Welcome 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 dish 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 to trigger this adaptation that we call the endurance.
Tation, 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.
Sure. The way I want to start actually here is calling back to some of the things we talked about in our previous conversation.
Stations, which are really people who 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 what the way that we say 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 that whatever that matters for you and then you want to go 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 of resistance exercise side.
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 lead their lose fat or for long Health shake and just like we smashed that myth from the strength training site, 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 we're going to want to cover all those reasons.
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.
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. Fantastic, I can't wait before we die.
I've 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 to lend mechanism that can allow people to access better endurance when I think about training for endurance? Again? I think about trying to run longer and longer each week. Yeah. Or Swim further and further and so on, but I do wonder whether or not there are other forms of training.
Seeing that can amplify the endurance adaptation that I or most people, perhaps don't think of as endurance.
Sure, the way I want to answer this is if we look back and think about how we answer 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?
If that's the case in durin's really comes down to your ability to maintain proper mechanics, that's going to be like the biggest way we can and 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 mechanical thing, I'll 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. Is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing endurance training?
Earning 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. 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 a nasal breather. Don't need to nasal breathe. But just again, is that like a one tool? That is a for 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 the right position. So 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 air assault thing for somebody. I've seen
recently this morning, I was on the assault bike, doing a Sprint and I asked Andy doctor 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. Correct. I'm encouraged me to be more upright, which I should probably do now as well, and he also accused me to the fact that during a one-minute Sprint, there is something that is quote unquote magic that happens. Right. About the 40-second mark. Yeah. And I use that as a as a milestone to look for in indeed something does happen at the 42nd this into a one-minute Sprint where all of a sudden it does.
Seem to get much easier for reside owners, and maybe you can tell you that, but it certainly had nothing to do with my posture. My posture needs Improvement.
Yeah, well, yeah. So breathing mechanics and breeding strategies. People tend to be over breathing early on in this is going to lead to problems later. So having a more strategic breathing pattern and approach is again a very quick
solution. I know that we're going to die very deep into the mechanisms of Energy and Metabolism and
Durance 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.
The classic Paradigm we're going to find here 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
Options here. The quick answer is, you need to be doing both and there's probably a bunch of stuff in between. The 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 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 all, 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 a 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 that but 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 Laboratories in Canada that that champion this idea that's called exercise snacks. So there's a bunch of there's a series
Studies have been done here that are really interesting and that 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, put your coffee and your bag down, and 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, use or repeated 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, that was three times a week for six weeks. 18 total times you did that. And what you'll see is a noticeable Improvement in this is statistically significant improvements in cardiorespiratory, Fitness specifically vo2max, as well as a number of cognitive benefits work productivity, Etc, that can happen in as little as 20 seconds. You don't have to go to the gym, you don't have to shout
Our you don't have to do anything like that. Just find the stairs run up and down 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 and energy law. I ran up the stairs three or four times. I 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 in and they took insulin measures and a whole bunch of
Other biological markers Associated that you may want to pay attention to with the high glycemic index, meal, and they looked at those immediately an hour, three hours, six hours is 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. 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
The mitigation, their 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? Absolute, 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'd get up as hard as you can. You can do burpees, you could do any number of things you can.
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 going to fall hurt yourself, things like that just to remind me. It's
once every four hours, one minute of all as so, 20 seconds. Scuse me 20 seconds of essentially all out exertion. Yep. While remaining safe not going so fast up. The stairs are doing jumping jacks. Oh, it's not down the
stairs up. The stairs plates
escalators. Don't count. Well, I suppose they count if there are enough
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 other the conveyor. Yeah, while talking on the phone, while waiting for their flight to take off and it's genius right? It looks a little awkward who cares. Yeah, but it
was have looked awkward in every airport. I've been in for the last 15 years for these exact reasons doing wild stuff like that.
Well, nothing's more Awkward than not 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 a the other fit test. It's just a scary. Yeah, I'm in the airport. I love this so once every 4 hours 22nd so maybe once when arriving to work once for hours in and then four hours and most people probably at work somewhere, you know, 8 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 so
Works.
So it doesn't necessarily have to be every four hours isn't 3:30. Three times a day doesn't have to be 20 seconds. They literally built that protocol because it was through, they're trying to replicate a real life scenario. Maybe you're in an office building your generally there for eight hours. Let's see if you did one every sort of at the. So if you want to do it four times a week, great. If you can do it, only 10 seconds, amazing. And you're probably going to get the same benefits, those 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're, you know, 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 they are bike and I will just smash out 30 seconds as fast as I can. Then walk right back in, love it.
Yeah, I'm going to start.
Yeah.
Also, you can just put one of those things, which I do also, just put one in your office and hop over out of it. You know, the whole entire thing. Now, literally takes 23 seconds. Before we
begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford, it is also separate from dr. Andy galvan's, teaching and research roles at Cal State, Fullerton. It is however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. We'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is
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When we think about endurance? I would like to open up the conversation to include more
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 laws and fatigue, and I want to feel fantastic as I move throughout my activities of daily living, whatever. Those may be work, exercise, enjoyment cognitive paying attention focused,
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 not 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 ten flights of steps, and my quads aren't burning at the end of it, right? Or it's 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
You know, 20 to 80 seconds. So this could be something like if you're surfing, you've got a paddle extremely hard for a minute to get on top of a wave or you want it. You've got you're out riding your bike and you need to be able to get up a hill and it's a very Steep Hill. These are going to take maximal effort for some small amount of time and then you get back up there. We tend to call that maximum anaerobic capacity so that the max amount of work, you can perform at a high rate for some amount of seconds to like maybe a minute.
Past that is your ability to repeat an effort, kind of like that for something like five to fifteen minutes. And this is, the example would be run a mile, right? Some, some interval like that, which is a longer distance, right? That is going to be our maximum aerobic capacity. Another thing you're going to want your body to do is 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. All right. What are those? Shapes and positions need to be okay. And then the last one is a maximum distance. So you will only 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,
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 the right position where they give you energy, you feel good about it and it's not just something you had to do when you regretted and you felt awful. So those are the factors. I think about, when someone says I want better endurance is I want to walk backwards is okay. When you say endurance, what do you mean? And that's generally the things I've come across as 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
He's going to be excellent and your physical performance in the gym or in any of the sporting activities, you do will be enhanced.
Given what you told us a little bit earlier. That endurance, really reflects, fatigue management, and energy production, how do each and both of those things, relate to endurance at a mechanistic level. So really, what I'm asking is, what is fatigue management? And what is energy production,
in 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 and all those categories we need to go through each one and figure out? Where am I failing? Some of them are going to be failing because of fatigue management and some of them will be family 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 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 a strategy though I promise and I want to ask you a very simple question. How do you lose
weight?
I 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.
Sure, that is the approach. You would take what I'm asking, really is, how you actually physically losing the
weight. So my understanding is that we have different fuel sources in the body glycogen, which is stored in muscle and liver body fat, which is sort of mainly white adipose tissue and, which is subcutaneous and around our organs and true, visceral fat, and that we can also use protein as a fuel. And then, as I
Call. There's also a phosphocreatine system and I think you're 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,
pretty correct, what's that got to do with fat loss?
At some point. Body, fat stores, adipose 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 see the side because they don't have their own Consciousness or what are Flips ignored, its are signaling in a way that registers that body fat would be the optimal fuel source given how long or intend or intensely a given activity has been performed.
Okay, 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.
How is it actually leaving the body? Correct. My understanding is that it leaves the body through respiration.
Aha. So now we have some interesting things to talk about.
How am I actually losing fat via respiration? What the hell is that? Even mean, how is something that occupied this physical space on the side of me leaving my body through my mouth? And that is a very clear answer there, right? Which I'm sure you're cute up to when you take a breath, in your generally, breathing in oxygen, O2 and some other things, but we'll just stick to auction 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, understand here is
All of your carbohydrates which is those 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 carbon 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 in 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 this core issue of, how are we handling carbon? And how are we moving around the body? And so what we do is we do the sneaky thing. So another question I like to ask people, this is why do we
breathe?
Well, for two reasons to bring oxygen into the system and offload carbon dioxide. But the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level and the set of neurons in the brain stem and elsewhere activate. The phrenic nerve or the gasp reflex, or a combination of things and we inhale or
inhale, right? So a reduction of oxygen intake. Generally doesn't stimulate ventilation unless you're at altitude, then that's sort of changes.
In general, it's an elevation in CO2. That's going to stimulate breathing on. The only reason you bring in 02 for the most part is to get rid of the CO2. Oxygen is not a fuel source. It is not a way and it works the same with fire by the way. So, you know, you have to have oxygen present for fire to go in a few squelch oxygen. The fire will go out, right? That's not a half of how those like fire extinguishers work but we think then that means oxygen is the fuel. It is not the future.
You'll it is something entirely different. It is a necessary product is a product that is necessary for the metabolism process to actually occur. All right, so we're kind of dancing around an idea here, which is this carbon cycle of life. So what happens in plants is they generally will breathe in the opposite and breathe out the opposite of human. So a plant will breathe in CO2 and exhale, 02. All right. This is why we have to have a certain amount of these things and algae and forests, and trees and stuff to maintain this. Oh,
Lucio to balance in our atmosphere. We do the opposite. So we have this wonderful circle of life. We breathe in 0 to breathe out CO2. They do the opposite. Well, what happens is because carbohydrates are long chains of carbon and fats are as well. Generally when we think about fats, by the way, it's important understand that structure a little bit. So if we think about triglycerides, it is a three carbon backbone chain of glycerol. So 1, 2 3 and horizontally running off of each. One of those are fatty acid
Chains. Right? So we form this structure, that looks like an e right? Like the letter e 3 in the back and then three chains coming off of it. Each of those chains are called fatty acids in each of those fatty acids are length of carbon, right? Number of carbon strung together. However, many carbons are there determines, which type of fatty acid, it is, right? So stearic acid, linoleic acid. Look, any different number of things. It's also what determines whether or not is a monounsaturated or polyunsaturated is if carbon requires a special thing, called a double bond. So, if there's a double bond,
Cause every carbon and carbon, then they're all fully saturated in your great. If there's any of them that are not double bonded. And in fact, an example, if there is one that doesn't have a double bond, that is now called Mono and saturated. If there are many is called polyunsaturated. So there's pros and cons to all these things. Right, in either case, we're still talking long carbon chains. So, what a plant will do is bring in carbon and then it has this wonderful ability to use energy from the sun called photosynthesis and it can take those carbons.
