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Data-led endurance coaching from Ballarat.
Grad Cert High Performance Sport (Nutrition+Data Analysis).
Free tools on my website, built by me :)

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An athlete asked if he still has to pay for his recovery week.

Deload, down week, recovery week. Same idea, different names.

I invoice monthly. A month with an easy week looks like less product. I get the logic. But you’re not paying for hours.

Hours are the easy part to write. You’re paying for the read. In a recovery week I’m checking-in:
Did the fatigue actually drop?
Is the next block ready to step up, or does it hold?
What is the athlete mood atm?
I’ve actually developed and built my own analysis tools too.

Do you take your recovery week, or skip it when you feel good?  Ps Triathletes. Not all triathletes, but always triathletes: 60’ swim > 60’ run > 60’ sauna is not a recovery day 🫠

Sources: Meeusen et al. 2013, Coates et al. 2018

Enhanced-endurance.com by @enhanced_endurance

Best coaching I saw at Kona happened at a DNF.

An athlete in trouble in the Energy Lab.
Her coach made the call and hugged her off the course.

Endurance athletes push through.

Some days that’s the mistake, and the athlete is the last to see it.

I’ve made that call lots of times. It takes a few goes before an athlete trusts me, and themselves, enough to stop.

Kona in numbers:
1 in 5 pros didn’t finish. 22 athletes.
6 were unwell. 4 started that way.
3 more stopped with hip, nerve, or blood-flow pain on the bike.

After illness, my athletes come back with Return2Play. Staged criteria, not guilt.

Pain on the bike in training? Get your position checked and practice time in position before race day, not during it.

Enhanced-endurance.com by @enhanced_endurance

Taper week is not an easy week.

Most athletes get this backwards. They drop sessions and go easy on everything. Then they feel flat on race day and blame the taper.

The research says do the opposite.

Bosquet pooled 27 taper studies back in 2007. The best results came from two weeks, with volume cut by 41–60%. Same intensity. Same number of sessions. Just shorter.

So keep the hard efforts. Cut the volume.

One catch. Don’t replace you spare time with a day in the garden; or tweak your bike fit coz some guy on YouTube said rearward cleats are faster. by @enhanced_endurance

1st rule of BiCarb: nothing new on race day.

2nd rule of BiCarb: NOTHING NEW ON RACE DAY.

3rd rule: if you haven’t trialled it at rest, in training, and in a C-race, you don’t take it in an A-race.

The AIS Sport Supplement program runs every supplement through three questions: is it safe, is it effective, is it permitted?

BiCarb is a Group A supplement. It has strong scientific evidence for use in specific situations in sports.

2-3% performance gain in:
* 1-10 minute maximal efforts - 1500m running
* Repeat sprint efforts - cx or crit racing
* Sustained hard hour that HYROX is built on.

BiCarb also comes with nausea, cramps, diarrhoea, vomiting.

A HYROX athlete went viral this week for what happened mid-race. The whole conversation is about hygiene. Nobody is asking whether it was bicarb.

The AIS four-phase protocol exists specifically to filter this out. Phase 1 prep. Phase 2 trial at rest. Phase 3 trial in training. Phase 4 trial in a C-race. Any A-race dose comes after all four.

If you saw the video and thought “gross,” you missed the point. What you saw is what happens when a Group A supplement meets Phase 4 without Phases 1-3. by @enhanced_endurance

Runners are years behind cyclists and triathletes on fueling.

We saw this carnage on display at @sydney_marathon with elites and weekend warriors suffering with cramp and vomiting.

Carb loading is not an all-you-can-eat challenge.
* The window is 1-2days
* Target 8-12 g/kg/day depending on timing and tolerance
* Low fibre, low fat, low protein. Always. Stomach space is the limit, not willpower.
* Coco Pops are roughly 85% carb with almost no fibre or fat. Who knew CocoPops would could be a sports food?
* Your pre-race meal tops up liver glycogen. It is not part of the load itself
* 4,3,2,1 as a starting point. 4 g/kg at 4 hours out, down to 1 g/kg at 1 hour
* Train your gut in the weeks before. Race day is not the day to F^%! around and find out

None of the foods on the 3rd slide are bad foods. They are the wrong fuel for this performance goal.

Carb loads are a performance strategy, not for health. by @enhanced_endurance

The dose-response curve flattens. The side effects don’t.

The ISSN says 3 to 6 mg per kilo.
The AIS says there’s no further benefit above 3.

For a 70kg athlete, 3 mg per kilo is 210mg.

