Mike Ricci (00:01.55)
Hi, Coach Mike Ricci here with Trust the Process podcast with Strength Coach Chris Lee today. Chris, how are you doing?

Chris Lee (00:07.387)
I'm pretty good man, how you doing?

Mike Ricci (00:08.982)
Good. Chris is a big time strength coach here in Boulder. He coaches a lot of pros, Olympians, I mean, professional triathletes. I mean, a gamut of people he, he trains, I mean, it would take us all day to go through all of them, I'm sure. Um, but you walk into his gym and he's got signed this and signed that on the walls. Pretty impressive. Um, Chris, how did you get into strength training? What was the impetus for that?

Chris Lee (00:21.801)
Yeah.

Chris Lee (00:30.235)
Then I started strength training when I was swimming in college and I realized I wasn't really getting faster and we weren't doing anything. So then I went and worked out with the football team. I'm like, those guys are strong. I'll work out with them. Then I realized the transfer wasn't quite there to my specific sport. So I took it upon myself. I was a captain of my swim team in college and started designing our strength and conditioning program for our team and then took that on. So

studied exercise physiology, and then became a strength coach after.

Mike Ricci (01:03.758)
Wow, that is amazing. I didn't know that story. That's really awesome. Chris has helped me personally with my strength training. I've referred some athletes to him. He does a great job. I will say that the first time I walked into your gym and you said to me, I'm gonna teach you what a hip bridge is, a real hip bridge. And I thought, well, I know how to do a hip bridge. I've known hip bridge since I was 20. Great. And he puts me on the box, put my shoulders in the box and I've got a pushup from the floor and my hamstrings given out. My glutes are nowhere to be found.

Chris Lee (01:05.872)
Yeah.

Mike Ricci (01:30.498)
And he wanted me to do 15. I think I did eight or nine. And I'm like, uncle, uncle help. So he's like, all right, we got something to work on. This is great. And you gotta realize with strength training, when you find those weaknesses, I get happy when I find those weaknesses because I'm like, man, I can get faster at this, right? The other one you've given me, which I love is, you know, when you put your knee up on the bench and you gotta bring, you know, the bottom knee up. And I forget the name of that right this second. Copenhagen's, right? My kids hate them, but I make them do them.

Chris Lee (01:55.251)
Mmm, Copenhagen planks. Love those.

Mike Ricci (01:59.718)
And now I can bang out three sets of 15 like nothing. And I've gone to extending my ankle onto the bench now and doing them. And I'm like, all right, this is getting somewhere. So where did you come up with all these creative exercises? Is it just that you've researched this stuff? I know you follow quite a few strength coaches, but give me a little bit about your philosophy and who you follow and what you like to see from athletes that come in the gym.

Chris Lee (02:21.415)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think philosophy wise, there's some great foundational fundamental people out there that have set the stage. There's the Mike Boyles of the world. He's a great strength coach. Greg Cook is another one. Jade Descheri when it comes to the running and everything running related. And then there's been a lot of research and I've had some amazing mentors through the years, people that are just way too smart for their own good.

But then it's a lot about trial, error, application, research, test, retest. And I think that's where there's a difference between having certifications and then having the time to apply those, the knowledge you've gained until you've realized certain things. For me, working with so many athletes, having done hundreds and hundreds of assessments and then piecing together the data and being like, wow.

Everyone sucks at Copenhagen planks. We need to make sure we do these, right? So it's been a fun years and years and hundreds of pieces of assessment data to piece together and figure out what works best for endurance athletes.

Mike Ricci (03:34.806)
Yeah, I love that. I think you're right. And you know, same, same on my side, you know, coaching endurance athletes for so long, like you know, I know the formula, right? And when I see a weak spot in somebody, I'm like, Oh, they need more VO2, they need more threshold, they need more long stuff, whatever it is. I love when athletes come to me. And, you know, they've been racing and they go do a four hour ride, and they can do a two hour run the next day. Like, I think I don't think my endurance is very good. I'm like, I don't think it's your endurance. It could be your muscular endurance, you can't hold a certain

Chris Lee (03:58.279)
Hahaha

Oh yeah!

Mike Ricci (04:02.542)
hour for four hours, but it's certainly not your endurance, right? And it just kind of makes me chuckle that, um, as much as we know, as much information is out there, people are, you know, people still don't understand like how important strength training is and you know, you can apply the right things to the right people at the right times. You get that nice bump in performance, right?

Chris Lee (04:22.015)
Totally.