Is that it inhales and use the energy from the Sun to form a bond. Now, in our prior discussion when we were going over hypertrophy, we talked about the energy required to go through protein synthesis. That's because forming a new atom or a new bond between atoms, often times takes energy. And this case is it does the same thing happens here. So if a plant does not have oxygen or does not have carbon dioxide in the air, it has no fuel that basically think about it. As that's what it eats, it needs to get, nitrogen from the ground in the soil.
Like we need to get nitrogen from our protein, but fuel lies in needs to get carbon dioxide, then it needs son to give it energy so that it can actually form that Bond, right? That's what it's getting its fuel from. Alright. So if we think about a classic plant produce the plant that produces either a starch or a fruit, here's what happens. It inhales that carbon and 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, we grow 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 will convert it into the fruit and it's going to eventually transform that stuff and a smaller carbon things called fructose. And if we think about the fruit,
Root or the sugar in fruit, it's often in the form of fructose or sucrose or a combination in sometimes Go-Go's. 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 it 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 happen. So the biology are the chemistry's is almost identical. It just runs in the reverse order and that's why again a tuber
Purrs 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 ingest carbon, which means we have to eat the starch the fruit. The animal some other
I'm 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 will put a little bit in muscle cells as intramuscular triglycerides and then the protein will use as structure right? To do different things. We don't like to use protein as material or a fuel, it's better use of structure. And what we have to do then is if all the sudden we realize that storage is
NG 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 and the blood. We have to bring in oxygen to bind that carbon molecule to make CO2, so we can exhale it and put it back into the atmosphere.
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 Clark 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 are 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 know it will reveal to us, some important bottlenecks about metabolism.
Ableism and energy utilization
you ever seen those magicians like show up and they can tell your mom's name or something like that before you because they can sort of all I got a
path. 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 a an incredible magician, a named, I think his name was Ozzy mind or something. I think that's right, had me, right?
Name on a card in a Sharpie pen. 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 as a collaborator with it and it to this day, it's still
Gives me chills because it was brought, I don't know how
magic. Yeah, right magic. Well, the reason I say that is I've given that little Spiel and I just gave you the countless times on my glasses and I would say 99% of the time as soon as I stop, the very first question is so can I dislike do a bunch of exhales and lose fat? Which is wonderful because I was really hoping you would do that and you rolled right into my trap, you landed perfectly. So I look like a like a magician over here.
I feel like I should look in my right shoe, right? 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. There are no free passes and Physiology. That's the saying no free passes. The answer. Your question is yes.
I want 100%. Yes, in fact, that is the only way to go about it. You have two options. You can ingest less carbon or you can expel more carbon people. Always say, calories in calories out, it's really carbon and carbon, aw, that's what a calorie is, Right, calories. The amount of energy we get for breaking carbon Bond, so it's really Less in more out, lesson is fairly obvious whether that comes in any form. And by the way, this is exactly why the percentage of your intake coming from fans or carbohydrates.
It doesn't really matter that much. If you look at fat loss clinical trials, you guys may have covered this in 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 doc. But in general, it's just simply about carbon and take turns out fat has a lot more carbons per mole than carbohydrates do. So there's more calories per
All in there. So if you the physical amount of fat needs to come in a smaller amount, this is the amount of carbohydrates is coming. It will come in as large 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? Some percentages in the wake and fat loss Works. Fantastic high-fat low-carbohydrate. Why? What are those things work? Because this is not about that. It's about total intake of
Until expelled. So absolutely. Can you lose fat by simply exhaling more? In fact, that is exactly what you did this morning.
When I hopped on the airdyne bike
for new 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 them fellows.
Sure. I can think of a lot of things that will stimulate increased rates of intimate
acceleration. One thing, could be simply going.
Right? So, the questions, 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?
Well, my lab studies cyclic hyperventilation is 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 quick people feel jittery, anxious stress. And unless they are consciously trying to Anchor their thinking about what that means and the benefits that to persisting typically they abort this
Cyclic hyperventilation, protocol really quickly within
seconds, you will feel tingling sweating. All kinds of things you're hyperventilating, right? And we could, we could talk and nauseam about how that changes everything from adrenaline to focus, the 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 no situation or scenario in which I can increase my rate of expiration?
Where I'm not going to pass out. I'm not going and altering hypocapnia hypercapnia issues. Any idea of a situation in which you would have an enhanced rate of exploitation without worrying about passing
out through a steady state exercise
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 too, 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. Hey 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 a 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 oh surely you know somebody
Who lost a bunch of weight in. The only thing they did is they just started running. There was no Advance product, they just started running and they ran five miles every day that works. And then tons of people who tried that and like didn't lose anyway. And lots of people who went to, I went to cardio kickboxing, class, lost weight. Oh I just started doing intervals on my blog. Why mysteriously you do all these things work. They had their you have something has some. Spidey-sense have to have to be going off in your brain where 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 and 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 - state.
Along these lines of exhaling carbons as the route for fat loss, makes me wonder whether or not increasing lung capacity is possible. I'm guessing 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. Okay, carbons per exhale. Are you?
You a more efficient fat loss
machine. 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 Sciences we abbreviate. This is q for some other reasons is either seal or q and cardiac output is heart rate X stroke volume. So it's how many beats per minute you're having as well as how much blood is coming out of it. So cardiac output is actually very
Be 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 volume is the amount of blood coming out per pump, you would automatically adjust reduce, your heart rate. So that you keep cardiac output exact to energetic demands. So you're sort of pushing one end, this 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 anytime,
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, you know, 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 who are in a good spot who want to optimize or get the next level. Whether this is professional athletes, trying to peek for physical performance, or the folks on our rapid Health optimization program. That feel good. Again, it's not disease stuff, and they want to feel incredible. One of the metrics were 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, you're not physically fit, regardless of whether or not that is quote, unquote, within the normative values. I want to see everybody. Some 60 beats per minute or close, right? That does 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 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 / 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 be 55 times a minute because I'm getting the same amount of Blood Out. / pump, chill. And this is why your resting heart rate goes down. You're 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 /, energetic changes, right? Energy requirements in the acute moment, right? How much do I need go? Which is going to be determined by
Ventilation. Right. How much are my 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 submaximal exercise test, when you are unfit to when you're fit, or when you're fit to wear your 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, but 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 that Max?
Because you may not see a much of a change at Max because you won't really, you don't really see an increase in maximum heart rate with Fitness. That's not a thing, right? So hot maximum heart rate is not a good 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 can contract 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. I won't really change but your cardiac output will because stroke volume will be
higher. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I should avoid training. That gets me up toward maximal, heart rate,
correct? Oh, you should absolutely do it,
right? That's what 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 foundation or nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012. So I'm delighted.
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Of vitamin D3 K to again. If you'd like to try out, let it greens go to athletic greens.com huberman, to claim the special offer, getting back to energy 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 issues 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. Now, 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 reading a bit more, maybe I'm bringing a little more fat after all the speeches is a modified, exhale and amazing. If I'm sprinting breathing differently and if
If I'm you know doing a 30-minute moderate quote, unquote moderate jog, 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 specifics about energy utilization, according to different modes of exercise. And if we could do better Define modes of exercise or types of exercise that trigger specific adaptations, I think this is where the bridge will move from being a mere line to a real.
Sure. 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 as well as the lack of limitations, okay? So it's really, really important. The way I want to start. This is we have this this Foundation now of of carbon and, 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 we were exercising like training fasted, right? Does training fasted enhance fat loss and the logic is sound, if I don't have any fuel, then I should be burning more fat, therefore should be losing more fat, it sound, it's not true. Is this great idea? It's one of these classic things in science and exercise. Physiology were like sounds good turns out it's not.
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 02 and breathing out CO2. However, the ratio to, that is what we call the either, re our respiratory exchange ratio, rrq 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.
Kris exercise, intensity the percentage of O2 CO2 rises in the favor of CO2. So you start breathing out way more CO2 than you are breathing in 02, 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 value that we would typically call something like 0.6, okay? And that's again, the relationship between 02 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 point eight or something like that. One of the ways that we Mark somebody of achieving an actual vo2max on a test, is, if that value exceeds 1 Point 1,
Now, any of you who are paying attention or thinking, wait a minute, how the hell can a ratio between two things ever get past one? Well, that's because you're getting 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 offload CO2.
Right? If I'm no longer exercising, why am I still breathing?
In other words, once you stop the demand or the need for extra for energy, you should stop ventilating but you don't write. That's because in the case of low intensity exercise the second you stop your right back down to resting ventilation. No problem because you were able to match the need for energy with the offload of waste 121 during that exercise. When you start creeping up the intensity, you can't do that. So you have to basically start stealing
feeling a little bit of fuel here. So even though you're done, exercising, you're still ventilating because you have to pay that back and pay that back by that. I'm specifically mean you have to bring in oxygen because you have a whole bunch of ways that's been accumulating in your tissue that you've got to deal with and I'll walk you through what that waste is. It's a particular molecule 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 were specifically talking about. All right so that being said as we start cruising up that our queue starts going up-up-up-up-up-up-up and if we get the one-year 1.0, you're in a like you're hurting. You're in a pretty good spot. All right.
I like that you're hurting. You're in a pretty good spot. Yes. A window into doctor any gal Pals mind. Yeah you really want to be a subject in his his laboratory
Sure masochists, warm to the Andes lab.
Yeah, absolutely. Alright. 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, you know, 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's it doesn't make energetic sense. We have a lot of backup supplies you're never out the trick here is this is there's a concept here we called crossover concept. So as we are
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. 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 with Ben
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 the sudden magically make you lose fat. It doesn't actually make sense. When you think about that we were 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 a lower intensity exercise, whether you're faster than audit, it's irrelevant but lower intensity exercise. A greater percentage of your fuel is coming from fat. However,
Total fuel expenditure is very low.
