we can lower our heart rate in decreasing that total strain that's being pushed to place upon us, that we're hopefully giving our body the ability to optimize our performance. So I think that's really critical. And then really, what we see within a heart rate realm is by around about eight to nine days. If you're doing heat acclimatization for consecutive days, it begins to plateau and we kind of reach our new normal and then we're transitioning from the short-term adaptation to kind of like this middle to a medium to a long-term training adaptation for heat acclimatization. I think that's really important. So things happen quickly so you can get a lot done within five days. Is the sum of that After two weeks of doing heat acclimatization, you can begin to really maintain it for a really extended period of time.

Speaker 2:

Now, heart rate's not the only thing that happens. There's things like our sweat rate increases. And why is that important? Well, it helps to cool our body more quickly, more efficiently. The drawback to that is that you also have to make sure you're hydrating well. So this is where those scientific numbers come into play, and these aren't huge ones, but just hopping on a scale pre and post training session to say, did I match my hydration within a reasonable amount for the given environmental condition? So hopefully you're learning something of saying I drink one water bottle and I need to drink one and a half or drink two, and I need to drink three or drink two and I'm right where I need to be. So again, we're seeing that we're matching that, so we're optimizing our acclimatization to the environmental conditions.

Speaker 1:

One important note on that, Lindsay, because I found myself giving that advice to a lot of my athletes when it was just hot in the summer of this year and coaches are terrible with analogies and metaphors, but it's always.

Speaker 1:

We always talk about like an engine and even more so of like you go out and do do hard riding and then you have to come back and eat carbohydrate in order to fuel the tank up again. Really, what we're talking about here in the way of hydration is you got to get the, the engine or the car into the garage and check the oil, check the antifreeze, check all these things Cause. Really, if you're stressing your body and not giving it all the nourishment, including just adequate caloric intake, but hydration and at the right times, all the heat stress that you're doing will go for nothing because your body can't form the adaptation to cool itself properly and the things that you're mentioning here. So don't overlook that recovery window of timing, of putting food and hydration into your system and, like Lindsay was saying, to get even more dialed, weigh yourself and drink at least that back. So sorry, just want to mention that.

Speaker 2:

No, I think it's great.

Speaker 2:

I mean, I love analogies.

Speaker 2:

I always think of it as a snowball and that if you're doing a little bit each day and you're not a climate or adjusting for that loss, that snowball gets bigger and bigger as it rolls down the hill and you can get away with it for a one-off situation or even a two or three-day situation, and it doesn't mean stage racing, but it's just your day-in and day-out training or coming home and dealing with the family, whatever your situation is.

Speaker 2:

But if all of a sudden you get to day five and six and you underestimate it, that snowball gets a little bit too big and it begins to roll out of control. And then all of a sudden, now you're faced with having to take, you know, four or five days off of training and it's missed right. So maybe you're not going to detrain, but it's a missed opportunity and I think that's really important for athletes at any level. Whether you're going for the Olympic gold or you're just trying to be your personal best or win the weekend group ride, whatever it might be. You don't want to have setbacks that you could have avoided and I think that fueling, hydration, the timing of heat, acclimatization are things that it's not new science, but you have to kind of look at some of the fundamentals and make sure that you're doing it correctly for your given situation.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So just to summarize this chart, kind of close it out Really, what we're talking about is a very short term window here of heat adaptation. A lot of the stress occurs early. Our bodies are amazing and we start to adapt very quickly. This protocol, if you will, is kind of ending around eight days before we start to enter in that maintenance time period. So in the way of timing, what Lindsay was talking about, if you're going to induce a heat training sort of protocol, we're really talking eight, nine, 10 days, depending on who you are as an athlete. So it doesn't have to.

Speaker 1:

You don't start your heat training protocol a year or two out you you gather information and data about how you respond to the training and then, once you start to implement it I really want to show this because it I think it does a great summation of what to expect, what to feel, what to look for in the data and the time course around it. Our bodies are amazing. Things in short term or acute adaptations to endurance, training and heat are pretty quick. So, Lindsay, anything else you want to add in?

Speaker 2:

on that? No, yeah, I think it's a good point there and maybe we'll tap more into it into the next or follow-up podcast. Is that timing? Um, timing is critical, but doing a little bit of experimenting is also important. So, if you're not sure, you can always do three or four days randomly, six months out from anything where there's nothing on the line, and just see how you feel.

Speaker 2:

Um, meaning, did you underestimate your hydration? Did you underestimate the amount of recovery or additional stress or strain that it takes on you? And you don't have to do a whole protocol, but at least it gives you some more information, so that way, when you are ready to incorporate into your final plan um, you have more insight. So, again, I love the numbers, I love the science, I want to chart everything out, but also there's just the other, the art of it, of finding what balances for you um out there, and everyone again is very, uh, individual Um, but I think, uh, practice makes perfect, so to speak, um and it's really important to do. And, again, you don't want to save it all for the final end and not know an outcome. So trial it before so you have, um, at least a little bit of insight or better understanding of what will happen as you're getting ready for your, your critical or your type of event.

Speaker 1:

You know, kind of in summary, is like even at the high end of of competition here, where we're talking about gold medals which there was a ton of uh for team USA in Paris Um, when you develop really good strategies, we can get good outcomes, but even as Lindsay said, there's not a one, one rule that applies to everybody. So if there's anything that you get from this first episode, it is number one. There's a global approach to it. It's not just like during your actual competition. There's a lot that goes on. So, gather a lot of information, start to identify how you actually respond to heat and you can start to play around and experiment with different protocols that may work for you as you enter in your competition sort of time phase.

Speaker 1:

Um, in episode number two, like Lindsay has alluded to and like I opened up, we're going to get more actionable for people who are super short on time, because you know what, anytime that you add in a new thing whether it is a $1,500, uh core temperature uh pill to your program or simply some of the hot bath and sauna and or just hey, riding out in the heat it's going to take more time, add more stress and if you're already just like scrapping for six hours of training time. Maybe we look at this a little differently.

Speaker 2:

So, lindsay, anything else to summarize today's episode? Gosh, I don't think so. Um, I think just the biggest thing for me, after being at the Olympic committee here for the last eight years and coaching in this industry for the last 20 some years, is that part of this heat acclimatization is part of your training program, but it's used at certain periods within your, your build or progression. But I look at it now as just you know, I'm going out to do some intervals. I'm going to go out and include my heat acclimatization now. It's just become more of a fundamental approach rather than this brand new shiny object.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's leave it there for today. Lindsay, thank you for your time. I mean, your time is precious for everybody, including someone in your position, but I think our listeners are learning a lot from you, especially on heat training. So, and for our listeners, be sure to come back next week to learn more from Lindsay, as we do talk about time crunched and non-Olympic athlete protocols. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast. That'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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