Athletic Progress With Innovation in Wearable Tech with Evan Peikon

Tyson: like rewrote it and added to it. I was like, oh, super cool. I think it's like one of the, I think that one of the Bibles that most CrossFit coaches should have and utilize like extensively. So, but yeah, finding lots and lots of value in that. But what I'll do is I'll probably like pre-record an intro, which I'll slap over the top of that. And then we'll go from here, man. Easy.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, sounds
Tyson: Hey guys, to the show on today's episode, we have Evan Pike on you would have heard ⁓ an extensive introduction prior to this point, but I'll sort of hand it over to the man himself. And if you can give us an introduction ⁓ on background and ⁓ essentially you got to where you are now just for those who you who don't know.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, absolutely. First, thank you for having me on. So again, I'm Evan Pycon. I'm a computational biologist and bioengineer. So my work spans precision oncology, biodefense, and human performance, the latter being the one that we're going to be talking about today. For a number of years, as a co-founder at a startup called NOx, we developed the first biosensory measure of muscle oxygenation, nitric oxide bioactivity in real time. And prior to that, I worked for a company called Training Think Tank for about six years. where we worked with lot of top CrossFit Games competitors, military special operations, and then I guess it would now be called hybrid athletes.
Tyson: All right, welcome back to the grip performance podcast. Today's guest is someone who I think is genuinely rerouting the playbook on how we understand physiology in this sport. Evan Pycon is a computational biologist, co-founder and chief scientist at Knox and one of the sharpest minds working at the intersection of exercise science and real world coaching. spent years at training think tank working with some of the top names in CrossFit. He's also worked alongside Olympic teams, professional sports organizations, and military sports operations groups. ⁓ makes Evan different isn't just his credentials, it's that he's Mm-hmm. Classic. Love it. Yeah, that's probably where I'm most familiar with a lot of your stuff. When I first started by consuming, it was all through the training think tank stuff. Like I think some of those videos now is like 10 years old, but they're still just like hyper relevant. very different like back then, but that's definitely like where I got started into, I guess, consuming a lot of the content that you've put out. One of the things that I'm definitely like curious to know is like a lot of the, you know, like stuff that you've put out is related to Nears at the time you were using ⁓ Moxie as like a reference point for, ⁓ guess, the device that you were using. What was essentially your first introduction to using that technology? And I guess what was the sort of like fixation to that? Or I guess like the interest that sort of made that one of the main, I guess, genuinely willing to challenge the stuff we've all taken for granted. This is one of the conversations I've been looking forward to and honestly the most nervous for so let's get into it. pieces of hardware that you've used to sort of develop your system and I guess a lot of the research that you then you know went on to go through.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, absolutely. So I first got introduced to NIRS, I think, in 2014 or 2015. So I got introduced to it by a guy named Ben Howe, who now he's the head of research for the Memphis Grizzlies, which is the MBA team at the time. He started a company called Train Adapt Evolve, and they put on an event years and years ago where One of their demonstrations, had someone do a critical power test on a rower. So we were in this garage, they put a device on a guy's quad and just had him row all out for three minutes. And they had a big screen broadcasting his muscle oxygenation data. And within 10 to 15 seconds, you just saw his muscle oxygenation bottom out. And this guy was just like completely suffering for three minutes. And you see the oxygen level in his muscles completely depleted. And at the time I was very much steeped in traditional exercise physiology. This doesn't make any sense. He started sprinting and you're supposed to be using ATP and phosphocreatine stores. And then we're supposed to be tapping the glycolytic system. And then after you exhaust those, then oxygen should be driving energy transduction process. And what we saw in real time is as soon as he started, oxygen bottomed out. And for the rest of the three minutes, his oxygen levels in the tissue were low. which means not a lot of oxidative metabolism going on. This was really counterintuitive to effectively everything I had ever seen or learned at that point. So that really got me kicked off with wanting to understand this technology. was like, either this Moxie device is a complete piece of crap and all of this data that we're seeing in lifetime is wrong, or there's something I clearly don't understand about physiology turned out being the second of those two. So that's really what got me interested in it. But then where...
Tyson: Yeah.
Evan Peikon: started to become less of like a personal obsession more of like a practical tool is when I started working for training think tank at the end of 2015. We are working with a lot of top CrossFit competitors and we wanted to understand like what their physiological limitations were while they were doing their sport. And one of the things that we really quickly learned is heart rate wasn't a great proxy for intensity during CrossFit just because of like changes in intra-abdominal pressure and breathing and bracing. heart rate trends were all over the place and it didn't always reflect the athlete's actual effort. So we found muscle oxygenation was a much more reliable tool for doing that. And that's really what started getting a lot of that testing kicked off because at the time in 2015, not that many people were using Nears devices. I think I bought the like thousandth Moxie device sold at that point. So no one really understood what the data meant. even more so in elite CrossFit competitors. So we're really building like the first data set of what the muscle physiology of like an elite hybrid sport athlete looks like. And that kind of turned into a 10 year obsession with doing that, I guess.
Tyson: That's a super cool story. Yeah, hundreds especially back in CrossFit. Like that was one of the things that like, I guess like interested me the most is like, these guys are thinking like this like that long ago in a sport where like... barely anyone was thinking like that. It was just like a work harder, like you just probably not doing enough volume. Like that's why you're not fit enough, right? I'm like, these guys are definitely doing it right. Back then when I guess your introduction to it in a CrossFit space, was this something that you were using on like a daily basis with athletes? Was it purely like a testing, I guess, piece of hardware that you had that like, gonna run, you know, these athletes through these different like physiological tests and then that's gonna help me sort of determine their training or was it more of like an auto regulatory tool, you've ⁓ in your book, is, I'll link to at the end of this podcast, there's a couple of different protocols in there, was that more of the use case for it?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, it's a little bit of both. So at the time I was using the Moxie almost daily in my own training just to really understand what the data looks like. And then anytime we had a high profile crossfit competitor come into town, ⁓ the owner of Training Think Tank, ⁓ me essentially have that and do whatever assessments I wanted with them. So anytime we would have someone travel in, we would get a few days of data on them. And then we had a few individuals that trained on site or would come in for like a two to training period and we would be able to get really high frequency data with them. So to answer your question, kind of all the above depending on the person.
