Developing a footballer is about more than preparing them for the next match. It means understanding what that individual player needs to keep training, developing, and ultimately reach their potential.

Mattia Modonutti joins us to share his approach to player development and performance within elite football. Rather than treating performance as a collection of separate disciplines and datasets, Mattia explains why the real value comes from getting coaches, strength and conditioning staff, nutritionists, medical teams, and mental performance practitioners around the same table to build a richer
understanding of the athlete.

The conversation explores training continuity, individualizing load within a team environment, balancing match demands with long term physical development, and the difference between simply using a physical capacity during football and actually training it. Mattia also shares how his thinking has evolved as he moved from hands on coaching into performance leadership and why being evidence informed means combining research with experience, practitioner expertise, and athlete feedback.

Interested in learning more about the latest developments in endurance performance and sports science? Subscribe to the HIIT Science email list for updates on new research, courses, and educational opportunities.

Speaker:

Mattia Modonutti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattiamodonutti/

For decades, VO2 max, movement economy, and fractional utilization of VO2max have been widely presented as three key determinants of endurance performance. But how strong is the evidence for that third piece?

Yannick Sondermann and Dr Lars Schwalm join us this week to challenge some long standing assumptions around fractional utilization and explore whether it truly deserves the weight it has been given in traditional endurance performance models.

Drawing on their recently published work, they unpack what fractional utilization actually represents, whether it changes meaningfully with training, and why improvements in the metric may not always mean what we think they do. They also explore VO2max, movement economy, durability, strength training, and what coaches should actually focus on when trying to improve performance.

The conversation ultimately comes back to a simple question: are we focusing on the variables we can actually change?

Interested in learning more about the latest developments in endurance performance and sports science? Subscribe to the HIIT Science email list for updates on new research, courses, and educational opportunities.

Today's Speakers:

Prof Paul Laursen https://www.paullaursen.com/

Yannick Sondermann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-sondermann/

Dr. Lars Schwalm: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-lars-schwalm-223ab2420/

Resources:

https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/ijspp/aop/article-10.1123-ijspp.2026-0039/article-10.1123-ijspp.2026-0039.xml

We have more athlete tracking data than ever before. But are we actually measuring what matters?

Dr Ted Polglaze joins the podcast to reflect on more than three decades in sports science, from manually tracking athletes on VHS tapes to the arrival of GPS and today's increasingly sophisticated approaches to measuring movement and load. His career has spanned multiple Olympic campaigns, elite field hockey, water polo, rowing, and other high performance environments.

The conversation dives into metabolic and mechanical power, why speed and distance alone cannot capture the true demands of team sports, and the importance of acceleration, direction, movement orientation, and what Ted calls "erraticness." Ted and Martin also discuss one element that has increasingly disappeared from modern tracking analysis: time.
From the limitations of current models to where athlete tracking could go next, this episode is a reminder that better technology does not automatically mean better understanding.

Interested in learning more about the latest developments in endurance performance and sports science? Subscribe to the HIIT Science email list for updates on new research, courses, and educational opportunities.

Today's Speakers:

Dr Martin Buchheit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-buchheit-6a355828/?locale=fr
Dr Ted Polglaze: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-polglaze-oly-23b6a81b3/

Top Episode Replay:

HEAT🔥 training is ESTABLISHED, EASY ✅ and FOR EVERYONE! Get on it NOW!

Brad Culp wants you to understand that HEAT training is not a FAD, and that PREPARING for your ENVIRONMENT is ESSENTIAL to your performance. Norwegians can do it, so can you! Plus, training is cheap🤑!

In the 139th episode of The Training Science Podcast, Paul and Brad discuss:

🔎 the FULL SCOPE of the “NORWEGIAN” method;

🥑 why FAT metabolism, volume AND intensity are all ESSENTIAL for endurance;

🇳🇴 how to BUILD a strong sense of “PURPOSE” around high-performance across all ages and sports - like in NORWAY!

