Speaker 1Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series, where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode is the third in the six-episode series on fitness, exercise, and performance. Today's episode is all about endurance and fat loss. That is, the specific protocols required to achieve the four different kinds of endurance and how to maximize fat loss. Dr. Andy Galpin, great to be back. Today, we're going to talk about endurance, and I'm very interested in this conversation because I, like many other people, strive to get a certain amount of cardiovascular work in each week, maybe a long-ish jog, maybe a swim, ride the bike, etc. But when I think about the word endurance, the idea that almost immediately comes to mind is about doing something for a long period of time repeatedly. But I have a feeling that there are other ways. There are other ways to trigger this adaptation that we call the endurance adaptation. I'm excited to learn about that. I'm also excited to learn about the fuel systems in the body that allow for endurance and other modes of repeated activity. So, in order to kick things off, I'd love for you to frame the conversation by telling us, what is endurance? And are there indeed a large variety of ways to induce what we call this endurance adaptation?
Speaker 2Sure. The way I want to start actually here is... He's calling back to some of the things we talked about in our previous conversations, which are really, people exercise for three reasons. Number one, you want to feel better. Number two, you want to look a certain way. And then number three, you want to be able to do that for a long time, right? So, you need the way that we say it in sports is look good, feel good, play good, right? So, I want some sort of functionality to be able to perform a certain way, whatever that is for you. You want to be able to look a certain way, whatever that matters for you, and then you want to be able to do that for a long time. So, when it comes to endurance, we have a bunch of misnomers here, which is... The same thing with the strength training or resistance exercise side, where we wanted to dispel this myth that I lift weights only because I want to gain muscle or play a sport. And I want to do cardio because I want to either lose fat or for long health sake. And just like we smashed that myth from the strength training side, I want to smash it from the endurance training side. There are so many other reasons that you want to perform endurance training, regardless of your goal, right? Whether it is longevity, whether it is performance, or whether it is... Aesthetics. And so, I want to cover all those reasons, exactly what to do, protocols, of course, and why those things are working that way. In general, though, the quick answer is really endurance comes down to two independent factors. Factor number one is fatigue management, and then factor number two is fueling. And that's all it really comes down to. So, all the different types of training are going to reach a limitation, which are either, again, your ability to deal with... Some sort of fatigue, and that's generally a fatigue signal. The other one is managing some sort of restriction of energy input. And a lot of... The spoiler here is a lot of the times people think it's a fueling issue, and really, it's a fatigue management issue, or the opposite. And to have a complete health spectrum, regardless of whether you're a high-performance athlete, like I typically deal with, or general public, you need to be able to do both. Manage fatigue, as well as understand fuel storage. So, that's really what we're going to get into today.
Speaker 1Fantastic. I can't wait. Before we dive in, I'm going to ask you what I often ask people who are expert in their respective fields, which is, is there any non-obvious tool or mechanism, or tool and mechanism, that can allow people to access better endurance? You know, when I think about training for endurance, again, I think about trying to run longer and longer each week, or swim further and further, and so on. But I do wonder whether or not there are other forms of training that can amplify the endurance adaptation that I, or most people, perhaps, don't think of as endurance.
Speaker 2Sure. The way I want to answer this is, if we look back and think about how we've answered that question with power, and strength, and force production, it is really about how much can you produce maximally once. What you're asking now is, how can I repeat that same quality of performance? What you're asking now is, how can I repeat that same quality of performance? What you're asking now is, how can I repeat that same quality of performance? If that's the case, endurance really comes down to your ability to maintain proper mechanics. That's going to, like, the biggest way we can increase your endurance exponentially, very quickly, is mechanical. And this is starting with breathing. And so we need to be breathing properly, we need to have proper posture and positions, and then we need to be moving well. Efficiency is going to trump force, always, for endurance. The other side of the equation is not that. You can have a little bit of leaks in your mechanics, and still squat well, or jump high, and be fine, because you don't have to suffer those consequences repeatedly, right? That's going to drain you over time. So, the quickest way to improve endurance is to improve mechanics, and the mechanical thing I would go after first is your breathing techniques, your pattern, your entire approach, as well as your posture. And then, from there, the third one would be your movement technique.
Speaker 1Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training? Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training? Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training? Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training? Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training? Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training? Or is it far more complex than that? And if it is far more complex than that, then, certainly, we can get into it during today's episode.
Speaker 2- Yeah, it is, both of those. I will give you a quick answer, though. A lot of the times, you can kind of hit the cheat code, which is nasal breathing. There's plenty of times when you don't want to nasal breathe, you don't need to nasal breathe. But just, again, as like a one tool that is a pretty general answer, if you can do that, a lot of the times, that will fix breathing mechanics, just by default. And we can maybe talk about why that is later. But that would be my... Sort of one sentence bullet point answer immediately of how to get in the right positions. The second one would be simply looking at your posture, right? So, whether you're on a bike or you're doing a lift or you're running, if you're literally hunched over and your ribs are touching your femur or getting closer and closer like tends to happen on a bike or an aerosol thing for somebody I've seen recently.
Speaker 1- This morning, I was on the assault bike doing a sprint and I asked Andy, Dr. Galpin, to critique my form and anything else he wanted to critique so that I could improve. And he did comment on my rather C-shaped posture, encouraged me to be more upright, which I should probably do now as well. And he also cued me to the fact that during a one-minute sprint, there is something that is "magic" that happens right about the 40-second mark. And I used that as a milestone to look for and indeed, something does happen at the 40 seconds into a one-minute sprint where all of a sudden, it does seem to get much easier for reasons I don't understand. Maybe you can tell with that. But it certainly had nothing to do with my posture. My posture needs improvement. Thank you.
Speaker 2- Well, yeah. So, breathing mechanics and breathing strategies, people tend to be over-breathing early on and this is going to lead to problems later. So, having a more strategic breathing pattern. And approach is, again, a very quick solution.
Speaker 1- I know that we're going to dive very deep into the mechanisms of energy and metabolism and endurance today. But as long as we're having a discussion about these briefs or tidbits of how to improve endurance, are there any other ways to improve endurance that are of relatively short time investment, even if they require a lot of energy? - Sure.
Speaker 2The classic paradigm you're going to find is, steady-state long duration posed up against what a lot of folks will now call higher intensity interval training, specifically. And there's a lot of misconceptions here. The quick answer is you need to be doing both. And there's probably a bunch of stuff in between that you should be practicing. If you honestly want to maximize those three factors we talked about at the beginning, you need to be training across this full spectrum. Just like I told you to train across the full spectrum of your lifting, we want to be doing the same thing here. So, are there independent special factors? - Yeah. - And that can happen with these shorter time length, higher intensity stuff? Absolutely. There's also magic that happens on the other end of that spectrum. So, it's very important that people don't just choose one side. Because what tends to happen is people either go with a, "Oh, I'm going to do 30 or 45 minutes of steady-state stuff." That's it. Or I'm going to do the opposite, which I'm going to leave that stuff on the table, not do it, because I only want to do high intensity intervals because I can get it done in five minutes. So, there's magic on both sides of the equation. We want to get into all of that. But just to answer your question. Just to answer your question directly, there's a whole bunch of things you can do in under one minute that are convenient to do. And there's a wonderful set of papers out of a couple of laboratories in Canada that champion this idea that's called exercise snacks. So, there's a series of studies that have been done here that are really interesting. And they've looked at a couple of things that are noteworthy. One of them is a 20-second bout of all-out work. And this is actually done in workers in an office. And so, what they have them do is run upstairs. And I believe it was about 60 steps is what it took them. Something along the order of 20 seconds exactly. And they repeated that about once every four hours. So, really, it's just you go to work, you get, you know, put your coffee in your bag down, whatever. You run up a flight of stairs 20 seconds later, then you go right back to work at lunch. And before you go home, you sort of repeat it there. And if you repeat that, that's multiple times a week you're going to do that. I think they, in one of the interventions, it was three times a week for six weeks. 18 total times you did that. And what you'll see is a noticeable improvement, and this is statistically significant improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness, specifically VO2 max, as well as a number of cognitive benefits, work productivity. activity, et cetera, that can happen in as little as 20 seconds. You don't have to go to the gym. You don't have to shower. You don't have to do anything like that. Just find the stairs, run up and down them a few times. Now you may have noticed you actually sort of caught me yesterday. I did that right here, right? I was just, I, we had a little bit of a break. I was feeling an energy lull. I ran up the stairs three or four times, felt a lot better. So that can actually also help. They ran another study where they looked at that following a giant high glycemic index meal. And what they saw, and then they took insulin measures and a whole bunch of other biological markers associated that you want to be paying attention to with the high glycemic index meal. And they looked at those immediately an hour, three hours, six hours, as opposed. And it was very clear that same intervention was able to improve postprandial glucose control, insulin, and a whole bunch of other factors in addition to that. So if you are the sort of type who's like, wow, I'm in an office all day, maybe also had a giant high glycemic index meal, not the best approach, but a little bit of mitigation there can just be running up a flight of stairs or doing something like that for as little as 20 seconds. So there's a lot of magic and power and maximal exertion. If one does not have access to a flight of stairs at work, could they do jumping jacks? Absolutely. I mean, you could do anything you really wanted. It's not the mode of exercise that matters here. It is simply the exertion. You just get up as hard as you can. You could do burpees. You could do any number of things. You could sprint down your road, down the hallway, back and forth. The mode is just something that was easy for the scientists to control. And X number of steps, people could do it. You're not going to fall, hurt yourself,
Speaker 1things like that. Just to remind me, it's once every four hours, one minute of all out. 20 seconds. Oh, 20 seconds. Excuse me. 20 seconds of essentially all out exertion while remaining safe, not going so fast up the stairs or doing jumping jacks so fast. And certainly not down the stairs, up the stairs, please. Escalators don't count. Well, I suppose they count if they're, if you're moving, if you're not remaining on the same steps. In fact, in an airport recently, I saw somebody walking against the conveyor while talking on the phone while waiting for their flight to take off. And I thought it's genius, right? It looked a little awkward.
Speaker 2Who cares? Yeah. But it was, I have looked awkward in every airport I've been in for the last 15 years for these exact reasons, doing wild stuff like that. Yeah. Well, nothing's more awkward than
Speaker 1not being able to walk to the end of the terminal simply because one isn't familiar with walking that far, carrying a couple of suitcases. There you go. Yeah. That's the other fit test suitcase carrier in the airport. I love this. So once every four hours, 20 seconds. So maybe once when arriving to work once. You're four hours in and then four hours, most people probably at work somewhere, you know,
Speaker 2eight plus or minus two hours. Now, one thing I actually really want to make clear because your audience is so incredible. They tend to be really excited about these protocols and they follow them exactly as written. That's not exactly how science works. So it doesn't necessarily have to be every four hours. It doesn't have to be three times a day. It doesn't have to be 20 seconds. They literally built that protocol because it was really trying to replicate a real life scenario. Maybe you're in an office building. You're generally there for eight hours. Let's see if you did one every sort of. So if you want to do it four times a week. Great. If you can do it only 10 seconds. Amazing. You're probably going to get the same benefits. Those are not the details to pay attention to. The detail to pay attention to is every so often, multiple times a day. Try to get your heart rate up really quickly. Doesn't require sweating. Doesn't require anything else. There's no warm up associated with it. Again, you need a minute break in between meetings or whatever and you can sprint up them. I do this all the time in my house. When you have those days when you're on like seven straight hours of zooms, etc. You can get out of 20 seconds. I run to my garage, which is over there. I hop on the air bike and I will just smash out 30 seconds as fast as I can and then walk right back in. Love it. Yeah. I'm going to start. Yeah. Just also you can just put one of those things, which I do also. Just put one in your office and hop over out of there. The whole entire thing now literally takes 23 seconds.
Speaker 1Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for having me. It's taught me a tremendous amount from using levels. It's taught me when best to eat, what best to eat, when best to exercise, how best to exercise, and how to modulate my entire schedule from work to exercise and even my sleep. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself, go to levels.link slash Huberman. That's levels.link slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that contains the exact ratios of the electrolyte sodium. Element is an electrolyte drink that contains the exact ratios of the electrolyte sodium, magnesium, magnesium, and potassium to optimize cellular functioning for mental and physical performance. Most people realize that hydration is key. We need to ingest enough fluids in order to feel our best and perform our best. But what most people do not realize is that the proper functioning of our cells and nerve cells, neurons in particular, requires that sodium, magnesium, and potassium be present in the correct ratios. Now, of course, people with prehypertension and hypertension need to be careful about their sodium intake, but what a lot of people don't realize is that sodium and potassium are not the same thing. If you drink caffeine, if you exercise, and in particular, if you're following a very clean diet, that is not a lot of processed foods, which, of course, is a good thing, chances are you're not getting enough sodium, potassium, and magnesium to optimize mental and physical performance. Element contains a science-backed ratio of 1,000 milligrams, that's one gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, and 60 milligrams of magnesium and no sugar. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement, that's lmnt.com slash Huberman, to get a free copy. Get a free Element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelement, lmnt.com slash Huberman, to claim a free sample pack. So tell me about endurance. What is endurance? How do I get more endurance? And how does it work?
Speaker 2When we think about endurance, I would like to open up the conversation to include more things than people generally do when they hear the word endurance. So if we just think about what you typically ask your body to do or would like to ask your body to do, and we just walk through them, it's going to be things like this. Number one, I want to have energy throughout the day. That's actually a form of endurance. Great. I don't want to have these lulls and fatigue, and I want to feel fantastic as I move throughout my activities of daily living, whatever those may be. Work, exercise, enjoyment, paying attention, focus, all that stuff. Great. That's one thing. Another thing you want to ask your body to do is I want to be able to repeat some small effort in a muscle group and feel great about that. This is what we generally call muscular endurance. So this is something like I want to be able to walk up those 10 flights of steps and my quads aren't burning at the end of it, right? Or it even gives me energy. Another thing you'll want to ask your body to do is to be able to perform a tremendous amount of work for a longer period of time, something in the realm of 20 to 80 seconds. So this could be something like if you're surfing and you've got to paddle extremely hard for a minute to get on top of a wave, or you're out riding your bike and you need to be able to get up a hill. It's a very steep hill. These are going to take maximal effort for some small amount of time, and then you'll get back up there. We tend to call that maximum anaerobic capacity. So the max amount of work you can perform at a high rate for some amount of seconds to maybe a minute. Past that is your ability to repeat an effort kind of like that for something like 5 to 15 minutes. And this example would be run a mile, right? Some interval like that, which is a longer distance, right? That is going to be... That is going to be your maximum aerobic capacity, right? Another thing you're going to want your body to do is... do is what we call sustained position. So this is, you want to be able to sit in your chair at work and have perfect posture for 20, 30, 40 minutes, right? You want to be able to stand in line at a grocery store for 15 minutes and not have a breakdown in posture. So you want to be able to maintain position when you're riding your bike, you're not collapsing, you're doing any of these activities and you don't get hurt or lose efficiency simply because you couldn't sustain basic positions, right? Whatever those shapes and positions need to be. Okay. And then the last one is a maximum distance. So you want to be able to go for a longer hike or have just a long day at Disneyland for whatever it needs to be and feel great at the end of it, right? So the goal with all of these things is not, can you just do them, but can you do them and then you feel good afterwards. So we're back in a right position where they give you energy, you feel good about it, and it's not just something you had to do and you regretted and you felt, so those are the factors I think about when someone says, I want better endurance is I want to walk backwards and say, okay, when you say endurance, what do you mean? And that's generally the things I've come across is if you can handle all of those things, you're going to feel like you're in fantastic shape. You're going to feel your recovery is going to be excellent and your physical performance in the gym or in any of the sporting activities you do will be enhanced.
Speaker 1Given what you told us a little bit earlier, that endurance really reflects fatigue and management and energy production. How do each and both of those things relate to endurance at a mechanistic level? I mean, really what I'm asking is what is fatigue management and what is energy production?
Speaker 2In order to do that, it's important that we understand all of those functional capacities that I just talked about. They all have different points of failure. Okay. So in order to then work backwards and say, well, how do I optimize my performance in all those categories? We need to go through each one and figure out, well, where am I failing? Some of them are going to be failing because of fatigue management. And some of them will be failing because of energy production issues. So if we walk through a little bit of how we make energy and how we handle fatigue, then we're going to have a better understanding of exactly what to do for each one of these categories. If you feel like one of them in particular is worse for you or lagging behind, or if in general, you just want to improve all of them. All right. Now I'm going to make a little bit of a 90 degree turn here. I'm going to do it with strategy though, I promise. And I want to ask you a very simple question. How do you lose weight?
Speaker 1I was taught that the calories in calories out thermodynamics of energy utilization governs most everything. That is if I'm ingesting less caloric energy than I burn, then I'm going to lose weight. And if I'm ingesting exactly as much as I burn, I'll maintain weight. And if I ingest more than I burn, then I'll gain weight.
Speaker 2Sure. That is the approach you would take. What I'm asking really is how are you actually physically losing the weight?
Speaker 1So my understanding is that we have different fuel sources in the body, glycogen, which is stored in muscle and liver, body fat, which is stored in mainly white adipose tissue, and which is subcutaneous and around our organs, intravisceral fat, and that we can also use protein as a fuel. And then as I recall, there's also a phosphocreatine system. And I think that's going to tell me that each of these systems is tapped into on different time scales, and perhaps according to different levels of exertion. And I'm certain that what I just said is not exhaustive, but hopefully it is most or entirely correct.
Speaker 2Pretty correct. What's that got to do with fat loss?
Speaker 1At some point, body fat stores, adipocytes, fat cells, are going to start liberating fat as a fuel source. And the stimulus for that, I'm assuming, is going to be that other fuel sources are either depleted or that the energy and metabolic systems of the body, I don't want to say decide because they don't have their own consciousness, but are signaling in a way that registers that body fat would be the optimal fuel source given how long and or intensely a given activity has been performed.
Speaker 2Okay. We have some stuff to clean up there, but we're still not really answering the question. How am I actually losing that body fat?
Speaker 1How is it actually leaving the body? Correct. My understanding is that it leaves the body through respiration.
Speaker 2Aha. So now we have some interesting things to talk about. How am I actually losing fat via respiration? What the hell does that even mean? How is something that occupied this physical space on the side of me leaving my body through my mouth? And there's a very clear answer there, right? Which I'm sure you're cued up to. When you take a breath in, you're generally breathing in oxygen, O2. There's some other things, but we'll just stick to oxygen. When you exhale, you're breathing out CO2. The difference between those two is that carbon molecule. Well, one of the things that's important to understand here is all of your carbohydrates, which is that word itself is a carbon that has been hydrated. So it is a carbon molecule attached to a water molecule. It is a simple chain of carbons. Your fat molecules are also chains of carbs. So it's a simple chain of carbons. Your fat molecules are also chains of carbs. So it's a simple chain of carbons. Your fat molecules are also chains of carbs. Your fat molecules are also chains of carbs. All of metabolism really, in terms of energy production, is simply trying to figure out a way to break those carbon bonds. As a result, we get energy from that. We use that energy to create a molecule called ATP, which is the central source of energy for any living being, right? That carbon is then floating around in free form, which is bad news internally. So we've got to figure out a way to get that carbon out of our system. So all of energy production, all of fatigue management really comes down to the fact that we have to figure out a way to get that carbon out of our system. So all of energy production, all of fatigue management really comes down to this core issue of how are we handling carbon and how are we moving it around the body. And so what we do is we do this sneaky thing. So another question I like to ask people is why do we breathe?
Speaker 1Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve.
