Let's just take it as it is, that Lance is in fact a genetic freak. And he rides a bike, so what makes him special? I would put his work capacity on top of everything, and part of it is, when you look at his anaerobic threshold, his threshold is somewhere between 78 to 82 percent which means he can workout at about 82 percent of his max capacity. That's amazing, that means his ability to get rid of lactate is remarkable. Now whether that's genetic or that's happened because he's been on a bike over time, it's probably a combination of both. But that also means that his ability to endure a high level of pain is also very remarkable, which means he can handle a higher workout than most of his competitors. And when you look at any of his training videos what he does, that's where he separates everybody. When you can do that in practice obviously that translates to performance and that's where again, you know, when he needs to put the throttle down he can do it and he basically will blow everybody away.

What makes somebody like Lance extraordinary is that he probably has these glycolytic oxidative enzymes at a higher level and part of that is from training but part of it may be genetics. And so he's able to shuttle out waste products at a quicker rate and so his muscles don't shut down, where as if I were doing the same thing my muscles would shut down because they cannot operate in that acidic environment. 

And typically, you have two kinds of enlarged hearts with athletes, you have one that the heart is a muscle, okay, and like with Lance his heart is enlarged because of his training, the heart is functioning as a muscle. You'll also see muscle hypertrophy in weight lifters and that's a negative kind of enlargement and so it's not as compliant where as the enhancement that Lance has allows him to produce more blood with less effort throughout his entire body. I don't know what his resting heart rate is but I have to imagine it's extraordinarily low. That just tells you that when Lance is going up stairs his heart doesn't have to work very hard, because he's pumping out so much blood with so little effort.

You know another thing that's remarkable about Lance is his percentage of body fat, every Tour de France that he's won he's weighed less each year. So you know body weight is probably one of the most under talked about issues in sport. You know most sport is enhanced by less weight, so if you follow the stuff on Adrian Peterson he wanted to gain weight coming into the season, and well it's like ok do that, but you're going to slow down and it's going to put more of a load on your joints, and so the only positive factor is that as he's banged around a little more he might have a little more protection, but it decreases his production on the field. And so Lance knows that and so every time he goes to get ready for the Tour de France, he's weighed less than he did the previous time, cause that's a huge advantage to put him on the bike with less weight and so you know when it gets down to the Tour de France he's measuring his food by the ounce. And that's again what separates the best from everybody else. He has utilized every aspect of the sport science field from the ergo dynamics on his bike, to the exercise physiology, to the sports psychology. He has maximized everything including his own body composition to be the best of the best.