Mike Ricci (04:24.186)
And I know you've worked with some Olympians and I know there's some people that are, you know, gonna be in the Olympics this year you're working with. And these people trust you. And they know that if Chris says to do it, they'd go do it, right? And I love hearing that story of you telling me those things. So even, and just make everybody feel better, even Olympians that come in to see you have trouble with Copenhagen's. They have trouble with certain exercises that they should nail, right?

Chris Lee (04:43.671)
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think the beauty in it is almost every triathlete, I don't care what the level is, nine times out of 10 we're starting with the same exercises. Whether you're a beginner triathlete or you're going to the Olympics, during that initial assessment I usually find really similar things. I think the big thing we'll talk about in Olympian or some Olympians.

They just have a huge engine. Now from a physical, right, they have speed and an engine. But when it comes to some of these little things, we'll call them little things because they don't seem as important. But they are equally important. Those Copenhagen planks, we'll do a little deep dive on that real quick. We're targeting the adductor. And the adductor is a Swiss Army knife, which is really interesting, especially in TT position.

Mike Ricci (05:16.458)
and they can run straight ahead really fast.

Chris Lee (05:42.827)
overworked and shortened a lot. Which doesn't, you know, that's my adductor, it's not a main muscle, but it is a primary, can be a primary restrictor in hip flexion, hip extension, hip abduction, and hip adduction. So it can basically lock up your whole hip if we don't train it. So that's a, it's a funny one that you brought up Copenhagen planks. Everyone hates them, but over time you realize how important they are.

Mike Ricci (06:12.026)
Well, I'll tell you the reason I loved him when you first gave him to me. I mean, I hated doing them, but I knew the benefit because when I do long rides and I can't tell you any 70.3 I've done where I might add doctors have not cramped at the end and yes, it could be salt related, but I'm pretty sure I've taken care of that side of it. So I knew where the muscle was fatiguing for a reason and I can do all the side lunges I want, right? Like that wasn't the answer to it. So when I've done, now that I've done the Copenhagen's, it's like, man, this is the real deal. Like I feel so much stronger doing them.

Even just running, like putting my foot down and pushing off and saying, wow, I got some power there now, right? It's all coming together for an old guy. It's, you know, it's, it's kind of fun to see. There's some light at the end of the tunnel still, you know? Yeah. So if you, if I said to you, and I don't want to put you on the spot with this, but if I said to you, you know, give me three to five exercises that everybody needs to get better at, what would they be in general?

Chris Lee (06:46.652)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Lee (06:54.312)
Yeah.

Chris Lee (07:07.743)
Copenhagen plank, star side plank, the opposite of a Copenhagen plank. I would say deep reverse lunges or deep Bulgarian split squats.

Mike Ricci (07:09.505)
Yep.

Mike Ricci (07:22.11)
OK, so your foot would be up on a plate or a small step to do the reverse lunge. OK. Yep.

Chris Lee (07:26.779)
Right, right. And then you have a slider in the back for support. I would say pull-ups are actually underrated. Pull-ups and rows and dead bugs. I would just go with those, covering all the bases if I have to, yeah.

Mike Ricci (07:42.092)
Love it.

Yeah, it's funny. So as I, as I went through your program this fall, um, I started making a list of the five or six things I wasn't good at. And I, and I'm opposite days of lifting. I would just go in the gym for 15, 20 minutes and just do those things and get better at them. And it's amazing what happens in three weeks. I mean, you're like, wow, now I can do three sets of 15 to Copenhagen's if I do them three times a week, right? Um, you know, do something once a week. Yeah, you're probably not going to get better at it. You're not going to get better at it. It's that frequent, right?

Chris Lee (08:00.486)
Oh yeah.

Chris Lee (08:04.787)
Totally.

Chris Lee (08:10.636)
Yeah, if you run once a week, you're not getting faster at running, right? Yeah, same idea.

Mike Ricci (08:14.134)
Not at all. Not at all, awesome. So then tell me a little bit about, so you came out of college, you were a swimmer. Tell me how you got to be a professional track athlete. Like that's a long way to go. And you never talked about running track or anything. So I don't even know if you had a running back.

Chris Lee (08:29.915)
No, I did not have a running background for sure. I swam the 50 and the 100 and the 200 IM in college and I was a sprinter and my friend Arlen Macaseeb from in Jersey, he's a Filipino national champion in triathlon. So this guy would swim with us in college and then I'd see him go out on a 20 mile run. I'm like, this guy's psycho, he's a maniac. What is he doing? But then I was intrigued. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? And he's like, in triathlon, you should...

Mike Ricci (08:32.494)
It's wild.

