The Athletes Podcast
The Athletes Podcast is a leading source of information, inspiration, and education for anyone interested in optimizing physical performance, maintaining good health, and living an active lifestyle. Join David Stark as he interviews some of the world's biggest athletes and fitness professionals, The Athletes Podcast provides practical advice, expert insights, and real-world strategies to help listeners achieve their health and fitness goals.The goal is to entertain, educate & inspire the next generation of athletes!
The Athletes Podcast
Luke Way reveals why 70% of athletes are limited by their breathing capacity.
Luke Way, founder of Isocapnic Technologies, reveals how respiratory limitations affect athletic performance and how proper breathing training can unlock significant performance gains.
• Approximately 70% of athletes are functionally limited by their respiratory systems, meaning they physically cannot breathe enough air to perform at their true potential
• VO2 max testing provides valuable insights beyond just a number, showing how different body systems contribute to or limit performance
• Many athletes compensate with rapid, shallow breathing (up to 70 breaths per minute) instead of utilizing their full lung capacity
• Breathing deeper rather than faster is more efficient as each breath contains "dead space" air that doesn't participate in gas exchange
• The Isocapnic device allows athletes to train respiratory muscles without hyperventilation, conditioning them for sustained deep breathing
• Nasal breathing is beneficial for low-intensity activities but physically cannot meet ventilation demands during high-intensity exercise
• Proper respiratory training can reduce the energy cost of breathing from 18% to 8% of total energy expenditure during endurance activities
• Blood work several times per year helps athletes monitor important markers like ferritin levels to optimize training and recovery
• Consistency in training, recovery, and injury management is the ultimate differentiator for athletic success
For more information about respiratory training and to connect with Luke Way, visit Isocapnic Technologies online or reach out at Kelowna Hockey Fest.
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What's up folks? Welcome back to the 267th episode of the Athletes Podcast, today featuring Luke Way. We're here in Kelowna, british Columbia, where we just took part of Kelowna Hockey Fest. Luke Way took Travis and I from starter through a rigorous VO2 test. You guys are going to see all of the data insights and I'm the guinea pig that you guys are going to be able to review over the next 45 minutes. Luke Way is an incredible father, someone who I look up to in the athletic space. Luke Way is an incredible father, someone who I look up to in the athletic space. He's the founder of Isocapnic Technologies. This is the 267th episode of the Athlete's Podcast brought to you by Perfect Sports Supplements. We're on the road. Our diesel protein is the best in the business. You guys get it. Use the code AP15 at checkout. Let me know what you think.
Speaker 2:Hope you enjoy the show. You're the most decorated racquetball player in US history, world's strongest man, from childhood passion to professional athlete, eight-time Ironman champion. So what was it like making your debut in the NHL? What is your biggest piece of advice for the next generation of athletes, from underdogs to national champions? This is the Athletes Podcast, where high-performance individuals share their triumphs, defeats and life lessons to educate, entertain and inspire the next generation of athletes. Here we go.
Speaker 1:A lot of energy time expended not quite as much energy expended as we did on the bike for those 20 minutes when I was dying next to Travis. Holy, dina, Luke, wait, can you tell us exactly what you put us through at at colonna hockey fest before I showed them up for putting on such an incredible event?
Speaker 3:yeah, man. So you, you did a a pretty standardized vo2 max style test. So it's an incremental step test. It's about three minute long steps and it slowly gets harder until you explode at the end of the test, which is a kind of fun and dramatic. And from that test we're able to find your zones for training. But I think, more importantly, we are able to actually see how your training should change in the next phase so you can actually make yourself better and not just be generically training and showing up and working hard. You're actually putting that hard work to a better end.
Speaker 1:Are you calling me out for being just a generically decent athlete at everything and not actually good at any one particular thing? Luke, Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 3:right now. You know your results are excellent. Statistically speaking, they're excellent. So I'm going to say you are excellent.
Speaker 1:I had one person comment, Marcus Wong, actually specifically talking about my respiratory status being functionally limited. Can we comment on that first to maybe start the conversation off?
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah. So when we profile athletes especially in large hockey team organizations sort of scenarios we profile the athletes to better understand, or let them better understand, how their training should be changed and how they can approach their respiratory training that is tailored to them. So there's three primary profiles. There's the functionally limited, so that means that they are unable to use the volumes that they have available. They're structurally limited, meaning that they have less volumes than we would expect for somebody their size, or they're balanced and they have a little bit of both, or they're limited in a little bit of both. And so for you you're functionally limited, meaning you have great lung capacity but your ability to use it and use it over the term of a test dwindles over time, if not is much lower than we would expect for a well-conditioned system.
Speaker 1:Now, luke, we need to give the listeners some context, because Travis and I took this test after, we'll say, a slightly more aggressive evening than we would typically do on a Wednesday. Coming in on a Thursday morning at 8 am, trav was worried about having a jammer. Obviously, trav is representing starter had to put his wheels to the test too. We had a bunch of NHL guys around us, so I wasn't backing down. But can you maybe explain this process? You've been a coach for 20 years, coaching endurance athletes 20-plus years now, I should say.
Speaker 1:We met Wednesday night after a phenomenal educational event thanks to Kelowna High Performance Kelowna Hockey Fest. We got chatting. Travis thought I looked like McDavid. You started introducing yourself thanks to Brad Thorpe, who was the keynote at the event, and one thing led to another. We're testing 12 hours later, slightly recovering from the night before, and you were able to provide us with an incredible data set. Can you just explain a bit more about ISOCAP, who you are, why you were so gracious with your time and how we're going to continue to progress, track our data over the next 60, 90, 120 days and see where we end up.