Tyson: Yeah, fair. And testing these athletes, right, like going through some of the initial like testing that you would run with them with these NEARS devices. What were some of the I guess like common trends like was, were you able to almost like assess someone from a behavioral or even just like a visual standpoint and sort of predetermined what you thought their results were going to be? Like maybe watching the train watching the move and then did that like sort of correlate with your initial expectations? Or was there more of a I guess like a shock or like an imposing sort of result to what your initial viewpoint was.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, I'd say there were some trends where like in retrospect it would be kind of obvious. Like one of the things, particularly in like 2016 or so across it was a lot different of a sport than it is now. So this was coming off the era where there were a lot of games athletes who were just incredibly strong but also really stiff and not that great in terms of their energy system development. So these athletes tended to... almost like deterministically present with cardiovascular oxygen delivery limitations. And that's something where it got to the point that if I was testing, particularly like a male games athlete who tended to be like 220 pounds plus like sub 8 % body fat, like generally stiff before they even started the test, I'm like, okay, this could be cardiovascular issue. And like nine out of 10 times that was the case. I'd say that once you got to the like really top games level, we're talking like a top 10 competitor, that's when things always started to get a little bit more like nuanced just in terms of like being able to guess what their limitation is, but also them having like much more complex presentations. It typically wasn't so clear cut with these individuals. But across the board too, there were certain things that held like an every games athlete. All of them had like outstanding oxygen utilization and tissues. Like they could basically drop their oxygen saturation muscle down to like sub 10 % failure. It was to the point that I just assumed that that was normal in high level athletes. I was like, that's, you know, probably like really common. And then I had gone to an event in Seattle. where they were top sports scientists from like Nike, Red Bull, the Olympic Training Center, and a lot of them were working with athletes across a number of sports. And I just mentioned to someone offhand, was like, oh yeah, like, you know, all the elite athletes could get to like 5 % muscle oxygenation. One of the guys looked at me, like, what are you talking about? And I was like, yeah, I've never tested like a top athlete that hasn't gotten that low. And they're like, that's really unusual. So that's something that was very specific to CrossFit athletes. I later learned that. That's absolutely not the case in endurance athletes. It's just that I'd only ever really worked with CrossFitters at the time, so I didn't really know how abnormal their physiology was.
Tyson: Yeah, and what do you think the guess the primary influence on that is, is it the like the higher intensity style of training like for the, you know, sport that they're doing that's allowing them to do that?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, I think it's a few things. One, I think, you know, we're taking people that are much stronger than conventional endurance athletes and asking them to do endurance sports. They're going be able to contract with much harder force. Typically, their cardiovascular development isn't going to be as well developed as like a cyclist, for example. So it's a combination of all these factors. And I think now in modern day, that's a little bit less of the case. You do see games competitors who definitely look more like endurance athletes. But again, in 2016, we were coming off a period where no one was doing really long-ended endurance training. It looked a lot different at that time than the sport looks now.
Tyson: Yeah, definitely more of the muscle like mass monster like straight base where all of the poster boys like come from in those years, that's for sure. And I guess like to give some context to I guess what we've like briefly touched on in terms of defining those limitations. your book, you've obviously ⁓ them as like utilization, respiratory, delivery, limited athletes. So for coaches or athletes, like I said, are listening at home, how do you give like a brief overview of specifically what each of those sort of like categories entail and how you would sort of, I guess, yeah, define those limitations.
Evan Peikon: Yes, so before defining the limitations, I always start with just defining VO2 max because that's really the jumping off point. And then this will also get into like why improving these limitations might not make you a better crossfitter. So if we take VO2 max, it's a measurement most people are familiar with now. What that really represents is it's the maximum integrated capacity for your pulmonary system to uptake oxygen. So nice big breaths in your cardiovascular system to get that oxygen to your muscles and then your muscular system to utilize that oxygen.
Tyson: Mm-hmm.
Evan Peikon: Now, each one of those systems could be a rate limiting factor for your performance. So to give an example, if you're someone that's limited by your muscles ability to utilize oxygen, and you're training to improve your respiratory system's ability to uptake it and cardiovascular system to get it to the muscles, you're not going to get better because you're not training your own rate limiting factor. So we call someone a delivery limited athlete. What we're really saying is out of those three systems, they cannot get that oxygenated blood to their working muscles. If we called them a utilization-limited athlete, we're saying that they're able to get that oxygenated blood to their muscles, but they just can't utilize it in the working muscles. Then each of these limitations, they could get a little bit more granular. So we say utilization-limited could mean two or three separate things, like within that umbrella. But essentially, we're trying to give a broad stroke phenotype of what's limiting this person's. because that's going to tell us what types of protocols do we need to do to get them better. On the tail end of that though, this is where we need to consider, it's not always the limitation for CrossFit specifically, so the sport gets really complicated because you're like, what's their energetic limit or do they actually need to address this? What's their sport specific limitation? How does their energetic limitation impact how you would train the sport specific limitation and you start to get in these kind of wormholes that you need to... ⁓
Tyson: Definitely. Thinking of that too, when you say working a training think tank or with any of the athletes you have in the past, where are you sort of prioritizing, I guess, that energy system work alongside, say, just movement efficiency? Like, is this sort of, I guess, model of, you know, addressing these specific limitations, more specific to say, like higher level athletes, where they're potentially not expressing as many like, you know,
Evan Peikon: kind of figure out how to integrate all these things together.
Tyson: movement economy problems? Or is it still something that, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're working with more higher level athletes, but like, does it for a coach consuming this sort of information, is it still applicable to someone at an intermediate level, while they still are, you know, working through these movement economy issues? Or should that be more of a, I guess, a primary focus of that program?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, I'd say the one place where it's not going to be that relevant is to the complete beginner, it's where they haven't. development the as and efficient as possible.
Tyson: Yeah. And I guess to give some, I guess, examples of how we would sort of utilize these in protocols, one, we'll run through potentially some of the things that you've mentioned in paradigm shift, but is it primarily fact that you're using these devices in cyclical work because of the ease of measuring it and like, you know, once weight or like mix work starts to get introduced, ⁓ guess it provides like too many variables.
