Peak athletic performance: How to measure it and how to train for it from the coach of the most elite athletes on earth | Olav Aleksander Bu

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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My guest this week is Olav Aleksander Bu. Olav is an endurance coach, exercise scientist, engineer and physiologist. He is the head of performance for Norway Triathlon and is best known for coaching two of the world's greatest triathletes, Christian Blumenfeldt and Gustaf Eden.
And he coaches the Norwegian Olympic Sailing Team and consults for multiple world tour cycling and elite track and field teams. In this episode, we were only able to cover a fraction of what I was hoping to cover, as we ended up going so deep on VO2Max and performance.
Safe to say, this will be the first of several interviews that I do with Olav. In this interview, we look at the relationship between VO2Max and ATP production, efficiency, energy and power. We speak about the quality of low intensity training as it relates to VO2Max, how weight impacts VO2Max, absolute versus relative VO2Max values, and why we maybe ought to pay a little more attention to the absolute numbers than just the relative, as I have typically done, the different ways to test for VO2Max, and the different ways to train to improve your VO2Max. And of course, Olav's work with his athletes.
We also have a pretty deep discussion around the role of lactate testing and its role in performance. So a couple things I want to say just to put this into context. Of course, if you're listening to this podcast, you have heard me go on and on about the importance of VO2Max. And so to really have the master class in VO2Max here alone is worth the price of admission. But there are so many other nuances we get into here around different terms that people have heard and sometimes confused. So what's the difference between lactate threshold one, lactate threshold two, LT1, LT2 and zone two? How are these actually measured? And even if you think, well gosh, I really have no interest in doing the kind of deep testing that Olav does or even the stuff that Peter does on himself, you're still gonna learn a lot about the physiology of this stuff here. One final thing I'll say, during the course of this discussion, I learned about something called the VO2 Master, which is a portable VO2 Max unit that Olav uses extensively with his athletes. Now, I've certainly heard of these types of devices in the past, though not specifically the VO2 Master. So it's always with a bit of skepticism that I assume that these things can't be that accurate. But during the course of the podcast, and then after the podcast, Olav and I got talking about it, and my curiosity was peaked so much that I actually got one of these devices. Needless to say, I have been blown away by this device. I consider it the single best investment I've made in tracking, and the accuracy is staggering. It's really remarkable that I can put this thing on and go outside and do a workout on my bike or do a workout on my StairMaster. Basically, I can test my VO2 Max on my own. And again, this is just one of the many nuggets that came out of this podcast. I'm not suggesting you have to go out and buy a VO2 Master, though if you're like me, I would highly recommend it. So anyway, without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Olav Aleksander Bu. Hey!
Olav, thank you so much for making time to sit down with me today.
I'm really excited about this episode, and I'm gonna try to contain my own enthusiasm such that the people listening to this will understand what we're talking about because the topic we're gonna go into today is really one that fascinates me to no end. But more than that, you are someone who brings a level of expertise that is so high that it really allows me to engage at a level of curiosity that I rarely get to engage in. And I don't think I've taken more notes coming into a podcast than I have for this one. I fully expect we will not get through half of what I've written down in terms of topics that I want to explore. But nevertheless, I'm going to apologize in advance to you and to everybody else for just how enthusiastically I want to address the subject matter of human performance. Perhaps before we get into that though, maybe you could just tell folks, let's assume people don't know anything about you and who you are, Olav. Just tell them who you are, what you do, and the types of athletes that you work with.