Speaker 3:Awesome, yeah, so I'm. I'm Luke, I run isocapnic. Isocapnic is a respiratory training company that me and my my partners have started. My background is in high performance endurance sport sort of Olympic and elite pathway, triathlon, cycling, running, that sort of thing and we we've developed a testing protocol for for endurance athletes over the span of the last 20 years. That has really led us down this pathway of objectively understanding what systems are strong, what systems are weak, so we can really guide training objectively for each of these athletes.
Speaker 3:In doing these tests, it's become this broken record of telling athletes how weak their respiratory systems are really and how that system is very much the limiting system to them ever getting any faster. They literally just can't breathe enough air to supply their system enough fuel to go any faster or any harder or perform any higher. And so we started this quest of trying to figure out how to properly train that system. We tried all sorts of different tools on the market. Nothing was really fitting the bill, and so we decided to make our own, and that's what we did. So that's the isocadmic device. The isocadmic device is just a very simple tool that allows us to directly train the respiratory muscles in a duration that's relevant for those types of muscles. Quick background on that is your diaphragm is primarily endurance muscle, and so even for a hockey player, even for, you know, a strength athlete, it's still primarily endurance fiber tissue, and so to train it for you know, a couple of breath holds, or a couple of, you know, 20 constricted breaths, is not enough to really get a good training effect out of it, and so we need to, like, train it for duration.
Speaker 3:Now, the challenge with that is, every time I breathe hard, I'm breathing off all my CO2. And so you need to be either producing enough CO2 to keep yourself in balance or you have to use our device that keeps you in balance by virtue of the device. And that's really the secret sauce of our device is it allows you to maintain what's called normal capnea. Your CO2 levels stay stable, and you can then train those muscles as hard and as fast and as vigorously as you ever want, for as long as you want, and do that for, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes, however long it takes to train them, depending on the athlete.
Speaker 3:Of course. A hockey player might only need to do it for 10 to 90 seconds, whereas I have 24-hour racers that will do 35, 40-minute long sessions. So I'm always asked like, okay, what's the protocol to use? And like, okay, what's the protocol to use? And it's like what's the protocol to use for a kettlebell? Like it's just a tool that allows you to train those muscles. So now we, it unlocks those, those muscles to be able to be trained like any other system, which is kind of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's gotta be fascinating for you. For me, I'm getting chills right now because I'm thinking about all the different athletes that you could run it through and the different data that you could obtain from it. Myself, obviously, sitting there next to a bunch of pro hockey players I'm not in necessarily hockey shape as a goalie different kind of muscles being used all the time but I can imagine you get a 5'5 athlete versus a 6'5 athlete. They got some very different lung capacities. Even the difference in Travis and I's data was fascinating to see how we were performing similar but using very different metrics. We'll call it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was really. It was a great example to have you guys testing side by side, because you guys both made it to like the same sort of level at the end of the test. But the way that you got there was completely different. You know, you, having a pretty good structural system up front, dwindled off throughout the test and what was the starter guy, travis yeah, travis, you know, actually had a little bit more of a structurally limited system, but he actually, like, utilized it a little bit differently to meet that demand in the end. So a really good case, you know, in real time, to show, you know the differences of how athletes can meet a performance load and get there in completely different ways, which is fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fortunately we had a former Vancouver Canuck over our shoulder helping us out a little bit there. We'll shout him out there in the incognito mode, but I do want to review the data here because you have it out in front of us. I think it's better to show than tell For those listening. Head on over to YouTube, subscribe to our YouTube channel and then you're going to be able to see Luke go through this data in real time and then maybe, if you're fortunate enough to be in Kelowna or Vancouver, you could reach out to Luke and connect, get your own data done yourself, and then you can compare to mine, see how much better you are than me potentially. But, luke, let's go, let's take it away.
Speaker 3:Awesome, yeah. So first of all, I got to air my laundry here that when you are getting VO2 testing done, demand more from your test, right? So this is a huge thing. It is so lazy, in my view, that these practitioners and physiologists will do these types of tests and really just give you the printout that's inbuilt in their system. And it's more important for an athlete to understand how this information can empower your training and help you make more intelligent decisions in terms of how you train your system.
Speaker 3:To just know your VO2 max number is like the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It really is almost the least important thing that we're looking at in terms of helping athletes. What really is important is understanding how you got there almost the least important thing that we're looking at in terms of helping athletes. What really is important is understanding how you got there, what systems were strong that showed no weakness towards the end, and what systems were stable and then found instability and eventually fell apart as the test went on. This is all data that's being collected with the tools and it just needs to be talked about and presented in a way that allows the athlete to like, get better and understand that like yes, you are not perfect, and that's exactly why we train right. We understand these systems are strong, these systems are weak, and let's train our weaknesses. So for you, let's get you up on screen here I think it's like it's a tool, like anything right.
Speaker 3:Ultimately it's going to tell you one data point at the end, but if you're not fixing the stuff in between, you're never going to change that end result yeah, yeah and I mean you know vo2 max is is a really nice simple number for the masses to kind of wrap their heads around and uh and understand.
Speaker 1:But knowing my score.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like well, and I mean I would almost say, a BMI score might be a little, even a little bit more empowering, because you have.