Evan Peikon: Yes, so that is part of it. A lot of the work that I did with those devices early on was with cyclic work. Again, yeah, just because it's the easiest to identify physiological limitations. And then even when we're talking about mixed work. It's like that data became really difficult to interpret, particularly if you're not like with the athlete the entire time when they're doing the test, it's really hard to differentiate like work periods versus rest periods or switching modalities. So a lot of that early on was just practicality. Also, you know, elite CrossFit athletes coming into town, they're to be here for two days. I know, you know, their coach is going to want to put them through a lot of sport specific testing or do work with them. So I'm like five access to that athlete for an hour. I'm typically going to do something cyclic with them, just on not, you know, trashing their joints. These, yeah, these days that did change for a while while I was at NOC. So we had worked with a lot of top cross-cut competitors, including a few podium athletes. And one of the things that we had done to make the data easier to interpret is we embedded accelerometers in our device. So traditionally when I'd use Moxie and someone would send me the data, I'd have to pester them and be like, what were you doing at five minutes and 30 seconds? What were you doing at 14 minutes?
Tyson: Punishment on here.
Evan Peikon: With NOx, because the device had accelerometers in it, it was capturing their movement data all the time. I didn't need to be with them. They would just send me the data and I would see both their muscle oxygenation, their movements, and I'm like, I know exactly when they're resting. Like, I know exactly when they're working. So it made it much easier to use that data both across it or if you're working with like a football player.
Tyson: Yeah, super cool. And so with these protocols in general, right, like, what is the I guess the foundational framework in you're building out say, a piece for a delivery limited athlete versus sort of that like respiratory limited athlete? What are the sort of things that you're trying to, I guess, achieve in that piece in terms of to help them, ⁓ know, with that limitation?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so in terms of training, this is where like really easy example to use is if we just take like 500 meter row repeats, let's say, pretend an eight minute 2k is fast and competitive. So we're not talking about a beginner athlete here. I'm just using that for easy math. So someone has an eight minute 2k, that's a two minute 500 meter split. So it's like everyone's on 500 meter repeat. So you go a 500 meter 2k pace, rest two minutes, repeat that over and over and over again. Typically what happens is the first few of them, not that much of a stress. Once you're like six to eight intervals deep, the last like 30 to 45 seconds are pretty gnarly. Overall, it's very like non-specific stimulus though. So when we're working with someone with a delivery or cardiovascular imitation, that's a really inefficient way to structure their energy system training. And the reason for this is that these individuals have a hard time overcoming what's called cardiac lag. So when you first, you know, do a 500 meter repeat at your 2K pace, what you'll find is that you start pulling and maybe you're getting some local muscle burning in your legs and then 10 to 15 seconds in, your heart rate starts elevating and maybe 30 % into the interval, you get to your peak heart rate for that period. For those cardiovascular-limited athletes, their ability to get their heart rate from baseline up to a peak tends to be slow. And by the time they do that, they've already deoxygenated their working muscles. So they essentially do that entire interval with their tissues and hypoxia. And that's the opposite of what these individuals want. They're trying to train their cardiovascular system and you're essentially shifting the stress towards their local muscles. So for those individuals, the best way to structure that interval is with like a gradual ramping pace structure. It's almost like a tempo run, but condensing it down to that for each interval. So if you were to do the 500 meter, you could say 100 meters at a two minute, 10 pace, 100 meters at 205, two minute, 155, 150. So you're essentially picking up speed across the interval and you do that each set. On paper, that's the exact same thing as 500 meter or two minute pace. So if you were to do the eight sets, you take the average pace, you're like, on paper, these are identical, but it's actually very different physiologic stimulus. And these are one of the things that we actually found using the Moxie devices early on with you. Put athletes through these and see how different the responses were. For the respiratory-limited athlete, you almost want to do the opposite. So for someone with a respiratory limitation, the more training you could do close to their VO2 peak, the better. Typically, even on a pretty hard interval, you don't actually reach a VO2 peak till like kind of the tail end of it. So you're actually accumulating very little volume there per interval. So if you wanted to get a lot of volume close to your VO2 peak, you would need really high step volumes. That's a huge problem for CrossFit athletes because they don't have the ability to just like layer on all that volume. They're doing 20 other protocols throughout the week. So in order to that volume, you actually flip that interval structure and you would have them go out really fast, almost like bad pacing fast, go out hot, something we know you can't possibly sustain and then trail off your pace over the course of the interval. So you're still Maintaining a really high respiratory rate, but you're able to keep working and essentially what you do is you deoxygenate the muscles fast But because you're slowing down your pace across the interval you're able to maintain that high percentage of the o2 peak Then guess what? You don't need to do a ton of sets, but you still get the stimulus that you need So a lot of what we do for these athletes when we identify their limitations, we're not doing these like crazy protocols We're just making these little minor tweaks to what they're already doing to shift the training more towards bias in there limitations and that even applies during the resistance training. There are minor tweaks that you might want to do if someone's respiratory-limited versus delivery-limited, for example.
Tyson: Yeah, awesome. And I guess when it comes to progressing those sort of intervals, what are the I know, for you yourself, sort of like jumping ahead here a little bit, but you mentioned a lot about like, you know, like the ethics centric, like programming, essentially, like you are writing the progressions for these not as a preconceived, all right, here is week one, week two, week three, so on, so forth. It's much more about like, how is this individual adapting to this specific piece? And therefore, that's going to dictate what the progression looks like. When you write these pieces and like I guess to isolate it to just make it easier from a use case standpoint, if we were to use the sort of like hot start intervals with that, a spiritual limit athlete, what are you looking for? Whether it's in the data, whether it's in like the, I guess the RPE or like the subjective notes that's then like, okay, we should, know, whether we're pushing the volume up, whether we're adjusting paces. Yeah, what's sort of shown that you're, I guess, happy with the adaptations that have occurred to then be able to progress that piece.