So that whole total carbon balance is not really being shifted much. As you start exercising at a very high 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 your 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 of probably ever seen is like 70%, you should probably be at about that. That's a kind of a good number to think honestly but people will understand a little bit about metabolism metabolism to be dangerous but not enough will throw out these terms like fat adapted and fat adapted as a real thing. But is a massive misunderstanding. Oftentimes right? It is this idea thinking like I can get to 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 and exercise, that does not enhance fat loss per se, right? So, this is the 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 don't have time to get into
Today, however, the opposite is possible. When you get into true high-intensity, exercise, you will be basically 100% carbohydrate and 0% fat, right? That is is very possible that in fact is 1.0, that's what 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. The idea then is 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 make sense burning fat.
Losing fat. Burning carbs is losing what then?
You think your liver shrunk, like, wait a minute? What did you lose that? Where'd 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 that fat? There was that there was that love handles sitting on the side of me. How did that come out of me by never burn that from our fuel? What you're failing to understand is there's a balanced 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 burn some liver glycogen.
The body understands that it is 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 go through this fancy situation where you convert carbohydrates into fat and back and forth. Like that's actually, like, fairly hard, what it's easier to do with 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 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 lat, 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 in excess. So, that's how you actually use fat as a fuel because you've burned down carbohydrates
storages.
As 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, correct? And then burning 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. And I've 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 the does
You 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 about of weight training?
If you equate for total energy expenditure, it won't matter now.
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 no benefit for fat loss, because remember, those are low weight, a lot of
And low volume, they're not really that really going to be helpful. You can make a little bit of a case for strength a little bit, but the total energy expenditure for strength training, even if it's an hour, if it's truly strength training, it's fairly low because the
repetitions are in the one to three range. That's exactly, it's not enough for total
work. So, if you're trying to develop a protocol, that sort of optimizes fat loss, which you want to do, you were closed. And my opinion is, do a combination of something in the hypertrophy /.
Muscular endurance,
strength, training room, okay? So 6 to 30 repetitions something like that, resistance training, great deplete muscle glycogen, maybe even a bit of liver glycogen,
maybe a little bit, depending on if you're doing it for a long time, but probably not a noticeable amount,
okay? So an hour of hypertrophy type training, if you're training hard with low, rest
animals, and you really did an hour, you would for sure, get there. But most people don't,
because of the reason why I crave large bowls of oatmeal and rice after I do weight training. Yeah, Army planners from us.
Like it,
you totally right then you maybe do a little bit of very high, intensity maximum heart rate well over VO2, max hard, as you can for 20, 30, 45, 60 seconds, something like that. With some recovery, a lot of recovery and repeated. And that's going to do a great job of diplomacy muscle glycogen, right? If you do that long enough, you'll get the liver. But again, most people don't because it's really, really hard to go that hard.
So, liver is our last last.
Sort. Yeah, basic mechanics here which will which will actually get into as are like third segment, here is energy production comes from the local exercising muscle first and foremost from phosphocreatine and carbohydrate stores and so again and we store in a muscle called glycogen right? That's your first sign of light on defense if you need glucose outside of that you're going to start pulling it from the blood but one of the things your body regulates a handful of things over almost everything, blood pH, blood, glucose blood pressure and
Concentrations, like, it really does not want to mess with those things at all. It will change. Almost anything else in the body to keep those things standardized, right? You generally because you need all those things for your brain to work and your brain will stop working, right. If you look blood, pressure will go up there. PH changes, you can't run metabolism electrolytes change, you can't think. And glucose is a primary fuel source for the brain. It's got to be a problem, right? So if that number starts to come down because you're grabbing glucose out of the blood, your liver is going to then kick in it's going to break down, its glycogen to put
Glucose in the blood to keep the blood number the level. In fact, one of the things you'll see is blood glucose concentrations rise during exercise, they don't fall. And in fact, they rise as an anticipatory state. If you train a lot, your blood glucose will start going up before you start moving. It knows it's coming, right? So you can play that game. You can rob Peter to pay Paul for a long time, until your liver runs out. And that's what actually is a bunk. And in terms of like long duration and during stuff, you're talking, many, many, many miles, several hours, typically we say, oh, it's got to be over two hours.
Before your liver starts to become a real problem, or it has to be tremendously intense, because of those reasons you have to burn through, just a lot of energy before your liver starts to get to a problem. You can continue to train when your muscle glycogen levels are low. In fact, people say glycogen depletion a muscle but it's a it's generally misnomer. I'm you are going to have tremendous signals of fatigue when that number is lower than 75%. So people think that like their muscles are getting heavy, you're probably still 75 percent full. A lot of folks will
Colquitt around the 50 percent. The highest I've ever seen is like, 95% true depletion, and that's an extremely, high level, cross-country skiers. And, like, their deltoid gets very, very low. Some very talented Runners will get fairly low in their quads, but the vast majority of folks by the time you're 50 percent depleted, you're going to quit. It's going to be really really challenging. So you're never really going to get that low. It's like a bit of a protective mechanism, right? But when your liver gets low,
You're going to be shut down and that's the case of we've ever been to, like a marathon. You've seen people run like twenty five and a half miles and then that is like Bonk. They go into like baby deers walking stance and then they collapse and you're like, how are you mentally weak? Like you ran 26 miles and you can't run the last point in a mentally weak. It is, if your liver is done, it's going to stop you because there's no more backup reserves muscle. You can get away with, you could push through it. Liver will not let you go
any farther. I find this fascinating because it makes me wonder whether or not the liver.
Depleted sends a neural signal to the brain web store or the brain must register some signal. Like I would like to be alive tomorrow. Thank you, whatever is happening right now. Stopping is going to be safer than continuing. Yeah. And so that stop signal is is one that I think a lot of people including myself are intrigued by because we always think that it's a related to willpower but the brain needs to preserve itself. And as the master computer, I mean, there are ways to go into kind of a
Otamatone type, not thinking just doing type Behavior. You have
arrived switches, right? And you can play those cards and you can get better at learning and be being less sensitive to that switch. That's exactly what happened. When you first start training, right? You start to realize, like, oh my gosh, I'm super tired than you realize really quick. Like, oh, I'm totally fine here. And this is like the
pick pick your person who's made sayings like this. But it's like you really only 10% to plated or 30%, or 40%
or something. We're all operating 40% of. Yeah, I could do. Of
course, any of those things are true because it is like a little bit of an override. You've just gotten very sensitive to being a small percentage depleted. And you've learned, okay, I'm tired and there is a long way to go past that, but once you get past that and you flip that override switch a lot, you just, you're going to break quickly because you basically learn to ignore that
And problems can happen really quickly after that. And that's even experienced endurance athletes. If you hit that level it's like you're going to be hitting the concrete next. And that's potentially a problem. I
want to make sure I understand a concept that you referred to earlier correctly because I have a feeling that I don't, and that's this issue of how the body accesses body fat stores.
When in a sub caloric State and I'm doing mainly glycogen burning exercise. Yeah, what I heard you say? And please correct me where I'm undoubtedly wrong.
What I heard you say, was that, okay, I go into the gym and I start lifting weights, I'm burning muscle glycogen, mostly local to the muscles that I'm using and then I start pulling glycogen from the bloodstream. Maybe there's some body fat stores that are mobilized, probably not dipping into my liver glycogen, okay? I complete the workout. Maybe I even hop on the are dying by can do a little Sprint. It go for a jog, Maybe,
I eat immediately afterward. Maybe I don't eat for a few hours afterwards but across the day I ingest fewer calories than I burn.
Is it the case that body fat is mobilized in order to replace the glycogen? That my sub caloric intake was insufficient to provide in other words, because I didn't eat enough to fill the glycogen stores in my using body fat converted into glycogen to fill those stores, right?
And if so, is that a case where I'm no longer exhaling carbons, in order to burn body fat? But rather, I'm repurposing body fat into muscle, have I turned fat into muscle in that case. Yeah, I'm
really glad you asked this because I did a very poor job on that last Point talking about earlier. I'm realizing playing back of my head, because there's so many really good questions. You cannot turn fat into muscle.
Can you turn muscle into that? No, I'm so glad you said that because when I was in,
In college. Yeah,
our I don't want to out that person. The physiology teacher seem to think still at that point that one could lift weights get muscular but then it would eventually turn into body fat that I that myth. As I think largely been
dispelled, I heard that so many times as a kid I heard it so many times in college. I heard it. So I hear it so many times in our undergraduate students from other faculty and such so
No, like that. They're not the same structures, they are very different. 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, we've burned a lot of muscle glycogen, how is it? I'm losing stored fat, right? That's really the Crux of the question and it doesn't even actually matter if you then went ahead and ingested extra carbohydrates or fat post exercise. That's not really think you hit on a couple of key things. Number one, this is
All in the assumption that total caloric intake is still low.
Right? You have to Total need gloat over. Okay.
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 maybe another series we can spend on that alone so don't don't go nuts about that. You have to be
work one way or the other. If you burn a bunch of muscle glycogen and you are high perchloric, you're still going to add fat. If you burn a bunch of muscle glycogen and your hypochlorite you're going to lose fat, right? Think about it this way?
You are 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. The way that I want to flag this year's people tend to think about it as, like, carbohydrates versus fat. That's not, it's more like a chain, more, like a,
Got where there's a front gear and a back here, you turn one gear at turns the other one, these are complementary systems, they are not and, or systems, right? You're turning one. And when we go through carbohydrate metabolism, may be here in a second, you'll understand why you have to have an anaerobic and 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. There's a fun.
Mental difference there. So, the, your carbohydrates are meant to be incredibly flexible. It is the primary fuel source for a reason. Your fat is not meant to be flexible, it is the meant to be unlimited. That's the basic point. So, you want flexibility over here and an unlimited capacity over there. Now, I'm safe guard 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.
