Welcome to Episode #48 of the Mile High Endurance podcast. Mile High Endurance is your weekly connection to coaches, experts and pro athletes to help you reach your endurance and triathlon goals. I'm your host Rich Soares with co-host Khem Suthiwan.
Today's interview is with coach David Warden. David is a competitive athlete, retired host of the Tri-Talk Podcast, and a highly respected coach. He takes a very science-based approach to helping athletes Swim, bike and run faster. We'll hear more from David shortly. I'm ready to ease into light training and working on my bio-mechanics. I suspect that I have room for improvement having seen my Swim Labs videos and feel that I have some flexibility issues that affect my run. This makes the interview with David particularly interesting to us. Here's the interview.
Intro:
I'd like to introduce coach David Warden. David is a competitive athlete, retired host of the Tri-Talk Podcast, and owner of David Warden Coaching. Welcome back onto the show, David!
A lot of listeners have heard our earlier interviews and many probably used to listen to you. For those who are newer to the sport or podcasting, would you mind giving a litter review of your resume?
Before we get in to the interview, I'd like to do a quick follow up to an interview we did 8 months ago. Do you remember the rapid fire questions?
Questions:
Let me give the listeners a little background on how we landed on this topic. I get a chance to talk to a lot of people who are new to the sport of triathlon and see themselves doing the sport for at least a few years. The question I get asked is, where to start? What is the best thing to focus on early in their triathlon career? My feeling is the first priority with an athlete, especially a new athlete, is injury prevention through good bio-mechanics.
I know bio-mechanic development is something you have some perspective on, so I'm excited to have you back on to talk about this topic. One of the things I'd like to do is make sure we have a definition of terms. The term bio-mechanic development may mean different things to different people. How do you define the term?
What's the Nature vs. Nurture score for bio-mechanics? How much control do we have over what we were born with?
Last week we spoke to Dr. Nate Williams about functional strength/balance testing. It would seem that functional testing or some other testing might be necessary to baseline an athletes bio-mechanics. What, if any baseline assessment, do you like to do with your athletes?
Okay, we've talked a bit about newer athletes. I don't presume bio-mechanic development is only for new athletes. Can we talk a couple of different cases that you have been presented with and how you have customized or integrated bio-mechanic development into their training.
How do we know good form when we see it? Or, how do we measure it? What quantitative tools do you use?
For those listeners who are curious, what are you doing in your coaching career now?
Are you working on any big projects (eg James Lawrence 50 IM dist in 50 days)?
I wanted to talk to you about the NYC Marathon before we wrap up. How did how your race in 2015 go?