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, for sure. So there's two parts to this. So first is like when we talk about progressive overload, lot of times we think about it like you progressively overload to drive an adaptation. So it's like every week if you were doing like five by five back squats, you add more load to the bar so you could get stronger. The first thing that I always say is it's not the right way to think about it. If you were able to add load to the bar, it's because you have already gotten stronger. You're not doing that to get stronger. So that's kind of the first pillar of like how I design training is I make things really repetitive a lot of times, both because it's easier to track things, but also I think there's really good argument that let's say you're doing like five hard start intervals last week and you did it and this week you come in and let's say we wanted to do like an intensity progression, for example. So we give that to you and let's say this is based on the pace and I'm like, okay, I want you to go a little bit faster in the structure. And if you're able to do it, I'm like, sweet, you adapted from last week. Let's keep doing this until you can't get better. The one caveat is I want you to get better performance without just crushing yourself more. Because you could always e-cap more performance just by going harder. So a lot of times, I'll use physiologic data to control the stress and make sure that we're actually inducing a similar amount of stress to your body week to week physiologically, but your performance is getting better. once we get to the point that we're just going the same protocol week after week, and you either have to stress your body much more to get your performance better, or you're just not able to get your performance better anymore, that's where I would start to say, okay, is this just simply like we need to give you more volume for you to adapt? Do we think it's just like we need another week of this before you could kind of like overshoot? Or is there something more fundamental like, okay, you've essentially hit a point where you have a new limitation that we need to address. If it's that last case, that's where I'll think like, okay, what do I think the reason why you're not getting better on this protocol is anymore? And then we'll kind of make a hypothesis and we'll say, okay, we're gonna swap that new thing into your training in place of what you've been doing. Sometimes that could be like a one for one swap. Other times, like you need to kind of tweak the training week to accommodate that new change. And then we'll run that new protocol. And then a lot of times what I'll do is, after we run that through exhaustion, we'll put you back to the previous protocol that you stopped progressing on and see if you can now progress on that while keeping the physiologic stress the more and we're like, okay, sweet. Now what we were doing, like we got you that additional runway for progression. So that's where a lot of when I'm working with athletes, they'll ask like, ⁓ what's the plan for the cycle? Like, where are we going with this? And I'm like, I absolutely no idea. Like we're just gonna have you, you know, obviously the starting structure has to make sense. but it's like every week in forms of the next week is gonna be. Sometimes we're repeating things, sometimes we're subbing things in and out. And if you think about all the different things that across the athletes program, constantly doing that and having to move things around and accommodate, the program ends up looking fairly like week to week or in subsequent weeks, but none of it was really pre-planned. It's kind of just like a natural progression of seeing how things go. ⁓
Tyson: Yeah, I love that thought process like that. Essentially the results of one week of dictating the week ahead and it's like there's almost like a like an honest sort of transparency to it to be like, you know, like the trajectory of this is almost decided by you. More so right like that we're essentially just taking feedback, we're taking results and that's dictating it and you know, it's not as I guess, sexy or as appealing as like the the eight week cycle to get you know, X result, but I think there's just a lot more truth in it. When you're talking about using the physiological data to essentially barriers on it, are you referring more so to like the intervals where, you know, if we're not, you know, re oxygenating up to a certain point that, you know, you're sort of terminating the work there to sort of stop them from just like accumulating, you know, excess amount of volume or fatigue in that piece.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, it could be that or it could even be like we don't need to use muscle oxygenation for this, but like let's say we're using muscle oxygenation and for like a really easy example, let's say you're doing like a four by four like view to mass protocols, like four minutes really hard, four minutes rest and do that four times. So let's say the first week you do that, you deoxygenate from 60 % oxygen saturation in your muscle down to 30 % and you're kind of holding that 30 % in the muscle the whole time. So let's say each week we're trying to increase your wattage a bit. And I see the first week we're at like 325 watts. You nail it. The second week we go up to like 335 and I'll look and see like, is your muscle oxygenation matching the previous week? If so, it's like your physiology is being like perturbed or disturbed to the same degree, but we eeked out some more performance. If say like three or four weeks in, we bump you up to like 350 watts and now you're deoxygenating down to 20%. I'm like, that's not progress on paper. Yes, your performance is better, but it's only better because we're actually stressing your body more. So did you progress or you just working harder? Like you're probably just working harder. So that's one of the ways that I would just kind of put like a check engine light on that to make sure that, you know, instead of saying like, ⁓ Tyson's performance got better. Let's push them again next week. And then we're just digging you in a hole and you exhaust your own wife of progression. It's making sure that we're never like,
Tyson: going hot up.
Evan Peikon: pushing further than we want to. And this is really because we're CrossFit athletes. It's like we want to get better at so many different things that a lot of the reasons why people don't get better at CrossFit is they're just tapping their body on everything and they're exhausting their potential and room for progress too fast.
Tyson: Mm. Man, loving this so far. When we're talking about like the, we're talking about near sensors, right? And like, for those of you who don't understand, would know like some of the people at the gym would be familiar with it because we have like, trained reds and stuff like that there, but these aren't, definitely way more, I accessible nowadays than they had been ⁓ when were the first using them. But ⁓ one the things that you mentioned just in email was the fact that you, you know, can see even just over the next year, the increase in accessibility to this sort of tech, right? So obviously these sort of protocols that we're talking about now that may not be something that just the standard sort of like affiliate member or person who's trying to like improve their training is going to be able to just go out and grab one. could, they're still like, I don't know, they're expensive just to just buy a few, right? But. How do you see that sort of technology integrating to be more accessible? What level do you sort of see it being used at? Is it something where it's almost going to be used to, you know, just people who are improving their like running through the week? Is it going to be something that's most affiliate members are going to be utilizing like in the form of a watch or a device that one of these bigger tech companies are going to be able to bring to mass market?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, I think it's definitely the latter. If you think about heart rate monitoring, in the early 2000s, heart rate monitoring wasn't that popular. It's like the people that were really into endurance sports used it, then once Apple Watches and whoops and oar rings put heart rate monitors on your wrist and your finger, it's like now everyone measures their heart rate. It's just ubiquitous. But it wasn't clear that that was going be the case 10, 15 years ago. When I first started working with CrossFit athletes, it was actually really hard to get them to buy a heart rate monitor and use that to track their training hours. What are you talking about heart rate monitoring? It's really similar with muscle oxygenation. Like that started as something that was really niche. When I first got into this again, only a few thousand devices had been sold. So if you think about the total number of people in the world that were using that, it was a really small number that started to pick up over the past few years. But recently we had the first real indication of this is potentially going to become mainstream. Loop recently filed the patents on the use of muscle oxygenation potentially as a new sensor they're going to spin out. Garmin also just filed a trademark on a new use for muscle oxygenation for like a muscle battery feature that they're going to release. So the fact that you see two of the biggest wearable companies in the world filing trademarks and patents on muscle oxygenation sensing tends to suggest that this is going to go from being like a niche thing where, you know, we have at this point maybe tens of thousands of
Tyson: Yeah.
Evan Peikon: people in the world using this technology to something that might actually end up on millions of people's bodies. And once that happens, and these companies are able to generate that much user data, you're going be able to automate a lot of the analysis and make it really like, and easy to use the same way heart rate is. It's just set up until this point, like, not enough people really wore these sensors for us to be able to automate all of this and turn it into something, you know. super easy that you can put it on the average affiliate number.
