GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Physical Endurance & Lose Fat

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, you're not physically fit ... It want to see everybody sub 60 beats per minute or close.

We talked about blood glucose levels... I generally want people to be at 85 or lower ... There's actually some papers that showed every single point increase above 85 increases your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes by about 6%.

Does training fasted enhance fat loss? ... It's not true. It's this great idea. It's one of these classic things in science and exercise physiology where it's like, sounds good. Turns out, it's not. It's actually a pretty gross misunderstanding of metabolism.

The average person, if you're around, say... 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 ... If you ingested zero calories, you have enough fuel in your stored fat to keep you alive for certainly 30 days.

If you want to get better at managing energy throughout the day, make sure that, number one, your protein is stabilized. Make sure, number two, you're ingesting your food in the right combinations, ideally with some fiber and/or some protein or both...

If you've seen any research about pre-exam testing exercise, you'll see a noticeable increase in exam scores if you do a 20-minute bout of exercise prior to taking an exam—and it's largely, in part, probably, because of things like elevations in lactate.

Zone 2... is inhaling and exhaling at whatever rate you need to be but still nasal only ... Whatever you need to do, but your mouth is closed the entire time.

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 we need to be moving well. Efficiency is going to trump force, always, for endurance.

It doesn't matter if you're burning '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.

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 fat. I'm sleeping—that's the highest percentage of your fuel that will be coming from fat of any activity you can ever do.

If you have to have caffeine to do your fasted training, that's generally another sign you're not very good at using fuel.

Unless 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 enough fuel; it is simply managing the waste production ... 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.