Speaker 2Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. Well, for two reasons. To bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level in the set of neurons in the brainstem and elsewhere. Activate the phrenic nerve or the gastrointestinal nerve. a starch or a fruit, here's what happens. It inhales that carbon, and then it starts packing it away. Now, in a root vegetable, what it does is it stores those things together. And if we store that thing and we grow a fruit at the bottom of it, we tend to call those things starches, all right? It's going to then take the carbon that is packed away in its root and send it up the tree. And it's going to actually do that by breaking it down into a smaller form of carbohydrate that we tend to often call things like sucrose and glucose. It'll ship that up the tree, it'll go out to the leaves, and it'll convert it into the fruit. And it's going to eventually transform that stuff into smaller carbon things called fructose. And if we think about the fruit or the sugar in fruit, it's often in the form of fructose or sucrose or a combination and sometimes glucose. So we have these smaller carbon, six carbon chains, generally in the form of glucose, that are being made from this larger storage of carbohydrates that we call starch, right? So it's packed in together. Your body does the exact same thing. So if it's a potato and it has a whole bunch of glucose packed away, we call that starch. If it's in your quadricep and we pack about a whole bunch of glucose away, we now call it glycogen. If it's in your blood as that six carbon chain, we call it glucose. If it's in the tree and in the fruit, we call it fructose, right? Those are different molecules. But that's effectively the same thing happens. So the biology or the chemistry is almost identical. It just runs in the reverse order. And that's why, again, tubers and potatoes and stuff tend to be starches and fruits tend to be glucose, fructose, and sucrose. So we have this wonderful circle of light. The plants can survive on just breathing in the CO2 and then getting the energy from the sun. We don't have that ability, at least to my knowledge, to run through photosynthesis. So the only way we can get carbon into our system is to actually... We have to actually ingest carbon, which means we have to eat the starch, the fruit, the animal, some other form of stored carbon to get that into our system. We then pack that away. We put the carbohydrates, as you mentioned earlier, either in our liver, our blood, or in our muscles. We put the fat generally in adipose tissue. We'll put a little bit in muscle cells, as intramuscular triglycerides, and then the protein we'll use as structure, right? To do different things. We don't like to use protein as... material or fuel. It's better use of structure. And what we have to do then is if all of a sudden we realize that storage is getting too much in our body, in other words, we're gaining too much weight, we have to figure out how to get the carbons out of our body. And that is metabolism, right? Anytime we're trying to break a carbon bonds that we can get energy to make ATP, that's going to release the carbon out of our tissue into the blood. We have to bring in oxygen to bind that carbon molecule to make CO2, exhale it and put it back into the atmosphere.
Speaker 1- It's a beautiful description of the circle of life and energy utilization in the human body. I have to ask the question that I'm sure many people are wondering about, which is if indeed we exhale these carbons, and as it relates to fat loss, that is the way that we lose fat if we're in a sub caloric state, for instance, has it ever been explored as to whether increasing the duration or intensity of exhales can accelerate fat loss? I mean, that's sort of the logical extension of what you described. And here I'm actually interested equally in whether or not the answer is yes, as well as whether it could be no, because I could imagine if the answer is yes, well, then there's some interesting protocols to emerge from that, but that if it's no, it will reveal to us some important bottlenecks about metabolism and energy utilization.
Speaker 2- You ever seen those magicians will like show up and they can tell your mom's name or something like that before you, 'cause they can sort of lead you down a path?
Speaker 1- Yeah, I mean, not to take us down a deep dive tangent, but I once went to the magic castle in Los Angeles and I was one of the people called up front and an incredible magician named, I think his name was Ozzy Mind or something, I think that's right, had me write my name on a card in a Sharpie pen. And I ripped up the card, I ripped it up. I put it in my pocket. And at the end of the 10 or 15 minute bout of him doing a bunch of other tricks, he asked me to look in my right shoe and under my foot in my right shoe was that card intact. - Yeah. - And it was no longer in my pocket. And I swear on my life, I wasn't a collaborator with him. And to this day, it still gives me chills because it, well, how magic.
Speaker 2- Yeah, right, magic. Well, the reason I say that is I've given that little spiel that I just gave you that countless times in my classes. And I would say 99% of the time, as soon as I stop, the very first question is, so can I just like do a bunch of exhales and lose fat? Which is wonderful. 'Cause I was really hoping you would do that and you rolled right into my trap. You landed perfectly. So I look like a magician over here.
Speaker 1- I feel like I should look in my right shoe right now. - No, I asked the question because it's the logical extension of what you laid out. But I know biology to be both diabolical and cryptic, but also exquisite in the way that things are arranged and you don't get something for nothing.
Speaker 2- There are no free passes in physiology. That's the saying, no free passes. The answer to your question is yes. A 100% yes. In fact, that is the only way to go about it. You have two options. You can ingest less carbs. You can ingest carbon or you can expel more carbon. People always say calories in, calories out. It's really carbon in, carbon out. That's what a calorie is, right? Calories is the amount of energy we get per breaking a carbon bond. So it's really less in, more out. Less in is fairly obvious whether that comes in any form. And by the way, this is exactly why the percentage of your intake coming from fats or carbohydrates, it doesn't really matter that much. If you look at fat loss, clinical trials, you guys may have covered this when Lane was in here. I'm sure like this is something he talks about a lot. It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant because it's not about that. There's nothing magic in those things. They are different. They have different physiological responses. Everything is different, right? No doubt. But in general, it's just simply about carbon intake. Turns out fat has a lot more carbons per mole than carbohydrates do. So there's more calories per mole in there. So if the physical amount of fat needs to come in a smaller amount, physical amount of carbohydrates will come in. There's a larger amount, but you can play any number of very high carb, low fat. What matters? Total calories, right? Again, it's not like the only thing that matters, but you know what I'm saying? - Sure. - Some percentages in the way can go. Fat loss works fantastic. High fat, low carbohydrate. Why? Why do all these things work? Because it's not about that. It's about total intake of carbon, total exhalation. So absolutely can you lose fat by simply exhaling more? In fact, that is exactly what you did this morning.
Speaker 1- When I hopped on the Airdyne bike for--
Speaker 2- When you did anything, right? The question is, can you think of a scenario in which you could have a bunch of increased rates of exhalation that helps in fat loss?
Speaker 1- Sure. I can think of a lot of things that will stimulate increased rates of exhalation.
Speaker 2- One thing could be simply going . Right, and so the question is like, can I literally do some breath protocols where I force exhale and lose fat? And the answer is yes. But what happens? What happens if you do hyperventilation training?
Speaker 1- Well, my lab studies cyclic hyperventilation as one of our many deliberate protocols. And one of the most prominent things that one observes is that levels of adrenaline increase very quickly. - Extremely quickly. - People feel jittery, anxious, stressed, and unless they are consciously trying to anchor their thinking about what that means and the benefits to persisting, typically they abort their thinking about what it means to be hyperventilating.
Speaker 2- Yeah. - And that's one of the reasons why we're using the cyclic hyperventilation protocol really quickly. - Within seconds. Right, you will feel tingling, sweating, all kinds of things. You're hyperventilating, right? And we could talk in nauseam about how that changes everything from adrenaline to focus to a whole bunch of things. So unfortunately, a strategy of sitting around, just exhaling more than you inhale, technically helps you lose more fat, but it's not going to last very long. So then the question is, well, how do I get into a situation where I'm not gonna pass out and I'm not going and altering hypocapnia and hypercapnia issues? Any idea of a situation in which you would have an enhanced rate of exhalation without worrying about passing out?
Speaker 1- True, steady state exercise.
Speaker 2- Or not steady state exercise. Lifting weights, intervals, moderate training, repeated. Any of these things. They all work equally for fat loss because all they're doing is increasing respiration rate. They're saying increased demand for energy, increased exhalation. That's the trick here. And when you equate these things to that, they have equal success in fat loss. It doesn't matter theoretically where you're getting it from. And so when we get into this idea of, well, what are the best training strategies for fat loss? It doesn't matter which one of these tactics you pick, as long as you maintain a consistent adherence over time, because of this exact fact. It doesn't matter if you're burning quote unquote fat in the exercise session, or if you're burning carbohydrates in the exercise session, it is totally irrelevant to your net fat loss over time. Okay, now there's some significant misconceptions there about what I just talked, and I would love to come back and walk through that in more detail, but that's the main take-home message here. It won't matter what's coming in, and it won't matter what's coming out, because in either case, it is the same rate of oxygen in and CO2 out. That's the key metric, and hopefully this helps a lot of people have some relief, because they're like, man, you're so tied up on what is the exact protocol for training for optimizing fat loss? What's the exact nutritional intervention I need for fat loss? And then you wonder why all these different diets can work effectively, and wonder why all these different training protocols, and surely you know somebody who lost a bunch of weight, and the only thing they did is they just started running. There was no advanced protocol, they just started running, and they ran five miles every day. That works. And tons of people who tried that and like didn't lose anything. And lots of people who went to, I went to cardio kickboxing class, lost weight. Oh, I just started doing intervals on my, why, mysteriously, do all these things work? They have, something has, some spidey sense has to be going off in your brain. We're like, there has to be something linking these things. And what's linking it is simply carbon exchange. So put yourself in a position in which you are exhaling more than you are inhaling without passing out. The other problem is, if you were to simply do a breathing protocol, while the rate of exhalation would go up, after that, you would correct and go in the opposite direction. So that's the problem is your net carbon output over the course of the day is not going to change unless you increase the demand for energy. And that's how you get into that negative state.
Speaker 1- Along these lines of exhaling carbons as the route for fat loss, it makes me wonder whether or not increasing lung capacity is possible. I'm guessing the answer is no. - The answer is yes. And whether or not increasing lung capacity is a good goal and route to enhancing fat loss. Essentially what I'm asking is, if you can offload more CO2 carbons per exhale, are you a more efficient fat loss machine?
Speaker 2- It's a wonderful thought and the answer would be no. Not something to worry about because if you were to exhale more carbon than actually needed, now we're in a state of inefficiency. You're burning way more energy than needed to do your activity. The heart has a metric called cardiac output. This is in science, we abbreviate this as Q for some odd reasons. It's either CO or Q. And cardiac output is heart rate multiplied by stroke volume. So it's how many beats per minute you're having as well as how much blood's coming out of it. So cardiac output is actually very specific to energy needs. If you try to work around that, it's just going to adjust itself. So what I mean by this is, if you were able to increase your stroke volumes, the amount of blood coming out per pump, you would automatically adjust to reduce your heart rate so that you keep cardiac output exact to energetic demands. So you're sort of pushing one end of the spectrum, but your body will pull the other one back to keep you at that exact same neutral level. So if you look at, if you think about like cardiovascular adaptations to endurance training, any type of endurance training, a common thing people will understand is resting heart rate. And so what that number is, is just how many beats per minute you're having when you're sitting here doing nothing. A very positive adaptation is a lowering of that resting rate over time. As general numbers, what you will hear is people will say things like, a normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 80 beats per minute. And if any of the things I've talked about with the individuals I work with, I don't work with anybody with disease, just to clarify that. I don't do anything with disease management, treatment, anything. It's always about people with heart disease. It's always about people who are in a good spot who want to optimize or get to the next level, whether this is professional athletes trying to peak for physical performance or the folks in our rapid health optimization program that feel good. Again, it's not disease stuff and they want to feel incredible. One of the metrics we're going to pay attention to is this resting heart rate. So here's what happens. As you improve your endurance, your resting heart rate will go down. If I see somebody over 70 beats per minute, unless something's going on, I want to see everybody else be perfectly fit. Regardless of whether or not that is "within the normative values", I want to see everybody sub 60 beats per minute or close, right? And that is not a difficult thing to really get to for most people. So if you train a lot, regardless of how you train intervals, steady state, it doesn't matter, that resting heart rate will come down. But since energy demands at rest haven't really changed, cardiac output stays the same. So what happens is stroke volume goes up. So literally, like we trained your quadriceps on the leg extension machine to get stronger, so you can produce more force per contraction, the heart will do the exact same thing. And so as you're able to get more of the blood out of your heart per pump, the heart realizes I don't need to pump as often. So that's the compensatory adaptation, which is saying, "Hey, look, I don't need to beat 60 times a minute. I now need to beat 55 times a minute because I'm getting the same amount of blood out per pump. Chill." And this is why your resting heart rate goes down, your resting stroke volume goes up, but your cardiac output is identical. So that's not a good metric of fitness. It's going to stay the same. Cardiac output will only adjust per energetic changes, energy requirements in the acute moment, right? How much do I need? Go, which is going to be determined by ventilation, right? How much air am I bringing in and putting out? That's going to determine cardiac output, and that's going to determine where we're at. If you were to do like a sub-maximal exercise test, when you were unfit, to when you're fit, or when you're fit to where you're super fit. At sub-max, you're going to see the same thing. Cardiac output will be identical. And you're like, "Damn, nothing happened." What you're not realizing is your heart rate at that same workload is now lower. And that's efficiency because your stroke volume is higher. Where it gets people tripped up is at max, because you may not see much of a change at max because you don't really see an increase in maximum heart rate with fitness. That's not a thing, right? So maximum heart rate is not a good problem. Proxy for fit or unfit or anything like that. Stroke volume will get limited eventually by filling capacity of your heart. It has to have so much time to fill up with blood before it can contract again and squeeze the blood out. And when you have a heart rate of 200 beats per minute, that just doesn't leave much time to fill. And so it won't really push you past that. So don't worry about trying to increase your maximum heart rate. That's not necessarily a good thing and it won't really change. But your cardiac output will because stroke volume will be higher.
Speaker 1- But that doesn't necessarily mean that I should avoid training that gets me up toward maximum heart rate, correct? - Oh, you should absolutely do it. - Right, that was my assumption. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic, and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic Greens daily since 2012. So I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it covers my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics are especially important to me. Athletic Greens also contains adaptogens, which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work, or just general life. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, if you'd like to try Athletic Greens, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer. Getting back to energy production, production and metabolism. So we've got these different modes of moving energy, but making and breaking energy bonds in the body, moving energy into different tissues and out of different tissues, and indeed out of the body through exhalation. How do each of these different modes of energy utilization relate to different modes of movement and exercise? In my mind, I'm starting to draw a bridge between, okay, when I walk for 60 minutes, you know, if I'm talking, I'm breathing a bit more. Maybe I'm burning a little more fat. After all, speech is a modified exhale. And if I'm sprinting, I'm breathing differently. And if I'm, you know, doing a 30 minute moderate, quote unquote, moderate jog, I'm breathing differently. So you've beautifully illustrated this bridge between energy production and utilization and carbon dioxide offload through exhalation. What are some of the specific things that, you know, that you would like to see? - Yeah, I think one of the things that I would like to see is a lot of the topics about energy utilization according to different modes of exercise. And if we could better define modes of exercise or types of exercise that trigger specific adaptations, I think this is where the bridge will move
Speaker 2from being a mere line to a real structure. - Yeah, absolutely. I want to lay one more foundational piece, and then it's going to be much easier to understand the limitations I put on some of these training protocols, and I think that's going to be really important. The way I want to start this is we have this foundation now of carbon and basic energy production. That's not to say there's no difference. There is, and that difference is important. But maybe we can answer the question from earlier, which is actually something you asked me this morning when we were exercising. You're like, training fasted, right? Does training fasted enhance fat loss? And the logic is sound. If I don't have any fuel, then I shouldn't be be burning more fat therefore i should be losing more fat it's sound it's not true is this great idea it's one of these classic things in science and exercise physiology where like sounds good turns out it's not it's actually a pretty gross misunderstanding of metabolism so it's not to pick on that topic i don't really care about that topic but it is a it's a common question it also gives me an opportunity to just tell you more about metabolism so here's what happens you are breathing in o2 and breathing out co2 however the ratio to that is what we call the either rer respiratory exchange ratio or rq respiratory quotient and i'm not going to differentiate those two they're not the same thing but we're going to skip past that for now as you begin to increase exercise intensity the percentage of o2 to co2 rises in the favor of co2 so you start breathing out way more co2 than you are breathing in o2 right and so if we were to look at that number you know what's the relationship it goes up so at rest most people have a of a value that we would typically call something like 0.6 okay and that's again the relationship between o2 and co2 maybe 0.7 if you were to go for a walk that increases slightly because you're now expiring co2 at a higher rate so now you've moved up to say 0.8 or something like that one of the ways that we mark somebody of achieving an actual vo2 max on a test is if that value exceeds 1.1 now any of you who are paying attention are thinking well wait a minute how the hell can a ratio between two things ever get past one well that's because you're getting into a place where you're actually offloading more co2 than is actually necessary and this is what actually causes and explains a thing that people like to call epoch which is excess exercise post oxygen consumption this is another way to think about it the only reason you're breathing is to bring in oxygen when offloads co2 right so if you're breathing in co2 at a higher rate than you're actually offloading more co2 than is actually necessary and this is what actually causes and explains a thing that people like to call epoch which is excess exercise post oxygen consumption this is another way to think about it the only reason you're breathing is to bring in oxygen when offloads co2 right you're breathing is to bring in oxygen when offloads co2 right you're breathing is to bring in oxygen when offloads co2 right if i'm no longer exercising why am i still if i'm no longer exercising why am i still if i'm no longer exercising why am i still breathing breathing breathing in other words once you stop the demand or in other words once you stop the demand or in other words once you stop the demand or the need for the need for the need for for energy you should stop ventilating for energy you should stop ventilating for energy you should stop ventilating but you don't but you don't but you don't right that's because in the case of low right that's because in the case of low right that's because in the case of low intensity exercise the second you stop intensity exercise the second you stop intensity exercise the second you stop you're right back down to resping you're right back down to resping you're right back down to resping ventilation no problem because you were ventilation no problem because you were ventilation no problem because you were able to match the need for energy with able to match the need for energy with able to match the need for energy with the offload of waste the offload of waste the offload of waste one to one during that exercise when one to one during that exercise when one to one during that exercise when you start creeping up the intensity you you start creeping up the intensity you you start creeping up the intensity you can't do that so you have to basically can't do that so you have to basically can't do that so you have to basically start stealing a little bit of fuel here start stealing a little bit of fuel here start stealing a little bit of fuel here so even though you're done exercising so even though you're done exercising so even though you're done exercising you're still ventilating because you you're still ventilating because you you're still ventilating because you have to pay that back and pay that back have to pay that back and pay that back have to pay that back and pay that back by that i specifically mean you have to by that i specifically mean you have to by that i specifically mean you have to bring in oxygen because you have a whole bring in oxygen because you have a whole bring in oxygen because you have a whole bunch of waste that's been accumulating bunch of waste that's been accumulating bunch of waste that's been accumulating in your tissue that you've got to deal in your tissue that you've got to deal in your tissue that you've got to deal with and i'll walk you through what that with and i'll walk you through what that with and i'll walk you through what that waste is it's a particular molecule that that a lot of people have heard of, but grossly misunderstand. So you gotta be able to handle that. So the reason that you sit there and go, and continue to ventilate is because you're now trying to pay back that excess post-exercise oxygen debt. That's that oxygen debt we're specifically talking about. All right, so that being said, as we start cruising up, that RQ starts going up, up, up, up, up, up, up. And if we get to one, you're 1.0, you're in a, like you're hurting. You're in a pretty good spot.
Speaker 1All right. I like that, you're hurting. You're in a pretty good spot. There's a window into Dr. Andy Galpin's mind. Now you really want to be a subject in his laboratory studies. Masochists swarm to Andy's lab.