Chris Lee (08:59.279)
you should try it. Like you're fit, you're strong. You know, I was a breaststroke or as well as you have strong legs, so you can pedal bikes. I was like, all right, I'll give it a shot. So I signed up for a sprint and I was like, that was cool. So being a young, you know, 20 year old kid, I'm like, all right, I'll do a half Ironman next. No training. Just let me just, I trained for it. But you know, like if I had you coaching me, I would have been much, much better. But, uh,

Mike Ricci (09:21.25)
Hahaha

Chris Lee (09:29.627)
Yeah, so I did that and graduated from college. And I thought, you know, it'd be a really interesting experiment to see if I can't become an elite power athlete and take that physiology and apply all my training knowledge to become an elite endurance athlete. So I was like, I can swim, I know that. I found I was decent at riding because I was strong. Running, what took me a long time. It took me.

Mike Ricci (09:57.57)
So what do you think it was? Do you think it was just the swimmer athlete that had to go from horizontal to vertical with some of that? Was it just lower leg stuff or was it just endurance or you were heavier? Like what do you think the limit of it?

Chris Lee (10:10.151)
Yeah, it was a combination of, I had never done that many plyometrics. I've never been that load bearing. So I didn't have any spring. And I just didn't know, I didn't move efficiently at the time. So it took quite a while to change things up a little bit. But it took years and years and years of, I like to think I've always trained really smart. I became.

a coach to others, a mentor to others, I think because I didn't quite have the ability they had, but I try to uncover every piece of knowledge to try to make myself the best. And then I realized I don't got it as much as these guys do. So, but it's fun to see, okay, I can use these lessons I've learned and impart them to others and watch them take it to the top. Well, it worked, okay, that was cool.

Mike Ricci (11:06.626)
That's awesome. You know, the one thing you said that I can just tell you're a great coach, and I look for this in coaches all the time, and it's the coaches that wanna experiment. And they don't always use themselves. I've used myself, you've used yourself as an experiment, but you're trying to unfurl that one little nugget. You're looking for that one nugget, that one thing that's gonna get you five seconds a mile faster, right? And we're totally digging in, you know.

Chris Lee (11:25.471)
Hmm.

Mike Ricci (11:31.234)
I do this all the time with my athletes. I'm like, hey, okay, so we've been doing this here, but you know what, for the next six weeks, we're gonna do this one thing every Tuesday. Like, why are we doing this? I'm like, let's just see what happens on the other side of this. And they're like, man, I dropped like five seconds in the pool just doing that one drill. I'm like, yeah, right, okay. And you know, as a coach, like that's your job. Your job is to just keep trying to uncover the important stuff so your athletes can use it, right? And I had someone ask me the other day, I...

Chris Lee (11:50.399)
Totally.

Mike Ricci (11:54.75)
I coach a master's group here a couple of times a week. And one of the swimmers says, do you ever do your own workouts? And I said, I would never give someone a workout I haven't done. I said, I know. So when you're doing whatever, four times 50 fly at the end of the workout, like I've done it, I know it sucks. Like let's get through it. Like I push yourself, you know? But you gotta set the example. You gotta set the example. But the thing...

Chris Lee (12:08.495)
Yeah. Totally. It's funny you mentioned that I think I always use the analogy of the Batman utility belt. And I feel like as coaches, Batman has something for everything in that belt somehow, right? And my goal is to acquire little nuggets, like you said, and oh, in this moment for this athlete, I think we can use this thing. Try that out. Oh, it worked. Great. If it didn't

Mike Ricci (12:37.994)
Right. And you know, sometimes, I mean, if you had to look at it, like in terms of experience versus intuition, like you can look at somebody and you can say, okay, we're going to do these three things are going to get better and they don't. Right. And then you're like, okay, I'm going to try something completely off the wall. Let's try to do something really weird. They're going to think it's weird, but it's going to work. And you know, it's going to work because your intuition tells you this guy needs this. Right. Even though this isn't written in any book anywhere, like I know that I'm going to have them do this exercise and this is going to work. And like, how many times does that probably happen for you?

Like the intuition is just so much of this. Yeah, totally. Awesome, all right. So you became a professional triathlete. How many years did you race for?

Chris Lee (13:07.071)
Oh, every time. Yeah, for sure.

Chris Lee (13:19.059)
I've raced for two years, a year and a half really, and then I realized, it's funny, I actually, it was one of those moments where you're like, I'm trying so hard and I'm just not really seeing that trajectory that I see around me. And then I, you know, luckily I had a little injury that made me pause and I've always wanted to go into pure coaching role. And I thought, you know, I think now is the time to transition into coaching and, you know.

Mike Ricci (13:20.653)
Nice.

Chris Lee (13:48.571)
I think that is, you have to identify what your strengths and weaknesses are. And strength of mind was coaching more so than being an athlete.

Mike Ricci (13:56.318)
Yeah, that's awesome. And I think you're working with a coach then or you're self-coached.

