Coach Justin

UAE introduce centralised TUE system for athletes dubaieye1038.com/news/sports…

'I'm probably not the one who trains the most' - 🇸🇮 Pogacar explains his approach to staying on top 📰 domestiquecycling.com/en/new… 📸 Cor Vos

JUST IN: Caitlin Clark will become the face of DlCK'S, per BBG.

ChatGPT kan selvsagt bygge et treningsprogram for deg. Men hvor godt blir resultatet? Det viser seg at det kommer mye an på deg selv. wattkoden.no/chatgpt-trening…

Failed a test 😬😭👀🌯

Kenya's current women's 400m champion Mercy Okech provisionally suspended after testing +ve for two different banned PEDs. Coached by Josephine Nyarunda.

I could be wrong, but there’s something about lactate gels that I’m still trying to understand… From my perspective as a chemical engineer and coach, I’m struggling to see how exogenous lactate supplementation could provide a meaningful advantage in athletic performance. I understand the importance of lactate as a fuel and its role in energy metabolism. In fact, I find it fascinating how much we continue to learn about this molecule. However, when I try to put things into numbers, a few questions come to mind. For example, a gel containing 5 g of lactate provides roughly 18 kcal of potential energy. To put that into perspective, a 70 kg cyclist producing 300 W, assuming a mechanical efficiency of around 23%, may be expending approximately 19 kcal/minute. Of course, the potential benefits may not be purely energetic. There could be effects on metabolic signaling, substrate utilization, or even specific applications during high-intensity efforts. But this is where my main question comes in: if our bodies are already producing, transporting, and oxidizing substantial amounts of lactate during exercise, how much of an additional physiological impact can a relatively small exogenous dose really have? And more importantly, would that impact be large enough to translate into a measurable performance improvement compared with a well-designed conventional fueling strategy? I’m not saying these products don’t work, nor am I ruling out potentially interesting applications in specific competitive scenarios. I simply think we should be careful when moving from an interesting physiological mechanism to conclusions about its practical benefits. As a coach, I’m interested not only in whether something could work metabolically, but also in how much it actually improves performance, for whom, and under what circumstances. And as a chemical engineer, I naturally find myself thinking about doses, concentrations, mass balances, kinetics, and the magnitude of the potential effect. Maybe I’m missing something important, particularly from a metabolic signaling perspective. Perhaps the real value of exogenous lactate lies not in its energy contribution, but in its ability to trigger physiological responses that are not directly proportional to the amount ingested. That’s a possibility I’m genuinely interested in understanding better. Because recognizing that lactate plays a fundamental role in athletic performance is one thing. Demonstrating that consuming it in gel form provides an additional performance advantage is another. I’d genuinely love to hear from those researching this topic and better understand what the current evidence tells us. At the end of the day, I think we’re all aiming for the same thing: a better understanding of physiology and better decisions based on evidence, rather than just promising mechanisms. And one final thought: I genuinely believe we haven’t yet fully explored or exploited the potential of high-carbohydrate fueling strategies, particularly when it comes to optimizing carbohydrate availability, gut training, and individual tolerance. Before looking for the next marginal gain through new substrates, I wonder how much performance we could still unlock by simply getting the fundamentals of carbohydrate fueling better.

Je partage à 100 % les conclusions de l'article: de la vraie musculation sur le vélo est préférable à la salle. Gain de temps, gestuelle parfaite, facile à entretenir toute l'année. nature-humaine.ca/2025/03/mu…

Met of zonder motortje?

Interview Eli Iserbyt over: M. Vanthourenhout: "Voorlopig de enige op niveau, maar Koppenberg ligt hem niet, hij heeft 25" bonus nodig in slotronde." T. Nys: “Rijdt maar 18 crossen en ik hoor dat Lidl Trek niet wil dat hij in aparte veldritploeg rijdt." hln.be/veldrijden/laat-de-da…

Spartacus 🧐🤓

Another Ethiopian runner banned. Former national 1500m champion Sofiya Shemsu Chegen.

Ethiopia 🇪🇹 🧐

Fietsen we straks allemaal met 32 inch wielen? 👇🏽 hetiskoers.nl/mountainbike-g…

"A rider who is, in truth, too good for our team" - Visma talent set to become leader for Dutch continental team cyclinguptodate.com/cycling/…