I want both these systems you want to be able to have great energy throughout the day. You want a 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? Upright, get it into the brain, get thinking better than thinking, clearly fast. So we want all these. Not just for exercise purposes for, but for activities of daily living, we want to Optimal system here and when people use the terms like fat adapted their generally hijacking, that in the thinking, man,
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 types. Not maximizing fat usage. They the people have co-opted that term a metabolic flexibility to be like, oh 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 gold standard here should be maximizing both. Alright, finally answering your question. If I were to to burn a bunch of muscle glycogen, how am I losing that fat? Well, the fuel you're ingesting and then hypochlorite 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, are, they already are, is going, is going off. And so in the exercise moment, it shot way up for
Rates and shot way down for fat as a compensatory response, it goes the other direction because your body is saying, we are low on carbohydrates, don't use them for fuel unless we absolutely have to write. 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, just 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 small, but it is it adds up sort of overtime. So does that explain a little bit better about how you lose fat? When you actually only burn carbs for exercise,
you explained it beautifully. You talked about Epoch the post-exercise oxygen consumption. Yeah, not being that significant in terms of energy utilization. Even though today we're talking about endurance in different forms of endurance. I do have to ask whether or not
people consider the
Elevation in basal metabolism that occurs when there's more muscle around. Yeah, 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 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. Yep. And is that, because
Of the muscle protein synthesis needs of that muscle or its glycogen storage needs, or
both. If you don't have enough muscle, you start to have problems with fat loss. It's difficult challenge. If you have enough muscle, and you're just trying to get extremely large. If you fear, FMI is 24 and your 15% body fat. Adding more muscles. Not really going to play a lot in the equation, and here's why muscle is more metabolically active at rest than fat butt fat is not a nerd. 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 Cal's 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 ten 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. The other hand, you could say that 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.
Like that actually adds up so you could slice this any way you want. Now maybe that number somewhere 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 Epoch where it's like, we used to really harp on it and now it's like, wow. 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 they describe their 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. May be a few calories here. 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, choices, a day. Well, outkick, 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 beyond
anything else.
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Cam 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?
Sure. 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 a performing in a type of exercise or an athlete, who performs in a sport that is likely 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 are going to use the same.
True for the other end of the spectrum. So those particular cases, it's not optimal to be equally effective because there are no free passes and Physiology, right? Your energy producing systems will operate you later, 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 who 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, 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 exercise, not a single one of these tests that I'm about to walk you through automatically means you can't use that as a fuel or
Or the other case, which is maybe your poor using carbohydrate is a field. So disclaimers aside, we'll get into a couple of
them. So should we think about these as informative and useful but not diagnostic
exactly what we call this data inspired or data lead and not data driven right? 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
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. Then 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 or, 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 six percent actually means. But it's a data point where I'm looking at. If I actually didn't see symptomatology and we run you through some questionnaires, ask how you're feeling throughout the day and we see uncontrolled energy balance. So you're a lot of energy, they need
Really, really tired and swings, okay, another data point, right? And we met patch, a few of these things together, that may give me some clues that being said, again, this 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. I can also be unrelated their reasons. You could have blood glucose concentrations at this level or enter you swings that are unrelated to carbohydrate ingestion at all. All right, so one test, you cannot run in addition to that, if you're going to get blood glucose measured, you can look at some markers we talked about earlier, but your AST and alt we talked about how you can kind of look at that AST and 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 .8, I actually like to see it lower than that. And that alone is is been actually associated with blood glucose dysregulation. And so if you see multiple designs, again, we're looking for patterns and patterns and patterns, and both in our case, biomarkers symptomology and performance. And now you, 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 work out.
You hopefully, it's pretty objective. So, in other words, like I run the same 15-minute Loop every morning for my cardio. Okay, great. How long does it take you to run that Loop? You can 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 fuel.
A source. If however, the one day you go to do your standard work out 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. It may be another clue that you have 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 that is equally a problem. We send, we hear people a lot. Make comments like, man, I have to stay away from carbs, I crash really hard, if I do them that has a, what that actually means is, you're very poor at utilizing carbohydrates. Has fuel your getting a, your ear. Your sensitivity is way off. We should be able to have
hydrate at a reasonable dosage, 50 grams and not fall asleep, 30 minutes later or half the Run dekap being so that is a sign in our opinion. This is again now just my practical brain telling you is, that's a sign of dysfunction. We should be able to have plenty of carbohydrates through the day if we choose to, if we want to for any reason. 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.
What is one way that people can enhance their utilization of carbohydrates? For exercise, the reason I ask is I think I fall into that category. Yep. I do consume some complex carbohydrates and fruit post resistance training and that tends to be one of the 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
and I prefer slightly less protein and more carbohydrate because it has this effect of sedating me a little bit. Yeah. And I sleep well and I know this runs against what everyone was taught which is to not eat carbohydrates low today, 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. Yeah. And I'm able to train fasted in the morning and my favorite pre-workout is
Consists of water and caffeine and electrolytes, and maybe some supplementation as well. But I love training
fasted. So there's actually a number of things.
One little sneaky thing you threw in there is actually the use of caffeine, so that's another sign. If you have to have caffeine to do your fast and training, that's generally another sign. You're not very good at using fuel.
So I use caffeine prior to resistance training workouts and generally I don't need it for any kind of cardiovascular
training. Yeah. And and when I say that, it doesn't mean it's bad. It's just like another clue this 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 in ergogenic Aid, we actually use a lot of high carbohydrate meals at the end of the day. A lot of the times for athletes who are cutting weight or trying to reduce way, so it is a fantastic way to handle a lot of things. And that idea that if you eat carbs late at night, that'll increase faster. Like that's all is so old and so well destroyed scientifically that that's not a concern you. There's just so much data showing in fact that there's so much data on
like deeding timing is generally poorly. Understood about when you can eat and what you can eating in the morning versus eating at night. Like a lot of what we've heard in there is topping
Maybe we just save that for sort of another day because we're going to get really far down. That's what are we cooking yet? But
yes, I think our plan is to cover that in an episode on nutrition. Okay. Which is in this series. The only thing that I would add to it is, you know what you hear about ingesting carbohydrate late at night, I should just say that 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 in the
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. to 3:00 or so hours or something like that before you
sleep around 10:00 10:30 or so. Yeah. So it's not, you know, midnight bowls of pasta. I've done that too. But but typically it's not. So I think that people will be very interested. Myself included in how meal timing relates to all of this. But
let's
So how do you prove fat? It has a Sheen. How do you improve carbohydrates position? Let's Hammer both out really quickly and 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 workout.
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 full fuel now. The downside is that may actually hinder your performance. That's typically only a concern for people at a very high level fat, is this lower fuel source? So if you're relying upon that, your top end is going to come down a little bit. And so, you wouldn't want to do that strategy prior to race. If it is a carbohydrate dependent race.
All right. I'm 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. Their carbohydrate 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 and appropriate eating strategy.
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 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, as if we see 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, the glycemic index like the rise in blood glucose. So, it could be simple thing. I was just like, oh, your combination,
Food is doing, it's not the total amount. It may be something again. More endogenous the actual system, it could be a her a tissue. 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. Make 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 high intensity. You want to get better at using carbohydrates to fuel train at a higher intensity and have carbohydrates right before the workout.
will do that a lot, if
If our, if we see folks who are kind of walk 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, is the feel as both that eating test. I talked about as well as performance, if you're a very, very, very slow starter. It's just like a 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 have a pre carbohydrate pre-exercise carbohydrate meal, then we're gonna do higher intensity stuff.
Not the point of making you sick and digestive issues, all that stuff. We want to get better at using carbohydrates as a fuel faster. If you want to get better at doing the opposite thing, you do that opposite router. Either again, using fat prior to the workout and knowing your Peak Performance is going to go down a little bit, but 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, we ought to think about it or you could bring in some fasted training and so I want to really make sure I clear
Why, when we were talking about earlier, I'm not at all against fast and training, it's not it works. It's just isn't required for fat loss. It isn't required for fat a Temptation. It is a great option, though, if you want. 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 at least, so 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 study 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 in nutrition. If you like higher carb, great. If you like lower court that 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 you'll be fine,
a few minutes ago you mentioned that. If we ingest a given macronutrient fat, then the body will preferentially use that fuel source.
You just carbohydrate it will use that fuel source.
Is it always the case that the body uses the ingested macronutrient prior to using glycogen? I have to imagine it's using both. I mean, if I were to have some carbohydrate before, 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 foodstuffs? That would allow them to not tap into the
Their own muscle fiber stores of
glycogen. All right, so the way that we derive energy 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 in 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 etcetera, Etc. All right. Now, when you want to produce energy for exercise,
Any time 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 monocoque andreea, not the nucleus. So it's the space in between everything else. This is like jelly like substance to sounds. They're 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 1 to 1 there, which means for every mole of phosphorus creatine. 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
Losing 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 4 to 1. 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 it's all 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 a sepia if you were to fully run through this thing which I'll talk about a second, I'm called the TCA cycle of Krebs cycle, you'll get now something like 28 or 30 or 35, 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 I'll come backwards and go through fat. So remember carbohydrate it is one carbon molecule that has been hydrated, so it is 1 to 1. So the actual chemistry here it is ch2o one carbon 2810. Glucose is a six carbon chain. So, the chemistry here is C6.
H-12 o-6, six carbons 6 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 out, so I'll try to make sure I explain it to you. I'll just listening and easy fashion. So you've got this chain of six, carbons those 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 splittin like being like you've split glycogen up, got a little bit of energy of them. All right, you formed this three caller carbon chain called pyruvate or pyruvic acid. Okay, there's differences are but don't don't kill me. General audience, friends. All right I got a lot to give this communicate this to everybody don't 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 chain. So I've got two three.
Carbon chains. I'd be careful how I do this with my finger so I don't flip you off here in a second, but I burn one more off of each. I get a little bit of energy and now that little to carbon chain I have to to conquer obtains. Those are called acetyl Co a alright 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 I am I started with six and I split them apart but I didn't two three carbon chains. I burned one each. I've got to free-floating carbons. I have to now 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 a teepee for fuel. That's called ATP hydrolysis, right? 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. So, now you have a free for floating inorganic, phosphate and an adenosine die. Phosphate so two over there. Amazing, that actually results because you use
Use water for it results in a free-floating hydrogen ion.
Cape. Just have to trust me. Hydrogen H2 well.
Hmm. Any idea what a free-floating hydrogen
is, it's going to assassinate yet says I was gonna say, it's going to increase the acidity. That's what it's for anyone that's ever measured pH. What you're really measuring is the the the amount of hydrogen
potential hydrogen that's a pH is right on a center. There's two definitions of pH but you get us one of the two.