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Today’s speakers:

Prof. Paul Laursen https://www.paullaursen.com/

Brad Culp https://twitter.com/bbculp

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References:

Brad’s Norwegian Methods book:

https://www.amazon.com/Norwegian-Method-Groundbreaking-Endurance-Performance/dp/B0CTYHG1ZV?dplnkId=ab116467-05b9-4879-b431-50bdef7a5e20

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What actually happens to the body when an athlete enters dangerously cold water?

Dr Jørgen Melau brings more than 20 years of experience as Safety Director and Chief of the Medical and Safety Team at the Norseman Extreme Triathlon, alongside a background in helicopter search and rescue and research into cold water swimming.

In this episode, Jørgen breaks down the physiology of cold water immersion, from the initial cold shock response to the loss of muscle function that can occur within minutes. He also explores hypothermia, swimming induced pulmonary edema, the surprising temperature drop athletes can experience after leaving the water, and why cold water can place significant stress on the heart.

The conversation also looks at whether athletes can truly acclimatize to cold, how to prepare for extreme events like Norseman, and what more than a decade of research at one of the world's toughest triathlons is teaching us about making endurance sport safer.

Today’s speakers:

Prof Paul Laursen https://www.paullaursen.com/

Dr Jørgen Melau

https://www.melau.no/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmelau/

https://jorgenmelau.substack.com/

Athletes have access to more data than ever before. But more data does not automatically lead to better decisions.

In this episode, Mollie Brewer explores the intersection of sports science, artificial intelligence, wearable technology, and human computer interaction. Drawing on her experience in professional cycling and her current research in computer science, Mollie explains why getting the fundamentals of athlete data right matters before we can unlock the potential of AI.

The conversation explores data literacy, training load and intensity management, the risks of chasing metrics, and how interface design can influence athlete behaviour. Mollie also discusses how AI could help bring together previously siloed information while preserving the human expertise, judgement, and athlete feedback needed to interpret it effectively.

Interested in learning more about the latest developments in endurance performance and sports science? Subscribe to the HIIT Science email list for updates on new research, courses, and educational opportunities.

Today’s speakers:

Prof Paul Laursen https://www.paullaursen.com/

Mollie Brewer https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollie-brewer-21a230aa/

HYROX is exploding in popularity, but the science behind what actually drives performance is only beginning to catch up.

Dr Ludwig Rappelt joins the podcast to unpack new research examining the demands of HYROX and how performance has evolved across its first seven seasons. With running accounting for nearly half of total race time, endurance provides the foundation, but the data suggests strength based stations can play an outsized role in separating stronger performances from weaker ones.

The conversation explores the balance between strength and endurance, potential thresholds for VO2 max and maximal strength, where athletes may still have untapped performance gains, and how HYROX specific training could evolve as the sport and its research base continue to mature.

Today’s speakers:

Prof Paul Laursen https://www.paullaursen.com/

Dr Ludwig Rappelt https://www.linkedin.com/in/ludwig-rappelt-b5239b18a/

Resources:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physiology/articles/10.3389/fphys.2026.1847569/full

What happens when you stop looking at performance through the lens of individual disciplines and start putting performance itself at the centre?

Katie Slattery and Jamie Stanley unpack their Performance Centred Practice framework, developed from years of experience across the Australian high performance system. They explore how coaches, sport scientists, practitioners, and athletes can build a shared understanding of what performance actually requires, then connect those demands directly to training and decision making.

The conversation covers shared mental models, productive disagreement within interdisciplinary teams, improving performance meetings, defining training quality beyond simple physical metrics, and creating better feedback loops between what happens in training and what ultimately matters in competition.

Today’s speakers:

Dr Martin Buchheit https://martin-buchheit.net/

Katie Slattery https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Katie.Slattery

Jamie Stanley https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-stanley-a5a7265b/

Athletica U
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLu7L8NU083obOOZnkl9qd1lxr5zfVKTkL&si=YkGXTSQsJcYBUPiD