Toptimum Performance

Toptimum Performance 'Optimize your sports performances, reach your personal top.'

Expert testing, profiling, writing, developing & coaching for motivated athletes.

Founder P.A.C.E. , mechanistic profiling intelligenc

Founder LakTiq, metabolic testing intelligence.

Congrats to Andreas Almgren for winning the half marathon world championship and beating all the African runners and oth...
21/09/2026

Congrats to Andreas Almgren for winning the half marathon world championship and beating all the African runners and other elite athletes.

Got some idea about how Andreas approaches his training [interviews, articles, podcasts, scientific publications, ...], and about the correct terminology, id est not the terminology that is used incorrectly in many places… Maybe something for a future post...

But especially the underlying physiology is very interesting, and on the other hand nothing really new actually.

Interesting running era, that’s for sure…

A systematic review screened 493 articles and kept 16, every programme at least four weeks long. Its verdict on the thre...
17/09/2026

A systematic review screened 493 articles and kept 16, every programme at least four weeks long. Its verdict on the three ways to shape a training week: pyramidal and polarised are more effective than threshold training.

Then it wrote the next sentence anyway: “although the latest is used by some of the best marathon runners in the world.”

Both of those are true at once, and that is the interesting part.

The resolution is a change of ruler. The lab measures what happens inside you — heart rate, lactate. The track measures what comes out — the pace on the clock.

A session sitting in the physiological middle zone can be, in the athlete’s own terms, specific race-pace work. Label it by the body and it is the weakest model in the sport. Label it by the pace and it is the most specific session in the plan.

So the review proposes sorting sessions by their share of goal race pace instead of by physiology. Do that and the three models stop competing. They become descriptions of where you are in a season rather than rival philosophies: further from race pace early, closer to it as the race approaches.

One honest limit, and it comes from the authors themselves. The exact percentages above and below race pace have not been established — the approach still needs work to find out which boundaries matter. Anyone selling you precise cut-offs here is ahead of the evidence.

You do not need the boundary to use the idea. You need the reference point. Name the goal pace first, set it correctly, describe every session against it, and re-anchor the whole plan when the athlete gets faster.

📚 Source: Kenneally, Casado & Santos-Concejero (2018). International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance 13:1114-1121.

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Many people assume the last lap belongs to whoever has the most speed left over — the gap between their top sprint speed...
16/09/2026

Many people assume the last lap belongs to whoever has the most speed left over — the gap between their top sprint speed and their aerobic ceiling.
Thirty-two trained middle-distance runners were used to test that directly. It did not hold up.

The design was clever. Each runner ran three 1500 m trials: one as fast as possible, and two where the first 1100 m was deliberately slowed — by 5%, then by 10% — each finishing with an all-out last lap. Slow the early pace, and the kick becomes the only thing that varies.

In the fast trial, the answer was purely aerobic. Running economy and the velocity at peak oxygen uptake explained 80% of the variation in time among the women, and 72% among the men once the early pacing was added. When the pace is honest from the gun, there is nowhere to hide.

In the paced trials, the intuitive answer failed. Neither maximal sprint speed nor the anaerobic speed reserve was associated with last-lap time. The sprinter’s advantage never showed up.

What did predict it: a higher muscle carnosine Z-score — meaning a more fast-twitch fibre profile, estimated by MR spectroscopy rather than a biopsy — and a greater maximal accumulated oxygen deficit. Fibre type and the size of the anaerobic battery, not top-end speed.

Which explains something every coach has seen. A runner can be unbeatable in a time trial and get outkicked in a championship, or the reverse. The two races ask different physiological questions of the same athlete.

So stop training the kick as a sprint. Build the anaerobic capacity, know which profile your athlete has, and race accordingly: take the sting out early, or wait — but pick on purpose.

📊Source: Bellinger, Derave, Lievens, et al. (2021). European Journal of Applied Physiology.

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Eighty-five elite and world-class men reported their training and their best times after three, five and seven years of ...
15/09/2026

Eighty-five elite and world-class men reported their training and their best times after three, five and seven years of systematic training. Then researchers asked which activity actually predicted how fast they became.

The famous theory says expertise comes from deliberate practice: effortful, focused, uncomfortable work aimed squarely at getting better. In running, intervals and tempo runs qualify. Easy running does not.

Here is how the predictors ranked:

— Total distance run: r ≥ 0.75
— Easy runs: r ≥ 0.68
— Short intervals: r ≥ 0.53
— Tempo runs: r ≥ 0.50
— Long intervals: r ≥ 0.22

Total distance on its own accounted for at least 57% of the variation in performance. One variable, more than half the gap.