So is this, are you going to tell me this is related to the the
burn? We're going to get close. Right? So I've got a bunch of free floating, you got the phosphates, which are
We problem to probably more of a problem Than People realize and that hydrogen.
What are you going to do without hydrogen? Well, one thing you can do is actually ship it over to pyruvate and bond it. There we have a special name of that little molecule when you have pyruvate and have a hydrogen attached to it, you know, it's called.
Mmm, hydrogen, peroxide
lactate.
Lactate lactic acid. This is that whole system, right? Again, I'm skipping some scat steps, making a little bit of mistakes or unintentionally folks, just to make this assume. 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 in a lot of fatigue, but the lactates actually not causing the fatigue. The
Actually sparing you from having a bunch of free-floating acid. It's 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 turn it right back into pyruvate. You can run it through this whole cycle as fuel. That I'm about to do, you can actually actual 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 hydrogen from from lactate,
like,
Lee.
Yeah. So what liberates? What will, what are the stimuli that can take? Hydrogen off the pyruvate? Yeah, oh yeah. And and then, in other words, to reduce lactate and free up that hydrogen oxygen
availability.
So, in fact, one of the major places that you ship hydrogen two, or one of the major places that you sleep elected to, is your heart.
Because this is what we call like the ultimate Soldier to fiber. And it is, 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. They still can be used to form water and now we have a place to store the hydrogen on 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.
X.
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 got to deal with the waste products, bone, right back to the beginning of our conversation and durin's is about two things, energy production, and waste management and we're right or 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 to do something with those pyruvate. Sore, those acetyl Co a ways 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 to carbon acetyl Co a runs through this entire cycle that we call the Krebs cycle.
That's this really interesting place that's where be 6 and N MN. 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, some of the hydrogen ions are 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 all the way to the Finish are going to pull off the second carbon
So you're going to take the second acetyl Co a run that entire thing same through as well. And so, what we did is we started off with a 6 carbon glucose chain. We split it in half, we call those pyruvate made a little bit of energy because we broke that one Bond of those two carbons that are in the Middle School. Those two three-carbon molecules. We pulled one carbon off of each. We brought in, we're sorry, we move those into the mitochondria, we brought one off. We took a breath, brought in some oxygen bonded. That Brett, took out to CO2 exhales. We ran the
Acetyl Co a through the Krebs cycle one two carbons per turn coming out of CO2. So we had six carbons totals we started and we exited 10 carbons. Now we have fully metabolized a molecule of carbohydrate.
That required, an anaerobic, start and anaerobic finish. If you don't have a lot of mitochondria, large martic andreea, high-functioning mitochondria, you're going to limit your anaerobic performance because you're going to get that 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 only mere 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. I won't be able to run in a highly acidic environment or a hot
environment. Yeah, 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 in the in pyruvate from in terms of
it's regulation of muscle contraction but I want to make sure I understood something correctly. You mentioned these these two parallel fuel systems, right? One is essentially an aerobic, 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 for
Essentially for aerobic metabolism. Yeah, 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 not an either?
No effect. Again, I think it's better to think of these things, rather as two separate parallel things, as one big cycle, their one gear, turning the next being compromised in one will compromise the
other that I should say, reminds me of what you said earlier, which is this, the bicycle gear
An analogy that works great. So if you if you short circuit one basically the chain can't move. That's yeah, fantastic. Okay. So so indeed, they they are running in parallel but they are interdependent.
Yeah, well they're actually not even running in parallel because they're actually falling to the same endpoint, 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 is full, it doesn't matter, you can't run either system, right? So 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 your toast because they're running on the same system, you can, you can, you can sneak a little bit here and there but not much
You also really nicely highlighted how lactate this thing that we think of as a limiting factor like the burn, it gets in the way and something we need to stop and buffer and old all sorts of things. Sure it's actually really a
fuel, it's a tremendously effective. Fuel is a strongly preferred fuel. Actually the is essentially this is a very classic case of Association correlation versus causation, right? So the original actually like this really cool history online,
Today but it was originally found. I think in Germany pardon my history there somewhere in Europe and hunted Stags. So one of the things is they sort of realize is like if we harvested a stag in a resting 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 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 tests, you will see as fatigue increases lactate will also increase the Assumption. There was then all 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.
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. Lactates, flying. 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 to the liver and it can actually go through gluconeogenesis and it can actually replenish liver glycogen just as a fuel source or you sound harder any number of sources. You can also just cut it put into circulation put it back in the muscle and once in
If 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 I may be 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 different ratios of fuel. Sources are used depending on how long, I happen to be exercising, for
'Well, if I do a very short bouts of exercise. Yep. 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 have 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 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 0, seconds and run all the way through marathon and will flag the distinctions where they start changing as soon as you want us to create muscle contraction and power. The very first source of energy is phosphocreatine that's going to power. You 40 to maybe say 8 to 15, 20 seconds of maximal
exertion.
And that's incoming from the muscle fibers 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. 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 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, which is going to take us again for a couple of minutes. Carbohydrate utilization comes first from the
Using muscles, 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 river water is H2O. Most of the time we're talking about glucose, it is in the
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 up tremendous amount at the end of anaerobic glycolysis. You're going to net something like 3 or 4 ATP.
So
And you get from the fossil record
triple quadruple, 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 want adaptation. We get to training in. This style is you'll increase your ability to store glycogen in your muscle.
What's this, 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 training, you hit a fatigue point. Now, you maybe can extend that to 100 115 seconds, simply because you're storing more glycogen in the muscle before we have to end, 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.
This little tricky position because this three carbon molecule is what we call pyruvate pyruvate casted and again, chemistry, folks, I'm skipping some steps. I'm going to intentionally, make some mistakes here. I'm making sure the entire world listening, regardless of where they come in. 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 glycol. This 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, any time we cross that barrier, we know we've automatically switch from an aerobic to anaerobic. 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. Okay? So before when we split the six carbon chain, we didn't actually leave any carbons free-floating. We just split a to molecule and half when we go to split from pyruvate and make it into this two. Carbon molecule called acetyl Co a or silk away. 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 this thing, 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 as the only way we can actually form energy, I guess remember to clarify any time we're using phosphocreatine or glucose or fat which we'll get to a second we're not actually getting
G4 exercise by breaking those down. We're getting energy that we can use to. Then make ATP. We break that ATP down. That's was actually powering muscle contraction. You can go back to our previous episode, we will walk 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 in the best way we can deal with that, is oxygen. Remember, we're going to breathe in 02 that O2 is going to combine with that free-floating carbon make CO2. We're
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 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 build-up of pyruvate. And so now we're having this giant backlog. And this thing fills up fast, we have a couple of strategies
Easier.
Well, when you're going through ATP and you're splitting, it's called ATP. Hydrolysis in of doing that. Remember, ATP is adenosine molecule and then the T part is triphosphate 123, which means you have three phosphates attached at 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 to that process requires water is called hydrolysis as a result of that. You then have a
A free-floating hydrogen. And as you well, know that is asset, 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 all we're building up acid, we have building a 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 hydrogen's that we're building up.
and store them on the pyruvate, a pyruvate that's holding an extra asset, 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 an incredibly High rate of waste production. Now, lactates is not the cause of fatigue 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 and 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 that are free. You can bring in the oxygen attached 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 to this fancy thing called the Cori cycle.
It is what the the proper cycle here is. So you can use it as a very potent fuel sources. Fact, a lactate is a tremendously valuable fuel source. I'm not only for exercise but for cognition and a bunch of other things. So lactates, in fact, this is why. If you've seen either research about pre-exam testing exercise, you'll see a noticeable increase in exam scores. If you do a 20-minute about of exercise, prior to take an exam and it's largely in part, probably because of things like elevations in lactate.
How intense of exercise would be most beneficial? 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. Say, in fact, there's an acute and chronic adaptation here. So Folks at exercise have better memory, memory, retention score, and exams Etc. But then also doing it for wire to that exam. Make sure you recovered and resting back down a straight, but you'll generally perform
better previous guest on the humor in lab.
Gasps who's the 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. Yeah, specifically for this purpose of enhancing learning and memory and has a lot of really beautiful data. I consider 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 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
amazing. So if we want to continue past that point we have to have some sort of strategy to get through it. Right? We're stuck, we're out of
Gasps 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 I work up to really 20-30 minutes. In fact, it really will take us to unlimited. If you look at a highly competitive marathon runner, even those that are running. So your two hour marathon, those folks are burning up to 80% carbohydrate. It is a 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. Are they ingesting carbohydrate as a fuel source during the race?
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 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 made several hours, then you actually might go to some fat as fuel sources. I, I know a lot of cyclists are using ketones and things like that, now, but traditionally, most endurance folks are going to buy us heavily towards carbohydrate.
Right now in one respect, you're not going to run out of carbohydrates until your many hours in these folks are 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 can be limited by some other things which will maybe sort of break down here to second.
But you're going to be fine there. A lot of those folks will take carbohydrate though, a very specific intervals. You want to. You do want to be careful though of ingesting, too many fast carbohydrates prior to your exercise spout. We have actually have this little thing that's called the insulin glucose double whammy. And what that means is when you ingest carbohydrates, immediately, your blood glucose goes up, and that's depending on the type of carbohydrate things like that. Well, the same thing happens with exercise. And so what happens is,
And wants to start pulling glucose out of the blood. At the same time, muscle wants to start pulling glucose out of the blood. And so we have this giant bowls of carbohydrate come in, and then all of a sudden, our blood sugar crashes. And so if you're going to be doing, so your your first half marathon or something like that and you're in those giant Corral's with there's like 100 people waiting to go in your standing in for 45 minutes. You may or may not want to slug down like three or four bananas and a bagel and and honey and things like you probably don't need that. Now,
Not everyone experiences this double whammy but it has been shown in the literature to happen to some people. So you want to just be a little bit careful and easy way to combat that is just practice exactly what you're going to do in your race and your training. That's like the simplest advice ever but you'd be stunned. How many people do things during the race that they've actually never done a
training? I suggest people do exactly what you described also for any kind of cognitive testing floors before. A big exam is not the time to discover whether or not you can handle twice as much as
S0 or take a nootropic for the first time or no or change anything. I mean if indeed the the score on that exam is Meaningful to you, you keep things regular. So to recap, what we've done here is we
started off in the cytoplasm with this glucose molecule that has 6 carbons. We took that thing, we split it in half, we call that thing anaerobic glycolysis. We made a little bit of energy but not much. We take those three carbon molecules. We ship them into the mitochondria, where you take each one of those weekly off one carbon each those carbons.