Speaker 3:You have a little bit more like day-to-day say on how how your BMI should be compared and where you like should change your diet to make that better, whereas just knowing that you're at a VO2 max of 55.2 doesn't really inform your decision-making for tomorrow. That's just like okay, I'm at 55.2. That's cool, but knowing that you are breathing 2.5 liters at your maximum tidal volume and we know from your spirometry that you have 8.25 liters available, you have 6.5 liters available in one second. So let's back off and let's say like just 70% of that 6.5 liters is attainable and you're only breathing 2.5 liters. You're so underusing your system. It's exciting for me because there's a huge opportunity for you to improve that system. You have this tool that you are just literally not using and why is that?
Speaker 1:Why would I not be using it? Is that just from me training that way for so long or being an athlete? I'm just like I'm going to adapt and get it done, no matter what, no matter what it takes, kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so a respiratory system is very interesting in the way that we one of my favorite adages in exercise physiology is the body will always do whatever's easiest and you were always using a respiratory system in a relaxed range of motion and so we have a pretty well-conditioned shortened range of motion that we use our diaphragm and our intercostals and our respiratory structures in that way.
Speaker 3:And so when push comes to shove and you've never conditioned range of motion of your respiratory system, it's going to default back to that shorter range because that's what it's good at.
Speaker 3:So if we've never challenged a big deep breath, you can't hope to use that big deep breath, you know, 20 minutes into a test. It's just it's going to be way too fatigued by that point. So by training the system ahead of time and conditioning it that it you know it can do 20, 30 minutes of breathing deep and meeting the ventilatory demand, then you know when you get to the end of your test you're now breathing five, six you know liters towards the end of the test or maybe even seven liters. I see people breathing 100%, 120% of their FEV1 number towards the end of the test. If they've trained that system and that FEV1 is that force exhalation volume over one second, that's like your ideal breath. Second, that's like your ideal breath, and so you know, for the standard that we try to set within our organization for athletes to achieve is 70% of that. But, like I said, that is just the beginning. There's people that exceed that.
Speaker 1:And so, looking at this data right now on the graded exercise test report, I would say that I have, you know, given my comparison to others, I'm actually doing well. And then I would say, double down on that, considering I'm only using 20% of or you know, 30% of my actual lung capacity.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah. So you're, you're, you're. You ended the test at 300 Watts, at a VO2 max at around 55.2. Your maximum heart rate measured throughout the test was 192 beats per minute. So good like functional ability with the heart. Your peak ventilation rate was 167 liters per minute, which is like pretty decent, to give you sort of context of that my you know five foot nothing. Mom will breathe, you know 70, 80 liters per minute towards the end of her test, but she's little. You know. It is pretty normal for me to test like a a tour level cyclist at you know 230, 240 liters per minute.
Speaker 3:So, there's, there's, so there's quite a bit of range there. And then as we train, especially strength athletes, we train them up towards that 300 liter per minute mark, just so that system is just never a limitation and that's certainly something that's trainable. To meet that demand of 167 liters per minute, you're doing that with 2.5 liters per breath or less. That means you're breathing 70 breaths per minute. 70 breaths per minute more than a breath a second. That is panting, that is really fast breathing right, yeah, you should have seen the video.
Speaker 1:I was doing more than panting there at the end.
Speaker 3:So really important point to drive home for people is that you have the choice when you're breathing, to breathe Like you have to breathe that 167 liters per minute, with either 2.5 liters per breath at 70 breaths per minute, or let's double it, let's go to five liters per breath at 35 breaths per minute.
Speaker 3:Right, and now? The reason why that's so much more efficient for the system is that every single time you cycle a breath right, every time you take a breath, you're moving the dead space air between your mouth and your alveoli. That is just plumbing. There's no gas exchange happening there, and so every single time you take a breath, that's 250 milliliters of just dead space air that just has to get recycled. So we want to cycle that through as few times per minute as possible so you're getting as fresh of air to the bottom lobes of your alveoli and your lungs and getting all that CO2 out of your system every single time we take a breath, and so we're really maximizing efficiency Down the road. You know that changes the way that oxygen enters into your bloodstream, that changes the way CO2 gets pulled out of your system and that also then puts your muscles in a different environment to perform in, and so it really trickles down the entire system on how it creates much more control.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I have so many questions. One of the questions that I wanted to ask as I was panting during this test was the nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, and I know that device kind of maybe I want to say limited my ability to nasal breathe a tiny bit. But I've read the book breath james nester, I mouth tape at night. I'm very passionate about this subject. I'm curious how this impacts performance. I know that nasal breathing nitrous oxide like. Can you maybe provide a bit more of that insight around how this is done, whether nasal breathing is beneficial during these tests, et cetera?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So, first and foremost, I am not going to downplay the value of nasal breathing. I think nasal breathing is a tool that is important and should be used in certain contexts. To think that nasal breathing will give you your maximum performance in a marathon or a performance load on the ice is just wrong. For you to breathe 167 liters per minute, there is zero chance you can do that through your nose. Your nose is just too small, like physically, it's just not a big enough orifice. We need to open our mouth to be able to breathe that much air and, like I said, 167 liters per minute is okay. Right, we see people breathing much more than that and again, nasal breathing is just, it just doesn't touch that. The maximum I really see people able to hold with nasal breathing alone is around 65 to 80 liters per minute. If they have a larger nose, maybe, but it's really like a physical limitation that way.