Tyson: Yeah, fair. And like for these companies, what's the biggest bottleneck to getting it to mass markets? Is just being able to produce it at like a cost effective means? Is that something that was well aware? you know, obviously, for people running, like if they're so used to wearing a woop, is it the fact that there's going to have to be like multiple sensors involved now and figuring out how to actually make that something that's like easy for the user to utilize?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so the cost efficiency, I don't think that's a problem. think these devices could already be produced in a pretty cost-friendly way. It's just that if you think about the companies that have commercialized this technology up until now, they're not selling millions of these units. So inherently, they need to be more expensive to justify the cost of doing the research and development to build these sensors. If you're a whoop, though, you could probably get this relatively cheap. I think the biggest challenge for them is just going be getting people accustomed sensors on their body. Like what makes something like a whoop so easy to use is that you don't take it off. They even essentially made a charging pod that like docks onto your wrists so you never need to take the device off. So it's going to be like one, getting people to wear two devices, getting people to become accustomed to like putting something on their leg while they're exercising. It's kind of like heart rate monitoring 10 years ago. of people used it, but. Ultimately, like was a little clunky for a while and now that heart rate monitors are typically on the wrist or finger and you never need to think about it. It's obviously a lot easier. But know, these are companies with a lot of money and resources. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with something pretty slick.
Tyson: A lot of money. Yeah, no, I'm excited to see how it goes in the future, especially if it makes it more accessible for me to be able to buy them without being so expensive. Like that'd be unreal if some of these like big guys get a hold of it and bring it to sort of mass market. I wanna sort of like change gears a little bit. I have, it's funny, like getting you on here. I'm like, I've got so many like selfish questions that I wanna ask. it's like, of the things that like I've heard you talk about, which... I want you to like expand a little bit more on was talking about like intramuscular coordination and essentially like high level athletes. One of the adaptations that they've essentially accrued is like the ability for their contract relax time to come down like their ability to relax a muscle being, you know, at a much faster rate than say, you know, their ability to contract the muscle, would you be able to sort of expand on that and even more so I guess? talk about how that's a trainable adaption and how you would even go about improving something along those lines.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, this is kind of one of those overlooked aspects of performance is both how quickly you could contract your muscle and how quickly you could relax your muscle between contractions. Really, as you go from like an intermediate to advanced to elite athlete, there's actually not that much of a difference in the speed of muscle contraction. But the more elite the athlete is, the faster they can relax the muscle between contractions. Why does that become important? Well, when you contract the muscle, the muscle utilizes oxygen. The faster you could relax the muscle, the faster you could release that tension, let blood flow back in, and reoxygenate the tissue. So you're essentially supplying oxygen at a faster rate between contractions. It allows you to maintain that high level of work for a longer period of time. This is something particularly in CrossFit. a big differentiator, but it's a really hard thing to train because a lot of this comes down to movement economy. If you think of like an elite marathon runner's performance, once someone's like pretty deep into their career and they're in their 30s, maybe even early 40s, a lot of the improvements that they're making year to year aren't that their VO2 max is getting higher, they're getting substantially stronger, it's that they're becoming progressively more efficient. But if you think about what they're training is they're doing the same activity every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and they're still improving in their movement economy. They'll take any single movement that a CrossFit athlete's doing. They've almost like zero chance they've accumulated enough volume that they've actually tapped out their ability to improve their economy. So it's one of those things that's really hard quality to train these athletes. Some people are naturally much more coordinated and could relax a lot faster. That's something that we could see with some of these technologies actually. But it's like, how do we best train that? The honest answer is, I don't know. Aside from volume, this is where there could be a potential application for things like flywheel-based training, where you literally have to relax the muscles much faster. Otherwise, it becomes very clunky, almost painful movements. But not super accessible. So it's a tricky one.
Tyson: Yeah, no, that should be interesting. And it's like, is that something that you find, I don't know if people do come into CrossFit that, you know, if they've come from, you know, weightlifting, where they've done 4 million snatches with a broomstick or some sort of like endurance background where they have been able to accumulate that volume that that is something that they may have adapted to prior to coming across to something like CrossFit and being able to build build the efficiency in that, you know, intramuscular coordination.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, yeah, I've seen it more in people that come from like endurance-based sports or even like soccer, whatever one that's not some American call football. Like these athletes tend to do much better at this. I've actually seen people that come from weightlifting or power lifting backgrounds. It tends to be more of a liability in this regard because yes, they have accumulated a ton of volume, but they've accumulated a ton of volume doing like single or like a small number of maximal force contractions, which is really the opposite of what you would want to do if you're a CrossFit athlete. You want to contract with as little force as you need to move the weight. So yeah, it does seem to be something that people with endurance sport backgrounds excel at much more, but keep in mind that's also very muscle specific. So it doesn't tend to help the upper body and like all of the higher rep movements that you'd have to do there.
Tyson: Now on to my next my next sort of selfish question as well as like, in the obviously we've spoken a little bit about like, ⁓ you know, training the respiratory limited athlete and sort of like touch on a protocol to utilize that. How do people distinguish between I guess talking about that as a limitation and then talk about manipulation of breath, right? When people talk about ⁓ co2 tolerance, and just like breath work in general, how is that, you know, how would you I guess vary ⁓ that of talking about like, we're spiritual training versus like what you're talking about with the actual working on that limitation from an energy system perspective.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, for sure. So a lot of these breath manipulation protocols really either don't help to address respiratory limitation or they actually like perpetuate respiratory limitation, particularly in CrossFit athletes. If someone's doing high intensity training regularly, there's a very small chance that they actually have poor CO2 tolerance. So what ends up happening is when you take a CrossFit athlete who's already training with really high intensity, they're being exposed to high levels of CO2 frequently, and you have them do breath retention protocols, you actually desensitize them to CO2 buildup. So this is where you end up with athletes that hypoventilate, and they don't breathe enough, and that becomes an issue in and of itself. But in terms of more traditional respiratory limitation, we're talking about... you know, not someone that's respiratory limited because they really poor posture, but someone who like their diaphragm muscle literally cannot sustain like the high force contractions. The way that you train this is really like improving the fatigue resistance of their diaphragm. So, you know, there are ways to isolate this, but in terms of like training loads, it's breathing with really high respiratory frequencies with good like inspiratory volume and then like full exhales. And then figuring out how to accumulate, like a lot of poly doing that without essentially triggering the reflex where you're to just shove the blood into your respiratory muscles at the expense of like arm and leg blood flow, which basically means that you have to stop exercising and you don't actually end up draining that.