We take a breath and we attached them to oxygen. We exhale them, get rid of that energy. We are now fully into aerobic glycolysis. Each one of those two carbon molecules. We run through the Krebs cycle, each round the Krebs cycle Burns. One, two carbons. So we go one, two, one, two. And now we've gone from six, carbon molecule all the way down to zero. We used the hydrogens that we pulled off of that Krebs cycle, run to go to the electron transport chain from there. We made a whole bunch of ATP and so we have now fully metabolized, one molecule
Like you of carbohydrate. And the end product of all of it is simply a tipi water and CO2.
Beautiful and leads me to the conclusion. That most everything is really about utilization of carbons and exhaling. CO2. Is that how I should think about bookending? What you just described?
This is why we started off the conversation with the circle of life. This is really a carbon game. This is why we call Chemistry with carbon organic chemistry. That's what this whole thing is about any living.
By being, has to run through metabolism. It's all a carbon game. Any living being has to use ATP. This is all just a big fancy game of. How do I make ATP and handle the waste? Remember endurance is all about Waste Management, fatigue resistance, the same thing, and energy production, we're playing a game here, the whole game, bring in energy, use it, mitigate waste
products. So in thinking about aerobic,
Or size or long-duration exercise. In this case, anything longer than five minutes for that matter. Five minutes all the way up to an ultra marathon.
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?
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, 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 to our marker. So and we're moving.
Very, very, very fast, but anything, south of that is just managing carbon buildup, and we do that best through oxygen utilization or getting more efficient, having a higher capacity for our anaerobic side so we can do that by having either more glycogen in our muscle. So that last longer or building better acid buffering systems. And there's a whole line of supplementation that are specifically acid buffers has a whole line of
Meaning there's a whole line of breathing to manage this that so we have a lot of strategies. 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 trained, according to that or do your strategy your nutrition your supplementation. That defeats that limiting factor. For example, if you are trying to maximize your performance in this 22nd maximal burst
And your strategy for that was to make sure that 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 and 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 like his, we can just walk through these and look at the individual limitations where the failure Point happens and then Adam
Effectively will outline your strategy for improving
them. So you taught us about carbohydrate utilization as a fuel source, what about fat and what about protein?
Great, 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 about of exercise, when you started doing it, you might be using 5% of the energy from protein.
Teen and then in that micro to 10 or so. And that happens 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 a robic so it has to be oxidized. Those are the same thing when I say oxidized you use oxygen,
To burn something to to make you feel. I'm so it's not a significant contributor to energy in that regard and unless you're talking Ultra marathons are 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 car.
Behide rate 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 fundamentally because 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, I 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 is means you break it down from the stored form. You put it in the blood as that glycerol backbone, which is
At three carbon backbone and 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 up taken 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 in the mitochondria cleave off. One carbon run, it as acetyl Co a bada-bing bada-boom exact same thing. Super easy to metabolize small.
I have to go through the mitochondria membrane, the fatty acid, chains, become a problem. So if you have a chain that's longer than our a torso 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've may have talked about at there's a lot of places that make it that's going to be 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, too? Because you're trying to make that two carbon acetyl Co a, so you can run through that Krebs cycle again because you're cutting off two carbons that
We have a special name for that oxidation process is called beta oxidation. That's exactly why we call it. Beta oxidation two carbons in. You cut it off to make that a satoko, a so you can notice the oxidation pass away. 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
A chain, whether it came from a carbohydrate original Source or a fat original Source, it ends up in the mitochondria as basically the exact same thing, if then ends the end of metabolism as the same thing. Remember the final end point of carbohydrate metabolism is water ATP. And CO2. Do you want to guess the final end point of fat metabolism? Its water ATP. And CO2.
So, practical 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 actually enjoy somewhat or you're willing to accept and anything that you absolutely hate. Don't do it. Sometimes is 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 ten straight minutes, and I'm so bored. And you're all, 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 levels. Either option will be equally effective
as 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 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. Mmm. And yet, I'm also okay fasting for part of the day. Yeah, I'm one of those pseudo intermittent fasters.
Talk about what I mean by that. I just how yummy between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. naturally, I'm not religious about it but 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
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 forms 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're the same comment for physical activity. In other words, people say man, if I do this type of training, then I just I'm 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, the data would suggest.
Just 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 what's called neat. So it's the non exercising part of your day in addition to the basal metabolic rate. So, physical activity wise, you don't send any prop. 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 perhaps best to not get into this
one. Yeah. Why don't we put this down the road to our discussion about nutrition specifically and and we've back to it. So we'll earmark it for that. Meanwhile, it sounds like, if one is thinking purely in terms of 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
Burn those calories using a form of exercise that relies predominantly on carbohydrate fat or protein,
correct? It's not that it doesn't matter. It's the 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. Out of say is either one is a viable
strategy.
Great. What about protein? As a fuel
as an actual feel? 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're out in the wilderness for a week, okay? And it's cold out there and you need to make a fire. 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 need to create a fire going to use that fire to energy and heat up. Okay, I said great the
We first place, you would probably start to make that fire is the match. You like the match and any match a it's going to light immediately but it's probably going to last five to 20 seconds. I don't know before it burns out. That's phosphocreatine.
Real fast, real brains 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, 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 entirely. If we might burns the gaps, I don't know, right? Depends on them. Which type of newspaper is I guess, right? Amazing. That's carbohydrate right. If you were really smart, you would use that. So then light of peace.
Of wood on fire and a wood. If you've been in the wilderness, it can 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 stored 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, all those things, but energetically basically fat will never ever be your limiting factor performance. So, when we start talking about 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 that is, is 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
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 100% 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
How do you make paper butts
fibrous? You combine it with water that you it gets pressed. It gets compressed.
Yeah, it's made from wood.
How do you make a match? It's made from wood.
What's carbohydrate? A chain of carbon was fat, a chain of carbon. These are similar molecules right there, meant to give you a pros and cons is 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're out in the woods with me and we were trying to make a fire and you're like, hey look, I found some old
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 going to 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 is just an incredibly poor choice. Your body will do it again maybe 5 to 10%, 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 near 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 are 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.
A of metal which is going to be very difficult, it's a very high commodity in the woods or the Wilderness to have something like metal
for people, that consume very low carbohydrate or 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 reached a certain level of adaptation, you've just gotten extremely good at generating glucose from other,
He's 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, Jesus, very little concern here. But if you are 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
We bad and slowly 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 can 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. It's probably like their Weapon. It's very effective. It is a really good strategy for weight management for energy stabilization throughout the day and the
I would very much support
that in 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 mostly 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 a cake.
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 managed to control their weight, very readily and like that diet. For that reason, when we had Lain Norton, on the podcast, he pointed out quite aptly. That in order to lose weight, you have to restrict
Something either worse time or macronutrients etcetera 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 received as 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 classic list of nine adaptations that exercise can induce the first for of course, being largely largely unrelated to today's
Conversation. But that were covered in the episode that we did on strength speed and hypertrophy so just to remind people the nine out up tations, our number-one skill and technique to Speed 3 power which is speed times Force for 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.
Put and finishing at number 9 with long-duration exercise. So if we could start with muscular endurance, this would be number 6 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.
So remember muscular endurance is something that's going to be generally in a local muscle. It is not a cardiovascular or systemic if you 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 give, here's how many pushups 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 in like that. So, how long can I stand without breaking posture? This is muscular
endurance, a plank, a wall
sit great. Yes, love all these things. Okay, now the
Took you on that big long metabolism. Journey is so I could help. You understand exactly how to train this Factor, any of these factors? With a more comprehensive understanding of what's Happening. Meaning thinking about the metabolism. If I'm going to ask my triceps to do 50, pushups 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.
And 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 waist. 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 pick 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, your
Lutz and you are, they small muscle group, for example, nobody ever threw up after 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 in 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.
Great. So
the reason I'm laughing because 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 received or obtain the progress that I've wanted to do 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 wanted. I have however vomited after a long run when I didn't, I
Right. Well sure. If I drink too much water. Sure. Oh sure. Too much water. Yeah, you'll get that out quick, right? I just want to be clear because I think some people are getting the picture that if they're not vomiting at them after their leg workout that they're not training, according to your standards Again, by the way, dr. Andy Gavin runs experiments in his lab. He's recruiting subjects are
also known as my graduate
students. That's right in a bat, sorry to interrupt, but I felt it was great. Accessory Interruption so muscular
endurance.
There's plenty of fuel, plenty of fuel, you manage acid buildup. And you also need to get that fuel out of you. That's going to be a capitalization 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 capitalization 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
Of the better. You are at dispersing. Any of these waste products build up whether it's CO2 or the acid. So, the adaptation you're looking for here is an increase in capitalization 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 and say under a minute or something like that. So getting the mobilization into the mitochondria getting fuel. That way too slow. That's not really going to get our performance here. So what our strategies to increase acid
Buffering ability. And then the capitalization. So, on the capitalization side, you simply need to train at that ability. So you go close to failure and practice that often, that alone will increase increase blood flow to that local area, which will get take you through your process of increasing capitalization. Easy-peasy specificity. So
either just to briefly interrupt, I find it remarkable, although not surprising given how amazing the human body is.
Simply by doing some movement, repeat like a wall said or a or push-ups or dips for that matter. Repeatedly over and over and over until you reach that failure Point. Yep, there were that quaking point in the case of a wall set that provides a stimulus for more capillaries to be built into the system. Literally the production or the the trafficking of endothelial cells, which make up the capillaries and exact allow basically more little
Pipes to feed the system with oxygen and remove waste
products like irrigation, right? Imagine you had a giant field, 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 off shooting little pipes and the more those you have the more coverage
you get,
Do we know what the specific signal is? That says, hey I failed at this. We need more
capillaries. I actually don't know what that is. I could I would speculate It's a combination of acidity as well as carbon dioxide and probably some nitric oxide stuff happening there but I actually don't
know, I'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.