Speaker 2Absolutely. All right. So the idea that I will lose more fat by being in an exercise situation that is burning more fat, it seems to make sense, but it's a massive failure to understand the metabolism. It's the exact same, explanation to why exercising fasted doesn't matter. So the exercising fasted issue under normal circumstances is irrelevant because you have plenty of fuel in the system, even when you haven't eaten breakfast that morning. Now, if you're talking like extended fasting over multiple days, this is a different scenario. If muscle glycogen, liver glycogen, and blood glucose are at sufficient levels, then you absolutely have enough energy to perform almost any type of exercise that most people are doing. Maybe if you're Rob and you're at mile 20 today, it's a different story, but the vast majority of us have plenty of fuel sitting around, so we're not going to burn more into fat just because we didn't eat breakfast that morning. So that just doesn't make energetic sense. We have a lot of backup supplies. You're never out. The trick here is this. There's a concept here we call crossover concept. So as we are starting to move up exercise intensity, we start burning a higher percentage of our fuel from carbohydrates and a lower percentage of our fuel coming from carbohydrates. So we're not going to burn more into fat. I'm sleeping. That's the highest percentage of your fuel that will be coming from fat of any activity you could ever do. So if the theory that I'm going to stay at a lower intensity to burn more fat was true, the optimal fat burning strategy would then be to sleep. Like, that doesn't make sense. Of course it doesn't. So why would then going at a slightly elevated rate somehow all of a sudden magically make you lose fat? It doesn't actually make sense. When you think about it that way, you're like, oh yeah, there's no way. So it's a percentage trick. It's a difference between absolute and relative. This is what this confusion is. So yes, as you start doing lower intensity exercise, whether you're fast or not, it's irrelevant. But lower intensity exercise, a greater percentage of your fuel is coming from fat. However, your total fuel expenditure is very low. So that whole total carbon balance is not really being shifted much. As you start exercising in a very low intensity, you actually start getting a higher percentage of your fuel from carbohydrate and a lower percentage from fat. In fact, at rest, about the highest you can get in most people is about 60% of your fuel from fat. As you're sleeping, you might be 70%, but you'll never be in a position ever, no matter what sort of thing you've heard on the internet, you'll never be in a situation where fat is your only fuel source. The highest I've probably ever seen is like 70%. You should probably be at about, that's a kind of a good number to think, honestly. But people who understand a little bit about metabolism to be dangerous, but not enough, will throw out these terms like fat adapted. And fat adapted is a real thing, but it is a massive misunderstanding oftentimes, right? It is this idea of thinking like, I can get in a spot where I'm maximizing fat burning. Maximizing fat burning and maximizing fat for exercise and maximizing fat loss, over time are not the same thing at all, right? That's the confusion. So if you enhance fat oxidation in an exercise, that does not enhance fat loss per se, right? So this is a lot of the confusion that's happening, right? So as we start moving up, we can never get in a position where we're using fat only as a fuel. Again, at best, you're at 70% fat, 30% carbohydrate. For a lot of reasons, we probably just don't have time to get into today. However, the opposite is possible. When you get into true, high-intensity exercise, you'll be basically 100% carbohydrate and 0% fat, right? That is very possible. That, in fact, is 1.0. That's what I argue. 1.1 is actually because your ventilation got so high, you actually exceeded that number, even though you're at 100% carbohydrate. This is what people came up with the idea then. It's like, well, I don't want to burn carbs. I want to lose fat. So my response to that is always like, okay, great. So it makes sense. Burning fat, losing fat. Burning carbs is losing what then? Like, you think your liver shrunk? Like, wait a minute. What did you lose then? Where did it come from? It's all coming as carbon. Don't worry about where it came from for your fuel. It just has to come out as carbon, right? There are differences in exercise efficiency for performance with our professional athletes, of course. But if the only goal here is fat loss, it doesn't matter where you get it from. The last bridge we have to connect here is like, well, wait a minute. If I only burned carbohydrate, how did I actually lose? How did I actually lose that fat? There was that love handle sitting on the side of me. How did that come out of me if I never burned that for my fuel? What you're failing to understand is there's a balance game that happens here. So if you were to do a bunch of high-intensity exercise training and you burned only muscle glycogen and blood glucose and maybe even you did it for so long you burned some liver glycogen, the body understands that it has expelled a lot of energy from that side of the equation. It's going to do a couple of things. Now, it's very difficult to do a couple of things. It's very difficult to go through this fancy situation where you convert carbohydrates into fat and back and forth. That's actually fairly hard. What's easier to do is something you said earlier is actually just bias energetics to a different fuel source. So in that scenario where you're down really low in your carbohydrate stores, any carbohydrates you bring in are going to go to storage. And since your net energy expenditure is something that your body regulates a lot, any fat that you then burn is going to go to storage. Any fat that you then bring in is going to be utilized as a fuel source because it knows it doesn't need it anymore. That is an excess. So that's how you actually use fat as a fuel because you've burned down carbohydrate storages.
Speaker 1As I'm hearing this, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, thank you for that incredibly important description of what is otherwise a very confusing landscape for most people. One of the key points I took away, and I just want to say, from the outset, this is not exhaustive by any stretch, is that burning fat does not equal losing fat from the body.
Speaker 2Correct.
Speaker 1And then burning fat... fat has to be divided into burning of body fat stores and we need to distinguish that from burning of dietary fat that is brought in correct oftentimes people don't disambiguate those correct right and i'm also understanding that reducing one's body carbohydrate stores muscle glycogen liver glycogen etc occurs during high intensity exercise yep those other ways but that is one very efficient way to tap into those stores which makes me wonder again this is one of these things that doesn't lead to a protocol makes me wonder whether or not doing high intensity let's say weight training for 45 to 60 minutes 75 minutes of strength training power training hypertrophy training which we've covered in an episode about those topics and then doing some steady state cardiovascular exercise is there any benefit to that arrangement that would quote-unquote enhance body fat loss from the body to be very specific now because unlike the idea that training fasted would shift the bias towards fat loss which it doesn't you've told us under those conditions muscle glycogen and maybe even liver glycogen is going to be depleted put simply can i enhance body fat loss by doing some cardio after a bout of weight
Speaker 2training if you equate for total energy expenditure it won't matter now that you did bring up a very important point that i want to clarify if you look at the exercise modalities that we laid out in our previous conversations we talked about nine different adaptations one was skill and then speed power strength hypertrophy muscular endurance anaerobic capacity aerobic capacity and long duration endurance now speed power and skill development have almost nothing to do with body fat loss so we're going to talk a little bit more about that in just a few minutes and then we're going to get back to the point where we can talk about some of the things that we talked about in our last episode and then we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
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Speaker 1in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
Speaker 2in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
Speaker 1in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
Speaker 2in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
Speaker 1in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
Speaker 2in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about in the last episode and then we're going to talk about some of the things that we talked about
Speaker 1turn fat into muscle. Can you turn muscle into fat? No. I'm so glad you said that because when I was in college, our, I don't want to out that person, the physiology teacher seemed to think still at that point that one could, um, lift weights, get muscular, but then it would eventually turn into body fat. That, that I, that myth is I think largely been dispelled. I heard that so
Speaker 2many times, uh, as a kid, I heard it so many times in college. I heard it. So I hear it so many times in our, uh, undergraduate students from other faculty and such. So, um, no, like they're not the same structures. They are very different. Um, let me, let me take a shot at answering this better. You were really, really, really close. So yeah, if you were to do that type of exercise where you've burned a lot of muscle glycogen, how is it I'm losing stored fat, right? That's really the question. And it doesn't even actually matter if you then went ahead and ingested extra, uh, carbohydrates or fat post-exercise. Um, that's not really a thing. You hit on a couple of key things. Number one, this is all under the assumption that total caloric intake is still low, right? You have total need below total. Right. I also want to flag calories in calories out is not the only thing that matters. This is a very complex thing. Calories in is incredibly complicated. Calories out is even more complicated. Okay. So we just, well, maybe another series we can spend on that alone. So don't, don't go nuts about that. You have to be hypo caloric one way or the other. If you burn a bunch of muscle glycogen and you are hyper caloric, you're still going to add fat. If you burn a bunch of muscle glycogen and you're hypo caloric, you're going to lose fat, right? Think about it this way. You're in a negative calorie state. Where are those calories going to come from? Are you going to reduce your muscle glycogen storages permanently? No, no. Are you going to reduce your glycogen storage in your liver? No. You want to reduce blood glucose? No, no way. Right. So where is that extra energy coming from? It's coming from your stored fat. It is your backup reserve energy system. Um, the way that I want to flag this year is people tend to think about it as like carbohydrates versus fat. That's not, it's more like a chain, more like a bicycle where there's a front gear and a back gear. You turn one gear, it turns the other one. These are complimentary systems. They are not and or systems, right? You're, you're turning one. And when we go through carbohydrate metabolism, uh, maybe here in a second, you'll understand why you have to have an anaerobic and an aerobic component to that. There is absolutely no way to complete carbohydrate metabolism without oxygen. That has to happen. The only way to engage in fat metabolism is aerobic and oxygen. There's no anaerobic component to it. So there's a are meant to be incredibly flexible. It is the primary fuel source for a reason. Your fat is not meant to be flexible. It isn't meant to be unlimited. That's the basic point. So you want flexibility over here and an unlimited capacity over there. Now I'm safeguarded against any energetic need. Okay. I need to run up a hill for safety. Cool. Carbohydrates are there. I need to then run for 17 hours. Cool. Fat is there. We want both of these systems. Um, you want to be able to have great energy throughout the day. You want to have great energy throughout the day. You want to slow drip coming from fat. You don't want up and down, up and down. Feel great. Up and down. Awesome. You want to be able to think very quickly and get hyper-focused. Boom. Carbohydrates ramp right up, right? Get it into the brain, get thinking better, get thinking clearly fast. So we want all these, not just for exercise purposes, for, but for activities of daily living, we want an optimal system here. And when people use the terms like fat adapted, they're generally hijacking that. And they're thinking, it used to be a thing we said all the time. And like all of my undergraduate classes for years. And that idea of metabolic flexibility is using optimal fuel sources and optimal times, not maximizing fat usage. They, the people have co-opted that term of metabolic flexibility to be like, oh yeah, yeah. Therefore learn how to maximize fat burning. That's not what that term means. That term means maximizing your ability to use whatever fuel is optimal in that time. Now I'll grant you, most people aren't fantastic at using fat as a fuel source relative to the other direction. But nonetheless, the, the, the, the gold standard, the gold standard is should be maximizing both. All right. Finally answering your question. If I were to burn a bunch of muscle glycogen, how am I losing that fat? Well, the fuel you're ingesting in that hypochloric state is going to say, Hey, look, we have a lot of muscle glycogen. We have to replenish. So any carbohydrate that comes in needs to be biased towards storage. It's got to go into those tissue. Any fat that comes in or doesn't even come in, but any fat that we're using for fuel needs to be utilized for activity. And that's where the caloric expenditure from fat comes in. So you're basically saying your general physiology, the energy for that starts coming from fat and the energy that's coming in from carbohydrate needs to be simply stored. And so what you see is your respiratory quotient changes, right? The RER is going, is going off. And so in the exercise moment, it shot way up for carbohydrates and shot way down for fat. As a compensatory response, it goes the other direction because your body's saying we are low on carbohydrates. Don't use them for fuel unless we absolutely has to, right? So use them for storage, get our fuel from the fat side of the equation. And so what you're generally going to say is like, Oh, I'm burning more fat to sitting around after things like that. And that's not even taking into the equation, the epoch part, which is like, it's not actually as large as people think it is. It's fairly large. It's not as large as people think it is. It's fairly large. It's not fairly small, but it is, it adds up sort of over time. So does that explain a little bit better about how you lose fat when you actually only burn carbs for exercise?
Speaker 1You explained it beautifully. You talked about epoch, the post-exercise oxygen consumption, not being that significant in terms of energy utilization, even though today we're talking about endurance and different forms of endurance. I do have to ask whether or not people consider the weight of their weight to be a significant factor in basal metabolism that occurs when there's more muscle around because muscle is such a metabolically demanding tissue. You know, if, is there a straightforward-ish equation, you know, if one adds one pound of, of lean muscle tissue to their body, even if it's distributed across multiple muscle groups, does that equate to a caloric need of X number of calories per day? Muscle protein synthesis needs of that muscle or it's glycogen storage needs or both.
Speaker 2If you don't have enough muscle, you start to have problems with fat losses. It's difficult challenge. If you have enough muscle and you're just trying to get extremely large, if your FFMI is 24 and you're 15% body fat, adding more muscle is not really going to play a lot in the equation. And here's why. Muscle is more metabolically active at rest than fat, but fat is not inert. So fat is still going to burn a small number of calories. Muscle burns more, but it's not nearly what people think it is. I'm a muscle guy. I'm a muscle physiologist. I would love to get people to have more muscle for any excuse I can. It's not honest to say that though. You're talking about when I was in undergraduate, we would say numbers like 50 K-cals per day per pound is what you can look at, right? So if you put on a pound of muscle spread across the body, your basal metabolic rate would go up by around 50 calories per day. I think that number is grossly exaggerated. It's probably a tenth of that. Six to 10 calories. Maybe. It's hard to know exactly what that number is, but the more recent estimates are something like that. So now on one hand, you could say, oh my gosh, that is not even meaningful. On the other hand, you could say that's super meaningful. It just depends on time domain you want to put that out, right? So if you were to put on five pounds of muscle and your basal metabolic rate went up 30 or 40 calories a day, well, over the course of a thousand days, that actually adds up. So you could slice this any way you want. Now, maybe that number is somewhere in between. I don't really know. It's not a field I paid that much attention to, candidly, because it's not a metric, kind of like EPOC, where it's like, we used to really harp on it, and now it's sort of like, well, maybe we exaggerated that, like, honestly, just a bit. But to me, it doesn't change the equation much, because if you don't have enough muscle, as I described, there are other consequences that are going to make fat loss hard. And so you need to have sufficient muscle. If the additional caloric expenditure is the carrot, great. If it's something else, I don't really care. There's just enough evidence that you need to have it, or I should say, there's enough evidence that it will really help you in your path. Maybe a few calories here or there is not really the thing, especially if you understand a normal food item. Anything you pick is going to be probably a couple of hundred calories. One bad food choice a day will out kick almost any amount of coverage you got on adding muscle mass to you. So like, you're really stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime. If you're worried about how many calories you're getting from adding muscle, fat loss is going to be about regulating that carbon intake above and
Speaker 1beyond anything else. I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor, InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals. I've long been a believer in blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long term health and well-being, can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. One issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there, however, is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors, et cetera, but you don't know what to do with that information. InsideTracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy. They have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are, of course, but then also what sorts of behavioral do's and don'ts, what sorts of nutritional changes, what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you. If you'd like to try InsideTracker, you can visit insidetracker.com slash Huberman to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans. Again, that's insidetracker.com slash Huberman to get 20% off. So I've heard about this concept of metabolic flexibility mentioned a few times. Frankly, you're the first person who's ever explained it to me in a clear and concise way. How do I know if I am metabolically flexible? And how do I increase my metabolic flexibility?
Speaker 2Sure. There's no specific standard, which is actually a good thing, right? And so if you have a level of specificity that you want or need metabolically, then you don't actually want to be in this middle ground. An example would be if you are performing in a type of exercise or an athlete who performs in a sport that is glycolically dominated. You don't want to be optimally metabolically flexible. You don't want to be super quote-unquote fat-adapted. You want to be biased towards the energy you're going to use. The same could be true for the other end of the spectrum. So in those particular cases, it's not optimal to be equally effective because there are no free passes in physiology, right? Your energy-producing systems will up-regulate or down-regulate accordingly. So you will actually limit your ability to, say, maximally utilize carbohydrate as a fuel if you're trying to up-regulate your ability to use fat as a fuel. And so this is like, there's a saturation point. Outside of that spectrum, most people would just say, hey, like, I want to feel great throughout the day to be able to do a bunch of different things. How do you know? A couple things. There's a lot of biological markers you can take. There's also just some practical takes. Now, none of these markers by themselves are any sign. What you want to do is probably a couple of them and then say, okay, this is maybe a clue. So, again, it's really important to emphasize, not a single one of these tests that I'm about to walk you through automatically means you can't use fat as a fuel or the other case, which is maybe you're poor at using carbohydrate as a fuel. So, disclaimers aside,
Speaker 1we'll get into a couple of them. So should we think about these as
Speaker 2informative and useful, but not diagnostic? Exactly. We would call this data-inspired or data-led and not data-driven. Great. Okay, cool. So, number one, you want to think about just overall functionality. Do you have a reasonable regulation of your energy throughout the day? Now, many things could be going into this, which is why these are not specific diagnostics. But as a basic measure, we talked about blood glucose levels. You know, a lot of people will say, again, you want that to be something like between 80 and 90 milligrams per deciliter is the blood glucose level. And you can go look at the cutoff points for what determines to be pre-diabetic and type 2 diabetic, etc. What I can actually recommend, this is, there's a little bit of science here, actually, that I'll talk you through, but a lot of this is my personal preference. I generally want people to be at 85 or lower. And that's because of a couple of things. Number one, there's actually some papers that showed any, every single point increase above 85 increases your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes by about 6%. Okay, great. So, technically, while maybe 90 or 95 or even up to 100 are, you know, in the quote-unquote normative values, that's one clue. Again, it's not definitive by itself, doesn't mean anything. You need to really pay attention to what increasing by 6% actually means. But it's a data point where I'm looking at. If I actually then see symptomology, and we run you through maybe some questionnaires, ask how you're feeling throughout the day, and we see uncontrolled energy bouts, a lot of energy, then you get really, really tired and swings. Okay, another data point. And we may patch a few of these things together. That may give me some clues. That being said, again, a lot of this rhetoric is used to then scare people off of carbohydrates. And that is, I want to be as clear as possible, that is not, not truly the only thing people should care about, right? It can be a thing. It can also be unrelated. There are reasons you could have blood glucose concentrations at this level or energy swings that are unrelated to carbohydrate ingestion at all. All right, so one test you can either run. In addition to that, if you're going to get blood glucose measured, you can look at some markers we talked about earlier, which are AST and ALT. We talked about how you can kind of look at that AST to ALT ratio before. You can actually do the inverse, which is look at ALT and AST. The kind of normative value there you're going to look at is like 0.8. I actually like to see it lower than that. And that alone has been actually associated with blood glucose dysregulation. And so if you see multiple of these signs, again, looking for patterns and patterns and patterns in both, in our case, biomarkers, symptomology, and performance. And now you're, if all three of those things are lining up, you may have an issue. So performance wise, a couple of little tests you can run. Ideally, you have some sort of standard workout you do. Oh, and hopefully it's, it's pretty objective. So in other words, like I run the same 15 minute loop every morning for my cardio. Oh, okay, great. How long does it take you to run that loop? Like you could pick whatever distance. It doesn't really matter. What's your heart rate during that thing. And then what's your perceived exertion. Now you should be able to do that fasted with very little drop in performance. Okay. If you can do that, then that tells me you're fairly good at using a fat as a fuel source. If however, the one day you go to do your standard workout and you feel awful fasting, that may be another clue that perhaps you're not very good at dialing in that system. If your recovery afterwards in terms of heart rate recovery is very long, that may be another clue that you have a poor utilization of fat as a fuel source. The inverse can also be true. So if I give you something in the neighborhood of like 50 or so grams of carbohydrate and 30 minutes later, your face is falling off the table. That's a good sign that you're in the opposite. You're actually very, very, very poor utilizing carbohydrate as a fuel. And the reason I bring that up is, um, that is equally a problem. We send, we hear people a lot make comments, um, like, man, I have to stay away from carbs. I crash really hard. If I do them, that has, what that actually means is you're very poor at utilizing carbohydrates as fuel. You're getting a, your, your, uh, your sensitivity is way off. We should be able to have carbohydrate at a reasonable dosage, 50 grams and not fall asleep 30 minutes later or, or have to run to caffeine. So, um, that is a sign in our opinion. This is again, now just my practical, brain telling you is, um, that's a sign of, of dysfunction. Um, we, we should be able to have plenty of carbohydrates through the day if we choose to, if we want to, for any reason. Um, now of course, if you were to throw 150 or 200 grams of carbohydrate in your belly, you're probably going to take a little bit of an energy hit after that, but we should be able to have a reasonable dosage and not, you know, have to fall asleep afterwards.
Speaker 1What is one way that people can enhance their utilization of carbohydrates? Uh, for exercise. The reason I ask is I think I fall into that category. Um, I do consume some complex carbohydrates and fruit post resistance training. And that tends to be when I'm hungriest for them. But typically, unless I'm, I've just done some resistance training, I keep most of my daytime meals, relatively low carbohydrate. And then in the evening, I prefer slightly less protein and more carbohydrate because it has this effect of, um, sedating me a little bit and I sleep well. And I know this runs against what everyone was taught, uh, which is to not eat carbohydrates late in the day, but I like it because then I tend to wake up in the morning with at least as far as I can tell my glycogen stores, not necessarily topped off, but, but certainly filled. Um, and I'm able to train fasted in the morning. And my favorite pre-workout is, uh, consists of water and caffeine and electrolytes and maybe some supplementation as well. But, um, I love training fasted.
Speaker 2So there's actually a number of things. Um, one little sneaky thing you threw in there is actually the use of caffeine. So that's another sign. If, if you have to have caffeine to do your fasted training, that's generally another sign you're not very good at using fuel.