And easy running outranked every hard session type. The activity that does not qualify as deliberate practice was, in the authors' own words, crucial to better performances, partly through what it contributes to total distance.

When all the modes went into the model together, only two still explained performance: easy runs and tempo runs. That is a short list for seven years of work.

The odd one out is worth sitting with. Long intervals — the one-to-two-kilometre repetitions runners dread and build their identity around — showed the weakest link to performance of any mode measured. Not a reason to remove them. A reason to stop building the week around them.

Protect the easy running first, raise volume before intensity, keep one quality tempo. And hold it in proportion: this describes what got elite men there over seven years, not a prescription for everybody.

Source: Casado, Hanley, Santos-Concejero & Ruiz-Perez (2021). Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 35:2525-2531.

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Your body does not count the calories in a run. It reads the run as a message — and different parts of it build differen...
15/09/2026

Your body does not count the calories in a run. It reads the run as a message — and different parts of it build different things.

Two stresses arrive in every session:
- mechanical load, from muscle contracting and bone taking impact,
- and low fuel, as cellular energy is spent faster than it is replaced.
They flip two different switches.

The low-fuel switch is the one runners underrate. As energy falls, AMPK comes on, PGC-1a goes up, and the cell starts building f.e.:
- more mitochondria,
- more glucose transporters,
- more oxidative fibre.

That signal comes from time spent working, not from how much it hurt — which is why base weeks change what you are capable of.

The mechanical message goes somewhere unexpected. A pressure-sensitive channel in bone cells opens on footstrike and lets calcium in. That is the trigger for remodelling: signalling switches turned on and sclerostin, the brake on bone building, is suppressed.
Take the loading away and the message never gets sent.

Muscle also talks to bone chemically:
it releases irisin, which docks onto a receptor on bone cells and keeps them alive. Strength work shows up in bone density, not just on the bar.

And the run reaches the brain. Working muscle puts irisin, BDNF, Lac-Phe and vesicles into the blood; these appear to cross into the brain and raise the growth factor behind synaptic plasticity and new neurons.

One caution: the pathways are the same in everyone, but how much running it takes to move them, and how long the effect lasts, still varies athlete to athlete.

So the mechanism tells you what to aim at. The athlete's body tells you how much.

Source: Ying et al. (2026). The Health Benefits of Exercise: Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms. MedComm.

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Twenty trained runners, six weeks, the same weekly distance. One group ran its easy days at the top of the moderate zone...
14/09/2026

Twenty trained runners, six weeks, the same weekly distance. One group ran its easy days at the top of the moderate zone. The other ran ten to fifteen per cent below it. Only the pace of the easy run changed.

They finished level. Neuromuscular and performance measures improved in both groups, with no difference between them. The slower group simply carried the block more comfortably — perceived strain ran lower on several days while the training itself landed in the same place.

What that means for a week:

— Hold the distance, ease the pace. The trade only works if the mileage stays put; the slower group spent longer on its feet for the same miles.
— The top of the easy zone is a line, not a target. Sitting well under it is still squarely inside the zone that builds the engine.
— Keep one hard session honest. Both groups trained five easy days and one hard one. The gains came from that shape, not from how fast the easy days were.

One thing moved the other way in both groups: the anaerobic reserve above threshold fell while the aerobic ceiling rose. A week built almost entirely of easy running plus a single hard session sharpens the engine and dulls the finish. If a finishing kick matters, it needs its own work in the plan.

The easy day is the pace nobody watches, and the one with the most room in it.

📚Source: Guimaraes, Foresti, Papoti & de Azevedo (2026). Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.

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Reeds gedurende enkele decennia volg ik zoveel mogelijk running relevante sportwetenschappelijke evoluties en inzichten ...
11/09/2026

Reeds gedurende enkele decennia volg ik zoveel mogelijk running relevante sportwetenschappelijke evoluties en inzichten op de voet,
en bouwde ik gedurende meer dan 15 jaar op quasi dagelijkse basis aan een kennis database bestaande uit (samenvattingen van) duizenden hoogkwalitatieve sportwetenschappelijle studies, artikels, boeken, reviews, etc…

Deze database gecombineerd met:
• een opleiding als Master in de Sport- en Bewegingswetenschappen
• ervaring als internationaal atleet in zowel running als duathlon
• lesgever anatomie, inspanningsfysiologie, sportwetenschappelijk onderzoek,
• diverse coaching diploma’s en 9 jaar ervaring als coach tot op internationaal niveau (oa titels en medailles op World Games, Europese en Wereldkampioenschappen)
• moderne software en technologie…

…laat me toe om zeer hoogwaardige sportwetenschappelijke bundels, gidsen en schema’s op maat en op basis van actuele consensussen en inzichten samen te stellen.

