340: What Saliva Testing Can Tell Us About Athletes

What can a saliva sample tell a performance team that a blood test taken a few times a season might miss?

This week, Richard Graves is joined by Marlon Millard, chemist and founder of Biolyz, to discuss how frequent biomarker testing could help teams understand what is normal for each athlete, and spot changes that deserve a closer look.

Marlon explains what saliva can and cannot reveal, why a cortisol reading needs context, and how testing trends may be more useful than reacting to a single result. They also discuss the practical challenge of turning large amounts of biochemical data into information that medical and performance staff can use alongside training load, wellness and performance measures.

The conversation looks ahead to whether these data could eventually help teams anticipate illness, poor recovery or injury risk, while being clear that reliable prediction still requires more evidence.

In this episode you will learn

Why Marlon moved from chemistry and endocrinology into athlete testing

Where saliva testing can add to, or differ from, blood testing

How frequent testing helps establish an athlete’s individual baseline

Why cortisol alone cannot explain the cause of a change

How training load and other data help make sense of biomarker results

Why one unusual reading should not trigger an immediate response

What is needed before biomarker data can support reliable predictions