Yesterday I sat in a product training for the new adidas Adios Pro 5, and during the presentation an interesting discussion started. The tech rep was talking about how the Adios line has consistently produced top-tier racing shoes over the years, and that adidas consistently makes the FASTEST shoes. I put that in caps because it’s the whole point of this post. I pushed back. My argument was that adidas doesn’t necessarily have the fastest shoe but an incredibly deep pool of great athletes. And there’s lab data suggesting another shoe is actually more efficient. In 2025, Wouter Hoogkamer and his team at UMass Amherst found that the PUMA Fast-R Nitro Elite 3 was 3.15% to 3.62% more economical than both the Nike Alphafly 3 and the adidas Adios Pro Evo 1. Every one of the 15 runners in the study was more economical in the PUMA. That’s a big number in a field where the differences between super shoes have been around 1% for years. So if the PUMA is the most efficient shoe, where are the PUMA podiums? There aren’t any. In the 2026 World Marathon Majors so far, adidas has 20 podium places, and PUMA has none. The fastest PUMA-sponsored athlete ever is Amanal Petros, who ran 2:04:03 in Valencia last December. That makes him the 52nd fastest marathoner of all time. That got me curious, so I went through the 51 men ahead of him and checked which brand each of them wore in his fastest marathon. Some of it came from race reports, and some of it I checked myself by watching race footage. This is the full top 52: Adidas: 25 Nike: 21 ASICS: 4 PUMA: 1 Li-Ning: 1 At first glance, that looks like a win for the tech rep. But the timing tells a more interesting story. The old world records from before super shoes were mostly set in adidas: Gebrselassie, Makau, Kimetto. Then from roughly 2019 to 2024, it was Nike’s era. Kipchoge, Bekele, Kiptum, and a long list of others ran their fastest times in the Vaporfly and Alphafly. And then in 2026, adidas came back in a huge way. There have been 23 sub-2:04 marathons this year, more than double any previous year, and 15 of them were run in Adidas. Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London in the Adios Pro Evo 3, and Yomif Kejelcha ran 1:59:41 behind him in the same shoe, in his debut. So the list isn’t really “adidas versus everyone.” It’s three different eras stacked on top of each other. Now for the part that weakens my own argument. If adidas’s dominance was only about having the deepest athlete pool, you wouldn’t expect athletes who were already with adidas to suddenly get much faster. But that’s exactly what happened in 2026. Amos Kipruto won Chicago in 2:01:09 at 34 years old. Guye Adola ran his first PB in nine years at 35 to win Berlin. Lemi Berhanu took a full minute off his best at 32 to win Amsterdam. These guys were adidas athletes before the Evo 3. A bigger athlete pool doesn’t explain why the same men suddenly ran so much faster. Something changed this year, and the shoe is the obvious candidate. I still believe Sawe would be the best marathoner in the world in any top shoe, but whether he’d have broken two hours without the Evo 3 is something none of us can know. And there’s a part that weakens the PUMA case as well. The Hoogkamer study was funded by PUMA, and one of the co-authors is a PUMA employee. It also tested 15 runners at recreational speeds, not elites running 2:55 per kilometre. To be fair, Hoogkamer also ran the original Nike study that found the Vaporfly’s 4% benefit, and those results held up in real races. So I don’t think the numbers are made up. But economy in a lab at recreational pace isn’t the same as performance in the final 10K of a major. What I find telling is this: Petros wore the Fast-R3 at the 2025 World Championships marathon. He ran exactly the same time as the winner, Alphonce Simbu, and lost gold on a photo finish. The shoe clearly isn’t slow. It just has almost nobody on the start line. When one brand has 25 of the fastest 52 runners and another has one, the podium count tells you more about the athlete pool than about the shoe. There’s one more detail worth pointing out. The shoe winning all those podiums is the Evo 3. That’s a $500, 97-gram, limited-release hyper shoe. The Pro 5, the shoe we were being trained on, is the one in stores. When someone says “the Adios line is the fastest,” a lot of that credibility is borrowed from a shoe most runners will never race in. Then we got to contracts. The tech rep made a good counter-argument: elite runners choose adidas because they believe the brand consistently makes good products. My response was that they probably signed because the contract was the biggest. I can’t prove that, because nobody publishes these contracts. But I still think money explains the athlete pool better than belief in the product does. Adidas can afford to sign the best runners early, sometimes whole training groups at once, and keep them for years. Sawe was already a half marathon world champion before he ran his first marathon, and Adidas had him long before he broke two hours. Once you have that many of the best athletes, you’re going to win most of the races, whatever shoe you put them in. And that’s really my point. Look at that podium table again. It doesn’t show which shoe is the fastest. It shows which brand has the fastest athletes on the start line. Those aren’t the same thing. Do I think the Evo 3 is a great shoe? Yes. The veteran PBs this year are hard to ignore, and I’d be lying if I said the shoe has nothing to do with it. But “adidas makes the FASTEST shoes” is a claim the podium can’t prove. So when someone tells you a brand makes the fastest shoe because their athletes keep winning, ask the follow-up question: is it the shoe, or is it who’s wearing it?

Agent Gianni Demadonna blames Kenyan doping purely on its athletes: “It is bullshit when they continue to say the managers and the coaches are involved.” “The Kenyan athletes have very poor knowledge. They see the money.”