As often self-described "tough" and results-driven individuals, athletes can sometimes struggle to find balance in a culture that values the "grind" over honest vulnerability. How can athletes use that vulnerability to not only reach their goals but thrive in the process? Ways Athletes Can Use Vulnerability: - Assemble a supportive team around you.  - Identify if/when training isn't adding value to your life.  - Realize when the process is broken.  - Allow yourself to feel disappointed.  - Don't be afraid to change/shift your goals.    Visit thomasendurancecoaching.com for more resources and to speak with an expert about how to help you reach your full potential.    **SUPPORT THE PODCAST** Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to take advantage of 25% off of the entire InsideTracker store! If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports. With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today.

Endurance Minded

Finding Strength Through Vulnerability

Alex Pisacane is part of the business development team at InsideTracker, was a college D1 wrestler, and is a lifelong athlete whose curiosity and quest to optimize his own performance led him to InsideTracker.  Episode Highlights Include: - How to use blood testing to establish individualized baselines. - What can we expect to be gained from regular blood testing? - Looking at nutrition, lifestyle, and activity as the three primary pillars of optimized health and longevity.  - What it looks like to take an "optimized" approach to health and wellness.  - The future of technology and individualized wellness data.    Visit thomasendurancecoaching.com for more resources and to speak with an expert about how to help you reach your full potential.    **SUPPORT THE PODCAST** Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to take advantage of 25% off of the entire InsideTracker store! If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports. With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today.

Choosing Optimization Over Perfection

We talk a lot about how to overcome adversity, define our goals, and navigate hardship, but there's a real need to celebrate our wins when they come to us. In this episode, Taylor highlights why taking time to celebrate is a crucial part of the athlete experience.  Episode Highlights Include: - Why it's important to celebrate.  - What to focus on when we are celebrating. Celebrate showing up. Celebrate the process.  Identify three things that made you the best version of yourself.  Identify how you can leverage that experience for the future.  Visit thomasendurancecoaching.com for more resources and to speak with an expert about how to help you reach your full potential.    **SUPPORT THE PODCAST** Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to take advantage of 25% off of the entire InsideTracker store! If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports. With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today.

Celebrating Your Wins

Carrie Jackson Cheadle joins us again to check-in and discusses what we've learned as a result of the experiences we've all had over the last year or so, and what tools we can implement to help us reach our full potential and enjoy each step along the way.  Episode highlights include: - Carrie's three biggest observations throughout 2021 as it relates to athletes and their sport.  - The importance of normalizing the need to pause and regroup from time to time.  - Redefining success. Asking, "What's really important?" - How to make process goals as exciting as outcome goals.  - Making race day the celebration.    Check out Carrie's book, Rebound.    Visit thomasendurancecoaching.com for more resources and to speak with an expert about how to help you reach your full potential.    **SUPPORT THE PODCAST** Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to take advantage of 25% off of the entire InsideTracker store! If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports. With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today.

Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities

As athletes, we're often too hard on ourselves when it comes to motivation. We ascribe our commitment and seriousness as athletes to how motivated we are. When that motivation wains, and it will, we struggle to give ourselves permission to let that happen, understand why, and restructure our approach. This episode covers why permission is an important mindset tool when it comes to motivation.  Episode Highlights Include: - Why might motivation ebb in the first place?  - What's our typical response when this happens and the negative language surrounding those responses.  - Why do we need to give ourselves permission in the first place? - Developing the tools to work through these periods when motivation isn't high.  Visit thomasendurancecoaching.com for more resources and to speak with an expert about how to help you reach your full potential.    **SUPPORT THE PODCAST** Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to take advantage of 25% off of the entire InsideTracker store! If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports. With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today.  