Chris Lee (14:02.427)
I was working with a coach, a buddy of mine, Randy. He's now back in Puerto Rico. And then for a small part, I was self-coached, but that was a disaster. Don't do that. I know all the rules and I'll break all the rules.

Mike Ricci (14:15.635)
Yeah.

Mike Ricci (14:19.05)
That's right. That's right. Okay. So let's get into a little bit of endurance athletes, triathletes. I know you've worked with a lot. Have you worked with ultra marathoners too? Yeah, okay. Yeah, I know Olympic marathoners for sure. And certainly some Olympic distance, Olympians, Olympic distance triathlon, ITU triathletes, right? So, you know, having a race repeatedly, fast and hard, recover and all that. So you've run the gamut of all that.

Chris Lee (14:26.739)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, quite a few.

Chris Lee (14:31.358)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Lee (14:38.785)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Mike Ricci (14:46.594)
Do you, and I know that with my athletes, I always try to preach them that the strength piece is really what brings it all together, right? Like it just brings everything together because you get that power, you get the strength, you know, the plyometric piece you had talked about. And we can assume that everybody knows it's important, right? So if you look at it on a scale of one to 10 and everybody does their long bikes, their long runs, they do their interval workouts and swims and all that stuff, like how important do you put that strength training

Chris Lee (14:55.238)
Hmm

Mike Ricci (15:16.47)
to 10. And I'm not talking about aging, I'm just talking about to get faster as an athlete, right? Like how important is it to strength train?

Chris Lee (15:23.235)
Yeah, I mean, if your cardiovascular, I'll call it training is a 10, which is an endurance for I would say strength is a 7.5. It's it's high. Yeah.

Mike Ricci (15:34.698)
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So, and then do you say, so, so let's just say, uh, I'm an endurance athlete. I come to you. I've got a, I'm going to race an Olympic distance race and, um, how many times a week do I need it to strength train?

Chris Lee (15:49.151)
So I would say the minimum effective dose there is two times a week. And that's something where certain athletes, I would say, hey, we have 12 weeks. Let's do three times a week. And then we can back it off, go into maintenance mode a little bit, and go two times a week. And then that's leading to your taper.

Mike Ricci (16:06.538)
Nice. Okay. Awesome. And then, and then speaking of taper, like at what point would you back somebody off? Like, let's say somebody do an Ironman, right? They're racing, they're, you know, nine months of training and they start in January, the race of September, um, obviously they've done a couple of 70.3s in there maybe. And they're gonna, they're gonna do an Ironman. Um, how far out would you back them off and what would you prescribe from the time they're backed off until race day?

Chris Lee (16:16.186)
Oh yeah.

Chris Lee (16:26.047)
Totally.

Chris Lee (16:33.607)
That's a great question. So strength taper is much different from cardiovascular taper, right? There's very different adaptations needed. So we also have to take into account, likely, eight weeks out from that Ironman, your training probably looks pretty hard, right? Volume's high, fatigue is high. So eight weeks out, we're already coming down a little bit, and we'll call that maintenance mode.

And the goal of those sessions is to have the three M's here. Maintain, modify, and mitigate. So we're maintaining your base strength. We're not pushing anything. We're modifying as needed. And then we're just trying to mitigate any injuries right now. Just let you train hard. So that's eight weeks out. And then four weeks out, we're talking about one more maintain and three weeks of taper. And three weeks of taper being.

this being race week here. So we have a volume decrease and a slight intensity decrease for Ironman, just because you don't need so much intensity in the gym. It's Ironman, not ITU. Right, so then we're looking at a further volume and intensity decrease, sorry, a volume decrease two weeks out. And then the week of, we're looking at an even bigger decrease there. So...

Just to throw some numbers out there, we're looking like 20% or 33% less and then 50% less, right? But that is taking into account you've done all the base work, you've maintained, and then you can taper well. If you've only done four weeks of strength in your life before, we're going to taper much more aggressively, right?

Mike Ricci (18:17.142)
Yeah.

So if I get to my final week and I'm doing Ironman, am I just going to the gym doing one set of 12 or one set of 15 reps or?

Chris Lee (18:29.463)
I would actually keep the volume low. So we're trying to mitigate delayed onset muscle soreness and any more of that hypertrophic effect, which is muscle damage. So we found that the seven rep range and under has very little soreness, right? And that five rep range, even less soreness. But we also don't want to go and...

smoke your central nervous system with weights attributed to those reps. So usually for five reps you would do like 85% of your one rep max. It's a little bit too high for that, right? That's where we may decrease that to 75% of your one rep max, which is normally what you do 10 reps at, but we're doing five, right? Because there's this concept of strength retention and

If you are doing 70% of your one rep maps a couple times a week, maybe twice a week or so, you will still retain 95% of your peak strength is what they found for so much strength there.