Speaker 1So I use caffeine prior to resistance training workouts. Generally, I don't need it for any kind of cardiovascular training.
Speaker 2Yeah. And when I say that, it doesn't mean it's bad. It's just like another clue that's like, okay, you should be able to do this without having to have caffeine to execute it. Now using caffeine to get a better result is sort of different as an ergogenic aid. Um, we actually use a lot of high carbohydrate meals at the end of the day, a lot of the times for our athletes who are cutting weight or trying to reduce weight. So it is a fantastic way to handle a lot of things. And that idea that if you eat carbs late at night, uh, that'll increase fat. So like that's all is so old and so well destroyed scientifically. That's not a concern. Um, there's just so much data showing. In fact, there's so much data on like eating timing is, is generally poorly understood about when you can eat and what you can eat eating in the morning versus eating at night like a lot of what we've heard in there is stopping maybe we just saved that for sort of another day because we're going to get really far down in the spot or we can yeah
Speaker 1but yes i think our plan is to cover that in an episode on nutrition um okay which is in this series the uh the only thing that i would add to it is you know when you hear about ingesting carbohydrate late at night i should just say that uh at least in my case i'm eating the majority of my carbohydrate unless i trained resistance trained early in the day in which case i post resistance training um in the last meal of the day but for me that's not really late at night that last meal is somewhere between 6 30 and 7 30 p.m so it's three or so hours or something like that before you sleep around 10 10 30 or so yeah so it's not you know midnight uh bowls of pasta i've done that too but um yeah but typically it's not so i think that um people will be very interested uh myself included in how meal timing relates to all of this but um yeah let's so how do you improve fat utilization how
Speaker 2do you improve carbohydrate utilization let's hammer both out really quickly um enhancing fat utilization is as simple as doing a little bit of work in a either pre-fat ingested state so anytime you ingest a nutrient prior to training you're going to bias towards that nutrient right which is almost what we were talking about earlier so if you want to guarantee you burn more fat eat more fat prior to a workout now you're not going to lose fat but what you're what you're effectively signaling is we have an overabundance of this fuel preferentially target this fuel now the downside is that may actually hinder your performance um that's typically only a concern for people at a very high level um fat is a slower fuel source so if you're relying more upon that your top end is going to come down a little bit and so you wouldn't want to use that strategy prior to race if it is a carbohydrate dependent race all right and in fact we actually see long-term adaptations that would suggest that so the enzymes responsible for carbohydrate metabolism will down regulate and so you get worse at that so not not a great strategy there um carbohydrate would be the opposite right so if you have carbohydrate prior to exercise you're going to bias more towards that so a handful of things you can do if your total caloric intake is simply managed that's going to take care of a lot of these problems an appropriate eating strategy so the types of food the combinations of food all those things are going to make your post-carbohydrate ingestion bonk a lot of those things can go away so there's a little bit of physiology that has to be um corrected for so it's a little bit in one hand you can go very deep here right so the real answer of how we would do this is if we see a scenario like that we're going to do a whole set of analyses we're going to go full labs right probably extensive blood panel urine saliva stool even and we're going to figure out where is that glucose dysregulation coming from so a lot of people think like oh it's a metabolism issue it might be it also might just be a flag that something else is happening in the body so we're going to actually work backwards a lot to try to figure out exactly why that's occurring it may be as simple as oh you're eating a lot of your carbohydrates without any fiber or protein and we know that that's important because those will actually blunt the glycemic index like the rise in blood glucose so it could be a simple thing of just like oh your combination of food is doing it it's not the total amount um it may be something again more endogenous to the actual system uh it could be um a heart rate issue it could be a breathing issue it could be a number of things so the way to get better at it is to simply train it and specificity is king here so if you want to get better at managing your blood glucose throughout the day so you're not feeling those things it could be a fuel issue but it could be a number of other things and it's just hard to go into all of them with within our time constraint so the practical tool that i would say here is if you want to get better at managing energy throughout the day make sure that number one your protein is stabilized making sure number two you're ingesting your food in the right combinations ideally with some fiber and or some protein or both that alone will help stabilize a lot of the problems then you need to train at a high intensity you want to get better at using carbohydrates as a fuel train at a higher intensity and have carbohydrates right before right before the workout we'll do that a lot if um uh if our if we see folks who are i kind of walked you through the test of identifying if you're not very good at using fat as a fuel the test for not being good at using carbohydrate as the fuel is both that eating test i talked about as well as performance if you're a very very very slow starter it's just like really hard to get going that generally indicates you might be in a situation where you're not very good at using carbohydrates as fuel so we're going to practice that we're going to pre-carbohydrate pre-exercise carbohydrate meal then we're going to do higher intensity stuff not to the point of making you sick and digestive issues all that stuff but we want to get better at using carbohydrates as a fuel faster if you want to get better at doing the opposite then you do that opposite strategy either again using fat prior to the workout knowing your peak performance is going to go down a little bit but you're you're investing in adaptation right so it's not about that workout it's about what's going to happen six eight ten weeks from now investment is what you want to think about it or you could bring in some fasted training and so i want to really make sure i clarify when we were talking about it earlier i'm not at all against fasted training it's not it works it just isn't required for fat loss it isn't required for fat adaptation it is a great option though if you want um what i was hoping to do with that conversation and maybe i didn't articulate that well is to not restrict people but is to open you up and elisa you have a lot of options if you like to do fasted cardio amazing it is great if you hate it you don't have to you can reach the same performance goals the same physique goals without ever doing it if you love long duration steady state stuff it is great if you hate it there are other options higher intensity stuff again if we're just talking about fat loss so i hope now that that's a little clearer in terms of the same thing nutrition if you like higher carb great if you like lower these are all great you have options and you don't have to fret so much over oh my gosh i have to do this thing a certain way and i absolutely hate it you don't have to worry about it hit those concepts and
Speaker 1you'll be fine a few minutes ago you mentioned that if we ingest a given macronutrient like fat then the body will preferentially use that fuel source if you ingest carbohydrate we'll use that fuel source is it always the case that the body uses the ingested macronutrient or ingested macronutrient prior to using glycogen i have to imagine it's using both i mean if i were to have some carbohydrate before um doing any kind of training the muscles still burn glycogen right or do they have some way to register the amount of circulating carbohydrate that would allow or available carbohydrate in the form of food stuffs uh that would allow them to not tap into their own muscle
Speaker 2fiber stores of glycogen all right so the way we derive energy uh for exercise or basic maintenance a little bit about cellular physiology so you've got a couple of organelle and structures that we need to pay attention to the first one is the nucleus that's hold your dna the second one is the mitochondria and then everything outside of that you've got all these other organelle that do a bunch of things like ribosomes for protein synthesis etc etc all right now when you want to produce energy for exercise anytime you hear the word anaerobic you automatically understand we are meaning without oxygen all right great that all happens in the cytoplasm the cytoplasm is that space that is not the mitochondria not the nucleus so it's the space in between everything else this is like jelly-like substance that sounds there so anaerobic metabolism happens there every single aerobic metabolic process happens in the mitochondria all right why is that important if i go to create cellular energy and i need it the fastest possible i'm going to go for phosphocreatine because it is stored directly in the cytoplasm the stoichiometry is one to one there which means for every mole of phosphocreatine i burn i can create one atp it's one to one it is incredibly fast but it is very limited because think about it how much of that could i possibly store in the small size of the cell that's it if i need energy past that point now i'll start using muscle glycogen because that is also stored in the cytoplasm so it is right there the stoichiometry is not one to one it's a little bit higher probably like four to one so for every molecule of glycogen you burn you're going to get something like four ish some small number of atp out of that which is great but again you're running into a storage problem how much can i possibly store inside a muscle cell it is very very fast much more effective than phosphocreatine but so there if i then want to metabolize any form of fat or if i want to complete the metabolization of carbohydrates i have to start transferring into the mitochondria now i start getting whole hosts of atp uh if you were to fully run through this thing which i'll talk about in a second i'm called the tca cycle or krebs cycle you'll get now something like 28 or 30 or 35 and kind of depending atp per so the energetic output is much higher okay so here's exactly what happens then i'm going to walk you through this in the form of carbohydrate, and then I'll come backwards and go through. fat. So remember, carbohydrate, it is one carbon molecule that has been hydrated. So it is one to one. So the actual chemistry here, it is CH2O, one carbon, 2H1O. Glucose is a six carbon chain. So the chemistry here is C6H12O6, six carbons, six waters. Very simple. That's a carbohydrate. All right. So you can imagine if you're watching on the video here, you'll see my fingers going nuts. I'll try to make sure I explain it to you all just listening in an easy fashion. So you've got this chain of six carbons is in front of you. And the very first step to metabolism is you snap that thing in half, right? So you break into two separate three carbon chains, all right? Now, in doing that, you got a little bit of energy because you broke that one bond, but not a tremendous amount. This is called glycolysis. So lysis being the split and glyc being like you split. So glycogen up. Got a little bit of energy of that. All right. You form this three carbon chain called pyruvate or pyruvic acid. Okay. There's differences there, but don't kill me. General audience, friends. All right. I got to give this, communicate this to everybody. So you got a little bit of that. Now you can't do much past that besides rip one more carbon off of each of those three carbon chains. So I've got two, three carbon chains. I'd have to be careful how I do this with my fingers. So I don't flip you off here in a second, but I burn one carbon chain. So I've got one more off of each. I get a little bit of energy. And now that little two carbon chain, I have two, two carbon chains. Those are called acetyl-CoA. All right. Amazing. I have now completed anaerobic glycolysis. I've got really nothing left I can do here. I made a little bit of ATP. Now, wait a minute. I have now freed two carbons because remember I started with six and I split them apart, but I didn't, I had two, three carbon chains. I burned one each. I've got two free floating carbons. I have to now do this. I've got to do this. I've got to do this. I've got to do something with them. My body will not let me go through that part, that last process, unless I've got a plan for that free carbon because I can't break it in half. Amazing. Here's what's going to happen. If I have those three carbon molecules and I don't have anywhere I can put that carbon, you're not going to go through that process. It's going to stop it. You're going to start building up pyruvate. Now, at the same time, you're breaking it up. You're going to start building up pyruvate. Now, at the same time, you're breaking it up. You're going to start building up pyruvate. Now, at the same time, you're breaking ATP for fuel. That's called ATP hydrolysis. You have water that comes in. You have an adenosine and three phosphates. That's why it's called ATP, adenosine triphosphate, one, two, three. You break one of those phosphates off. There you go. There's your energy. Now, you have a free floating inorganic phosphate and an adenosine diphosphate, so two over there. Amazing. That actually results, because you use water for it, results in a free floating hydrogen ion. Okay. You just have to trust me. Hydrogen, H2O. Any idea what a free floating hydrogen is?
Speaker 1It's going to- That's acid. Yeah. I was going to say it's going to increase acidity. That's what acidity is. For anyone that's ever measured pH, what you're really measuring is the amount of hydrogen.
Speaker 2Potential hydrogen. That's what pH is, right? 100%. There's two definitions of pH, but you get it. That's one of the two.
Speaker 1So, is this, are you going to tell me this is related to the burn?
Speaker 2We're going to get close, right? So, I've got a bunch of free floating. You've got the phosphates, which are actually a problem too, probably more of a problem than people realize, and that hydrogen. What are you going to do with that hydrogen? Well, one thing you can do is actually ship it over to pyruvate and bond it there. We have a special name for that little molecule when you have pyruvate and you have hydrogen attached to it. Do you know what it's called?
Speaker 1Hydrogen peroxide?
Speaker 2Lactate. Lactate, lactic acid. This is that whole system, right? Again, I was skipping some steps, making a little bit of mistakes here, intentionally folks, just to make this as simple. So, what happens when you start running a bunch of anaerobic glycolysis? You start seeing massive rises in lactate. Cool. Not lactic acid. Right. Right? That's why we see associations between a lot of lactate and a lot of fatigue, but the lactate's actually not causing the fatigue. The lactate is actually sparing you from having a bunch of free floating acid. It also can be then used directly back in the muscle because as soon as you bring in enough oxygen and you can take that hydrogen back off of it, you've now turned it right back into pyruvate and you can run it through this whole cycle as fuel that I'm about to do. You can actually actually ship it out of the exercising muscle and ship it into a non-exercising muscle and then go backwards and make glucose. What actually liberates
Speaker 1hydrogen from lactate? Like chemically? Yeah. So, what liberates, well, what are the stimuli that can take hydrogen off the pyruvate and then, in other words, to reduce lactate and free up that
Speaker 2hydrogen? Oxygen availability. So, in fact, one of the major places that you ship lactate to is your heart because it's what we call like the ultimate slow-touch fiber and it has a ton of freely available mitochondria which have a ton of access to oxygen so it can actually then go to it, form water. The oxygen that's going to be used to form water and now we have a place to store the hydrogen. Got it. Right? Cool. So, as a result of anaerobic glycolysis, we have made a little bit of ATP. We've created a lot of waste and we don't have anywhere to go with these end products. So, when you do anything of a higher intensity and it says I need energy fast, you're going to go to this system first, right, right past ATP because it is the fastest place to get energy but you're not going to get much of it and you've got to deal with the waste products. Boom. Right back to the beginning of our conversation. Endurance is about two things, energy production and waste management and we're right, we're fatigue buffering. This is it, right? How well can you handle the elevations in hydrogen, right, drop in pH and how and then what are you going to do with these products? If you want to fully metabolize a carbohydrate, you then have to take some, do something with those pyruvates or those acetyl-CoAs which are going to do if oxygen is available, you will take those things and ship them into the mitochondria. They have to go through some cell walls and some other things like that but they're going to get inside there. Once they're in there, that two carbon acetyl-CoA runs through this entire cycle that we call the Krebs cycle. That's this really interesting place. That's where B6 and NMN, people are like, that's where that whole stuff starts to kick in. All your B vitamins basically run that entire circle and you're going to start off the top. You have a bunch of fun stuff going on. But as a part of that circle, you're going to pull off some of the hydrogen ions. You're going to send these to what's called the electron transport chain. That's where you're going to get a ton of ATP out of and as a result, about halfway through the turn, you're going to pull off one carbon and about halfway through the other, almost the other way through the finish, you're going to pull off the second carbon. So you're going to take the second acetyl-CoA, run that entire same through as well and so what we did is we started off with a six carbon glucose chain. We split it in half. We called those pyruvate. Made a little bit of energy because we broke that one bond of those two carbons that are in the middle. Cool. Those two, three carbon molecules, we pulled one carbon off of each. We brought in, sorry, we moved those into the mitochondria. We brought one off. We took a breath, brought in some oxygen, bonded that, took out two CO2 exhales. We ran the acetyl-CoA through the Krebs cycle. One, two carbons per turn coming out of CO2. So we had six carbons total and we started and we exited with zero carbons. Now we have fully metabolized a molecule of carbohydrate. That required an anaerobic start and an aerobic finish. If you don't have a lot of mitochondria, large mitochondria, high functioning mitochondria, you're going to limit your anaerobic performance because you're going to get, they're going to run that door full very, very quickly. You can't go past it because hydrogen will build up way too fast and one of the things that we know is both temperature and pH run enzyme function. So they're going to stop. You won't even be able to run through, in fact, that ATP hydrolysis phase. Even if I gave you a whole infinite supply of ATP, if I put enough acid in there, it would stop working because the ATPase enzyme needed to split. It won't be able to run in a highly acidic environment or a hot environment.
Speaker 1Yeah. At some point, perhaps today, perhaps in the future discussion, but still not too far from now, we could talk about the role of temperature. Oh, yeah. In pyruvate in terms of its regulation of muscle contraction. But I want to make sure I understood something correctly. You mentioned these two parallel fuel systems, right? One is essentially anaerobic, right? And the other is aerobic. You said that if we can't pull enough, if we can't break enough bonds, then we limit our anaerobic capacity. Correct. I would have thought, given that the mitochondria are the site essentially for aerobic metabolism, that we would be limiting our aerobic capacity as well. Perhaps you could just clarify for me how these two things are divided, or is there not a clean division? Is it not in either one?
Speaker 2No. In fact, again, I think it's better to think of these things rather as two separate parallel things as one big cycle. They're one gear turning the next. Being compromised in one will compromise the other.