Permission to Lose Motivation

Kyle MacRae is a Scottish recreational cyclist who once ran away from a big mountain and wanted to find out why. In doing so, he learned to change the way he thought about his cycling, and himself. THE MENTAL CYCLIST is the result of that journey: A book designed to help any cyclist develop deep self-expertise, take on any challenge, and have amazing experiences on a bike.  Episode Highlights Include: - Using motivation as an alternative to willpower.  - Distinguishing logistical vs. psychological barriers. - The importance of the mind-body connection.  - Understanding guilt vs. shame.  - The role of fun in reaching your full potential.  - Stress as a non-binary thought process.  To learn more about Kyle, THE MENTAL CYCLIST, and to order the book check out the links below.   Website Facebook Instagram  Amazon   For more information and resources visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com   SUPPORT THE PODCAST: Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to take advantage of 25% off of the entire InsideTracker store!  If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports. With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today.

Dodging the "Comparison Trap"

Just because we set out to accomplish one specific goal, doesn't always mean that we should continue to push forward in the face of adversity. There are times when knowing how and when to pivot are important in an athlete's journey. These pivots can help you find more joy and sustainability as an athlete.   Episode Highlights Include:   - Pivot when the process is no longer adding value.  - Pivot when the "cost" is too great.  - Pivot when the goal is too aggressive.  - Pivot when things are out of balance for too long.  - Pivot when it's no longer bringing you joy.    For more information and resources visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com   SUPPORT THE PODCAST: Visit https://www.insidetracker.com/ and enter code ENDURANCEMINDEDPRO25 for 25% off of your purchase.    If you're a coach, trainer, registered dietitian, or other health and wellness practitioner, InsideTracker Pro is your gateway to offering your clients InsideTracker -- the truly personalized nutrition and performance system that’s trusted by hundreds of elite athletes and top coaches in strength and endurance sports.    With InsideTracker Pro, you can earn revenue, enjoy discounts, and help your clients perform better than ever. Visit https://info.insidetracker.com/enduranceminded to sign up today. 

Knowing When to Pivot

We welcome back Selene Yeager to the show to discuss a wide variety of topics many of which come from her latest podcast endeavor, Hit Play Not Pause, where she discusses the role menopause plays in maturing female athletes and helps them optimize their physiology, maintain fitness, and harness their power.  ----more----Episode Highlights Include:  - The important of heavy strength training for endurance athletes.  - How to navigate the marketing associated with the endurance sports space. Supplements, diets, meal plans, etc. How do we know what works and what to trust?  - How acceptance is critical for longterm growth. Work with the body you have, not the body you used to have.  - Hormone therapy for women.  For more information visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com  

If It's Too Good to Be True, It Is.

Motivation is not defined by how many workouts you complete. Athletes should give themselves the permission to make space in route to their full athletic potential, and coaches should work to identify when and how to make these opportunities for space productive so that longevity is prioritized above all else.  The four key areas for mental space are: - During vacation/travel. - During big blocks of training. - After the completion of a big goal.  - When stress is high external to training load.  Visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com for more tools and resources on this topic and more. 

The Importance of Mental Space

Revisiting our conversation with Carrie Cheadle, renowned mental skills coach, from May of 2020 to understand how we can apply our experiences and perspective to our ever-changing circumstances. Carrie's insight and expertise is applicable across a wide variety of disciplines, skill sets, and backgrounds.  Episode Highlights Include: Understanding the role of stress in performance and how it should be factored into our expectations and goals.  There's no straight line to our goals, so resiliency is critical for sustainability.  Perfection is not the goal.  What your "Operating Manual" tells us about how to reach optimal performance.  When it's the right time to work on limiters, and when it's not.  Visit Thomas Endurance Coaching for more resources, guidance, and support.  

Defining Your Operating Manual

With so many event cancelations and forced alterations to our goals over the last year and a half, some athletes are struggling to find the drive and clarity necessary to set their sights on big goals again. In this episode Taylor talks about why that might be the case, and where the true value lies when we embark on the journey to reach lofty goals.  Episode highlights include: Embracing a goal with a high potential for failure is a good thing.  The work required to reach that goal is hugely impactful, and has far reaching impacts over and above fitness.  The process provides valuable perspective and doses of humility that have broad reaching effects on your athletic identity.  For more information on how to define, work towards, and execute on your goals visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com.