Gidsen en bundels over diverse topics zoals o.a.:
• aanpak langere doelen op vlak van training, voeding, carbo loading, …
• blessurepreventie en aanpak bij eerste signalen of pijntjes,
• evidence informed suppletie en nieuwe innovaties en evoluties hierin
• aanpak verblijf in hoogtetent en/of -stage
• en nog veel meer…

Door de combinatie van sportpassie, gedurende decennia geduldig opgebouwde kennis en tal van relevante ervaringen, samen met een eigen trainingsvisie en ontwikkelde methodiek (na o.a. veel sampling de maximale metabole intramusculaire quasi steady state pace intervalmethode)
…hoop ik het verschil te maken met gelijkaardige aanbieders.

En hoop ik mensen te overtuigen die voor kwaliteit willen gaan en een aanpak die op alle vlakken menselijk, op maat, doelgericht en wetenschappelijk onderbouwd is.

✉️ [email protected] bij interesse

🔸Optimize your sports performances, reach your personal top!📈🔝

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Sixty well-trained male runners, sixteen weeks, four training sequences and one matched training load. The only thing th...
11/09/2026

Sixty well-trained male runners, sixteen weeks, four training sequences and one matched training load. The only thing that changed was the order.

Filipas, Bonato, Gallo and Codella ran pyramidal throughout, polarized throughout, and a switch at week eight in each direction.
The pyramidal week was 77 per cent below the first ventilatory threshold, 17 per cent between the thresholds and 6 per cent above the second; the polarized week was 80, 6 and 14.

In week one only Tuesday separated them: fifty-five minutes of steady tempo against four times seven minutes above the second threshold.

Every group got faster over the 5 km time trial.
• Pyramidal into polarized gained 1.5 per cent,
• polarized throughout 1.1,
• polarized into pyramidal 0.9,
• pyramidal throughout 0.6.

Velocity at 2 and 4 mmol per litre were the only significant predictors of who improved; peak oxygen uptake was not.

Where the summary departs from the paper:
• The 1.5 per cent is presented as clearing technical error. The paper gives 3.2 per cent as the smallest detectable change of a 5 km time trial and states that most of its own significant changes fall below it.
• Polarized throughout is listed at 0.4 per cent. It gained 1.1. The 0.4 is the first eight weeks of the pyramidal-into-polarized arm.
• The five seconds is the margin over the other groups, not the gain. A 1.5 per cent gain on a 986-second baseline is about fifteen seconds.
• Absolute peak oxygen uptake and peak lactate are listed as unchanged. Both rose significantly; what was absent was any difference between arms.

📚 Source: Filipas L, et al. (2022). Scand J Med Sci Sports 32:498-511. doi:10.1111/sms.14101. Open access.

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The term “anaerobic threshold” carries a claim inside it: that the muscle is short of oxygen. Poole, Rossiter, Brooks an...
10/09/2026

The term “anaerobic threshold” carries a claim inside it: that the muscle is short of oxygen. Poole, Rossiter, Brooks and Gladden argue that the claim does not hold.

Wasserman’s chain ran from limited oxygen delivery, to lactate and hydrogen ions, to falling pH, to bicarbonate buffering, to carbon dioxide, to ventilation.

This review accepts every step downstream and rejects the first: insufficient oxygen is not the primary basis for lactataemia. Lactate is instead a crucial energy source, a major gluconeogenic precursor and a signalling molecule, with no ipso facto evidence of muscle dysoxia or anoxia.

It also separates two boundaries. The lactate threshold divides moderate from heavy exercise. Critical power, the threshold for a sustained ‘non-oxidative’ contribution, divides heavy from very heavy and sits often far above it.

Where the summary departs from the paper:
- It is presented as the modern consensus. Two letters challenged the review and its authors replied to both, all inside volume 599 of the same journal in 2021.
- Rossiter and Brooks, two of the four authors, published opposing essays five months later on whether the concept is valid.
- The review is said to require abandoning threshold zones. It states that gas exchange estimation of the lactate threshold remains important in training and in the clinic.

📚 Source: Poole DC, Rossiter HB, Brooks GA, Gladden LB (2021). J Physiol 599:737-767. doi:10.1113/JP279963

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