Mike Ricci (19:45.226)
Wow, that's huge. So, okay, let's just take the same Ironman athlete and they are now done with their Ironman, the body's completely destroyed. How soon would you get them back in the gym and do you feel like a strength and mobility would actually help their recovery?

Chris Lee (19:59.487)
Hmm

Chris Lee (20:05.799)
Yeah, this is a great question. So there's two types of races that have extremely high muscular damage and endocrine system. Disregulation, that would be Iron Man, and the marathon. There's some good research on the marathon. And what I've found over time is that we're playing with the endocrine system more so than anything else. And that so.

endocrine system, hormones, chemicals in your body. It takes up to a month sometimes to fully regulate everything here. So we're working after site movement.

Chris Lee (20:58.724)
Oh, we're doing some light movement, some blood flow, and we're really trying to promote range of motion, right, initially. And changing up the movement pattern, so there's something to be said about your body recognizing, I don't want to move through this range of motion that I adjusted a lot of. I'm really not doing so well here, which, when you change it up, it actually allows the brain to...

calm down a little bit and to promote healing because you're using other parts of your body. Right, and that is also a little bit more fun. So it helps promote that healing process. So two weeks of that and then two weeks of reloading, slowly allowing the body to build back up. And I think that's a big missing piece. Some people do nothing and they feel junky for a month of training, right? Because yeah, of course you do. You've done...

A lot of that, your body's a little fried. So change up the energy systems, change up the movement patterns, and then slowly reload so the body can slowly be like, okay, I'm ready to accept some more training.

Mike Ricci (22:08.95)
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, perfect sense. Okay, so let's go to the other side now. So we did the long distance slow twitch people. And if we have ITU people or even age groupers that are racing a sprint every month or every, twice a month or once every three weeks, that's typically what sprinted Olympic athletes will do. Let's say my race season starts in June and I'm gonna mid June and I'm gonna go to mid September. So I've got a solid three months in there. How do I come on and off the weights? Like am I...

Chris Lee (22:16.383)
Hmm.

Chris Lee (22:26.612)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Ricci (22:39.05)
Am I still maintaining at 50% each week, even if it's a B race, or do I just worry about the taper and I'm just kind of training through the B and C races? Because it doesn't really matter. Although we know from looking at numbers that, I don't know if you ever used the stride power meter, but there are numbers in there that talk about leg spring stiffness. And we can see when people are just petite, they can't push off. I mean, go do a set of 10 box jumps and tell me how it feels. I mean, that's an easy way to do it. Does that feel springy or do you feel like you're just getting 100 pounds on your back?

Chris Lee (22:43.839)
Hmm.

Chris Lee (22:58.911)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Lee (23:05.789)
Yeah.

Mike Ricci (23:08.738)
Right? So how do we how do we load and unload with those consecutive races over a few a few months?

Chris Lee (23:09.5)
Yep.

Chris Lee (23:16.079)
Yeah, so again, I think that's where the beauty of maintenance mode comes in. I think that concept of strength retention is so underrated. You can retain that strength. So let's decrease that volume and intensity big time. After you race or in between that, we just do a reloading session, get the body back, have some load in the system, nothing too much, back to the races. So at no point should

Mike Ricci (23:23.918)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Lee (23:45.055)
five reps with enough rest at 75% of your one rep max, 50% of your capacity, fatigue you too much. You do two sets of five, right? Not much, but your body has these things called satellite cells and they basically store the information of muscular contraction, which is strength, right? So they can store that strength information for a long time. I hate the term.

but they say it all the time, like, old man strength. But it's true. Your body remembers everything you've done, and it just takes a little bit of a reminder to turn it back on. For example, those Copenhagen planks you did, hey, I did three weeks of this, and boom, big, big increase. You're a strong guy, so it turns back on quickly.

Mike Ricci (24:35.766)
Yeah, it's amazing. If I don't do it for a week, you know, I'll do a day of them, they'll suck. And then the next day, boom, I'm back at it and it's all good. Yeah.

Chris Lee (24:40.999)
Totally, yeah. And then with taper too, B races, da-da-da. A races, we're always going to actually apply that same taper we wanna, triathlon's hard. You're training so hard, so long, especially that eight weeks out, right? So we're gonna do that same protocol for ITU as we would for Ironman. We're just allowing you to train hard. There's no more gains to be made in the weight room at that point.

or goals just to maintain. There are games to be made that last month in training, but I don't wanna interrupt that at all.