Speaker 3:Now, the value of nasal breathing is that it is a mechanical limitation. It makes it harder for you to breathe, and so it forces you to breathe smoother. So you breathe in smooth and out smooth. So that's the nice thing about having that constriction is that it forces the muscles through this like extruder of breath, right, and so it just slows down into a sinusoidal wave pattern. We need to be able to break out of that when the going gets tough. But that doesn't change the fact that it is a good tool for certain jobs. So you talked about mouth taping at night. There's all sorts of benefits to breathing through your nose at night Humidifies the air as it's going into your system. The ventilation rate is nowhere near 167 liters per minute. It's, you know, much closer to like 10, 20, 30 liters per minute. So it's like orders of magnitude smaller than what is required during load, and so your nose can meet that demand quite easily. Load, and so your nose can meet that demand quite easily. And so what a lot of people will default is to a mouth breath, which leads some, like you know, issues with dental hygiene and things like this. And so closing your mouth is just going to help like keep you a little bit healthier, and it's going to help with the the introduction of nitric oxide into your system.
Speaker 3:There's two places in the body that nitric oxide are produced. One is in your nose and one is in the endothelial cells of your veins and arteries, and so this gas that's produced inside your nose gets sucked back into your lungs as you're breathing in, and it's a vasodilator, so it opens up your airways, it relaxes the muscles and it's also antibacterial, so it helps to clean and purify the air as it's moving in. The nitric oxide argument is not a good argument for high performance, because just because you're breathing 167 liters per minute doesn't mean you're also increasing the amount of nitric oxide. Your nose is just constantly sort of like producing a steady rate of that. And when you're diluting you know that amount of nitric oxide into 10 liters per minute, it is potent and it has a good value.
Speaker 3:When it's being diluted in 167 liters per minute, it's moot at that point and so it's not really doing a whole lot for you. And so nitric oxide has its purpose at the low end of the spectrum in terms of ventilation rates, but towards the top end, you know it doesn't really matter so much. The other thing is that by breathing through your nose at lower intensities, you know it does help you engage your diaphragm a little bit more, and I believe that that's because of that constriction. The constriction causes a little bit of resistance in how you breathe, and when you feel that resistance, your body's going to engage larger muscles and the largest muscle you have for breathing is your diaphragm. And that's why nasal breathing is very much linked to diaphragmatic breathing is that you have to pull with that bigger muscle to pull through your nose, especially if you have, you know, smaller nose.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is good to know. This is great. This is I'm. This confirmed everything that I was thinking, at least, and I know I wasn't getting to 167 liters per minute with my nose, but I just had to make sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, exactly yeah. What else can I tell you about nasal breathing I?
Speaker 1:mean, hey, this is great. I am am more so. I know you sent over like three separate reports. I was talking with mark afterwards. He was enamored at the fact that you were able to just whip this up, send it over right away. Travis and I were reviewing it. I'm like what him, travis, martel, mark fitzgerald have built at colonna high performance and colonna hockey fest on an annual basis is simply sensational. You know there was probably 100 plus athletes there this year. There's going to be, we'll say, double that next year. We got some exciting plans in the works, hopefully including some of our CSM females there, but I really think that incorporating stuff like ISOCAPNIC on an annual basis, probably quarterly basis, for those athletes that are local to you is going to provide so many insights for them to be able to look at. You know, review, compare, compete, like everyone's competitive in that environment. And you know these are data points that no one's getting right now, unless I'm told otherwise.
Speaker 3:No. So so I'll kind of show you like three levels of information here. This first page is what you typically get from a VO2max report, which gives you your VO2max number and some of your stats about your ventilatory thresholds and your zones and that sort of thing which is all fine and dandy. You get a little scale here to help you like rank yourself amongst people, your age and size and that sort of thing. That's sort of like the basics of a VO2 max report.
Speaker 3:Beyond that, if you're lucky, you might get this graph right here which shows your VO2 number as it increases. So as the load increases you can see it step up. Your heart rate increases in red and then blue. Your VO2 number increases with it too, and so we see a VO2 max number towards the end and that's how we like see that peak VO2 number and that's how we objectively assess that VO2 max. If you're much, much luckier, you get the mechanics data and this I rarely see outside of people using like a VO2 master device or something like this, where we actually get to see how your respiratory muscles are meeting the demand. So I know there's a lot here, so I'm just going to try to simplify it.
Speaker 1:The yellow the pieces that you put onto my leg and arm correct. So this data?
Speaker 3:that I have on screen right now is your VO2 master data. So it's the device that's sitting on your face, okay, okay, and so with this one we see in yellow how big your breaths are for any point during the test. The light blue is how fast you're breathing, so we can see you start it at around 20 breaths per minute and you peaked out here towards that 70 breaths per minute. At the end there right, and then the green line is your ventilation rate. So how many liters per minute?
Speaker 3:So the simple way to think about this is that the relationship between the load, the steps here and the green line is more or less unchangeable. Your body needs to produce that much ATP energy to meet the demand of the stress load of the test. You have the choice to meet that green line load by pushing this yellow line up or down, breathing deeper or smaller. And for you you started out at like two and a half, three liters. A couple of times you scratched the surface at three liters per breath and then it's stabilized at around 2.5 liters and then, when the going got really tough, at that last step, when you failed, you went from 2.3 liters to below 2 liters. It actually got much smaller. Your big time compensator was just breathing faster, which is, again, it's not that uncommon. The body will always do whatever is easiest and that's your default is to just breathe fast, and we can totally train, train this to breathe bigger why is that?
Speaker 1:why, like, is there any reason why? Like that's my, my go-to? You said that's common for most people, but that's just like a I gotta breathe, I gotta get it in somehow, yeah it's.