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 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, uh, exercise choice,
Voice. 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, how I do wall sits two failures and push-ups to failure given that this is a local process. I'm guessing that. If I do push-ups to failure, I'm not going to increase the number of capillaries in my legs very much,
correct. So 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 to plank, hold the plank, you can 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, they're
okay. In terms of exercise order as well as this dovetails with volume. Yeah can I combine training? Let's say wall sets 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. Yep, absolutely. Again, pick the exercises. You want the moving patterns you want to do and do them. The order Almost Doesn't Matter What the one caveat with larger muscle groups, particularly again, multiple leg activities that will induce 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 compromised 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 for us in general my recommendation, those do the bigger muscle group first, how many sets and how often should one perform training for muscular endurance?
And when now 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 percent of your one or Max. Because if you go higher than that, the repetition counts going to fall and you're no longer going to be training while scare 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 Moscow.
That's relative to traditional hypertrophy straining because the load is very, very light. So you can do these more frequently. If you would
like more frequently such as
you can 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 and do less days, that would be fine. So if you want to do two days a week and you say wanted to do, let's say you could do 25 push-ups and the goal.
Liz 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. And we 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 that 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 and again this is not about hypertrophy. This is about muscular.
Endurance. So I do want to emphasize and again please correct me if I'm talking out of line here. Do you 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 percent where
there's a big cross over here. So anytime we're talking past like 15 reps were 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 and then people grow and then you landed still right in the middle of hyper tree-ring, right? So like for people are like, oh my gosh, like every time I lift weights, I blow up. I go lighter, I do more reps and I, you're still writing hypertrophy.
Some, they'd actually be much better off training very, very heavy in the 123, rep range. Think they'd get really strong, and they wouldn't grow much. Exactly. So, tell me if this is a reasonable protocol for what I'm going to call the typical person.
In my mind, the typical person somebody who hopefully is doing resistance training, hitting that 10 sets, per muscle group per week minimum. Yep. 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 high intensity workout. Here. Are there some Sprints? Maybe, some Plyometrics, some skill-based training and doing a bunch of different things. Yep, to be 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 out up. Tations to the exclusion of the others.
That person decide, okay? After they do their longer run, they're going to do Max time plank, to Max duration, they're going to do wall set to Max duration. And then you do pushups, the 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 again on their so-called rest day. Just a real quick.
It's a door and in doing so build more capillaries into the relevant, muscle groups and build their muscular endurance. Yep. Without eating into their overall recovery too much.
Too much. Yeah. So again, the nice part about this is they don't Hammer you too much. You're not going to get tremendous this or if you keep the load light, the only switch I would make there is, I would probably do them after your interval rather than before. So, you can make sure you keep quality there, 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.
The interval training so that would work fantastic. The only other variable we haven't hit on Heroes 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 in place that would meet at a tad time
time. Yep. And if in if you run into a wall there
just like the same Concepts we talked about was strength and hypertrophy back it down to more like in the 80 or 85 percent 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 of the processes 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 Rose, either. Same thing would be happening here.
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 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,
O, c 8 with anaerobic
capacity. 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 build up my products, not fatigue as in like mentally. I don't want to do this anymore. So if we just think about the energetic 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. Tomatoes 30 on 30 off things like this. Like this is what we're talking about in this kind of anaerobic capacity area now
Here's what's going to happen is fat going to be your limiting know. We're already made that clear. Right? What about carbohydrates? Well, if it's a single bout or a 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 Michael muscle glycogen.
In any of those cases, oh, 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 got to continue, you will actually cruise into a robic glycolysis. This is exactly why the community that I have worked a lot with professional fighters. Very high-level boxers, world champions UFC,
L, it is a five minute round that you're going to do 5 times. This is for world championship fight to 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. Even though the individual ballots are 30 seconds long, the entire thing lasts so long it is primarily aerobic. You have to have both capacities, got to get really high anaerobic. You also have to have a lot of aerobic going on you how you're going to start running into limitations.
Of heart rate, stroke volume and then even potentially ventilation. The need for oxygen to be able to come in and clear. The carbon dioxide totally out of the system becomes a problem because not only are you having so much build-up for such a long time, you're also using multiple muscle groups. So, now this is a very important distinction. Must go. Endurance tends to be localized. Now, this is not
Right? If you're doing these intervals, you're on an assault bike. You're sprinting up a hill. Your grappling of somebody, you have a lot of muscles being involved, which means, all of that waste, is being dumped into the central part. You have to clear and I'm by clear dynami, not out of the muscle, I mean, out of the body. So your ability to bring in and utilize oxygen is going to be a major limitation to your ability to handle this stuff. So what do you do?
Well, specificity wins practice the exact thing you're talking about. So if you want to get better at sprinting, the straightaways and walk in the corners do that.
You can't always do it though. You're going to run into limitations. So this is when backing off to a lower intensity is going to give you a lot of benefits. We know very clearly if you want to improve cardiovascular fitness, high-intensity moderate intensity and low intensity or effective and you actually probably want to do a little bit of all of them. This is why none of our Fighters whatever just do high intensity training. There's going to be some moderate. We tend to call this like cardiac output training, you can think of this
As like anywhere between Zone to Zone 4, if you like zones I don't use them personally. So I'm just going to
intentionally interrupt you because this issue of zones has come up a few times. I want to make sure everybody's on the same page. You also mentioned that you don't necessarily favor, the Zone nomenclature but for those not familiar with Zone. 1 2 3 4 all the way up to 5 is a back of the envelope type.
Verbiage and some people and is more precisely followed by four other people. Meaning, for me, Zone 1 is simply walking. Easy walking Zone to would be for anybody, the pace or intensity of exercise. That one could perform while still maintaining a conversation. But just barely meaning. If you were to push any harder than it would be difficult to hold that conversation. Then you'd be in zone.
And then Zone 3 4 5 as I understand them are a little bit vague but maybe you could give us a sense of the breathing patterns associated with each of the zones so that people could map to those when we discuss Zone 1 through 5. And as I say all this, I certainly tip my hat to all of those people out there who like to measure percent of maximum heart rate, they like to use, heart rate, monitors, they're using
Any number of different devices. I sometimes use those devices, but in general, I tend not to, and I use my breathing as a Rough Guide of which zone I'm in. So before we go back to specific protocols for anaerobic capacity, tell me how you think about Zone 1 through 5 and how people might be able to assess whether or not they are in zone. 1, 2, 3, or 4 or
5 great. So zone 5, is that absolute top thing and we can flag ourselves there. I like tell you flagged one and two the distinction between 34 and
I've, I'm less concerned with either, we will do some heart rate stuff, but not to identify what zone around the fact is the distinction between those zones is basically just made up, right, that? Not that it's fake, but there's no, like rationale
there. It's a little bit like perceived effort in weightlifting. You know, how are you at 100% output or 70%? You know, when you're at zero and, you know, when you're at a hundred in that moment, but the difference between 60 and 70 is anybody's guess,
Totally. So we use or the relevance, right? So, why does it matter if I'm at 60 or 70 is they're actually your friend, there's not right? It doesn't really matter. In that regard, if you are 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 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 Mackenzie 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, and gave me the
permission to. Thank you, Brian. Brian is a good friend of ours. And I do think that 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. Yeah, great. So
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 2 to 3? S 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 was mean to be ventilating, more than you need which actually sends that re are up higher than it needs to be which kicks you hire into carbohydrate utilization. If you're supposed to be in quote unquote Zone 1, 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 carbohydrates.
Tabassum it should be
efficient Nas. And so this would be getting into an argument with somebody while on a long walk. You feel exhausted afterwards or an over breathing?
Yeah, totally right. Okay. Yeah, so you should be able to breathe at a specific Cadence in generally, people are doing that more frequently than the night than they need right. Zone to rather gear to is inhaling and exhaling, at whatever rate you needed to be. But still nasal only. So it is a force.
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 is the fuel source but you're still able to control that and restrictive, who nasal breathing. Now, Gear 3 and 4, which is our final ones. There's no gear five Gear. 3 & 4 is like a subtle distinction. I actually don't even care about the difference there. I basically use gear 12 and then that's for, but you're basically talking about either a nose to mouth strategy,
Or a straight-up mouth mouth, right?
So breathing in through the nose out through the
mouth. If 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 do is enter the nose out through the mouth. Again, I wasn't even care about this tension. I basically jump from 2 to 4. I Brian May do it differently. I don't actually know for is just mouth mouth, right? And this is the case in most sporting applications you're going to be breathing.
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 write we practice a lot. Trying to stay nasal only for as long as possible but that's going to have 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 to go your mouth unless you're an absolute freak is
It 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 percent while breathing through your nose. I know some people get hired but that's the general distinction. So we pay much more attention to those particular gears, then we do heart rate
zones and zone 5 would be just pure mouth-breathing all out. When they hear
your life, the gear systems just 124 there's no fifth gear. Got it. So the gear for would again be mouth-breathing as much in as you can bring as much as you can
out, got it.
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 in 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 as he'll say, let's just hold our breath. Now, until we hit that piling or that lifeguard stand on the
Each and within seconds, you actually can start to panic Absol. 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 yeah, probably not running out of oxygen at those lower. Intensity is no question or simply building up carbon dioxide and that gasp reflex is screaming to go off, and you're actively
suppressing it. Yeah. So the interesting test here is your CO2 Tolerance on.
On Ryan'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, nonreactive, you can be responsive but nonreactive to elevations in CO2. So you should see them and feel them. But you should be choosing how you respond rather than another reaction there are interesting data looking.
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 app 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 of anaerobic, anaerobic metabolism it
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 prop.
So we're turning to anaerobic capacity this morning. We were training. Not together, I couldn't keep up with your work out, but I, but in the same general space and I did my once a week, maximum heart rate, one minute Sprint on the assault bike sometimes.
Do more minutes, meaning, I will do a 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 gain more and more painful. Mmm, there was a quit signal going off. In my head you said there's real magic that occurs around second 40 and indeed somewhere around s 44.
Whatever reason, it seemed easier but at the one-minute, Mark, I was happy to stop because I was really at least what fell to me. 100% output. Yeah, 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 raised? It is important. That is, if I want to train in aerobic capacity for sprinting, I probably should have been sprinting cycling. I was only assault bike and so on.