Mike Ricci (25:14.262)
right. That makes perfect sense. Okay, so changing gears a little bit. If I'm, you know, let's say I'm a 35 year old triathlete versus a 45 year old triathlete versus a 55 year old triathlete. And let's say that functionally, they move well, they can do their Copenhagens, they can do the reverse lunges, hip bridges, all that stuff. Do you look at the numbers and say, man, this guy should be able to deadlift this or should he be able to dump press X or

should be able to hold so many pounds of dumbbell and doing a one-legged lunch from the bench. Does that stuff ever cross your mind? Do you look at people, I'm just gonna throw something out there. So I know you work with a couple of guys who are 30-minute, 10-k-ers. And do you look at them and say, man, that guy can only deadlift 200 pounds. If I could get him to 250, he's gonna get faster. Does that really not matter?

Chris Lee (26:07.731)
Hmm. So I differentiate this is the type of athlete you are. So I spent a year and a half, two years as the strength and conditioning director for a sport genetic testing company. So my boss was the department head of genetics in Stanford. Brilliant guy. And what we looked

Chris Lee (26:37.487)
OK, what kind of athlete are you? And that's what I found really interesting for running specifically, cycling a little bit different. But are you a tendon athlete or are you a muscle athlete? So then there's the difference of how much, how strong is strong enough. And this is another mentor of mine, Eric Cressy. He's a big deal in the strength world. He says, there is too strong. You don't need to be that strong. You know?

Why are you risking that much injury for a baseball player? 450 pound hex bar deadlift. You don't need to be any stronger than that. In fact, you might not even need to be that strong. How well can you jump and how is your range of motion and how is your control? And for triathlon, work capacity. Can you do those 15 single leg loop ridges or those 15 Copenhagen planks? I think those fundamentals, those are what I'm looking for.

beyond strength. Getting stronger, I think, if you're able to work up to lifting your body weight for a couple reps, that's pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. And we can continue to build on that. But I think that's where there's a beauty in working with alongside a coach, like yourself. Hey, Mike, what do you want this athlete to accomplish right now? Oh, OK, maybe increasing their weight in the weight room.

Isn't that big of a deal then? That's focused on whatever you want to, maybe VO2 max, right? Or like, oh, maybe this is the right time to increase a little bit of load. So there's no perfect number for anyone. I think the baseline of, can you do these Copenhagen planks, star side planks, single leg loop bridges, single leg calf raises, single leg squats, can you do those things? Great. Now let's add some strength on top of that and then work with your coach to figure out what do you need to do there and when.

Mike Ricci (28:31.978)
Right. That's a great answer. Did, did. So I know Eric Cressy, you followed him for a long, long time. Um, still read his newsletter, you know, his podcast. He always has really good stuff. Um, can you explain what you mean between a tendon athlete and a muscle athlete?

Chris Lee (28:45.963)
Mm-hmm. So I'll give you an example. I worked with a female Kenyan marathoner who just got third at Boston and I evaluate a lot of tendons looking at spring and I've never felt anything like this before in my life. This tendon was truly like a spring. It would bounce my hand back out. So there are certain people with extremely bouncy, strong, thick tendons and they're gonna get a

Muscularly based athletes, right? Where we may not have that spring, but we can produce force for a long time and a lot of it. Right? So in that case, I would train your strength more. I would increase tendon athlete strength a little bit, but continue working on their strength because we can always increase our weaknesses and work on those, but they'll never be

stronger than a strength if it's a true, not a weakness, but a difference physiologically, right? So if you're, if you've got crazy tendons, work on those tendons, yeah.

Mike Ricci (29:51.594)
Right, right. No, that makes sense.

Yeah. If you've got someone who has a high VO2 and maybe they don't have a lot of endurance or the not a lot of muscular endurance, you got to figure out, you know, you got to maintain that VO2 so they can still access it during a race if they need it. If they're cyclists, right? Like they're, you know, racing in a crit or something like that versus somebody who's an Ironman athlete who needs to go at, you know, 80% of threshold for, you know, 180K, right? So for four, four and a half, five hours, right? So totally different. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. It's awesome.

Chris Lee (30:08.251)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Lee (30:19.315)
Yep.

Mike Ricci (30:25.01)
Okay, that's all good stuff. Do you wanna talk about your app you're coming out with? Or you wanna hold off on that?

Chris Lee (30:31.519)
Sure. So we can talk about that in a second. But to that point, I did want to piggyback off what you're saying. Something we did learn working for that genetics company, right? You already have the human knowledge, but your genetic profile is just what your ceiling is. So maybe your tendon spring stiffness can maximally be this high.