Speaker 3:it's because that respiratory system fatigued out right, so it wasn't. It wasn't capable of meeting the ventilation demand with deep breaths anymore. And for you, deep breaths for this test was only like two and a half liters per breath, yeah, not deep. And we know that you have much, much, much more available in terms of just structural size. It's like teaching a bird how to flap its wings If it never does it before it takes practice.
Speaker 1:I like to think of this in every aspect of my life. I got a lot of room to grow.
Speaker 3:Well, you know what. That's how I like to categorize these things. Right, let's highlight the things that you're good at. But also, you can breathe exceptionally fast. That's a cool thing. So you can breathe exceptionally fast, that's a cool thing.
Speaker 3:Another thing is that you have a really good range on your cardiac system. Your heart starts out around 100 beats per minute and it gets up to almost 200 beats per minute, which is like that's a good working range for your heart. We don't want it to be squished towards the top end, where you start at 150 and you end at 200, or to be stuck low and you start at 70 and you end at 120. Right, you have a good working uh range of your cardiac system. So your cardiac system is one of your strong suits and if we were to keep going down here, we could get into the moxie data, and this is the purple line here.
Speaker 3:This is your muscular system. This is the other system, or the other sensors that I had on your legs, and this is looking at how well you're utilizing your muscular system, and we can see that it's a pretty steady flow down. We start out around that 70% muscle oxygenation. So for those that don't know what SMO2 or MOXIE. Muscle oxygenation is is the muscles ability to utilize oxygen, and so we can just measure that directly now, back in the day old days we would use like lactate to try to understand this a little bit, but lactate was limited in how many data points we got, and we're pricking fingers or ears all the time to try to get that data, and so we're not really getting a stream of data. We're getting sort of like a snapshot on little bits, and it's a surrogate to what we're actually interested in is what the muscles are doing. This is just a stream of data of exactly what we want to see, which is the muscle oxygenation of the muscle.
Speaker 1:And so. I would have had a slightly higher number had I not had a couple beverages the night before, likely correct.
Speaker 3:Yeah, your high highs might have gotten up towards the 80 mark and really when you're fatigued and maybe a little bit more beat up, it just drops the overall performance output a little bit. So you ended the test at around 300 watts.
Speaker 1:During this session you might have made it to the 350 mark had you, you know, know, came into it, rested um, but I used some, some narwhals or lactico right yeah, there, where are my narwhals? Back here shout out to evie and ariel, yeah, yeah so, yeah, so this is actually one of your strengths.
Speaker 3:you have a reasonably high high with your muscular system and you got down below 20 at the end, which is a reasonably low low. So your ability to utilize your muscular system is quite good and this is the reason why your VO2 number was so great. Even though your respiratory system was limited, your ability to suck oxygen out of the bloodstream is quite good, and that adds to the load of the VO2.
Speaker 1:That was just peer pressure of having so many eyes on me to finish that thing. There was no way I was getting off without finishing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and an interesting one here especially for, like you know, a goalie is your core temperature. So we had a rectal thermometer shoved up. No, just joking. We had a sensor on your rib that measures your core temperature, your radiant energy, and so from that we can tell how hot your body's getting. So the blue line is your core temperature, your radiant energy, and so from that we can tell how hot your body's, your hot your body's getting. So the blue line is your, uh, your core temperature. The the red line is your, your skin temperature. So we can actually see the point at which you started sweating and your skin got colder and your core temperature still went up. So that's an important thing for especially endurance athletes, but really any athlete is that for us to produce that energy, it has a huge byproduct of heat that's generated. That heat is measurable both at the skin load and through your tissues to see your core temperature. And what we do want to see is that your body does get warmer as the load increases, because that shows that you're utilizing calories're utilizing calories well and uh, and it's not falling apart. If it starts to drop off at some point, it's usually followed up pretty quickly by a, by a metabolic bonk, where your system loses energy because it's just not providing enough ATP to uh to output.
Speaker 3:And then the last couple of graphs here are comparables, where the next time you come in for your test we can look to see is your wattage is higher for the given heart rate in this graph. And then the next one is your VO2 higher or lower given the load. And what we want to see is that your training is progressing and so the VO2 that it's costing you to go 200 watts, for example, is lower. The vo2 that it's costing you to go 200 watts, for example, is lower. You actually are at a lower vo2 number for the same output, meaning it's costing you less. This is really important for endurance, but it's also very important for for hockey, because if you can perform at the same intensity as the others on the ice but it costs less, gives you the option to either perform higher or make calmer decisions, be a bit more accurate. And same sort of idea here with your performance load versus your heart rate. We want that heart rate relationship to drop. We want the heart rate to come down for a given output.
Speaker 1:So how many of these tests have you performed and where would you rank, kind of I want to say, the performance that Travis and I put up there and biggest areas for improvement? And maybe this will be on the other two data points or PDFs that you show me moving forward. But you know, I've been looking at this. I'm like I feel like I did pretty good, but I'm like the type that's always striving for more and I want to get better Right, and I'm like where are my big rocks that I got to move to make big improvements?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so. So first of all, I got to hand it to you guys that you know I I was introduced to the group, you know, the night before and and you guys were like with bells on the next morning to run through the test, which is awesome, that you're game for that sort of torture, so to speak. So that's awesome.
Speaker 1:I'm a guinea pig man. This podcast has been six years. Culmination of being able to meet cool people like yourself, train with individuals like World's Strongest man NHL, pwhl, nfl, nba man, nhl, pwhl, nfl, nba like this is. The dream for me is getting to be able to chop it up, learn about how I can get better and then go and put up some numbers. When we got bryce put testing us on veld right yeah, exactly so.