Speaker 1That, I should say, reminds me of what you said earlier, which is the bicycle gear analogy. That works great. So if you you short circuit one basically that the chain can't move that's yeah fantastic okay so um so indeed they they are running in parallel but they are um interdependent yeah well they're actually
Speaker 2not even running in parallel because they're actually funneling to the same end point right which is like if you're going to come from the anaerobic glycolysis route or you're going to come from the fat route which i'll talk about in a second they're both going to be limited in the mitochondria so when that thing's full it doesn't matter you can't run either system right so it is more of like a again if you're running the bike gears it doesn't really matter if the back one's larger or smaller because if either one is limited you're toast because they're running on the same system you can you can you can sneak a little bit here and there but but not much you also really
Speaker 1nicely highlighted how lactate this thing that we think of as a limiting factor like the burn it gets in the way and it's the thing we need to stop and buffer and all all sorts of things sure it's actually
Speaker 2really a fuel it's a it's a tremendously effective fuel yeah is a strongly preferred fuel actually the is essentially this is a very classic case of association um correlation versus causation right so the original actually like there's a really cool history on lactate but it was originally found uh i think in germany um pardon my history there um somewhere in europe and hunted stags so one of the things is they sort of realized is like if we if we if we harvested a stag in a rest of state when it didn't know we were there versus if we chased it and it was ran down that these lactate concentrations were significantly higher in in the latter situation therefore lactate started immediately getting this association between high fatigue points and it is easy to measure if you do any sort of lactate test any sort of metabolic test you will see as fatigue increases lactate will also increase the assumption there was then oh my gosh is the cause now we know like again it's not the thing it's in large part trying to buffer the negative consequences of atp hydrolysis and and some other things so it is certainly playing a part in that role but it is not the core driver it's also why you don't need to worry about doing things to quote unquote um reduce lactate in the muscle after exercise or to clear lactate or any of those things you may still want to do those activities but not for that reason lactate's fine you're actually going to use it and again the neighboring exercise muscle fibers in the same muscle another muscle you can send it actually to the um to the liver and it can actually go through gluconeogenesis and it can actually replenish liver glycogen just as a fuel source or you can send the harder any number of sources you can also just kind of put it in circulation put it back in the muscle and once enough oxygen is there you can just kick it right back into either glucose or glycogen it's totally fine so it is obviously clear though once that number gets very very high other things are going to be happening that are causing a lot of hurt and this is your managing waste right is really an issue of managing what am i going to do with all this extra carbon what am i going to do with all this extra inorganic phosphate and some other nasty byproducts but that's the thing you have to deal with i'd love for you to teach me how
Speaker 1different ratios of fuel sources are used depending on how long i happen to be exercising for example if i do a very short bout of exercise typically that's correlated with a higher intensity output i mean i suppose i could jog for one minute but here i'm thinking about sprinting for one minute or less which fuels are used is that mainly driven by fat stores by carbohydrate stores is it driven by dietary fat preferentially or carbohydrate that i've ingested if indeed i've ingested those or protein for that matter and then as we transition to exercise that goes a little bit longer you know anywhere from you know three to five minutes how do those ratios change and as we transition to longer duration what most people think of as endurance exercise but long duration output of you know 20 minutes or more leading all the way up to a full marathon how does that change the ratio of fuel sources that are used and i'd be particularly interested in distinguishing between carbohydrate fat and protein that's ingested so coming from food sources or carbohydrate fat and protein that are coming from storage sites within the body okay great let's start at zero seconds and run all the
Speaker 2way through marathon and we'll flag the distinctions where they start changing as soon as you want to create muscle contraction and power the very first source of energy is phosphocreatine that's going to power you for zero to maybe say eight to 15 20 seconds of maximal exertion and that's in coming
Speaker 1from the muscle contraction and power that's going to power you for zero to maybe say eight to 15 20 seconds of maximal exertion and that's in coming from the muscle contraction and that's in coming from
Speaker 2fibers themselves yeah that is actually stored in the what's called the cytoplasm so this is a little area or space in the muscle fiber um that's sort of like in this jelly-like substance and it's nice because one molecule of phosphocreatine gives you one molecule of atp so it's not a big energy output but it's very fast because it is stored right there in the local exercising muscle right now if you need energy past that point say you know 10 or 15 seconds up to maybe a couple of minutes this is now you're going to have to transition from the muscle fiber to the muscle fiber transition because you're going to burn through that phosphocreatine it's going to be out you're going to have to move to now carbohydrate metabolism this is what we call anaerobic glycolysis so there's two phases of glycolysis now glycolysis itself means glucose burning all right so just means we're using carbohydrate as a fuel source so initially when we start off this cascade um which is going to take us again for a couple of minutes um carbohydrate utilization comes first from the exercising muscle so it's very similar to phosphocreatine that way if you start running low on it you can actually start pulling blood glucose and if blood glucose gets low you'll have to start getting glycogen from the liver to keep that up and we've sort of covered that conversation all right so a little bit of chemistry here just give me a little bit of room here so now remember a carbohydrate is a carbon molecule that has been hydrated so one carbon attached to one water and remember water is h2o most of the time when we're talking about glucose it is in a six carbon chain so when we're talking about glucose it is in a six carbon chain so six carbons attached to six water molecules all right great when i go to split this up through anaerobic glycolysis it works a little bit like this so you've got this six carbon chain the first step is to snap that thing in half you're going to make two three carbon chains now we broke one bond right there so we got a little bit of energy but not a tremendous amount at the end of anaerobic glycolysis you're going to net something like three or four atp so more than you
Speaker 1get from the phosphocreatine triple
Speaker 2quadruple but still not very much there's another major downside that's coming in a second to this system the upside is it's fast now why don't actually one adaptation we get to training in this style is you'll increase your ability to store glycogen in your muscle which is great right we can actually biopsy you and measure the amount that you store and a training adaptation is awesome so you're able to sustain this system longer so perhaps 90 seconds into your interval you hit a fatigue point and now you maybe can extend that to 100 or 115 seconds simply because you're storing more glycogen in the muscle before we have to and then go into the blood and get it in the form of glucose so that's great so we've got this six carbon molecule and we split this in half we got that little bit of atp and now we're in this little tricky position because this three carbon molecule is what we call pyruvate pyruvic acid and again chemistry folks i'm making sure the entire world listening regardless of where they come in can can follow me here okay so don't burn me on the details right you've got this pyruvate the problem is you can no longer do anything with that glycolysis is over you've got to make a choice right in order to make something out of those three carbon molecules you've got to ship them to the mitochondria as we said that is the only place of aerobic metabolism right we cannot do aerobic metabolism anywhere else until we enter the mitochondria so we've got to make sure that we're making sure that we're making So anytime we cross that barrier, we know we've automatically switched from anaerobic to aerobic. Well, here's the problem. If you were to take one more carbon off that three-carbon pyruvate, you have to now do something with that carbon waste. So before, when we split the six-carbon chain, we didn't actually leave any carbons free-floating. We just split a two-molecule in half. When we go to split from pyruvate and make it into this two-carbon molecule called acetyl-CoA or acetyl-CoA, now we've got a free-floating carbon. We have to have a strategy for that because that's going to increase the acidity level. Any enzyme in our body that works to create fuel is very pH-sensitive, right? So if pH gets off either high or low, these enzymes can't work. And that's really, really important because even if I were to give you a direct injection of ATP, remember that's that energy currency, that's the only way we can actually form energy. I guess remember to clarify, anytime we're using phosphocreatine or glucose or fat, which we'll get to in a second, we're not actually getting energy for exercise by breaking those down. We're getting energy that we can use to then make ATP. We break that ATP down. That's what's actually powering muscle contraction. You can go back to our previous episode where we walked you through the detail of the muscle contraction. But that's what we're after, okay? So in the case of pyruvate, if we split that off, we have got to deal with that. And the only way and the best way we can deal with that is oxygen. Remember, we're going to breathe in O2. That O2 is going to combine with that free-floating carbon, make CO2. We're going to exhale that thing out. That's our waste management strategy. But... that has to happen in the mitochondria. Remember, if we're using oxygen, it has to be in the mitochondria. So if we have the ability to ship pyruvate into the mitochondria, we're golden. But what happens if we don't? Why do we not? Well, if we don't have enough mitochondria or our mitochondria are too small or they're too far away or we don't have sufficient oxygen availability. Why don't we have sufficient oxygen availability? Because we created the pyruvate too fast and the demand in the mitochondria is exceeded by the buildup of pyruvate. And so now we're having this giant backlog and this thing fills up fast. We have a couple of strategies here. Well, when you're going through ATP and you're splitting, it's called ATP hydrolysis. In of doing that, remember ATP is a adenosine molecule and then the T part is triphosphate, one, two, three, which means you have three phosphates, attached to the end. When you break that phosphate off, that's where you get your energy. And so now you have an inorganic phosphate and an ADP, adenosine diphosphate, two. That process requires water. It's called hydrolysis. As a result of that, you then have a free floating hydrogen. And as you well know, that is acid, right? That's potential hydrogen. That's what that means. And so you've increased the acidity in the muscle by breaking up all this ATP. And so, uh-oh, we're building up acid. We are building up pyruvate. We don't have nowhere to go with it. And we can't cleave off a carbon because now we're just going to exacerbate the acid increase. So what we can do is we can take those hydrogens that we're building up and store them on the pyruvate. A pyruvate that's holding an extra acid has a special name and we call that lactate. All right? So that's why we see this buildup of lactate. So one of the downsides of anaerobic glycolysis is, uh, an incredibly high rate of waste production. Now, lactate is not the cause of fatigue. In fact, if you think a little bit more carefully about what I just said, it's actually stopping you. It's what we call a acid buffer. You can actually use it for a bunch of other things. You can ship it to a neighboring muscle fiber in the same muscle that's not working. You can ship it to the liver. You can ship it to the heart and a bunch of other places. And then you can actually just work backwards. So if you ship it to, for example, the heart and it's got a bunch of mitochondria there, you can bring in the oxygen, attach it to that hydrogen, make water, and now you're right back to pyruvate. You put two pyruvate back together and now you just make glucose. So you can actually store it in the liver. This is a process called gluconeogenesis through this fancy thing called the Cori cycle, which is what the proper cycle here is. So you can use it as a very potent fuel source. In fact, lactate is a tremendously valuable fuel source, not only for exercise, but for cognition and a bunch of other things. So lactate, in fact, this is why if you've seen any of the research about pre-exam testing exercise, you'll see a noticeable increase in exam scores if you do a 20 minute amount of exercise prior to taking the exam. And it's largely, in part, probably because of things like elevations and lactate.
Speaker 1- How intense of exercise would be most beneficial?
Speaker 2- I don't know that exact answer. I just know that generally any form of exercise is good, but if you were to reach a reasonably high heart rate, you're probably gonna see, in fact, there's an acute and chronic adaptation here. So folks that exercise have better memory retention, score in some exams, et cetera, but then also doing it prior to that exam, make sure you recovered and rested back down to straight, but you'll generally perform better.
Speaker 1- Previous guest on the Huberman Lab podcast, who's a psychology professor and neuroscientist, and also Dean of College of Arts and Sciences at New York University, NYU, Wendy Suzuki, is religious about daily morning exercise, specifically for this purpose of enhancing learning and memory, and has a lot of really beautiful data. I consider her one of the real pioneers in this space. So if people want to learn more, they can look to that episode or Wendy's work. We can provide a link to a couple of the papers, but this is fantastic in that it's incredibly clear. I think for the first time, I'm understanding what lactate is really doing, and it's dispelling a lot of myths that I think I and a lot of other people, arrive to the discussion about lactate with. What happens when the bout of exercise extends longer?
Speaker 2- Amazing. So if we want to continue past that point, we have to have some sort of strategy to get through it. We're stuck, we're out of gas. We have to then ship it to the mitochondria. And now we're going to enter what's called aerobic glycolysis. And this is going to take us anywhere from, again, say that 90 seconds of all that work, up to really 20, 30 seconds. In fact, it really will take us to unlimited. If you look at a highly competitive marathon runner, even those that are running, say your two hour marathon, those folks are burning up to 80% carbohydrate. It is not a fat burning thing. And the reason is fat metabolism is way too slow. It provides a lot of energy, but it is incredibly slow. If you're trying to run a four and a half or so minute mile, repeated 26 times, you have to be moving fast.
Speaker 1- Are they ingesting carbohydrates? - Yeah. - Okay. - Are they going to dehydrate as a fuel source during the race?
Speaker 2- Unless you're on the team, you don't know. They won't really tell you. These are sort of trade secrets. It would be, I would say fairly rare to not have something. Right? And there's a bunch of different strategies. If you're going to go really long, like some of these, like cycling where the races will be several hours, then you actually might go to some fat as fuel sources. I know a lot of cyclists are using ketones and things like that now, but traditionally, most endurance folks are going to bias heavily towards carbohydrate. Now, in one respect, you're not going to run out of carbohydrates until you're many hours in. These folks are a unique case, but the average individual who's doing an hour, hour and a half cardio even, you're not going to be limited by your carbohydrate stores. You're going to be just fine. You're going to be limited by some other things, which we'll maybe sort of break down here in a second, but you're going to be fine there. A lot of those folks will take, they're going to take a little bit of a break, they're going to take a little bit of a break, and they're going to take a little bit of a break. They're going to take a little bit of a break, they're going to take a little bit of a break, and they're going to take a little bit of a break. And they're going to take a little bit of a break, and they're going to take a little bit of a break. And they're going to take a little bit of a break, and they're going to take a little bit of a break, and they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break,
Speaker 1and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break,
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Speaker 2and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break, and then they're going to take a little bit of a break,
Speaker 1So in thinking about aerobic exercise or long duration exercise, in this case, anything longer than five minutes for that matter, five minutes all the way up to an ultramarathon, the breathing associated with endurance exercise, the heart beating, which of course is associated with the breathing and vice versa. It's really all about bringing oxygen into the system that then allows those carbons to be used and within the mitochondria specifically, and then carbon dioxide to be exhaled as we work through the carbons of the sort of beads on a string. Is that right?
Speaker 2Unless you're moving incredibly fast for a very long time, and we're talking probably north of 90 minutes. Endurance is really not a game of making sure I have... It is simply managing the waste production, and that's exactly what you described. You need to bring in the oxygen so you can handle the carbon that's building up as a result of both the anaerobic, anaerobic glycolysis. That's our game here. If we start talking about endurance events longer than that, now we do have to start worrying about running out of muscle glycogen, running out of liver glycogen, etc. Or if we are at that two-hour mark or so and we're moving very, very, very fast. But anything south of that is just... It's just managing carbon buildup, and we do that best through oxygen utilization or getting more efficient and having a higher capacity for our anaerobic side. So we can do that by having either more glycogen in our muscle so that lasts longer or building better acid buffering systems. And there's a whole line of supplementation that are specifically acid buffers. There's a whole line of training. There's a whole line of breathing to manage just that. So there's a lot of strategies where we can maximize endurance. All we have to do is go back to the earlier part of our talk, which is figure out what's the actual limiting step and then train according to that or do your strategy, your nutrition, your supplementation that defeats that limiting factor. For an example, if you are trying to maximize your performance in this 20-second maximal burst, and your strategy for that was to make sure your muscle glycogen is saturated. For an example, if you are trying to maximize your performance in this 20-second maximal burst, and your strategy for that was to make sure your muscle glycogen is saturated. It's probably not going to help a ton because you're not going to be limited by total fuel. You're going to be limited by your ability to buffer acid. However, storing more glycogen in your muscle in preparation for a marathon is a tremendously effective strategy because that will become a limiting factor. So what we can do actually next, if you'd like, is we can just walk through these and look at the individual limitations where the failure point happens, and then that effectively will outline your strategy for improving them.
Speaker 1So you taught us about carbohydrate utilization as a fuel source. What about fat, and what about protein?
Speaker 2Great. I'll start with protein because it's easy. It is generally at best going to represent 10% of your energy output. Now, that will grow over time in terms of if you did a several-hour amount of exercise. When you started doing it, you might be using 5% of your energy from protein, and then that might grow to 10 or so. And that happens because… Because you start running low on muscle glycogen. You start running low on liver glycogen. You start then having to pull in energy from another place. So, like, as those numbers go down, you'll see an increased uptick of energy from fat as well as protein. Having said that, it's not a tremendous fuel source. It is only aerobic, so it has to be oxidized. Those are the same thing. When I say oxidized, you use oxygen to burn something to make a fuel. So. It's not a significant contributor to energy in that regard, unless you're talking ultramarathons or longer, and it is also not something that can enhance performance. And so, we don't really need to talk much more about it than that. In terms of fat as a fuel source, now, here's the fundamental difference. While carbohydrate starts anaerobically and finishes aerobically in the mitochondria, you're using mostly the carbohydrate in the exercising muscle tissue. Eventually, you can pull from blood, and then you can pull from the liver. With fat, you have a tiny amount stored in the muscle, intramuscular triglycerides. But the overwhelming majority of fuel you get from fat comes systemically. And so, now we have a fundamental difference. We actually literally have a time problem. I can get energy from carbohydrates faster because it is directly there. If I go to pull it from fat, I've got to pull it from the rest of the body, which is why somebody who loses fat, loses it from their entire body, despite the fact that they may be only exercising a couple of parts. So, think about a runner, someone who lost a lot of fat running. You don't see them just lose fat in their legs. It comes from their face and their neck and everywhere. Why? Because what you're going to do is pull fat from the entire system. You're going to break it down through a process called lipolysis, which means you break it down from the stored form. You put it in the blood as that glycerol backbone, which is that three-carbon backbone. In the individual fatty acids, it's going to float through the blood. There's a seven-step system here, but we'll skip it for now. It's going to have to get then uptaken into the muscle. In the muscle, then it has to get taken up and run into the mitochondria. Now, that backbone, that three-carbon glycerol backbone, is actually going to function almost exactly like the three-carbon pyruvate. Just get it into the mitochondria, cleave off one carbon, run it as acetyl-CoA, bada-bing, bada-boom. Exact same thing. Super easy to metabolize, small enough to go through the mitochondria membrane. The fatty acid chains become a problem. So if you have a chain that's longer than our eight or so carbons, it has to actually go through a special transporter on the cell wall to get in, and that's going to be limited by a thing called carnitine. And you're probably familiar with that as a supplement. You may have talked about it. There's a lot of places that make it. That's going to be a limiting factor. If it is a smaller, what we call a short chain, or even a medium chain, triglyceride, which a lot of folks have heard of, MCT, that's what we're talking about, that can actually go directly through because it's small enough to pass through, and you can use it immediately as an energy source. In either case, the way that you finally metabolize a fatty acid is a process where you would go through and cut off two carbons at a time. Why would you cut off two? Because you're trying to make that two-carbon acetyl-CoA so you can run through that Krebs cycle again. Because you're cutting off two carbons at a time, we have a special name for that. Acidation process. It's called beta-oxidation. That's exactly why we call it beta-oxidation. Two carbons in, you cut it off to make that acetyl-CoA. So you can notice the oxidation pathway, the electron transport pathway, is identical, whether you're talking about the carbohydrates or the fat. In fact, it doesn't even matter. More to our point, if we're talking about simply fat loss, it really just is about running that electron transport chain. Whether it came from a carbohydrate, or a carbohydrate original source, or a fat original source, it ends up in the mitochondria as basically the exact same thing. It then ends the endometabolism as the same thing. Remember, the final endpoint of carbohydrate metabolism is water, ATP, and CO2. Do you want to guess the final endpoint of fat metabolism? It's water, ATP, and CO2. So, practical application. There are a lot of applications here. If you want to maximize fat loss, what type of training is best? It really doesn't matter. If you enjoy longer steady-state stuff, fantastic. If you enjoy intervals, amazing. If you would like to do a combination, that's my personal preference, that's great too. You have a ton of options. Pick what you think is a combination of challenging. Not all exercise should be easy, but you will actually enjoy somewhat, or you're willing to accept. And anything that you absolutely hate, don't do it. Sometimes it's very, very, very difficult to do high-intensity training. You have to really be interested in doing it. If not, it ends up turning into like moderate-intensity training. You sort of just check the box. And it doesn't work that well if you're just checking the box. So, if you're like, "Man, mentally, I don't have it in me today to get to a high heart rate and throw up and all that stuff." Cool. But you can just do some moderate steady-state stuff, well, that's a win. Great. If you're like, "Oh my gosh. More than 10 straight minutes and I'm so bored." And maybe you're also like, "I don't have 45 minutes. I got to get this done in 8 minutes." Great. Go do some high-intensity intervals. Either option will be equally effective.