Tyson: Are you familiar with like isocaptic and breathe way better? Is that something kind of in your book, like you talk about like spirometers and like power breath is like using like the breathe way better or a device similar to ever something that you've guess explored or see relevance to.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so like back in the day at TTT, we had used like an earlier version of that device, something similar called the Spire Tiger. They stopped making these at least 10 years ago. They were also really expensive for no clear reason. Yeah, that was something that we used a lot of essentially that would allow someone to train their diaphragm without chomping blood away from their arms or to the extent that they did it didn't really matter anyway because they were training their diaphragm in isolation. We have used that quite a bit. The reason why we didn't end up recommending that broadly is you do really open up the risk of lower back injuries in CrossFit athletes when people are doing a lot of work with these devices, but they are really effective in reality.
Tyson: Yeah, okay, interesting. I guess I'll go into like one of the other sort of talks that I've had. We've touched on. VO2 max previously, and I know like whenever, especially even in CrossFit, it's one of those things when people talk about VO2 max, it's like, right, well, the higher VO2 max that I have, obviously that just will show that I'm a better athlete. And if I fixate on improving this like metric, which becomes like less tangible in a sport like CrossFit, but you've used examples in even like more isolated, like endurance sports to show that people with the highest VO2 max are not always the people. that are winning these events, right? So I guess what value is there in sort of like understanding, I guess, what VO2 max is versus what efficiency is and how those two can actually almost like contradict ⁓ ⁓ high level.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so starting with enduring sports, that's one of those things that if you were to take a really huge population of people like someone that's barely trained up to like elite marathon runners, what you would see is that VO2 max is really strongly correlated with running performance. Like no one's going to argue with that. If you have someone with VO2 max of 35 and someone with VO2 max of 75, that second person has always been winning a race. But then if you were to take a like a weak group of runners, who have similar VO2 maxes, maybe between 65 and 80, VO2 max is a horrible predictor performance. Because at that point, there's so many other factors, like your critical speed, your economy, they're going to end up influencing your abilities. Somewhere, when we come into CrossFit, it's like, yeah, if you have someone who is really low VO2 max, like they're really weak, and then someone who's really strong and have VO2 max, they're obviously going to be better off. But the reason why it's a poor predictor performance in CrossFit is because there so many other things that are going to influence your performance. Let's take an ex-Ironman triathlete comes into CrossFit and they view to max of 75 which is probably higher than 85 % of games athletes. Is that person going to do really well in that kind of not because they're weak. It's like their strength prohibits them from actually using the capacity that they have. So the way that I think about it is VO2 max is like an upper ceiling of your performance in a sport like CrossFit. But then the lower ceiling is like all of your sport specific qualities, your strength, your skill, like your pacing. So we could imagine two scenarios. One is where you have a really high ceiling, like you're an ex endurance athlete, but you're weak. So your second ceiling is really low. If you want to get better at CrossFit. you're be wasting your time trying to improve your VO2 max. Like you need to raise that lower ceiling and get it to meet your potential by improving all the sport specific qualities. On the other hand, particularly ⁓ if they were regional athletes, like a lot of like ex-regional athletes, they would come to TTT, we would put them through testing and you're like, they had kind of really lower intermediate VO2 maxes but they were. really strong, really good at the sport, so they did well in the Open, but you're like, for those people to get better, it's like no amount of Metcon strength work, skill work is gonna get them better because their VO2 max is shit. So it's like, you need to raise that ceiling and then you could raise the sport specific. So it's always identifying like, which of these two things do you need to raise? Is it your like potential or your sport specific qualities? And then you could use that to prioritize like, which of these things do you actually train?
Tyson: definitely.
Evan Peikon: I had certain CrossFit athletes that I worked with where I'm like, we never did energy system training, just like pure cyclic work. Like we were always working on sports specific work, even some of them like at a games level, because they just came in with such high VO2 maxes already. Then I had other people where like the vast majority of their training was cyclic, because anytime they would start doing some sports specific work, they would so quickly close that gap and like realize their potential that it was just always a game of like,
Tyson: Hmm.
Evan Peikon: making the engine bigger so could actually get them somewhere.
Tyson: It's a great lens to look like look at it through with that like in mind, how are you I guess thinking about what the weekly structure for someone looks like, especially talking about those two variables between like people who doing a lot of sports specific work versus more of that like energy system work? Do you have I guess sort of like a system or framework that you look at designing the day versus the week, I guess to ensure that I know without you know, talking about like concurrent training to be like, I'm going to make sure there's not too much interference between the type of adaptations that I'm looking to get in these sort of like energy system versus the sport specific sessions.
Evan Peikon: Yeah. for sure. So starting with someone that let's say like ⁓ earlier stage intermediate can't handle a lot of volume has like a nine to five jobs. So like more limited training. This is where for those individuals, the way that I would tend to structure week is essentially if you have one day and maybe on this day, they're doing a lot of high like neural demand work, absolute strength training. Then the next day they might do something with like. much higher metabolic demand, typically trying to like improve their limiter. And then if you're going to say like the third day, we're going to do things that, you know, are not super stressful in either of those regards, maybe more of their like assistance work, aerobic support work, movement work, and kind of like flow through that type of structure. The more elite someone is, the more we end up condensing that to short periods of time. So if I were to take a games athlete, that structure might be there like morning, afternoon, PM session. So within a day, we might be using that state in logic where in the morning they're doing like their heavier strength training afternoon, we might be doing some like sports specific work or limiter based training, like evening might be more support work. And it wouldn't mean that we're necessarily following that exact logic each day. This is where like the second day may be more focused on like, you know, something that needs to be prioritized heavily, but that's kind of a general framework that I'm using. Oftentimes where I end up breaking from that though, it's really like when I first started. to put together someone's training program, literally write down what is like every single thing we need to train for this person that we could possibly imagine. And then I'll essentially take like a week A and a week B and I'll find things that are kind of overlapping. So if we're like, oh, this athlete needs to improve their like front squat strength, they also need to improve their back squat. I'm like, whoa, one of those goes in the A week, one of those goes in the B week. Like they're redundant. So we kind of like separate out things redundant and we're ready. Like, okay, one of these is going to go in one week. One's going to go on the other. And then within each of those weeks, we kind of just move things around in a way that allows us to like maximize training quality, like to the highest extent we can. And that ends up essentially being the person's training split. And then again, like weeks a week, we're essentially just making little tweaks and moving things around as needed based on like what's coming in and out of the rotation. And then depending on person's limiters, we might have some other considerations. So if we had a respiratory-limited athlete, and I'm like, I know I'm going to want to do something that's really going to fatigue their diaphragm, I'm like, I'm not going to have them do something with really heavy spinal load in the next day because the diaphragm's a spinal-stabilizer. That's just asking to blow their lower back out. So you end up having to make some of those changes that aren't necessarily like,
Tyson: Yeah, asking for entry.