The Value of Doing Hard Sh*t

Jen Rulon has been a triathlon coach of 18+ years and owner of JenRulon.com. She received her Masters in Kinesiology with an emphasis in Exercise Science. You can find her knowledge as an author and speaker ranging from Triathlete Magazine, Runners World, on the TEDx Stage, the Health and Wellness Expo in San Antonio, TX, Men’s Journal Online, and the New York Times. When Jen “retired” officially from the long course triathlon in 2019, she decided to split her focus elsewhere. This is when she started to take her lessons learned from racing 15 Ironman Triathlons and teaching women how to build that “Monarch” Mindset.  Her newest book, “Self Motivation Strategies for Women” is available on Amazon or order directly from Jen for a signed copy.  Follow her on Instagram. Episode Highlights Include: Leaning into failure to drive success.  Remaining committed to long-term goals in the face of adversity.  Finding your “why” outside of fitness, and the role of internal validation.  Maintaining motivation through both the “light” and “dark”.  Establishing your support network to reach your full potential.  Formulating your “Priority Pie” to understand where you’re at vs. where you want to be.  Understanding the role of obsession in sustainability and becoming a lifelong athlete.  For more information visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com

Let Joy Lead the Way!

Taylor Thomas, Founder, and Coach at TEC answers a listener-submitted question covering the top five most valuable qualitative metrics and how to use them to better quantify and understand stress.  Metrics Discussed: HRV - Understanding what it is, where it comes from, and how to use it.  Sleep Quality - Looking at deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep, time awake, etc. to understand sleep patterns and how to build healthy sleep habits.  Overall Feeling - Taking note of your mental and physical well-being. Motivation - It won't be high every day, but what do we do when it drops? Stress - Understanding the role that stress, from all areas of our lives, plays in our ability to train effectively.  Visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com for more information on everything discussed on Endurance Minded. 

Interpreting Morning Metrics for Improved Performance

AJ Sobrilsky is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and a Board Certified Orthopedic Specialist at Excel Physical Therapy in Bozeman, MT. He's also a coach and consultant with the Climb Strong group. He brings his experience as a runner and mountain athlete to his work as a physical therapist to address the nuance of the athlete experience as it relates to injury prevention, resiliency, and treatment. Keep up with him on Instagram.  Episode Highlights Include: - Load management and how to properly handle stress, no matter where it's coming from.  - Building capacity with longevity in mind.  - The mental aspects of training and recovery from injury.  - Pain vs. injury. How to know the difference.  - Defining expectations to establish a realistic runway for success.  For more tools and resources to help you pursue your goals visit www.thomasendurancecoaching.com

Contextualizing Stress and Its Role in Performance

For many athletes training is a combination of workouts that often results in a race towards peak fitness. While maximizing our fitness through individualized workouts is critical to reaching our full potential, it's not the only benefit of executing a training plan. In this episode, Taylor talks about the benefits of workouts that we may not realize are there.  - Confidence: Consistent workout execution builds confidence, which is not always guaranteed in other aspects of life and training.  - Experience: Each workout provides the opportunity to gain experiences that bolster the confidence and skillsets needed to reach your goals.  - Perception: Gaining the awareness necessary to use an intimate understanding of your body to make decisions when it counts.  - Compartmentalization: Making time for your workouts will uncover your ability to be productive in all areas of your life.  Visit thomasendurancecoaching.com for more tools and resources to help you pursue your goals. 

The Hidden Value of Workouts

Endurance Minded dives deep into the psychological, emotional, and mental components that drive endurance athletes to push themselves further and faster. Interviewing everyone from world class athletes and coaches to everyday folks, Endurance Minded seeks to tap into what it is that drives athletes to strive for more.

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Endurance Minded

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