Speaker 1As you mentioned earlier, exercise is useful for aesthetic changes, functionality, and for longevity. But when thinking about exercise specifically for fat loss, I do have to ask this question. I often hear from people, like, "You know what? There's a lot of people that they prefer one type of exercise versus another for sake of fat loss because certain forms of exercise make them very hungry." I'm wondering whether or not there's any relationship between the intensity or type of exercise and the hunger stimulus. Now, I don't have this problem because basically everything makes me hungry. And yet, I'm also okay fasting for part of the day. I'm one of those pseudo-intermittent fasters. Talk about what I mean by that, I just happen to eat between 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. naturally. I'm not religious about it, but I don't do it for any other reason except that that tends to be when I'm hungry and exercise outside of that in the morning, typically, in any case. is there a way that people can determine what type of exercise might be better or worse for them based on its appetite stimulating or inhibiting effects because i also hear that you know some people will go for a long run and then they are quote-unquote not hungry for several hours afterwards does that have anything to do with which fuels are being utilized during different
Speaker 2forms of exercise that's actually a really good question i don't know the the mechanisms that could explain that answer what i can tell you is you hear the same comment for physical activity in other words people say man if i do this type of training then i just am exhausted and i lay around the rest of the day so my total caloric expenditure is actually compromised as an aggregate because i'm down um the data would suggest in general that doesn't happen so most of the time we don't see a reduction in physical activity with either high intensity or steady state training in fact you generally see equal if not increased well what's called need so it's the non-exercising part of your day um in addition to the basal metabolic rate so physical activity wise you don't seem to be probably now hunger is a little bit of a different thing the answer here is i don't think we have time to actually do justice on this so
Speaker 1perhaps best to to not get into this one yeah why don't we punt this down the road to our discussion about nutrition specifically and and weave back to it so we'll earmark it for that um meanwhile it sounds like if one is thinking purely in terms of uh burning calories yep and getting the health benefits of exercise to create a caloric deficit to create fat loss it doesn't matter whether or not they burn those calories using a form of exercise that relies predominantly on carbohydrate fat or protein correct it's not that it doesn't
Speaker 2matter it's that either one will work because when we say things like that it's it doesn't mean they're actually identical there are some slight differences and maybe those differences are important for some people and not others i don't think it's a good idea to say that there are some
Speaker 1i don't say it's either one is a viable strategy great what about protein as a fuel as an actual
Speaker 2fuel so here let me give you an analogy imagine that you are you were with me a few weeks ago in southern montana and we were out um in the wilderness for a week okay and it's cold out there and you needed to make a fire uh and if i said look you can pick any of these things there are some there's some wood over there we brought some newspaper and then we brought a match and we can heat up okay i said great the very first place you would probably start to make that fire is the match you like the match and any match hey it's going to light immediately but it's probably going to last 5 to 20 seconds i don't know before it burns out that's fossil creatine real fast real burns out if you were smart you would take that match and then light the newspaper on fire right now if you were to burn a whole newspaper uh it is more energy then you get to the match but you still you know i don't know what's going to take a few minutes some number of minutes before an entire newspaper burns up at five i don't know right depends on them yeah which type of newspaper it is i guess right amazing that's carbohydrate right if you were really smart you would use that to then light a piece of wood on fire and a wood if you've been in the wilderness it could last hours days it's really quite unlimited your phosphocreatine storage is very limited small glycogen is a lot higher because you can store it in muscle you can store it in other places so you have more but not a lot fat is unlimited the average person if you're around say 70 kilos up 170 pounds or so and you're moderately lean maybe 15 body fat nothing crazy you probably have enough stored fat to create enough energy to survive for more than 30 days right this would literally be if you ingested zero calories you have enough fuel in your stored fat to keep you alive for certainly 30 days you wouldn't feel good and all those things but energetically basically fat will never ever be your limiting factor to performance so when we start talking about well what limits my performance in these areas you can just wipe fat off the list it will never be your limiting factor to any type of endurance performance you simply have way too much the only problem with fat is it's just too slow i've got to mobilize it i've got to get in the blood move it that whole thing too slow so if i want to go faster i will never be able to fully utilize fat which is why we talked about earlier you'll never see a situation in which somebody is a hundred percent burning fat as a fuel and no percent carbohydrate it's always going to be too slow highest you'll get maybe 70 so percent protein in this equation is none of that now you may notice
Speaker 1how do you make paper what's fibrous you combine it with water that you it gets pressed it gets
Speaker 2compressed yeah yeah it's made from wood how do you make a match it's made from wood what's carbohydrate a chain of carbon what's fat a chain of carbon these are similar molecules right they're meant to give you pros and cons it's very difficult to just light a log on fire without a lot of work you have to burn burn burn burn burn so these are complementary systems that are really close to the same thing protein is none of those things protein is more like a piece of metal so if you were out in the woods with me and we were trying to make a fire and you're like hey look i found some old uh railroad over there let's throw that on there i would probably look at you like you're crazy now technically can you melt metal sure but you're gonna burn a lot of energy to try to get a little bit back out of the metal and now you've also cost yourself a very very valuable structure so protein is a fuel source for exercise or metabolism it's a very valuable source for exercise or metabolism it's a very valuable source for exercise or metabolism again maybe five to ten percent but you now you're burning a very valuable supply in a situation in which you don't know where there's ever going to be anymore remember protein is fairly transient it's and you're not very good at storing it you can store a ton of carbohydrate and an unlimited literally amount of fat so you just really need to disregard thinking about protein as a fuel source your body does not want to do it you're not good at it you can go through a process of gluconeogenesis from protein make glucose from it is just very poor you're not going to get much out of the exchange and you've burned your supply of metal which is going to be very difficult um it's a very high commodity in the woods or the wilderness to have something like metal for people that consume very low carbohydrate
Speaker 1or zero carbohydrate diets are they pulling more energy from muscle so which i imagine is a conversion of amino acids into ready carbon chains yeah i mean in this particular case once you've
Speaker 2reached um a certain level of adaptation you've just gotten extremely good at generating glucose from other fashions right so you can bias heavily towards fat adaptation the downside is and we've seen this born in the literature you're going to perform slower so if you don't care about maximizing performance especially over something where it is a maximal effort for a few minutes or something then maybe you're not concerned and that's absolutely great especially for people just don't exercise then hey geez very little concern here you're not going to be able to do anything but if you're interested in your performance and you're wondering why you're just like slugging it down well what you've done is you've down regulated the ability literally the enzymes responsible for that entire anaerobic glycolysis portion they get down regulated which means there's not as much around anymore and so you get really bad and slow at using carbohydrates as a fuel source so it's a very poor strategy for people in an anaerobic based sport or who like that type of activity and if you don't care no problem if you don't exercise at all then you really have no problem there which is actually why a high fat low carbohydrate nutrition strategy for people who don't do much physical activity is probably like very well it's very effective it is a really good strategy for weight management for energy stabilization throughout the day and the research would very much support that
Speaker 1in my observation i would agree i've tried low carbohydrate diets of severely limiting or completely eliminating carbohydrate and after about two or three days i feel pretty lousy but especially because i want to train very intensely in the gym in addition to doing longer runs i tend to do all of those things across the week yeah but i've also observed and in fact know several people that love the very low carbohydrate aka keto ketogenic type diet they're not doing ketogenic diets for mental health reasons per se but indeed those people tend to do very limited exercise or they tend to do a lot of long endurance but low intensity long endurance these are the i walk to get my exercise types and they do indeed walk a lot and some of them manage to control their weight very readily and like that diet for that reason when we had lane norton on the podcast he pointed out quite aptly that in order to lose weight you have to restrict something either time or macronutrients etc to arrive at that sub caloric threshold get below the sub maintenance threshold i guess one of the things i want to point out is this should be used
Speaker 2as again not a this is better or worse this is just you now have a ton of options so whatever personal preference other factors you get to craft this strategy of performance aesthetics and health based on your personal preferences at this point i'd like to go back to our
Speaker 1classic list of nine adaptations that exercise can induce the first four of course being largely largely unrelated to today's conversation but that were covered in the episode that we did on strength speed and hypertension So, just to remind people, the nine adaptations are number one, skill and technique, two, speed, three, power, which is speed times force, four, strength, and five, hypertrophy. Today, we're talking about the remaining adaptations on that list, starting with muscular endurance, followed by anaerobic capacity, followed by maximal aerobic output, and finishing at number nine with long-duration exercise. So, if we could start with muscular endurance, this would be number six on the list of nine adaptations. Muscular endurance, how do I build muscular endurance, why should I build muscular endurance, and just to remind me what fuel sources are predominating when I'm training for muscular endurance. Great.
Speaker 2So, remember, muscular endurance is something that's going to be generally. In a local muscle, it is not a cardiovascular or systemic issue, and it tends to be something in the neighborhood of, say, five to maybe even up to 50 repetitions. So, this is the classic example we'll give here is how many push-ups can you do in a row. Most people are going to land somewhere in that range, I just said. How many sit-ups can you do in a minute? How many pull-ups? How long can you hang on a bar as a dead hang? Things like that. That's muscular endurance. Muscular endurance is not a mile run or a marathon or anything like that. So. So, how long can I stand without breaking posture? This is muscular endurance.
Speaker 1A plank, a wall sit.
Speaker 2Great, yes. Love all these things, okay? Now, the reason I took you on that big, long metabolism journey is so I could help you understand exactly how to train this factor or any of these factors with a more comprehensive understanding of what's happening. Meaning, thinking back to the metabolism, if I'm going to ask my triceps to do 50 push-ups. In a row. What's going to be my limiting factor? Am I going to run out of fat? No chance. Am I going to run out of glycogen? No chance. That's way too few of repetitions. You have a lot left there. So, what's going to be the thing that stops me from getting 51 repetitions? Either you're going to have too high of a pH rise, so too much acid buildup, or you're going to have a problem clearing the waste. So, really, this is two factors. Dealing with acid buildup and getting acid out of the muscle tissue and into circulation. Because you have plenty of ability to handle that small amount of acid buildup in your entire body. It's just you can't handle it in that tiny spot. Now, I picked the tricep for a very specific reason. You're going to deal with more pain when you use a large muscle group like your quads or your glutes than you are with a small muscle group. For example, nobody ever threw up after arm wrestling. Arm day. But a lot of people throw up after leg day. Why is that? Look at the total amount of waste that you're dumping into your system when you have quadrupled or 10x the muscle size. Small muscle groups are only really going to be challenged in that local area. Large ones will dump so much waste into the system that you'll want to avoid that as quickly as possible. And that's one of the reasons why you throw up after hard exercise.
Speaker 1Great. I'm laughing because I don't think... I'm laughing because I don't think... I don't think I've ever thrown up from a weight training session. And so it's making me wonder if I've ever trained that hard. I've received or obtained the progress that I've wanted to generally over time. Not every week, every workout, every month. But certainly over the 30 plus years that I've been weight training, I've achieved the results I've wanted. I have, however, vomited after a long run when I didn't hydrate well.
Speaker 2Or if I drank too much water. Sure. Oh, sure. Too much water. Yeah. You'll... You'll get that out quick.
Speaker 1Right. I just want to be clear because I think some people are getting the picture that if they're not vomiting after their leg workout, that they're not training according to your standards. Again, by the way, Dr. Andy Galvin runs experiments in his lab. He's recruiting subjects all the time.
Speaker 2Also known as my graduate students.
Speaker 1That's right. In any event, sorry to interrupt, but I felt it was a necessary interruption. So muscular endurance, there's plenty of fuel.
Speaker 2Plenty of fuel. You manage acid buildup. And you also need to get that fuel out of you. That's going to be a capillarization issue. So the way that we can think about this is capillaries surround your muscle. And the whole point of them is so that blood can come into them. They hit this capillarization. That actually slows the diffusion rate of blood down. And so you can exchange nutrients in and get waste products out. And then we get things back into circulation. So the more of those you have, the better you are at dispersing any of these waste products buildup, whether it's CO2. Or the acid. So the adaptation you're looking for here is an increase in capillarization. Potentially a slight increase in mitochondria. But the time is too fast. Right? So we're going to be able to need to do these 50 repetitions in, say, under a minute or something like that. So getting the mobilization into the mitochondria, getting fuel that way, too slow. It's not really going to get our performance here. So what are strategies to increase acid buffering ability and then capillarization? So on the capillarization side, you simply... You simply need to train at that ability. So you go close to failure and practice that often. That alone will increase blood flow to that local area, which will take you through your process of increasing capillarization. Easy peasy. Specificity.
Speaker 1Just to briefly interrupt, I find it remarkable, although not surprising, given how amazing the human body is, that simply by doing some movement repeat, like a wall sit or a uh... Or pushups or dips for that matter, repeatedly over and over and over until you reach that failure point or that quaking point in the case of a wall sit, that provides a stimulus for more capillaries to be built into the system. Literally, the production or the trafficking of endothelial cells, which make up the capillaries and allow basically more little pipes to feed the system with oxygen and remove waste products.
Speaker 2It's like irrigation, right? Imagine you had a jump. You had a giant field and you had two big pipes running down the outside. Well, in fact, if you want to make sure water gets evenly dispersed across the entire field, you'll have a bunch of offshooting little pipes. And the more of those you have, the more coverage you get.
Speaker 1Do we know what the specific signal is that says, hey, I failed at this. We need more capillaries.
Speaker 2I actually don't know what that is. I would speculate it's a combination of acidity as well as carbon dioxide and probably some nitric oxide. But I actually don't know.
Speaker 1I'm guessing nobody knows for sure because we still don't know, for instance, what the exact signal is for hypertrophy. It's kind of an amazing situation. We know the requirements for getting the result we want. Yeah. But we still don't know what the specific signal is. In any event, what I'm hearing is building more capillaries is great for enhancing muscular endurance. And the way to get more capillaries into those muscles is to train for muscular endurance by getting close to failure or to failure. To some point where you simply can't continue for whatever reason. Could you give us an example of what a reasonable training protocol might be in terms of the classic galpin list now? Yeah. Exercise choice, maybe a few options, order, volume, and frequency. Great. What should we be doing? How often should we be doing it? And, you know, for instance, should I do wall sits to failure, then push-ups to failure? Given that this is a local process, I'm guessing that if I do push-ups to failure, then I'm going to be doing push-ups to failure. I'm not going to increase the number of capillaries in my legs very much.
Speaker 2So, you nailed it. Exercise choice is high precision here. So, pick the muscle group and the exact sequencing and movement pattern you want. High precision. This is the thing. If you want to get better at a plank, hold a plank. If you want to do more push-ups, do more push-ups. You can do some other stuff that's complementary. But really, this is a high precision game. Do the exact same thing for exercise choice. Very simple there.
Speaker 1Okay. In terms of exercise... Exercise order. I suppose this dovetails with volume. Yeah. Can I combine training, let's say wall sits for my quads and, you know, nearby muscle groups, and then do push-ups to failure, and then also do some sort of pulling exercise to failure?
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely. Again, pick the exercises you want, the movement patterns you want to do, and do them. The order almost doesn't matter with the one caveat. With larger muscle groups, particularly, again, multiple leg activities, that will induce... That's a small amount of systemic fatigue. And so if you, I guess, theoretically wanted to maximize your push-up number, and you did a whole bunch of, say, split squats, and you just did those and you, you know, did lunges for a mile or something like that, you might actually slightly compromise. You might not, but you might slightly compromise your ability to do as many pull-ups in a row or hold a bent over row or something like that. So if you really cared about that level, then you maybe want to do the one thing that's most important first. In general, my recommendation... My recommendation, though, is to do the bigger muscle group first.
Speaker 1How many sets and how often should one perform training for muscular endurance and when?
Speaker 2Now, the lovely part here is we've moved down the spectrum past hypertrophy. You don't need a lot of load here. In fact, the load only needs to be at or slightly above what you want to move. So if you want to get better at moving 50% of your one rep max, you don't really need to train much more than 50%. maybe 55 or 60% of your one-arm max because if you go higher than that, the repetition count is going to fall and you're no longer going to be training muscular endurance. So you just need to stay right around that number that you want to work on. So again, if the target is doing more pull-ups and assuming that you have the strength to do it, you check that box. You simply need to practice the repetition range that you want to be in. That's all it takes. You can repeat that a number of times, but because remember, the volume is fairly low. The load is very, very low. You can actually repeat these quite frequently. So you won't get extremely sore from muscular endurance relative to traditional hypertrophy training because the load is very, very light. So you can do these more frequently if you would like.
Speaker 1More frequently such as?
Speaker 2You could do it three or four times a week, easy. If you would like. You don't necessarily need to. Three days a week per muscle group is probably fine here. If you wanted to do more sets on a given day, you could do it three or four times a week. If you wanted to do more sets on a given day, and do less days, that would be fine. So if you wanted to do two days a week, and you say you wanted to do, let's say you could do 25 push-ups, and the goal is to get to 30 push-ups, just as an example. You might say, okay, I'm going to do sets of 17, and I'm going to do three sets of that. I'm going to do that three days a week. That's going to build up quite a bit. Or you could say, look, I'm going to do a set basically to failure. I'm going to recover and do one or two sets at, say, 80%. And I'll do that twice a week. That's going to push the pace pretty well. You're going to have a lot of gains from that.
Speaker 1And again, this is not about hypertrophy. This is about muscular endurance. Correct. So I do want to emphasize, and again, please correct me if I'm talking out of line here. I do want to emphasize that because we mentioned pull-ups, if you can't get 25 pull-ups, then, and you're doing 10, you're training for hypertrophy. You're not training for muscular endurance per se.
Speaker 2There's a big crossover here. So anytime we're talking past like 15 reps, we're technically in hypertrophy and muscular endurance. Got it. So here's the common mistake. I don't want to get bulky. So I'm going to go lighter and do more reps.
Speaker 1And then people grow.
Speaker 2And then you landed still right in the middle of hypertrophy range. Right. So like for people who are like, oh my gosh, like every time I lift weights, I blow up, I go lighter, I do more reps. And you're still right in the hypertrophy zone.
Speaker 1They'd actually be much better off training very, very heavy in the one to three rep range. They'd get really strong and they wouldn't grow much.
Speaker 2Exactly.
Speaker 1So tell me if this is a reasonable protocol for what I'm going to call the typical person. In my mind, the typical person is somebody who hopefully is doing resistance training, hitting that 10 sets per muscle group per week minimum to maintain or build strength and hypertrophy, but is also doing some long duration training that we'll talk about in a little bit. Maybe throwing in, uh, high intensity workout here or there, some sprints, maybe some plyometrics, some skill-based training and doing a bunch of different things to be all what I would call all around fit. Yeah. They're not training for any specific event or trying to maximize any one of the nine adaptations to the exclusion of the others. That person decide, okay, after, um, they do their longer run, they're going to do a max time, a plank to max duration. They're going to do a wall set to max duration and they're gonna do pushups to max duration. And then also do that same workout before they do their high intensity interval training, some other point during the week, and then maybe even do it, uh, again, um, on their, uh, so-called rest day, just a real quick five minutes. And in doing so build more capillaries into the relevant muscle groups and build their muscular endurance without eating into their overall recovery too much.
Speaker 2Too much. Yeah. So again, the nice part about, this is they don't hammer you too much. You're not going to get tremendously sore. If you keep the load light, the only switch I'd make there is I would probably do them after your interval rather than before. So you can make sure you keep quality there. Uh, and you're not compromised by a local muscular endurance when you're actually trying to get a more systemic fatigue with something like a higher intensity interval training. So that would work fantastic. The only other variable we haven't hit on here is progression. And this is very simple. Try to add a rep or two per week. That's really all you have to go after. So if you're up to 22 this week, try to hit 23 next week for wall sits and planks. That would be added at time time. And if, and if you run into a wall there, just like the same concepts we talked about with strength and hypertrophy back it down to more like in the 80 or 85% range and accumulate a lot more practice, that's going to help a lot with capitalization as well as acid buffering. So you're going to continue to give yourself signals for upregulation, um, of the processes, what you needed for that. And it's not always pushing you to the end of failure. Just like we don't want to always go to failure with strength. We don't want to always go to failure with high intensity intervals either. Same thing would be happening here.
Speaker 1Speaker 1: What about anaerobic capacity? How should people train for anaerobic capacity? What exactly are they training for? Meaning what is the structural or seller adaptation or adaptations that are occurring that allow for increases in anaerobic capacity and why are increases in anaerobic capacity good for us? Speaker 2: Even if we're a quote unquote endurance athlete, or we are a recreational app exerciser who is not interested in building more muscle speed or things that I typically associate with anaerobic capacity.
Speaker 2Speaker 1: Yeah. So this is really, really fun. Remember anaerobic capacity is a total amount of work you can do for something like seconds to a few minutes. And this is extremely high levels of fatigue, the highest you're really going to see. And by fatigue here, I mean acid buildup. My products, not fatigue as in like mentally, I don't want to do this anymore. So if we just think about the energetics for a second, I'm going to do say, let's take a really easy example of people have done that thing where you you'll go to the track and you sprint the straightaways and you walk the corners. Remember that sort of thing? Yeah. Tabata's 30 on 30 off, things like this. Speaker 1: Like this is what we're talking about in this kind of anaerobic capacity area. Now, Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: here's what's going to happen. Is fat going to be your limiting? No, we've already made that clear, right? What about carbohydrates? Well, if it's a single bout or two or three bouts, probably not. But if you're doing this for a long time, say you're going to go 30 on 30 off for 20 rounds, you may actually start reaching a point of running out of muscle glycogen. In any of those cases, though, you're going to be running into an acid problem. If you were to continue to do this, multiple repetitions, in addition to running low on muscle glycogen, you're also going to start running into oxygen transportation problems because you're building up a lot of byproducts. You've got to continue. You will actually cruise into aerobic glycolysis. This is exactly why the community that I have worked a lot with professional fighters, very high level boxers, world champions, UFC fighters. It is a five minute round that you're going to do five times for world championship fight. You get one minute break in between. So imagine going like 30 on 30 off for five minutes, getting a one minute break and doing that five times. 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Speaker 2Great. So zone five is that absolute top thing. And we can flag ourselves there. I liked how you flagged one and two. The distinction between three, four, and five, I'm less concerned with either. We will do some heart rate stuff, but not to identify what zone we're in. The fact is the distinction between those zones is basically just made up, right? Not that it's fake, but there's no like rationale there.
Speaker 1It's a little bit like perceived effort in weightlifting. You know, are you at 100% output or 70%? You know when you're at zero and you know when you're at 100 in that moment, but the difference between 60 and 70 is anybody's guess.
Speaker 2Totally. So we use, or the relevance, right? So why does it matter if I'm at 60 or 70? Is there actual difference? There's not, right? So it doesn't really matter in that regard. If you're a very highly trained, particularly cyclist, things like that, then, and you can control a lot of circumstances, those things start to make a lot more sense. But when you're in an open environment, like the athletes I deal with, it's just not going to, it's not going to matter that much. So the way that I approach this is, and I will use this word intentionally, stolen directly from Brian McKenzie and his company Shift Adapt. They use what's called a gear system. And I absolutely love it. It's what we've been using for a long time. So with Brian, with your permission, I'm going to take it right now. Thank you, Brian. You gave me the permission.
Speaker 1Thank you, Brian. Brian's a good friend of ours. And I do think the breathing gear system is a terrific way to think about the zones and to get a good sense of what zone one happens to be in.