Speaker 3:So for you, the like, the quite obvious mover for the next little while for you is, uh is improving your respiratory system. Did we get you an isocapnic device?
Speaker 1:no, not yet. Yeah, we're gonna get you an isocapnic device. No, not yet I'll come grab it next time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're gonna get you an isocapnic device so you can actually train this system. So right now, you're meeting the demand with with fast, small breaths, and so we're gonna give you training that's gonna teach you to endure bigger, deeper breaths for longer is that that balloon thing that you got the video of me using?
Speaker 1:that's right yeah, so.
Speaker 3:So that device allows us to control CO2 output so we no longer have the risk of hyperventilation. And now we can train that system for as long as we want, and so you're going to be using it as part of your warm-up five-minute warm-up before any workouts you do Super, super simple and then you're going to have like three or four sessions a week that'll be between five and 10 minutes long, where we're specifically training your ability to endure bigger, deeper ventilation rates. So you're breathing deeper, okay.
Speaker 1:Luke, we have one question Everyone's dying to know what's the ideal way to increase VO2 max and why is it important.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, that's a. That's a loaded question. So I'm I'm working with, with, with Mark out of Kelowna here to to help maximize you know, the NHL players performance during VO2 max. Vo2 max is very much a functional test, and so it's. So it's measuring how good you are at the modality that's being tested. So if it's an assault bike, then you better be coordinated and good at it if you think you're going to perform on it. If you are a marathoner, it's probably not wise that you do it on a bike. If you're a cyclist, it's probably not wise that you do it on a treadmill. That's the thing. Choose the modality that you're most functional at, because that's going to truly test how good you are at it.
Speaker 3:Vo2 is a measure of a couple things your muscular demand, so how much oxygen your muscles are consuming, how much oxygen your circulatory system can move around. Your cardiac output is related to that. And then your, your ability to absorb oxygen through your respiratory system. So that's the primary things. What's the number one thing that you can do to get better? Well, 70% of the people that we see through our lab over the last 25 years are limited in their ability to ventilate air. They literally just can't push any harder to drive that VO2 number up any higher, because they literally can't breathe enough air. And so by training the respiratory system to move, more air allows us to move that set point and that limitation on the top end so you can push a little bit harder, a little bit deeper, and that limitation on the top end so you can push a little bit harder, a little bit deeper.
Speaker 1:There you go, folks. Easy, just put it to the test, hit Luke up, send him a message, get your data tracked. No, I mean, for me it's like this is again. I said it, this is the dream, because now, every year, I'm going to come back, I'm going to be doing vertical test jumps, I'm going to be doing abductors, abductor testing and like, hopefully, maybe on a quarterly or semi-annual basis, whatever the case may be, but I think it's really important.
Speaker 1:People are getting their blood work done, people are getting all of these other data points taken down, noted, and if you're not looking at every system in your body, ie your respiratory system, then just because you have big muscles and can bench press 500 pounds or whatever the case may be, doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to outrun someone who grabs your wife's wallet or purse and you need to go race and catch them right. Like I look at that as okay, I'm want to be physically fit, capable of doing anything at any point, kind of, like you said, generally decent at whatever, whereas, you know, professional athletes need to be very good at their specific tasks. I think, general pop, we're all athletes. We're on the athletes podcast here today. Everyone should have the ability to run a mile or move their body to a certain degree to like bare minimums. My on the right track there. Would you agree with that? Yeah, and luke yeah.
Speaker 3:so vo2 is an interesting test that I think is relevant for for just about everyone from the health and wellness and longevity side of things. The VO2 max number is a really good indicator on longevity factors and lifespan and healthspan, so it's important for just anybody to get their VO2 max done so they're better understanding their health, of their system. For high performance athletes, it is the understanding of that 1%. How can you make yourself 1% better? And showing up every day and working hard is the easy part. If you're an elite athlete, that's what you're good at. You can show up and grind.
Speaker 3:Now can we make that grind more intelligent and make it a little bit more potent? That's that's the challenge that we have as as testers and physiologists and coaches and trainers is to is to make the training more potent and and understanding where these systems are strong and weak is really important. Like it's really fun for me working with you know, hockey players and rugby players and stuff like this, because they've been working their muscular and cardiac systems for their entire career, and then we test them and we show like results like this that are, like I said, are not surprising to me, but show a massive limitation and they're just like oh my God, I have so much room for improvement. This is great. Now I know exactly what I need to do next to make myself that much better.
Speaker 1:So did you know that I had run a marathon prior to this? And does seeing this data of me having run like marathons, like does it seem shocking, or do you question like how I got through that or what? Like? What questions come to mind for you there?
Speaker 3:No, I mean, I could guess how you met the demand of of running the marathon, assuming assuming you're you're running, like how fast you are running. So, like, the cool thing about endurance sport, especially like a participation endurance sports like this, like a marathon, is that you can just run slower and it just not cost your body that much. If you're running as as fast as you can for a marathon, then I'm going to predict at this point, looking at this data, that you are meeting the demand, breathing probably, you know, two steps per breath. So two steps to breathe in, two steps to breathe out. So you're probably breathing 40 to 50 breaths per minute throughout the entire marathon, which is not very efficient for your system, but it is.