Evan Peikon: informed by like metapol of demand or like neural demand you're like it's kind of like i don't want to hurt someone across their training so you have those kinds of considerations
Tyson: Yeah. Yeah, and like, so that 14 day approach, like with the splits, right? Like, I know that's obviously like quite common practice more so for just sure that the athletes touching on, you know, so many of the different things that are required just in the sport. ⁓ did you look at that as well, just from like an adaptation, like recovery framework, like not everything's just in this like one week cycle, or is it more like, ⁓ need to spread. enough movements over the course of these two weeks. And so like, rather than it being like a four week block where they're only doing the back squat, I want them to be able to back squat and front squat like you said, and that alternating framework just allowed that to be the case.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, it was really the latter just allowing like high exposure some more things because this is one of those things where I've crossed out at least before I'd adopted those rotating splits. You'd have to make these decisions. You're okay, this is an athlete that needs to improve their squat strength. Either we're gonna have them like this, gonna be like a back squat block and then the next block is gonna be a front squat and you're like, well, damn, then they're going like four to six weeks without touching the movement. Or you're like, well, now they're back squatting front squat every week and then you're like, well, What if also need to improve their deadlift? You're just like creating unnecessary constraints. Where for a CrossFit athlete specifically, that A-week, B-week split, it just allows exposures of so many different things that within a two-week period you could touch on so many more qualities.
Tyson: Yeah, I love that. And to sort of keep going down like I guess the the programming talk as well. So the LBP model like the limited bridge performance model, something that you talk on lot in the book as well ⁓ like a whole chapter. How is the I guess like the energy system training varying in those circumstances, right? So talking about the protocol that we spoke about at the start, just with like the cyclical rowing work, is that something that like maintains consistent across all of those phases or things are starting to look very different where maybe hey, like there's just less monitored training in sort of a performance phase. And a lot of that is like more isolated to that sort of like limited bridge phase.
Evan Peikon: Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely the latter. So what the pure limitation based training protocols are really going to go more in that limiter and bridge phase. Once we get to performance phase, it's like, I'm not, I'm not so concerned about raising someone's like ceiling for performance at that point. I'm like, I just want you to eke out everything you can to actually perform. That said, it's not like that cut and dry that it's like, we never do sport specific work in a limiter phase. We never train limiters. performance phase. The way that I think about this is like dials that you're up and down. So it's like in all three of those phases, like in the limiter phase, you're also doing bridge and performance work and performance phase, you're doing everything. It's just like, where's the highest contribution of volume coming from? So like a limiter phase, I might have a CrossFit athlete only like really doing the sport like once a week, once every other week. And by really doing the sport, I mean like just a straight up like open style metcon or a big game style metcon.
Tyson: it up.
Evan Peikon: Then in a performance phase, it might be doing limiter support work once a week, once every other week, just enough volume that they're not regressing and actually lowering their ceiling for performance, but not enough that they're making any meaningful progress in those things.
Tyson: Yeah. And with those, I guess, like in the. performance for actually, no, that's how change the direction a little bit. We've spoken a fair bit about like, NIS sort of like devices, but what other I guess tech have you used, I guess throughout your career that, you know, maybe you don't speak as much on like in this book, like is VBT something that you've sort of utilized? Like is, do you still use your like muscle oxygen devices in resistance training and strength training? Or do you sort of use like a multiple devices? Like you use VBT or these other sort of like auto regulatory devices as well.
Evan Peikon: so yeah, I've used VBT, ⁓ used DMG, like metabolic analysis, kind of like every sensor that you could imagine we've used, even at Training Think Tank, we were like repurposing sensors that weren't meant for use on humans. like, using for some of these things, I'd say these days, I primarily instead of working with athletes one on one, I typically work with like organizations and teams. So a lot of it is like, what do you guys already have access to? ⁓ get the most out of that or if I'm working with like professional climbers or elite climbers, muscle oxygenation is like really the only thing that makes sense for them in their sport. So it's either a combination like when you have let's get the most out of it or like what do I think is going to benefit you most and to the extent that someone has the resources to actually get those things like let's go for it if not we'll just do our best to know kind of work without it.
Tyson: Yeah, fair. When it comes to like utilizing the nears in like some of the teams and stuff that you've worked with, or even athletes that you worked with, has there ever been a I guess, like a case study for you where there was like an individual that sort of, I guess, went against a lot of the preconceived notions that you'd had up to a specific point that like really changed how you thought about something that maybe like, I don't know, was like a key part of, you know, writing the book or like the framework that you've thought of.
Evan Peikon: That's a good question. Yeah, I'd say yes, but maybe not in like the most obvious way. particularly working with CrossFit athletes, this is where for so many years, particularly like let's say 2016 to 2018, like we had put so many athletes through testing, we had started to like get patterns that were like. so clear that a lot of times like within five minutes of the test, like, know exactly what this person's limit is going to be. And I'll also guess where exactly they're going to fail on the test. One of the things that we started to see though, is like as that sport started to progress in the training started to like get so much more varied, things started to become like a lot less deterministic with an athlete coming in that you'd be like, okay, this person's like really jacked, like, you know, they might look a little bit stiff and then you test them and you're like, a respiratory limitation on what is going on. We started to see some weird things like that over time to where it became much harder to profile an athlete just from superficial characteristics or just from looking at their training data. So that was kind of an unexpected thing. I can't think of any cases though where it was just something like totally left field where you're like, this even a human that I'm looking at right now?
Tyson: Yeah. Mm-hmm. And do you think that that sort of change come from maybe as like more people entered the sport that there was just like different profiles of athletes or more so just the actual change in the way that the sport was structured that changed their training and then that sort of changed the results?