But it doesn't mean we can't train it. If it's current, still raise it. It just means maybe the ceiling is here, not here. But across the board, if we can raise all these things up a little bit, that has a compounding effect that may supersede what your genetic profile for one attribute may be. So back to your point of train holistically and train smart, well-rounded.

The athlete with a huge VO2 but minimal muscular endurance, well, let's still train that because that might give you the capacity for all these other things that might ultimately make that ceiling higher than it was with one attribute.

Mike Ricci (31:40.362)
Right, awesome, awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna give you maybe a softball question, but as let's say I'm a 60 year old triathlete and I do strength train a little bit, but tell me how important that is as I age and I'm no longer am I like putting muscle on, right? I need to keep that mobility and keep that strength. And even as I age, you know, out of sports and now I'm 75, 80, how important is it to strength train to just, you know, the rest of your life, right?

Chris Lee (31:46.424)
All right.

Chris Lee (32:09.311)
Man, the need for strength training is exponential, I would say with age, non-linear. So as you age, it's linear. And then as you age, the need for strength increases. We lose that ligament and tendon elasticity. So we have to train it, right? We lose the muscular pliability and strength. So we have to train it. Mobility, even more so. Our bodies just aren't as adaptable. And the big, big thing, bone health.

Right. Strength training lows your skeletal system, which allows you to have higher bone density. Right. Biggest thing in bone density, when we looked at it from a genetic lens, there's not a lot you can do other than you can eat well, sleep well, blah, blah. But the only way if you have low bone density to increase that is through heavy loading. Right. So as we age,

it's more and more important. And we know we lose muscular strength as we age. So that's a huge component, right? If your engine is huge and you can't put out the force necessary, you're going to get slower, right? And then eventually to a point where you break down, which we don't want to see.

Mike Ricci (33:17.855)
Right.

Mike Ricci (33:22.13)
Right, do you think that, so you know, there are a lot of women that don't want to lift heavy weights, women that I coach and all that, and do you see that like, you know, instead of doing, let's say, you know, whatever, three sets of eight deadlift of a heavy weight, you know, what if they did something that was like three times 20, but they're still getting that heavy fatigue at the end, it's still not the same power though, or is it? That's the part I've never been able to understand.

Chris Lee (33:48.903)
it's not the same load on your body, right? So it won't have the same physical effect, and I mean muscle tendon skeleton, and it won't have the same chemical effect either. So there's some good research around lifting heavy, just enough not to crazy destroy you, can actually offset some of your stress hormones. So your cortisol, da-da-da, norepinephrine, epinephrine from training hard.

when you do a heavier load, there's actually more of a production of testosterone and some more building up hormones versus the breaking down hormones. So that's huge and it also doesn't have a big soreness component. The more the reps sometimes, the more the muscular damage can be, not always. So it's really important to think of it as an offset. Most of endurance sport, we think of this as catabolic breaking down.

it slowly wears you down. So when we think of strength, we're thinking about anabolic. Can we slowly build you back up just to create a net zero? That's, if at the end of the day we can create a net zero, I consider that a huge win.

Mike Ricci (35:02.454)
Right, no, that's perfect. That's great, that's great. And I guess I, yeah, so that makes perfect sense. And now I understand it a lot better. And I just, I always think about, you know, lifting heavy and whether it's, you know, bench press, dumbbell press, a lat pull down heavy or deadlift, which is my favorite, but it's that force, right, it's that force production of getting that first rep going. And then, you know, you're at five reps, knowing you have three more and you're at the, you're at the rope and you're like, how am I going to do this? But you do it, right? You pull through and you do it and you walk away going, I just got stronger, right? That's a, that's a great feeling.

Chris Lee (35:18.48)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Lee (35:27.047)
Yeah, totally.

Chris Lee (35:30.991)
Yeah. And at the end of the day, something is better than nothing for sure. So we're all, we're all busy. We have lives. And it's hard. It's hard to figure out what to do when. So sometimes if you, I say this to you sometimes, I have 10 minutes. I just do 10 minutes straight of Turkish getups because that's all I got time for.

Mike Ricci (35:32.629)
Um.

Mike Ricci (35:36.566)
Right, absolutely.

Mike Ricci (35:50.41)
Yeah, I mean, that's crazy to me and I think that's awesome. After my runs, I typically do pull-ups and push-ups and even if it's five rounds, you know, I got 25 pull-ups in and 50 push-ups. It takes me five minutes and sometimes that's what it is. But that old man's strength has to come from somewhere, you know? Yeah. Cool. And I was going to ask you what your favorite exercise is. So I'm guessing it's Turkish get-ups, right?

Chris Lee (35:54.248)
Hahaha

Chris Lee (36:09.427)
Yeah, exactly.