Speaker 3:It is also the system that you currently have, and so to think that you're going to change that on race day is probably not a good idea. But it does reveal a limitation that on your next marathon, you've trained that system up to be able to react a little bit differently and then you'll be able to meet that demand a little bit better, keeping in mind that, like you know, for something like a marathon, be able to meet that demand a little bit better. Keeping in mind that, like you know, for something like a marathon, you know you're, you're, you're functioning at, you know, 70% of your VO2 max for a long period of time, meaning that your respiratory system is using, you know, between 10 and 18% of your total energy, and so if that's inefficient then that's just bleeding off performance. So if we can make that respiratory system more efficient, we can push that number from 18% down to like 8% and we're not using nearly as much energy to do the same. Ventilatory output.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes me question. Yeah, it makes me a question. I started running maybe February 2023, 2024, whatever it was and then did a half marathon a few months after that, four or five months after New Balance sent me some shoes, did the full marathon and didn't really want to pursue it after that. I mean, I'm still doing the occasional run. But I also just read some study from Gatorade which sounds super legitimate, about the fact that study reveals men who run daily have up to 41% lower testosterone than men who don't train at all. Do you see any accuracy to that statement? Or is that just a random social media stat that I shouldn't be paying attention to? Luke way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a. That's an interesting one. So strength training is very much more related to the testosterone markers. So if they're're, if you're doing no strength training whatsoever, it wouldn't surprise me entirely if, if you're causing some anemia and causing some, uh some, some hormonal imbalance like that, for sure okay.
Speaker 1:So to balance, or like, make sure that you're not completely dropping your t levels, just make sure you incorporate some resistance training a couple days a week. Balance out endurance.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I always recommend doing some strengthening and conditioning work just to make sure that that system is more resilient and we're able to brave any injuries down the road.
Speaker 1:Okay, We've focused for 45 minutes here on the hockey Kelowna Hockey Fest, isocapnic. I want to give you an opportunity to highlight your athletes, what you've been doing here over the past few decades, I will say and what you see in the future as far as predictions are concerned, as far as ways that you see the next generation of athletes, because here on the Athletes Podcast our goal is to entertain, educate and inspire that next gen, and personally I think there's a lot of value in what you're providing here today. Selfishly, I'm getting a little personalized session, but for those listening and watching, there's an incredible amount of information here. You're a resource that people can reach out to. What are your kind of crystal ball goals here for the next few years and where do you see the space going?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's super exciting for me to be more involved in the team sports world, like hockey, football, rugby, for that matter.
Speaker 3:It's really cool for me to see it coming from the endurance side, how hyper-focused and hyper-aware and really well-developed the muscular training modalities are in these spaces.
Speaker 3:But then it really shows like how what we've been doing in the endurance world for, for you know, many decades is really going to to change the way things work, especially now that we're seeing more teams using things like VO2 max as as standards to to issue players ice time, like it. If. If these athletes aren't training these systems properly, then it literally like it, it hurts their career and it'll hurt their performance output. So where I really am excited to you know, to work with these, these teams in the near future is to really help maximize how they're able to execute a VO2 max test and affect how well they can perform on the ice through shifts. We have a whole bunch of things coming down the line in terms of research papers that are coming out on how we are changing breathing strategies and how that's changing effective workloads and accuracy on the ice and rate of perceived exertion of those loads Like. It's really fascinating stuff how the breathing is really like the catalyst for unlocking that next step.
Speaker 1:So much we still don't know about the human body that we're just uncovering.
Speaker 3:Eh, yeah Well, and it's really just a collaboration of like things that you know the endurance world have been playing with for for, like I said, a while, and so it's a matter of like, like leveraging that in the right way to make hockey players that much better Athletes are competitive.
Speaker 1:For decades, people have had everything behind curtains making sure that they don't want to give the next person beside them the edge that's going to ultimately get them the spot on the team versus the other, when in reality, we should all just be sharing information, all getting better, because ultimately, everyone's going to improve in that way, and if your guy beside you is competing harder, it's going to make you work harder, get better. I don't know, to me maybe that's just every. I want everyone to win space, but I think, hey, let's, let's get everyone with all the information available, with the best information available, doing everything they possibly can, and then let the cards fall where they do. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Like that's the, the, the even playing field mentality, where sort of everybody has access to these things, and really that's been. Our mandate as a company is to make high-level respiratory training just available to anybody, and so we've put the whole company together with that in mind that it's just removing of barriers. Now, that being said, I can't tell you how many NHL players are using our device, because they don't want me to right, it's a trade secret for them, because it's an edge for them to get their competitive advantage, and that's sort of like the ongoing, you know, saga of working with professional level athletes, is that it kind of becomes their secret weapon.
Speaker 1:Well, that's why you get to work with me and I just share it with everyone and then you get the rewards. The NHL players can still keep it, keep it quiet, but no, I think like the other part that I was frustrated with, if I'm being honest, was that I didn't throw on like lactigo because I heard about how this could benefit. I wasn't using the narwhals during that session like from a curiosity standpoint. I'm also like our sponsor perfect sports supplements they provide us with incredible supplements.
Speaker 1:I use creatine daily. Are there supplements that you suggest for athletes to improve any of their bodily systems? Do you think that has a real impact? Is that just the one percent at the end of the table like? Give me your insights there, because you're looking at the daily, you know yeah, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3:So we're we're big advocates on doing blood work, you know, several times a year with our athletes, just because, like you know, hematocrit is very much a currency that we have to spend during training and during racing, and so being on top of your ferritin levels and your vitamin loads is really important. So if we can identify early anything that's chronically low or chronically towards the low end, then we can build a regime that's going to help top that off. Then there's the basic things that sort of everybody should be doing, which is like making sure you're getting enough protein, making sure you're taking in your aminos things like creatine is a great one to do daily that sort of thing and then just being really aware on everything that goes into your system is what your system is made out of. So you feed it crap, it's going to give crap out, and so trying to eat healthy, trying to eat whole, trying to eat a variety of foods and staying away from any one niche.
