Rhonda: Where do you see the future of, well, specifically high intensity interval training research and, you know, like the training methodologies, where's it going, like how we can find really, you know, how we can define good studies to optimize for VO2 max, to optimize for like mitochondrial biogenesis and these important measures of longevity and health and performance for the athletes too.

But where do you see the field going?

Dr. Gibala: Yeah, so a whole bunch of levels there. And I think it, you know, what's the most, it's like, how do we spend our tax dollars, right? What's the most important, education, health, all of that. But I think given the pervasiveness of physically inactivity writ large, there's a lot of behavioral work that needs to be done there around, is it a viable public health strategy? What are the best strategies to encourage people to engage in any physical activity behavior, but could brief vigorous physical activity, intermittent physical activity, non-exercise physical activity, could we have interventions that, behavioral interventions that will finally encourage people to do that.

So I think that's a massive area that needs to get looked at. Number two is, you know, clearly I'm a proponent for interval training, but I fully recognize that we haven't done, or just they're not out there, these large scale randomized clinical trials, making very good comparisons between traditional endurance exercise and interval type training, with proper what we call non-inferiority designs, which is like, what's the margin of, if there was a difference, it doesn't matter, right?

So maybe that's half a met or 0.2 of a met, whatever your metric is and design your studies. So it's like, if we show that margin of non-inferiority, then it's good enough. We can basically call these things the same, because a lot of the comparative studies to date are relatively small. And so there might be real biological or health related differences there, but the sample sizes just aren't large enough to be able to detect that.

And so certainly in my own work, you know, as I progress into what's the, probably the final phase of my career is, I think we've asked a lot of interesting questions in our work. We've mainly done relatively small scale proof of concept studies, but in our own work, we're thinking a lot more about rigorous research design.

And I think the field of exercise science generally is wrestling with this issue of moving towards proper sample size estimates, proper power calculations, registering trials, so we don't have systemic bias creeping into results, P-hacking, things like that. So I think that's a very big area of, maybe we need fewer smaller studies that generally look the same, and a lot more groups collaborating, larger multi-center trials.

You know, being engaged in some of this work right now, easier said than done, but I think that's where we need to go to, to get to the level of evidence that the people that write the physical activity guidelines might say, okay, now this issue is more informed, right? To make some decisions there. You know, probably less important for the general public, but the whole area of elite training for athletes, right?

Which is, you know, invariably, almost all of these athletes are experiments of one. So, you know, if Kipchoge trained slightly differently, would the marathon record be slightly lower? You know, probably not. You know, who am I to question Kipchoge's training, but I think we continue to wrestle with this. Like, we don't really know.

All these experiments of N of one, and elite coaching is that blend of art and science, but we don't have these large, you know, interventional studies in athletes, saying exactly what's the best way to train. We have some of them, we touched on them, but they're really, really hard to do. But if you're interested in elite performance, and then maybe the, I'm sure I'm missing lots, but probably the final one would be technological advancements, right?

There's just been huge advancements, obviously around sleep research, activity tracking, things like that. You know, continuous lactate monitoring in athletes. Will that really move the needle, or, you know, revolutionize training using some of these markers? Maybe, you know, and also data and activity tracking for everyday people as well.

You know, the ubiquity of smartphones, and watches, and things like that. Getting back to the behavior, you know, can we encourage people with activity prompts, and things like that? Like, is that a viable strategy, or is that, it's just never really gonna work in the real world? So, these sort of translational studies that continue to move research out of the laboratory into real world settings, so that we can truly move towards effectiveness studies, as opposed to efficacy studies, I think is where the field needs to go.

Rhonda: Awesome. Well, Marty, thank you so much for taking quite a bit of time to have this discussion with me today. I mean, I learned quite a bit, and I know people are gonna really enjoy learning this, you know, everything that we talked about today. I know, so we talked about your book, The One Minute Workout, people can find that, Amazon, I mean, anywhere, right?

Dr. Gibala: E-book form, hard copy, yeah, it's available everywhere, as they say.

Rhonda: And then you also have a website, Martin, is it mart? MartinGibala.com. MartinGibala.com, and then a Twitter. Your Twitter handle is @gibalam?

Dr. Gibala: Gibala M, so G-I-B-A-L-A-M, so my surname, first and initial.

Rhonda: Okay, awesome. So people can go to those places to learn more about high-intensity interval training, your website, your book, and also follow you on Twitter if they wanna get your-

Dr. Gibala: Yeah, absolutely. You know, really, I started the website just so it was a one-stop shop in terms of you can learn about our research, you can learn, I put up podcast interviews like this, links to the book, links to Dr. Phillips and I have a free online course that people can take called Hacking Exercise for Health. You know, and let me just add one last thing is opportunities like this to engage in knowledge translation, science communication, it's huge, right?

And in writing the book, one of the things I had to get comfortable with, you know, in science, we wanna control everything, and if you move, you know, when you're writing research papers, you get a little controversial or you move outside a little bit and you just get whacked, right? Whereas I think when you're boiling down or trying to boil down information for the general public or other knowledge users, and we don't have all the answers, we just have to sort of give our best guesses, not move outside the lanes too much, but say, this is the best evidence right now.

It's not perfect. And so the way you do a podcast interview or write a book for the general public, it's very different from how you write a scientific article, and that's okay, right? There's some people who will only write scientific articles, never move outside their area. That's fine, we all do what you're comfortable with, but, you know, that also has limitations, right?

Because that, many of these things are still behind paywalls, people can't get to them, and so science communication, knowledge translation is really, really important. And so thanks for this opportunity and the work that you do on this podcast. I think it's tremendously important.

Rhonda: Thank you so much. And it's nice to know that other scientists will be listening and there are collaborations that can also happen out of podcasts as well. So it's been a pleasure, Marty, and thank you for everything you do and for coming on the podcast today.

Dr. Gibala: Thank you very much.