Speaker 2Yeah, great. So the first gear is your ability to simply breathe in and out through your nose at a set cadence. So basically, regardless of how hard you're working, can you restrict your breathing to like a two to three second inhale, and then a two to three second exhale. And this is really clever, actually, because a lot of folks will jump immediately into an over breathing strategy, which means you'll be ventilating more than you need, which actually sends that RER up higher than it needs to be, which kicks you higher into carbohydrate utilization. If you're supposed to be in quote unquote, zone one, you're trying to be efficient, not fast. So using more carbohydrates than you need to be, you're trying to be efficient, not fast. So using more carbohydrates than you need is not beneficial here. You're walking for the day, you're out on a longer hike, you're enjoying the day, you shouldn't be trying to ramp up carbohydrate metabolism, it should be efficient.
Speaker 1And so this would be getting into an argument with somebody while on a long walk, you feel exhausted afterwards, you've been over breathing.
Speaker 2Yeah, totally. Right. So you should be able to breathe at a specific cadence. And generally, people are doing that more frequently than they need, right? Zone two, rather gear two, is inhaling and exhaling at whatever rate you needed to be, but still nasal only. So it is a forced, right? Whatever you need to do, but your mouth is closed the entire time. You shifted higher up, you're burning more and more carbohydrate as a fuel source, but you're still able to control that and restrict your nasal breathing. Now gear three and four, which is our final ones, there's no gear five. Gear three and four is like a subtle distinction. I actually don't even, care about the difference there. I basically use gear one, two, and then that's four. But you're basically talking about either a nose to mouth strategy or a straight up mouth-mouth, right?
Speaker 1So breathing in through the nose, out through the mouth.
Speaker 2If you can control it that way, you can do the opposite actually, right? Can you breathe in and out through your nose? But the classic one people will do is into the nose, out through the mouth. Again, I really don't even care about distinction. I basically jump from two to four. Brian may do it differently. I don't actually know. Four is just mouth-mouth, right? And this one is just mouth-mouth, right? And this one is just mouth-mouth, right? And this one is just mouth-mouth, because the nose is restricted, right? There's only so much space. And as we talked about earlier, the consequences of not having enough oxygen in or CO2 exhalation, if you're restricting that, this is going to be problematic. So in your actual competition, please go to the mouth if you need to, right? We practice a lot trying to stay nasal only for as long as possible. But that's going to eventually happen. When you're doing your high intensity intervals and you're really going as hard as you can, you're going to have a lot of trouble. So if you're doing your high intensity intervals and you're really going as hard as you can, you're going to have a lot of trouble. So if you're going to have to go to your mouth, unless you're an absolute freakazoid, and you can stay in your nose, but that's not going to happen, right? Most people can't get past, say, 70 or 80% while breathing through your nose. I know some people can get higher, but that's the general distinction. So we pay much more attention to those particular gears than we do heart rate zones.
Speaker 1And zone five would be just pure mouth breathing all out, running for your life.
Speaker 2The gear system is just one to four. There's no fifth gear. Got it. So the gear four would again be mouth-mouth. Breathing as much in as you can, breathing as much as you can out.
Speaker 1Got it. And I appreciate your description of the gear system and how it roughly relates to the zones we've been talking about. I also am reminded, if anyone wants to experience the relationship between breathing and the offloading of carbon dioxide and your ability to exert effort in anything, a game that a friend of mine sometimes likes to play when we walk or jog and talk is he'll say, let's just hold our breath now until we hit that piling or that lifeguard stand on the beach. And within seconds, you actually can start to panic. It also becomes very hard to coordinate your action after a little while. Again, be really careful with this, but, but it will teach you in a moment in a very real world way, how important it is to be able to offload carbon dioxide because you're probably not running out of oxygen at those lower intensities. You're simply building up carbon dioxide and that gas reflex is screaming to go off and you're actively suppressing it.
Speaker 2Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah. So the interesting test, here is your CO2 tolerance. On Brian's website, you can go directly there. You can, there's a video to how to run this test, and then you can put in your numbers and it'll tell you sort of exactly what to do as a result of it. But the CO2 tolerance test is a test of exactly what you just mentioned. So you should be fairly tolerant. In other words, non-reactive, you can be responsive, but non-reactive to elevations in CO2. So you should see them and feel them, but you should be choosing how you respond rather than an inert reaction. Dr. Justin Marchegiani There are interesting data looking at things like out of the blue panic attacks. You can actually notice those in blood via rises in CO2 up to 45 minutes prior to the event happening. So there are signals happening in your body that you may be sensitive or not sensitive to. The more in tune you can get with that, the better your life is going to be. And even if we're specifically just talking about exercise performance. So it's okay for CO2 to rise. It's going to rise. It's a byproduct. It's going to rise. It's a byproduct of anaerobic, anaerobic metabolism. It's a byproduct of carbohydrate and fat metabolism. As we've established, it's going to get there. You're going to feel that. However, if you immediately go into a panic because of a small increase in CO2, this is a
Speaker 1problem. So returning to anaerobic capacity this morning, we were training not together. I couldn't keep up with your workout, but I, but in the same general space and I did my once a week maximum heart one minute sprint on the assault bike. Sometimes I'll do more minutes, meaning I will do one minute then take some rest and do another minute after some rest. But I decided to do that one minute with you there so I could learn from you. And indeed I have to assume that that was largely within the anaerobic capacity realm. The first 30 seconds or so were manageable. We're getting more and more painful. There was a quit signal going off in my head. You said there's real magic that occurs around seconds. You said there's real magic that occurs around seconds. You said there's real magic that occurs around second 40 and indeed somewhere around second 40 for whatever reason, it seemed easier. But at the one minute mark, I was happy to stop because I was really at at least what felt to me 100% output. Is that a good protocol for building up anaerobic capacity? Keeping in mind what you said before, which is that specificity or precision as you've raised it is important. That is, if I want to train anaerobic capacity for sprinting, I probably should have been sprinting. Cycling, I was, I was on the assault bike and so on. How many of those one minute all out sprints or 30 second all out sprints on the, on the bike could and should one perform per workout and per week? So marching through exercise choice. Yep. Let's do it. Order, volume, frequency, and progression. Yep. Choice of exercises, train for what you want to improve. Is that right?
Speaker 2Not necessarily. So in this particular case, if you have a specific goal, yes, of course do it. Um, exercise choice, a couple of things you want to look for. You want to pick something that you feel extremely confident in the movement with because you're going to forget your brain very quickly here because you're going to go into our pain cave okay so if you're not comfortable running don't go run here you're never going to get to the spot we need to get to it if you're not comfortable or if every time you you go on a rower your low back hurts the next day don't do it if you're not comfortable using kettlebell swing is that you get the point don't do an exercise you're not comfortable with you also secondarily want to be careful cautious of heavy eccentric loads because you're going to be doing a lot of repetitions at a high intensity so this is where i love an assault bike this is why a rower is great swimming is amazing running uphill generally more favorable than running on normal ground especially if you're not runner don't run downhill that's a lot of eccentric load i don't love things like box jumps here right because again a lot of eccentric loading if suppose you can jump up line of the box step down but now you're you're again you're too many things are going in your mind i don't want to slip and fall i don't want to smash my shin on the box what happens if i'm too many variables pick something that is safer where you can really focus on your breathing and your posture and the performance all right so that's exercise choice and then within that if there's some specific thing you want to get better at go ahead do it okay how many different
Speaker 1movements meaning should i do the assault bike and then uh some form of safe executable uh overhead pressing um it's a little hard it's a little harder to imagine um anaerobic capacity for the upper body unless you have access to a skier or one of these um what are those things called the climber machines yeah the versa climber the versa climber that's the one the versa
Speaker 2climber um you can tell how often i do that one uh it's a great so great piece of exercise equipment
Speaker 1yeah so we're thinking how many how many how many exercises and in what order is it going to be two exercises since you're involving a lot of muscle groups typically that's a really distinction
Speaker 2generally these are going to be total body movements so you can do something like a skier if you want to really isolate your upper body great love that you can do lower body isolation like cycling right where everybody's not involved you can use weights here you can do some barbell movements and stuff like that they're just not my favorite choices for most people too many complexity things going on so uh i generally am going to pick total body movements if you're pushing a sled dragging a sled sprinting uphill swimming these things like that are going to be
Speaker 1good i'm seeing now why the assault bike is such a powerful tool because you're using your arms with some degree of resistance but not a lot of eccentric load plus legs some resistance not a lot of eccentric load and yet one can go quote unquote all out for 30 to 60 seconds yep and
Speaker 2the consequences of a technical breakdown are minimal it's more like you're going to actually have a worse performance rather than an injury rate so there's just a wonderful invention because of that where other things the consequences like say if you're going to be doing a barbell or kettlebell activity the consequences of making a technical mistake you might actually get an acute injury right there so they're just a little bit higher
Speaker 1in the risk scale how many sets or sometimes referred to as repeats yep so how many 30 to 60 second all-out sprints again doesn't have to be running sprinting but all-out effort would be the better way to phrase it should i perform let's say per week right and then decide whether or not we can divide those up across multiple workouts or whether or not it's better to do them in the same workout yeah
Speaker 2if you're staying with the same exercise for all of your workouts that's a little bit different answer than if you're if you're modifying them so say you're going to do this three times a week and you're going to do an air bike one day you're going to do some hill sprints another day and then
Speaker 1you can do some swimming another day for sake of example i'm going to say um same movement because i think most people are going to do the same movement and then you're going to do the same exercise so i think most people are going to be most comfortable with one or two types of movements unless they are really coordinated or an excellent athlete i think most people can probably find a hill that they could run up yeah and uh an airdyne or a salt bike a rower things of that sort yep
Speaker 2you're gonna have a pro and a con here so the pro of doing less sets is you can actually train much closer to truly 100 the downside is volumes low okay so a major mistake people make here is they'll do something like um i'll do 20 seconds on 10 seconds off and i'll do that for 40 rounds you're not really actually going that hard in those 20 seconds so a key in fact if you look at the literature and all the boss and all the positive benefits of high intensity interval training that assumes you are actually hitting very close to 100 if you're sliding down into like again moderate training stuff you start to actually be in a spot where you're not getting a lot of training and you're not getting a lot of training and you're getting the total high-end stuff but you're not doing it long enough to get the low-end stuff either and so you end up in this like you burn some calories you probably still enhanced mitochondrial biogenesis and a little bit of capitalization but you didn't really justify only doing three rounds that's where the problem comes in so in terms of a couple of protocols i'll give you how many sets per week it's it's really hard to give a number unlike the strength training stuff where it was easy to kind of land some stuff on um a typical set per week is a set per week so a typical thing you'll see is like a minimum bill tends to be something like four rounds per day three times per week
Speaker 1wow that's a lot so my once a week all-out effort of sprinting on the assault bike the so-called airdyne bike for 60 seconds one to three rounds of that might be doing something useful for me but i should probably be doing that two or three times a week if you're going to get to a max heart rate i
Speaker 2generally don't do that like to say give me a minimum of one day a week two is better days per week how many rounds whatever it takes you to get to that maximum heart rate right so in your case you did one minute okay good if you're going to extend past a minute or two one round might be enough so for example uh if you want to just do something where i'm going to run a mile as fast as i can that's all you need to do for the day you don't need to do multiple you can do mile repeats if you'd like but that is really really challenging i know we've extended the time duration here but i wanted to go there to show you the time domain matters here if you're doing something like a 20 second burst you're going to need more rounds if you're doing something longer like multiple minutes you don't need as many rounds to get there so um in addition if you're really reaching past this um 90 seconds of of hell window it's just going to do a lot more damage to the system not damaging than bad but as in there's a lot to recover here so we need more recovery time from that a 20 second burst doesn't really challenge you challenge you in that 20 seconds but you'll be recovered and fine a three minute thing is going to hurt and it's going to hurt for many many many minutes after that and you're going to still see maybe some performance decrements the next day depending on what your recovery stuff looks like so um a couple of things to pay play with would be something like this if you want to try like a
Speaker 1minimum of four rounds of that probably three days a week so 30 seconds all out 30 seconds rest is one round repeat that four times at least once a week at least two would be better great right if you
Speaker 2want to go something a lot longer than that you might be able to get away with one but generally two days a week of this is better if you start actually pushing past like three to four days a week up to five or six you may actually be causing some problems there's just a little bit of excess fatigue that's going to happen there that you maybe want to stay away from in fact you can see a lot of endocrinological problems and some other sleep issues and some other things kick in and we'll talk about more of those things later but that's the number to get with if you want to try something more like a 20 second burst i actually would recommend giving yourself more rest so you can actually do a higher rest than work ratio most people tend to think of this as doing like one to one 20 seconds on 20 seconds off or lower i love doing like 20 seconds on 40 seconds off the quality of that 20 seconds becomes extraordinarily high and it's also possible to now get like six to eight rounds so as i'm hearing this
Speaker 1i'm going to wager a uh an offer uh to you and if you say okay um then to to those listening based on what you're telling me about the relationship between intensity and quality and the need for sufficient duration of this anaerobic work yeah how is five to six minutes per week of all-out work that's pretty good so what that means for me is i would do three all-out one minute sprints on one workout separated by a minute or two maybe more and i would do that two or three times per week just trying to hit that five or six
Speaker 2minute per week threshold yep actually i think one of the uh things that i think is really important is that if you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day and you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day and you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day and you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day and you're going to do six to eight rounds of a day and some of his original research was comparing six total minutes of work to upwards of like 180 minutes of work throughout um the entire week and then one of the classic studies was looking at vo2 max improvements and he saw equal if not greater improvements of vo2 max with that so i think actually the name of his research is v2 max improvements and he saw equal if not greater improvements of vo2 max with that so i think actually the name of his research is v2 max with that so i think actually the name of his research is v2 max with that so i think this book might be like a six minute this book might be like a six minute this book might be like a six minute workout or something and so you'd like may workout or something and so you'd like may workout or something and so you'd like may have nailed that directly on the head have nailed that directly on the head
Speaker 1have nailed that directly on the head uh purely
Speaker 2by luck but actually by also maybe wrong that number so we should probably fact check that
Speaker 1yeah well and also by inference from what you were saying you know if you're going to do this 20 seconds on 40 seconds off and you're doing more rounds or one minute all out so the way i'm going to think about this if it's okay with you is for five to six minutes a week i am sprinting yeah for my life correct but i'm sprinting for my life with good form in whatever movement i happen to be doing and i can do all of that in one workout but i'm separating out bouts of 20 seconds all the way up to one minute yep by the necessary rest in order to recover my breathing get back to pure nasal breathing maybe zone one zone totally totally and then hit it
Speaker 2again if you're gonna do the one minute thing like you do i actually generally encourage one to three minutes of rest before you do the next round and probably up to four to six rounds that would be your six minute number there now the caveat there is we don't worry about heart rate recovery we worry about exactly what you mentioned which is nasal only recovery once you can get back to that give yourself another 30 seconds or so and then
Speaker 1you're ready to go for round two this is where it gets fun because i can imagine challenging myself to get on the assault bike for one minute of kind of warm-up very low intensity each morning and then sprint for a minute and then head off into my daily routine no okay that if you're going to do
Speaker 2that though you need to give me three minutes of nasal only breathing before you go back to work
Speaker 1we need to down regulate that and there are people in my life that would love for me to engage in more nasal breathing because it'll have me speaking less so no problem chances are i'm going to use the um two or three workouts per week of one minute all out maybe i'll try the shorter protocol can i
Speaker 2give you one fun protocol to try here please so if you have a you can use this on any equipment um but i learned this from another mutual friend kenny came this is a great little it's a little test a little a little game you can play with yourself and the only way to play this game is you're going to lose which is really really lovely so you can do this at any duration you can do this for any duration of time but two minutes is a good number okay so you have to do this in somewhere where you can know distance so this could be running cycling the the air bike is what i use the first two minutes you're going to cover as much distance as you can possibly cover in two minutes and you're going to note that so let's say you covered 400 meters right okay great you're going to rest for two minutes amazing that next round you're now going to go for distance so you're going to cover the exact same amount of distance you covered in round one which in this example was 400 meters and it doesn't matter how long it takes you it may take you two minutes and five seconds two minutes and ten seconds because you're a little bit fatigued around one round three you're going to now come back and do that exact same time domain that you did in round two so if it took you two minutes and five seconds in round two now round three is going to last two minutes and five seconds and you want to see if you can cover a greater distance 405 meters 410 meters than you did in round one and the beauty of this little protocol six minutes total of work right but if you slack in one of the rounds you just make the next round harder is there
Speaker 1any rest between rounds yeah two minutes always two minutes rest you don't have to but this would
Speaker 2be my recommendation kenny kane came up with this i don't know if he came up with it he taught me
Speaker 1well we both know kenny and he's an incredibly nice and incredibly skilled trainer um i'm going to call it the sugar cane yeah it's so great because it sounds really painful and if you go
Speaker 2out too hard in round one you're in such big trouble round two but if you go too easy in round one you're going to get absolutely obliterated in round three so it's like a wonderful thing and you can pick that number as a standardization and then just try to improve that a little bit per week so progression is the last part of this whole thing that we haven't got to yet before we move on um and the way you want to progress all of these things is you can time stamp again how much work you can do and then just try to do a slightly higher amount of work five percent or so every week or you can add a round which is a really nice way so um in the in the research um studies that have been done they're going to do things like week one you'll do three rounds week two you'll do four rounds three you'll go five rounds so you'll like add a round until you get up to say six or seven or eight rounds at the end of the protocol so that's a really nice way to go about it or you can cap the rounds and just try to get more work done in that same amount of time meaning going more intensely correct get you know get further distance in your 30 seconds or your 45 seconds or whatever um i want to encourage people to go as low as 20 seconds that's going to allow you to go very very very fast that's going to actually challenge that phosphocreatine piece a little bit i want to encourage people to also go as high as 90 seconds so the honest way the way that i will do it not that it's about me but just as an example of something you could do i do something in the 15 to 20 second burst range and i will generally hedge towards a two to one rest to work ratio so i'm probably going to rest 40 to 60 seconds that's to that's to make sure that 20 second burst is extremely high quality cool i'm also going to do something in the 30 to 50 second range okay i might go one to one work rest ratio the quality of those 30 seconds is going to come down but the acid buffering is going to be extraordinarily challenged i also will do that with a triple or quadruple rest range so again 30 seconds on maybe two minutes off now i won't be able to be i won't be working on my ability to handle the waste product build up there but i'll be working on my ability to produce more force over that time which is another skill set and then all the way up to say what you do a minute 70 seconds and you can go one to one there or up to three to one you're going to be working on a little bit of his different thing but that's exactly how we hit both sides of this equation working on dealing with waste as well as actually working on bringing in nutrients and getting that system a little bit more effective so you could set that up across your week and just it could be something like day one is that 20 second burst window day two is that maybe 60 second window and then day three is maybe one all-out effort and we're done there
Speaker 1let's talk about the specific protocols and adaptations related to maximum aerobic output or maximum aerobic capacity as it's sometimes called
Speaker 2sure now we're moving past like that couple of minute range into like the you know five to 15 minute range but at a maximum intensity so what's the highest you can go from there we're not talking about our last category of long duration here well the beautiful part is we've already explained a lot of it because it's very similar to what we just talked about with anaerobic capacity it is primarily going to be a problem of dealing with waste products especially at the end it's not enough total distance to be running out of muscle glycogen though it may start to creep down a little bit fat's not going to be an issue but certainly more oxygen transportation is going to be an issue. So we're just hedging a little bit more towards that side of the equation. Towards the end of that workout, no doubt about it, clearing out waste products is going to be a huge issue. But really, oxygen demand delivery is starting to take more of a prominent role because we have had more time to clear waste. And if we're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same. So a classic thing here is a one mile test, right? This is going to last for most people somewhere between five and 10 minutes. You're sort of right in this window. If you just want to practice that once a week, we're done here, right? Exercise choice, same thing we talked about, right? Pick an exercise you're comfortable with that you can actually do. And you can prepare for that. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need.