Speaker 1:I am hitting a candy store right now. Now, man, this has been 50 minutes where I've just been soaking up as much as I possibly can. I'll be listening to it again to review my data. I guess I want to know what got you into the space 25 years ago. What were you doing? What sports were you playing as a kid? We got a few minutes left here. I always like to find out. You know the backstory, the background of these individuals that we get on the show and like. What inspired them to get who those individuals were? And you know, are you scratching that itch now today? Is that what gets you up in the morning?
Speaker 3:yeah. So I started off in well. My first sport was downhill ski racing. Instead of growing thicker, I grew longer, and so, as my my comrades in arms back then were upwards of 220 pounds, I was like working my tail off. They'd be 145 pounds, and so when I started doing endurance sport, I was like, wow, okay, this is like way better use of my time. And so I really set my goals high in the endurance world and I'd raced professionally for triathlon for a number of years. And then I got into the coaching world and started working with my mentor, dr Sellers out of Vernon here, and we started coming up with different testing methodologies for athletes to better understand how to make better decisions. And through that process, it's just been this problem-solving scenario where we identify these limitations and we find ways of training those limitations. The respiratory system has just always been this primary limiter for a lot of people and there just really hasn't been something on the market. So it's out of necessity of us training our athletes that this tool exists.
Speaker 3:We needed a better tool to fix that system and stop wasting training time so we could actually train the systems that are weakest, and so that's why we brought it out is just so my athletes could benefit. Turns out that it's beneficial for people with anxiety, people that are training to go to altitude, people that are dealing with acute mountain sickness, people that are trying to get bigger lung volumes, people that are trying to get more functional lungs all sorts of ways of using this tool to get better.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to get mine. I'm going to be using it every day. I'm going to be freaking testing my data marks at every single point that I possibly can. No, this is awesome. I really appreciate your time, luke. Again, you came out within 16 hours and we were testing and got reports back. It was phenomenal. From a selfish standpoint, I always like to bring up the fact that we've had on probably about a dozen goalies to date. I personally think they're probably the best athletes that are out on, the best functional athletes, all-around athletes out there, and maybe suggest some sports for that next gen to pursue in a way to round out their athleticism.
Speaker 3:Okay. So the way I want to answer that question would be the way the industry was answering the fittest athlete question back in the early 80s. They tested marathon runners, cross-country skiers, swimmers, kayakers, cyclists, all in lab to understand what you know. Finally, you know, objectively speaking, what athlete is the fittest athlete of all, and what they found was that the marathoners were the best athletes of all, and all right. So then we started digging into the data and what they did for all of those athletes is they ran them on a treadmill. So, of course, the ones that were functional at using the treadmill were the most fit, because if you put a kayaker on a treadmill with their skinny little legs and their big heavy upper body, yeah, they're not going to run super well and it's not going to allow them to shine in the way that their body has been conditioned. And so you know they're they're like I've worked with a like, like crossfit games athletes that are just incredibly phenomenal, but they're just, they're not very good runners, they're not very good cyclists. They're pretty good at strength, they're pretty good at gymnastics, right. So in terms of like rounded, you know, maybe that's an argument, but certainly I think it's very specific.
Speaker 3:I think it's a wonderful how conditionable the human body is to becoming a chess master or to becoming the best athlete in whatever modality you're in, and so, yeah, what that? Maybe that's like sidestepping the question a little bit. So no, that's great, I think. I think my bias would be triathlon, because they do three sports, they, they have a huge training load to meet that demand, that that it's not just like an all season thing, but it's an all career thing. You know, from the moment they're, they're, they're 12, 13 years old or even younger, to the end of their careers, they're, they're, they're training, you know, 20 to 40 hours a week, getting in massive training loads, and that's, that's what it takes. And so I I just don't see very many other athletes doing that same sort of thing or for that long of a, of a duration.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ben Hoffman and Liam Donnelly are two individuals I've had on the show Nice Massive training capacities, much larger than mine, and I just get to admire from afar what they're capable of doing. Liam Donnelly's got some incredible TikTok content going out there, if you haven't seen it.
Speaker 3:Big shout out to Liam. I love Liam. He's such a great kid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's the best, well overdue to get him back on the show, but maybe we'll do a conversation. The three of us will do some testing in person and see how much better his stats are compared to mine. No, no, this has been awesome. Luke, again really appreciate what you've been able to do over the past few weeks. I'm excited to stay in contact, though our way of wrapping up every single episode is we ask our guest their biggest piece of advice for the next generation of athletes, and I'd love to open the floor for you to share yours.
Speaker 3:Okay, if you're an athlete and you want to get better, the the, the secret pill. The very important thing that you need to do to excel in what you do is consistency. Consistency is king. If you can't show up every day, right, and that means that doesn't mean that you are ignoring injury and you're ignoring being sick. That means that you are managing those things better than everybody else on the planet. Your ability to be consistent is what gets you to the finish line before everybody else. Be consistent.
Speaker 1:Consistency is king, folks. That's it, luke Way. Thank you so much for coming on. The Athletes Podcast, 266th episode. People are going to love this one. Thanks again for coming on, man, really appreciate it. Excited to do a review next year and see where the data points are at, maybe after not so many bevvies.