Evan Peikon: I think a little bit of both, obviously the training varied. think it's also like a lot more talent coming into the sport. Of course, like anyone who is going to the games in 2015, 2016, like these are really high caliber athletes, but by no means were these people that were like tapping the potential of what the sport would become. If you were to take Rich Groening at his prime and stick him into the games right now, he probably wouldn't be winning the games. It's not that he wasn't an amazing athlete, it's just that money's come into the sport, the reach of the sport's gotten better, so you're dealing with a completely different caliber of athlete than you were in those days, so think that's a big part of it as well.
Tyson: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that's a super exciting like thing as well as just as the sport grows, more money comes into it just to sort of see, I guess what that potential is. How many of the bigger training camps do you think are utilizing the same like you at training think tank obviously doing all of this stuff when you were there years and years ago? Is this something that you have like insight into like a lot of these other training camps of sort of following suit and utilizing the same sort of systems that you guys were back then? Or was that something maybe more unique to you and then maybe like higher end specific sports, like when you're talking about climbing or if you were working with some of the bigger like collegiate or like professional teams that they're more sports science based that they're like, yeah, we're using a lot of this or can you see it? Yeah, in the CrossFit space.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so the ones like also kind of starting like 2016 or so, so training thing, I think was the first big camp and cross that he used it. And then I know within about a year or so that training thing, things started like publicly talking about, know OPEC said shortly like followed suit and started integrating it as well. From there for a few years, it was really just those two and then kind of like random athletes scattered. I'd say in the last two to three years though, I can't be specific on this just because working with these groups and stopping public, but I can say a lot of the top CrossFit Games competitors and they're kind of like home camp groups have been using this technology. It's just none of them were really talking about it publicly. But again, I've worked with multiple podium athletes this technology and none of them are people that use.
Tyson: Mm-hmm.
Evan Peikon: know that by following them on social media, for example.
Tyson: Yeah, sort of to go down to the final route as well, like we obviously mentioned like Knox being the hardware, software company you're involved in developing. You left. I guess coaching and like being very involved in sort of like, guess, the interpersonal side of things to sort of go and pursue that. What was I guess the main motivation behind that? Did you see like a gap in the market? Was it not an opportunity that was like that arise? Or was it something where you're like, feel like I've fulfilled sort of what I wanted to get out of you know, the coaching side of things and now I want to take everything that I've learned and sort of use that to develop something that's, you know, whether it's like just more scalable or something that you're just more passionate about at the time.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so kind of all the above. So even while I was actively coaching, it's like really my favorite thing to do was like put athletes who testing, like analyze the data. It was always much more of that. And training think tank was awesome for that because we had so many like elite athletes coming on site. So it was just kind of like the default physiologists that got to do all that work. then during COVID, obviously like that shut a lot of things down. So it stopped really being able to do physiologic testing on athletes, started getting more involved with like working with some of these technologies just in like a remote capacity and then ended up getting an opportunity to start NOC. So it was one of those things like I'd been coaching for years at that point. I'd kind of like checked off my bucket list items. I've worked with X Meta Games athletes, like I've worked with like special operations groups, pair support teams. And I was kind of like, I know what this is like I could definitely do this longer and maybe try to get like further along in my career, but I was kind of satisfied. I'm like, I don't really want to be like the best in the world at doing this thing. I just kind of wanted to see what it's like at all these different levels and in all these different organizations. It was a good time to jump over. It's like the technology development side. It was a cool opportunity. It gave me access to a lot of these different organizations to see how they were doing things. Yeah, I think it was just kind of right place, right time.
Tyson: Fair. And with the, I guess, the nitric oxide component to it as well, right? Like this is something that's not really available in many of the other, or like, don't think any of the other sort of devices. Was that something that you, I guess, sort of wanted to integrate? Or was that someone on the team that you were like, yeah, I could definitely see a lot of value in, you know, adding this sort of measurement.
Evan Peikon: Yes, so that really came from the company in offices, like it became known working with, like, athletes. The company was actually started intended as a, like, exercises medicine product for vascular dementia. So that's why it had that measurement in there. And then in the process of looking to, like, how do we build and commercialize this technology for medical applications? One of the things that you realize is you're like, Whoa, it's going to be a lot of money before we can get this approved by the FDA. It's gonna be a lot of years before we actually put this on someone and we need to make money and like figure out how to sustain this company in the short term. So that's where we ended out essentially spinning the company into what it became, which was more of like a sports technology. And that metric oxide measurement kind of came along for the ride as we did that, where we already developed a technology to do it. Let's introduce this in sports and see what you could do with it.
Tyson: Yeah, cool. And I guess to, I guess sort of bring it home, and this could be a bit of a long-winded topic, but I'm still sort of respectful of your time as well. So if there was, you know, there's a CrossFit coach in the space that's listened to this, they've bought your book, they've like, yep, I'm gonna get a hold of Inez. device, whatever brand that may be and start to incorporate it with some of the athletes that I work with in a one on one basis. What are the sort of protocols that you think people are going to find the most value in, in terms of like, all right, you start off by using it as a, you know, a diagnosis tool, and then, you know, start to work in these sort of protocols, where do you think people are going to find the most value in sort of utilizing these tools in that CrossFit space specifically?
Evan Peikon: Yeah, so early on I would start really simple. do two things. One would be just stick the device on your athletes and just see what happens. Like don't make decisions based on it. Just see, you know, how their body responds to different types of protocols. You might see for one athlete, you're like, oh, that's really interesting when they back squat, they could deoxygenate their tissues really well. But when they're cycling, they can't. Like why is that? Another athlete might see the opposite pattern. So just start noticing these things and seeing like, does it track with anything else you know about these individuals? Then I would start thinking of like the simplest assessments that you could do that aren't disruptive to people's training. Like stick that in a lot of different athletes training and see like, you know, wow, these five people that I have that are kind of hard gainers have trouble gaining muscle mass. You're like, they all like respond similar on this test. These other people have a completely different response. So a lot of it's just pattern matching early on and trying to understand like, why do some people respond one way, some people respond to the other. Once you get pretty comfortable with that, that's where you could start designing assessments. And there's a lot of resources available already, like how you use this to auto-regulate training, like guide efforts on energy system training. But any time you're introducing a new technology, ⁓ observe and see what's coming out from it. I think that's really the easiest way to get started. ⁓
Tyson: get into it and just start exploring, strap it on people and see what you can correlate and build from there. I love that man. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it so much. Appreciate you reaching out to come on board and hopefully there's definitely some valuables and takeaways from this.
Evan Peikon: Yeah, thank you again. Appreciate you having me on.
Tyson: man. I'll start recording here. Man it's a crazy, in my head I'm like this