Chris Lee (36:17.167)
Uh, if I was smart, yes, but I really just like deadlifting. I just think it's fun. Um, yeah, it feels good, right? Afterwards, like I feel pretty good. Yeah. Again, that offset of hormones, right? You can offset some cortisol for the day.

Mike Ricci (36:22.506)
Yeah, yeah, that's such a manly thing, right? It's just like, it feels really good. When you do it correctly, it feels good, for sure, for sure.

Yeah. I love when people try to start a conversation with you right after you're like deadlift a heavy set and the testosterone just like pulsing through your body and you're like, I can't have a normal conversation right now. Like I'm jacked to the gills.

Chris Lee (36:49.544)
Yeah, you're going to make some impulsive decisions, right?

Mike Ricci (36:51.734)
That's right. Cool. All right. Do you want to talk about your app a little bit? You're going to introduce this pretty soon, next few months.

Chris Lee (36:59.455)
Sure, yeah. Yeah, so I'll demo it for you a little bit later, but it's basically everything we've talked about today. I have put into a app, so it is looking at who you are, your sport, your experience level, and based on all the principles for strength training, specifically for endurance sports, and then from their subcategories, specifically for cycling, triathlon.

running, ultra running. What are the periodizations needed? What does taper look like? And what are the most important exercises for those? So we took all these concepts and we decided that it's really hard to program strengths sometimes. So we wanted to make it really easy and accessible for people. So right now we have our version launching where

Mike Ricci (37:41.164)
Yeah.

Chris Lee (37:56.739)
Anyone can input their race schedule, A, B, C races, right? Their fitness profile, their personal biological profile. And based on these items, we will craft a learning workout. So every workout you do, it's learning with you, but it's based around getting you to the goal of your A race, B races, and C races. And part of the beauty of what we've done is we've gathered there's

there's a database online that I've accessed that has 50,000 lifts recorded. And based on those, we've categorized and looked at sport and body types and said, okay, for a triathlete, for example, if you're doing a squat, single leg, seven reps, how much weight do you do? Most of the time the answer is, I don't freaking know. So the truth is we don't really know, but.

we can come up with a very good estimate for you to start at. And what the app does, it learns every set with you and it'll automatically progress or regress you. You might say, I'm feeling a little tired today. And then the weight will automatically adjust, right? And then it's learning out, right? So you see about week, a race 30 weeks out. So we're adjusting not only the weights and the exercises will progress with you.

But in certain phases of the season, like we talked about, that eight weeks out from a race, it'll completely change what that workout type looks like, how many sets, how many reps, how much weight. So it's doing a lot of that mathematical work for you that normally you'd have to go get a calculator out, type these things in, and figure out how much weight to use.

Mike Ricci (39:27.679)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Ricci (39:48.574)
Yeah, I remember, I remember way back when I must have been, well, it's had to be 18 months ago, we were in your gym and you were telling me about these ideas of, you know, figuring out, you know, the weight people needed to lift and all this. And it's amazing that you've been able to, you're a smart guy, but it's amazing you've been able to pull this together and you're going to launch it. It's like a baby, right? Like you've been working, working with this thing for so long. And that's, that's incredible. Congratulations. That's really, really awesome. Really awesome.

Chris Lee (40:05.767)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Totally. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it. I'm excited. I'll give you a little sneak peek after this. But yeah.

Mike Ricci (40:17.711)
Okay, cool. So can you send me a couple of links for those exercises, like those four or five base exercises, and I'll put them in the show notes so people can see them and they can access them. I know you did some of that stuff with Brad with CU and he totally appreciated it. And CU team had

Chris Lee (40:24.883)
Sure, yeah, absolutely.

Chris Lee (40:31.459)
Yeah, the CU kids right now are actually, they're using a, I have an online endurance strength, rolling template is what I call it. But I'm trying to transition everyone over to this app because the app individualizes for every single person. So as a team, they're doing similar things, but each individual is unique versus, I stopped in the whole team's using this template and I realized that

Mike Ricci (40:44.044)
Yep.

Mike Ricci (40:51.512)
Wow.

Chris Lee (41:01.491)
Oh man, well Bobby over there maybe shouldn't be doing that much weight, but he doesn't know that.

Mike Ricci (41:06.782)
Right, right. That's awesome. All right. Well, thanks for, thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Um, I'll make, uh, make sure people can reach you. Um, if they're interested in, I know you have online program, you got the app coming out, but also you're in person here in Boulder, um, you're hard, you're hard to see cause you're a busy guy and you're pretty popular, but we'll make sure people know how to reach you. So thanks so much for coming on.

Chris Lee (41:30.088)
Yeah, you got it.

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