Consider what that might look like for your event: 
- Pre-workout can be anywhere from 91 to 387mg.
- Coffee, 80 to 280.
- Sports gel, 8 to 100.

Most athletes are guessing, and some are at double the useful dose without knowing it.

Two things worth more than chasing the top of the range > Work out your number and test it in training.

Individual response varies enough that the band might not be yours. And take the same caffeine before both tests in a test week. A caffeine difference between two tests is larger than most adaptations you’d be trying to detect.

Oh and, abstaining for days beforehand does not improve the effect on race day - PHEW!

Guest et al. JISSN 2021.

AIS Sports Supplement Framework, updated July 2025. by @enhanced_endurance

Heat training works on the blood, not the muscle.

Five weeks, 47 elite cyclists, randomised and controlled. Haemoglobin mass up about 4 per cent. Citrate synthase, fibre type and capillary density unchanged.

A 4 per cent effect is real. It is also about the same as the repeat variation in my own CP testing. So one test either side of a block cannot tell you whether it worked for you.

Two of my athletes are on heat blocks into Amy’s next month.
One in a suit, one in the sauna. I will post what the data shows either way. Might be interesting to track if passive or active heat training is more manageable for working athletes.

Lundby et al. J Appl Physiol 2023. by @enhanced_endurance

Every mix has a ratio on the label. It’s the wrong number to be reading.

2:1 glucose to fructose isn’t a rule.
It’s what the arithmetic gives you at 90 g/h.

Glucose absorption caps near 60 g/h. Fructose uses a different transporter, so everything above that has to arrive as fructose. At 90 g/h you calculate 2:1. At 120 you should be closer to 1:1. At 60 you don’t need fructose at all.

You don’t pick the ratio. You pick the rate.

Sugar is promoted as a cheap hack. Sucrose isn’t wrong, I use it, but its 1:1 whatever you’re doing. Right at 120 g/h. At 60 it serves you fructose you had no use for.

My athletes know 90 g/h is a benchmark. What can get tricky is the need to know this is 60g of maltodextrin and 30g of fructose. So I built a calculator that does the conversion.

Podlogar and Wallis, Sports Medicine 2022. by @enhanced_endurance

“Carb loading is dead.” That’s the take doing the rounds. It’s wrong, and the study everyone’s quoting doesn’t say it.

Here’s a more critical take.

A 2026 review didn’t test carb loading. It audited 60 years of loading research to see if it was designed well enough to trust. Different question.

What it found:
* 14 endurance studies, efforts over 90 minutes
* Only 2 were double-blind and placebo-controlled
* Those 2 found no significant performance benefit
* The other 12 let athletes know they’d loaded, so belief and glycogen rose together

That last point is key. When athletes fueled properly and knew they’d loaded, the edge measured d = 0.35. A sports nutrition placebo measures the same.

But don’t overcorrect. Those 2 blinded studies had 7 and 9 participants and raised glycogen far less than a real load. Too small, too light to prove loading is useless.

So it’s not proven. It’s not debunked.

What I still tell athletes: glycogen fuels hard efforts, so load, but load smart, not just all-you-can-eat.

https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsnem.2026-0058 by @enhanced_endurance

Most threshold tests fail because of motivation, not physiology.

A 20-min FTP test or a Zwift ramp need a true max effort. Most athletes can’t produce that solo.

So I stopped asking athletes to test in isolation.

I pair testing with Strava segments they actually want. KOM hunt, mate’s time, leaderboard. Motivation is built in. The numbers get closer to real.

I don’t always need a dedicated test either. Race files do half the work. A B-race gives me a 5-min number. A club crit gives me 20-min data. Every time-specific PR updates the curve.

Free CP calculator on the website.
4 numbers in, full curve out.
Link in bio by @enhanced_endurance

$Big cycling channels are catching up to critical power testing. The science isn’t new. The tools aren’t either. Here’s the system I’ve built around it: 1 — every athlete has ongoing CP analysis. Two to four maximal efforts, fit to a curve, CP and W’ out. 2 — every retest goes into a history. Progression tracked across the block. Same athlete, May vs March, CP up 22W. 3 — full physiological breakdown. Power stack, fractional utilisation, athlete type, VO2max estimate. This athlete sits at 81% fractional utilisation. Diesel profile. Strong aerobic engine, smaller above-threshold reserve. Training prescribed accordingly. 4 — the calculator on my website does the first part for free. Anyone can use it. The deeper analysis comes with coaching. Link in bio. by @enhanced_endurance$

Enhanced_Endurance

@enhanced_endurance