Speaker 1So the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same thing. And if you're not good at that, we're going to be failing earlier than we need. minutes. I'm going to go as fast as I safely can. And every week I'm going to measure how far I travel. Yep. Easy. In that 10 minutes. Love it. Probably not on the same day that I'm doing the anaerobic capacity work. Probably not. But probably okay to do after a strength training or hypertrophy workout as long as I didn't train legs. You could, um, it's probably going to
Speaker 2compromise recovery is the way. So I would, if you're going to do a session like this, I would probably do it on its own day. Unless you wanted to do something like speed or power, then you could roll right into this and have no problem. Maybe a strength day, a hypertrophy day. I'm not sure, um, you would do there because again, especially if you did any sort of lower body exercise. You're going to be compromised here, but remember these tend to be full body movements. So even if you did arms that day, your arms are going to be compromised and you don't want to fail this
Speaker 1because of local muscular failure. All right. So now I've got my work cut out for me. I'm going to be doing five to six minutes per week of all out work divided into 60, 20 to 60 second bouts with sufficient rest. And I'm going to give myself 10 minutes a week of, in my case, it'll probably be running as fast as I can. Cause I do enjoy running and I can do it safely. Um, maybe uphill and see how far I go.
Speaker 2Yep. If you want to combine the two. So if you're just saying, Hey, I'm bought in Andy, like I want to do both of these things. They are similar, but they have independent benefits. I'm convinced. How would I build these into the same week? Um, maybe do one of each that still gets you at quote unquote, two days per week where you're going to hit a high maximum heart rate. So we already checked that box off. So one day can be a shorter length interval, repeat one. And the other one can be a shorter length interval repeat one. And the other one can be a shorter length interval repeat one. And the other one can simply be a five to 15 minute maximum work and you're done.
Speaker 1Long duration, endurance exercise, the stereotypical endurance exercise. Sure. How far, how long, how fast or how slow should, uh, rather, uh, should I go? And here I'm going to venture that exercise choice is one that we could click off even at this point in the discussion, because obviously it's gotta be something that I can do for a long while without getting injured, uh, uh, overuse injuries. Um, there's a little bit of novelty we can
Speaker 2actually throw in here. So one of the things I love to do for long duration and endurance for people who don't love running, cycling, or swimming is you can do the really cool workout, any number of things where you can put a little circuit together. As long as there's not a lot of downtime between one circuit to the next time you can actually do is something, as simple as like, maybe you're going to do farmer's carries and you'll do that for say three minutes and you'll set those down and you'll, you'll go straight into a plank for a minute and you'll pick that up and you go straight into maybe body weight squats for two minutes. Then you go straight into another exercise and you, so you can sort of rotate things around. Um, maybe you can do even some like shadow boxing stuff or some jump rope. You can do different gymnastics movements and body weight movements, and you can run that thing through and you can basically get the exact same thing. So you can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do the exact same thing accomplished and not feel like you're doing, oh my gosh, this mind numbing type of training. If it feels like that to you. Um, another way you can do that to actually even simplify it even more. Um, we've done this at Kenny Kane's gym plenty of times where you just maybe even pick three machines. So you're going to go, I'm going to go 10 minutes on the rower and I'm going to go 10 minutes on the treadmill and I'm gonna go 10 minutes on the bike. You can actually knock a 30 minute quote unquote steady state session out in and not feel those problems if those things happen. So you can actually have a lot of fun there. We will do a lot of times with our fighters. We'll do things like put a very low load. I'm talking sub 50% of your max on a barbell and you're going to squat and you're going to do, you know, maybe a minute. You're going to put that down and then you're going to go over and do 50% of a bench press. You're going to put that down. You're going to go over and do 50% of a, of a crab walk. And then you're going to go over and do another one. And you can actually run through this entire thing. You don't hit that many reps in any individual, the movement, the load is very, very light and you can keep heart rate, basically a steady state and do 15 or 20 or 30 different exercises. And it's actually like fairly fun and engaging to do. And it's a little bit more specific than trying to get a 275 pound NFL player to run for 30 minutes, which is not going to be good. So I'm just chuckling because I love
Speaker 1to run outdoors and I've enjoyed runs on all my travels and I find it to be a great way to see different places. And I like moving through space, but there are weather conditions and times when that's not an option. So what you described as a terrific alternative, I have to assume that the specific adaptation that's occurring here is related to the fat burning system. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean fat loss overall, but fat burning system. And yet I do have a question, which is, can you build enhanced micro capillary systems into the station cardio?
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely. You can. In fact, depending on which paper you like more than the other papers, you may even find evidence that this is a superior method than anything else. So steady state endurance is very important. I used to not like it as much. There's just so much evidence now that suggests it's probably a really good thing for basically everybody. Maybe for some individuals, it's not in all year of their training. But if you're not a high level athlete or have a very specific goal that's right in front of you, it's probably best to do at least 20 minutes as a minimum, maybe 30 minutes of some steady state exercise once a week for basically any training goal outside of, again, a couple of really specific scenarios that are happening. The other thing that kind of kicks in here that we haven't really talked about is now we're actually reaching a position where fatigue still starts to play. So diaphragmic fatigue starts to run into an occasion. So we forget generally breathing is a contraction to open up the lungs to change pressure so the air will flow in. And then the exhalation is passive, right? It's just a muscle has been stretched. It goes back to just resting. When you get to a maximum heart rate, inhalation and exhalation become active. So you're squeezing as hard as you can to open up and you're squeezing to contract to blow air out. You're going to get fatigued, that system, right? Over time, you have contracted, contracted, open up. If that system starts to get fatigued, you start running into failure here. So you need to practice that. And this is when all kinds of things like breathing drills to just simply training in this fashion. There's all kinds of exercise devices for your lungs. And when we say that, that's what we're really talking about. The musculature around the lungs needs to not fatigue. So that's the only other little component I wanted to throw in here. If we're not talking about acid buffering, which in this particular case is not a problem anymore, the time domain is long and slower. So we have plenty of time to use fat as a fuel. We also have plenty of time to use anaerobic anaerobic like causes and clear out waste products. So we don't really see pH being a problem with this type of exercise. You may start running low on liver glycogen. If you're going a very long time, muscle glycogen may start getting low, but not really. These are huge issues. You're going to run into maybe a little bit of a stroke volume issue, but an intensity is not high enough to become a problem. You're more likely to break down posturally or breathing mechanics than really anything else. Unless again, that duration really gets generally past two hours for most people. So those are the things that are going to limit us. So how do we improve it? What do we train? We went through the exercise choices. You also need to make sure you're training your intercostals. We need to be training our diaphragm in some fashion. Again, it can be the exercise itself, can be your normal training. The thing you need to be careful of here, and this is actually true for all the things we just talked about. When we think about fatigue and we think about failure of endurance, we really need to pay attention to technical breakdown. That is always the marker we look for. So when we, when we go through our stuff with our athletes and they quote unquote fail or they finish, that's generally because we saw a massive technical breakdown. You're done. Like you're over there. It's not always the case during all your round of the training, but this is something to really pay attention to. So if you're on that bike and you're 40 seconds in, and all of a sudden posture starts wrenching over, I may stop the test. I may stop the training. It's like, no, what we decided failure was, is when you lost your technique to some sufficient level. Um, so you want to pay attention to that too, because that's going to determine your ability to perform well as well as maintain efficiency, which is a really big problem here.
Speaker 1Tell me if the protocol I'm about to describe would be a reasonable one for people to incorporate to 120 minutes of long duration work per week. So one way to accomplish that, that I often use is to head out for a weight vested hike. It's not a heavy weight vest. It's maybe, I think it's eight or 10 pounds. It's one of these thinner ones. And if people don't have access to that, you can bring a backpack with some items in it. I mean, it can be as simple as that. You don't even need external load. It can just be your body. Okay. Great. And, and do some hiking at a, at a fast enough clip that I'm breathing harder than I would be if I just kind of shuffled along. Yeah. I might stop here or there, drink some water, no big deal. But. I can carry on a conversation if I need to. So it's zone two-ish, but probably pushing a little bit harder than that for that duration. Not a lot of deep soreness occurring after this, maybe a little bit of achiness and some stabilization muscles that were used that may not be used too much, especially if I've been sitting a lot during the week, kind of reminds me of how much I've been sitting. But doing that all in one long afternoon, typically on a weekend, or doing two shorter sessions throughout the week, maybe 45 minutes and 45 minutes, and then working up the progression to longer duration. Seems like that would be something that most people should be able to do. And that it would weave in well with any resistance training or the anaerobic and aerobic output capacity work that we talked about just a moment ago.
Speaker 2Great, that's a fine version to do it. If you want to go shorter and bring up the insufficiency, the intensity a little bit, so you want to keep it more to the 30 to 60 minute range and go closer into the, I can't have a conversation right now, but again, I'm not at a blistering heart rate, then you could probably get that same thing done in a smaller time window if that was a consideration. So if you wanted to blend all three of these together, you have a lot of wiggle room, right? So you could do something like order. If we're talking about this type of training, you could do this first and then finish, you could do this with either one of the higher intensity stuff we talked about. So it could be roped into the same thing. It could be its own independent day. It could be your sort of active recovery day. It tends to be fairly restorative for as you alluded to a little bit there. So it's not that big a deal to do this on your quote unquote off day. If you're that type of person who like, even on your off day you have to do something physical, this is fine, right? If you wanted to do it on a lifting day, especially if it's a power or strength day, it's probably fine. If you wanted to do it before the workout or after it either way, you're probably okay. Probably best to do it after if the primary goal is one of the strength training adaptations. If it's not, if this is a primary goal, do it first. Amazing. If you wanted to do it in the combination with the other interval stuff, you could do it fine there. You could do it before or you could do it afterwards. I actually have no problem doing it afterwards because that in effect, especially if you say nasal only during this training will help the down regulation, you can go and so you can finish that fairly well down regulated actually. So it's kind of like a nice way to get thoroughly warmed up, go really, really hard and then give it a nice 20 to 30 minute slow back down. And by the time you finish, maybe even on a three minute walk.
Speaker 1- Nice, slow nasal breathing.
Speaker 2- Four second inhale, four second inhale, maybe five, you can play with the numbers a little bit. Then maybe you don't even need to do the down regulation breathing afterwards. You'll be in a good spot. Well, you wouldn't want to do this before, do your intervals, finish your intervals, throw up, lay on the ground, sweat all over the gym floor, get up and go back to work. That's probably not our best strategy.
Speaker 1- As people are hearing this all, they may be thinking, wow, this is a lot of work to do, but I've been keeping track of the math here. So I'm sure some of you out there are as well. And we're really talking about 10 minutes of the, of running or sprinting on the bike or rowing once a week. We're talking about six minutes or so of the much higher intensity, but short bouts divided into rounds of 20 to 20 seconds to a minute with rest in between. And then some longer duration workout of 30 minutes minimum, but maybe as much as an hour, even two hours, which in total doesn't really equate to that much time, especially if one can access these things right out their front door or at home. And as we pointed out, you don't need any specialized equipment to do that. Oh. - I forgot the muscular endurance. I wasn't trying to cheat there. There's some muscular endurance thrown in as well. So that brings me to a question, which is if I'm doing my training for muscular endurance each week for anaerobic capacity and for maximum aerobic output and long duration, and given that all of that is gonna take roughly two hours for the typical person total for the entire week, which I would argue is going to give you back so much life, literally. In terms of longevity, you're literally gonna earn back years of your life. - Productivity, you name it. - Offsetting all sorts of metabolic issues and enhancing your sleep and improving mood. I mean, there's so much data, so much data pointing to all those positive benefits. If I do all of these things and I'm fairly consistent about them, am I going to be metabolically flexible? Am I going to have a well-developed, fat burning, carbohydrate burning system? And will I be essentially fit? I mean, this is leaving aside issues of strength and hypertrophy, which were covered in the previous episode. Will I be fit? I mean, to my mind, the ability to sprint very fast if one needs to, the ability to go longer duration if one needs to, and the ability to do something in between as well as hold a box overhead if necessary while installing a shelf or something like that. These are the realities of life. And to me represent real functional world fitness. If that's the case, is there anything that we would want to add to this program? Or would you consider that a fairly comprehensive and complete endurance training system?
Speaker 2- If we remember the target, which is, I want to have energy. I want to look a certain way. And you want to be able to do that for the duration of your life, for a very long life. This style of training, where you incorporate all of those areas of endurance, gives you all of the necessary adaptations one would need to execute all of those things. Remember, fat loss or weight management is not best done with any individual style of protocol. So if you do a little bit of all three of these, you've checked that fat loss box. You don't need to go out and do anything separate for it. You've done all the things then to cover aesthetics from that side of the equation, right? You've done the things to both enhance mitochondria, to enhance blood flow, increase oxygenation, and manage fatigue and waste development. Boom, energy's there. Fatigue is there. I'm not going to get tired or have to quit or stop or sit down doing any of these activities I want. At the same time, if you look at the literature on mortality, one of the strongest predictors of how long you're going to live is your VO2 max. So we've set up a scenario in which you're going to hit all three of those primary goals by doing a combination of this training. You're not going to miss any plausible adaptation from endurance training, and you should be set for regardless of your goal.
Speaker 1- Incredible. And as I understand, totally compatible with strength and hypertrophy training, provided that your goal is to also be strong and also selectively hypertrophy or generally hypertrophy your muscles or maintain your muscles. For many people that are listening to this, I'm guessing that they have an interest in building more endurance, but not just the ability to go further, but the ability to go a given distance at a higher speed and to do it with better form and to breathe better and to feel better before, during, and after. For those folks, maybe you could spell out a program that combines these different elements of endurance and does so in a way that informs how, for instance, the higher intensity short duration sprints, would be expected to improve their longer duration work and how perhaps their longer duration work can progress if they are careful to include some planks and some wall sets and things of that sort. I asked this question specifically because I have to believe that while there probably are some folks out there, they're looking to just maximize their plank from week to week to week. Typically, it seems that people fall into these categories of either wanting to get stronger and get bigger muscles, gaining degrees, or to get better at endurance, or to get better at everything overall. Right now, I'd really like to just focus on what you think is a nice contour of a program for the person that wants to get better at endurance, but do it with more speed, more stability, and just feel like a strong endurance runner, cycler, swimmer, or whatever happens to be their endurance event.
Speaker 2- Okay, great. So let's just give an example. Maybe you want to run your first half marathon, something like that, okay? Maybe you've done it a couple of times before, but you just want to get better at that time. I would probably put somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70% of your mileage in the moderate intensity zone. Okay, so you need to accumulate mileage, and you need to be able to handle what we call the tissue tolerance. So in this case, your feet need to be able to handle 13 miles of pounding. It doesn't matter how much high heart rate training you do or your fat deliverability. None of that matters if your feet are blown up by mile eight. Okay, so in addition, we talked about how even training in that 70 to 85% heart rate zone is quite effective at oxygen delivery, fat utilization, capitalization, et cetera. So you're going to get a lot of direct endurance benefits from that work. You're also going to be working on what's honestly going to be one of your limiting factors, which is that tissue tolerance and that pounding, okay? In addition, you need to be efficient with your technique, and you need a lot of repetitions for motor skill development. So you want to spend most of your time there. It's easy to recover from, it's not extremely, demanding and challenging awesome that leaves you with another 30 or 40 percent of training i would spend 10 percent of that in that like 20 second burst area you're going to drive up fatigue extremely high and you're going to really maximize your ability to recover from waste production all right great i would spend the remaining amount of time either on a little bit of actually maximum speed stuff that could actually be in the 20 second burst if you're really trying to go as fast as you can at the beginning of that exercise and then the rest of it i would spend in that other zone which is more of like the 5 to 15 minutes but you're probably going to want to repeat those and this is when things like 800 meter run rest for double the time and then repeat that two or three times you actually need that in this scenario because you're going to need to be able to be running for two most people are going to do a half marathon and maybe around two hours or so something like that and so you want to literally a little bit of what we call repeated endurance right so be able to handle that higher heart rate come back down do it again at the same time that's actually how you bump your mileage up so instead of having this do more of these long duration distance runs you can still get maybe five or six miles done in a day if you're going to do a one mile repeat or whatever number you're looking at so for a lot of people that's kind of how i would structure it um that's honestly is very similar to what we laid out in the previous conversation which is getting this idea that more than 50 should be basically practice a little bit of work at the very top end of the spectrum but not too much and then a little bit of work at the other end and you should be in a good spot a major mistake one would make here is only doing the long duration steady state stuff and just sort of saying i'm gonna run five miles this week and then do six miles next week and seven i said that might work for you it's i think we have enough evidence at this point both in the scientific realm as well as most of the coaches i think in this space would agree with me is that's a suboptimal strategy so it could work but we can do better and in terms of
Speaker 1the structure of a program like this i realize that those structures vary tremendously different coaches and different books and different programs are going to say oh you should run monday through friday with weekends off or every other day but in terms of this 70 percent um 30 percent divide where 70 percent is going toward the specific event you know doing the kind of work that you're going to do during the specific event that you're most interested in cultivating or improving and the remaining 30 percent coming from other sorts of uh of supporting work how should one think about distributing that other 30 percent should it be all geared towards maximizing recovery for the 70 percent or in other words um could i do all that 30 percent
Speaker 2work on one day i probably would split it into two days um that's the reality of it is so if you're thinking man coach wants me to train six days a week my schedule is tight i can pull off four to five okay great what i might say is two of those days are just your your tempo right this is what like a runner would call it's like tempo training um kind of in that space remind us what tempo training is it would be this like 60 to 80 effort range where you're like running at probably the same stride length and rate that you're going to run your race at maybe a little bit lower but something similar you're practicing skill you're accruing mileage and you're getting a little you're getting work and for sure work but it's not absolutely the fastest you can sprint it's also not conversation so this would be the um what
Speaker 1before we refer to as the 10 minutes of of fast running or 10 minutes of fast rowing this is
Speaker 2lower intensity than that got it this is uh this is work accumulation got it this is practice stuff um then one of the days a week i would probably enter in that 20 second 30 second burst for a little bit of speed there and then one of the other days is when i would do that true high intensity as hard as i can for hitting a vo2 max something like that so that's probably how i'd break it up if i had like four days a week if you had five you can maybe add in another day where you do more of that volume accumulation practice work but that's that's a
Speaker 1pretty good split well this is the point in the episode where i say thank you ever so much you provided an enormous amount of incredibly interesting clear information that's also actionable i do feel as if i far better understand endurance in its many forms and even the seller underpinnings of that and even subseller underpinnings of what endurance adaptations are and how to foster those through specific protocols things that not only i can do tomorrow but that i will do tomorrow and where i hit my pain points i'll understand what's happening and the adaptation that i'm triggering when my legs are burning or i'm talking for air through my mouth or i can calmly move along just through nasal breathing i will now know what's happening in my body and the specific adaptations that i'm triggering i think you also highlight something that is vitally important and i've never heard it phrased as clearly as you did today which is that it really doesn't matter how one seeks out to achieve fat loss provided certain criteria are met even while certain forms of exercise tap into fat stores more than others it's not just a matter of how much fat you eat but it's also a matter of how much fat you eat it's not just a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's
Speaker 2a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat you eat it's a matter of how much fat actually all mine and uh i actually really appreciate the fact that you let me go so far into metabolism my phd is in human bioenergetics so anytime i can go many hours into metabolism i get very excited and i don't typically get that leash um in this format so i appreciate that i know you understand your audience will love that hopefully oh they'll they'll love it and i think
Speaker 1that they'll especially love it because they understand that if one can wrap their head around even just a small fraction of the mechanisms that underlie a given protocol it gives both tremendous depth and meaning to that protocol and makes it so much more flexible for people they can really think about what's happening as they're engaging in a given protocol and know exactly what they can expect in terms of results great we've been on a bit of a journey
Speaker 2here we've covered a lot of ground with speed development and strength and hypertrophy and now we walk through you know probably several hours here of of endurance what i would love to do next is to just give you a more straightforward not as much background not as much metabolism none of the mechanisms right into protocols for someone who says look i want to hit those marks you keep talking about i want to look good i want to feel good and i want to do that across my lifespan how would i build all these things into a protocol that actually covers maybe the entire year and how would i would be able to repeat that year after year so i almost have this evergreen sustainable year-long periodization structure that covers all the nodes i need to if i want everything we've talked about in these nine adaptations in this short series so i would love to do that in our next conversation if you're learning from and or enjoying this
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