How many of those one minute all out Sprint's or 30-second all-out Sprint 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? Not necessarily. So in this particular case, if you have a specific goal, yes, of course, do it?
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 this pot, 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 come from with you. Also secondarily want to be careful cautious of heaviiy centric 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 I rower is great. Swimming is amazing running uphill generally more favorable than running on normal ground, especially for not Runner, don't run downhill, that's a lot. He's Centric load. I don't love things like box.
She jumps here, right? Because again a lot of eccentric loading, if suppose, you can jump up line in the Box, step down. But now you're again, you're too many things going with your mind. I don't want to slip and fall. I want to smash my shin on the box. What happens if I'm too many variables?
Pick something that it 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 movements meaning should I do the assault bike and then some form of safe executable overhead pressing, its little heart, it's a little harder to imagine anaerobic capacity for the upper body unless you have access.
Access to a skier or one of these. What are those things called the climber machines? Yeah, the first climber the Versa climber, that's the one, the verse the climber you can tell how often I do that one. Huh. It's
a great exit is so great piece of exercise equipment.
Yeah, so we're thinking how many, how many, how many exercises and in what order is it going to be two or three exercises into your involving? A lot of muscle
groups. Typically that's what really distinction. Generally, these are going to be total body movements so you can do something like a skier. If
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 to me, complexity things going on. So I generally am going to pick total body movements pushing a sled dragging, a sled, sprinting, uphill swimming. These things like that are going to be
good. 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 that and the consequences of a technical breakdown are minimal. Your is 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,
The consequences of making a technical mistake, you might actually get an acute injury right there. So they're just a little bit higher in the risk
scale. How many sets or sometimes referred to as repeats? Yep. So how many 30 to 60 seconds all-out Sprint. 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.
Do them in the same workout.
Yeah. If 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 going to do an air bike. One day you can do some Hill Sprints and other day and then you can do some swimming another day.
For the sake of example, I'm going to say same movement because 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 and an Arrow Diner, assault bike, a rower things of that sort. Yeah, you're gonna
have a pro and a con here so the pro of doing less sets a, 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 I'll do 20 seconds on 10 seconds off and I'll do that for four.
80 rounds. You're not really actually going that hard. I was 20 seconds. So a key. In fact, if you look at the literature and all the buzz 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 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 enhance mitochondrial biogenesis and 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 a, how many sets per week. It's really hard to give a number, unlike the strength training stuff where he was easy to kind of have some stuff on a typical thing. You'll see is like a minimum bill of tends to be something like four rounds per day. Three times per
week. Wow, 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, two, 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 generally like to say, give me a minimum of one day a week to
spatter days per week, how many rounds, whatever
it takes you to get to that maximum heart rate, right?
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 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 you, 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 in addition, if you're really reaching past this, 90 seconds of Hell window,
It's just going to do a lot more damage, the system not damage than bad but is in legs a lot to recover here. So we need more recovery time from that a 20 second. Burst doesn't really challenge you to challenge. Using that 22nd should put your be recovered in 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, a couple of things to pay play with the be something like this.
If you want to try like a classic 30 seconds on 30 seconds off protocol, the literature will show like a minimum 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 want 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 6, 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 endocrine and logical problems and some other sleep issues and some other things kick in and we'll talk about more of those things as later, but that's a 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 is doing like one to 120 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, I'm going to wager a, an offer to you. And if you say, okay, then 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.
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 Sprint's 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 minute per week
threshold. Yep. Actually I think one of the Marty Kabbalah is the scientist Canadian guy, amazing work. He's done a lot of the research on high intensity interval stuff. Right. And I think the number he actually threw out there. 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 vo2max improvements and he saw equal, if not greater improvements of VO2 max with that. So I think actually the name of his book might be like this six minute workout or something and it. So you'd like may have nailed that directly on the head
purely by luck. But
actually by Also may be wrong about numbers. We should probably fact check that
bag will and also by inference from what you were saying. You know, if you're going to do this, 20 seconds on 40 seconds off, 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,
Q is for 5 to 6 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 about 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, 1 Zone,
totally totally
Hit it again. If you're new to the one minute thing like you do, I actually generally encourage one, two, 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 you'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.
Op 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 that though you need to give me three minutes of neighs only breathing. Before you go back to work,
we need to down regulate of that and there are people in my life that would love for me to engage in more nasal breathing because you'll have me speaking less. So no problem. Chances are. I'm going to use the two or three workouts per week of one minute all out.
Maybe I'll try the shorter protocol.
Can I give you one fun protocol to try here? Please. So, if you have a, you can use this on any equipment, but I learned this from another mutual, friend, candy cane. This is a great little, it's a little test, little a little game. You can play with yourself and the only way to play this game as you're going to lose, which is really, really lovely. So you can do this at any do Raider. 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
no distance. So this could be running cycling, the the air because 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, is 400 meters and it doesn't matter how long it takes you.
It may take you two minutes and five seconds to minutes and 10 seconds, because your little bit fatigued from round one, round three, you're gonna go now, come back and do that. Exact same time domain that you did in round 2. So, if it took you two minutes and five seconds in round 2, 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 M, 410 meters, then 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 any rest between rounds? Yeah, two minutes.
Always two minutes. Rest, you
don't have to, but this would be my
recommendation. Kenny king came up with
us. I don't know if he came up with it, he taught me
well. Thank you both know, Kenny and he's an incredibly nice and Incredibly skilled trainer. I'm going to call it the sugar cane. Yeah, it's so great because it sounds really painful and if
you go out too hard and round 1, you're in such big trouble around.
If you go to easy and round 1, you're going to get absolutely obliterated in round 3. 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 for a week. So progression is the last part of this whole thing that we haven't got to yet before we move on. 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 5% or so every week or you can add around
Which is a really nice way. So in the research studies that have been done, they're going to do things like week, one, you'll do three rounds. We to you'll do four rounds. R agree, you'll go five rounds. You like add around 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 gold more intensely,
correct. It, you know, get further distance in your 30 seconds or you're 45.
It's 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.
One rest to work ratio. So I'm probably going to rest 40 to 60 seconds. That's true. That's to make sure that 22nd verse 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 restoration, the quality of those 30 seconds is going to come down, but the acid buffering is going to be extraordinarily challenged.
I'll 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, two, one. You're going to be working a little bit of a different thing, but that's exactly how we
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 3 is maybe one all-out effort and we're done
there. Let's talk about the specific protocols and adaptations related to maximum.
Mm, aerobic, output or maximum aerobic capacity, is that sometimes
called sure. Now, we're moving past like that couple of minute range into like the, you know, five to Fifteen 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.
I'm 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. That'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 work out. No doubt about it. Clearing out, waste products is going to be a huge issue but really oxygen demand delivery 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 means to be a little bit at that exact same. So a classic thing, here is a one-mile fast, right? This is going to last for most people somewhere between five and ten 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?
Can exercise you're comfortable with that. You can actually do and you can progressively increase in terms of the intensity, you're not going to be have to stop and change your exercise. You're not going to move around, is like a, circuit isn't great here because you got to put one Implement down. Pick up another one. You want to be doing something where there is literally not a second of off switch. So similar exercise Choice principles, we just covered
If you going to become a real Savage and you want to do repeats here, you can endurance, folks will do that a lot 1, mile repeats, 800 meter repeats, things like that. Or I'm not sure what the swimming distance equivalents would be, but swimmers we do this constantly, but you don't need to, this is really hard. It's pretty hard in the system. It's very good for you 12 twice a week of hitting this. I think you'll be in a really, really good spot frequency. We sort of just covered, we have covered, exercise, Choice volume, you just sort of nailed and intensity is
Basically running you up to the top there now because you can only do that. So often you want to add in another 40 or so percent of your time, being lower intensity support, work for that. So this is something probably less than 85% of your heart rate, but higher than quote, unquote is Zone. 2. You got to be working here. This is not, I could have a conversation paste. This is higher than that. It's in between conversation pace and the pace. I need to be at to run my fastest mile of ever done. That's that middle.
I'll ground and you need to train that so that you can continue to work on capitalization auctioning Transportation but you're not burning down the house, getting all the way up to 100 100 plus percent of your VO2
max.
Could I use a crude version of this? Where I say, okay, I'm going to exercise for 10 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 he's not 10 minutes, love
it.
Probably not on the same day that I'm doing the anaerobic capacity work.
Probably not
if you want to be okay to do after a strength training or hypertrophy workout, as long as I didn't train legs,
you could
Is probably going to compromise 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 want to do something like speed or power, then you can roll right into this and have no problem. May be a strength day, hypertrophy day. I'm not sure you do there because egg 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 going to be compromised
And you don't want to feel this because 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 is 60, second bouts with sufficient rest and I'm going to give myself ten minutes a week of my case. You'll probably be running as fast as I can because I do enjoy running and I can do it safely. Maybe uphill and see how far I
go. Yep, if you want to combine the two,
So if you're 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? Maybe do one of each that still gets you at quote-unquote two days per week where you're going to hit a hot maximum heart rate. So we have to check that box off. So one day can be a shorter, length interval, repeat one and the other one can simply be a five to Fifteen minute, maximum work, and you're done
long duration.
Endurance, exercise. The stereotypical endurance exercise. Sure.
How far, how long, how fast or how slow ship rather, 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 got to be something that I can do for a long while without getting injured. Overuse injuries,
there's a little bit of novelty. We can actually throw in here. So one of the things I love to
Do for long-duration, endurance for people who don't love running cycling or swimming. Is you can do the really cool work out 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 farmers carries. And you'll do that for say, three minutes and you'll set those down and you'll go straight into a plank for a minute. You pick that up and you go straight into maybe body weight squats.
For two minutes. Then you go straight into another exercise and you shoot, you can sort of rotate things around. 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 accomplished and not feel like you're doing. Oh my gosh, this mind numbing type of training. If it feels like that to you, another way you can do that to actually even simplify it even more. We've done this, that candy canes, Jim, plenty of times where you just made.
Even pick three machines. So you're going to, I'm going to go 10 minutes on the rower, and I'm going to go 10 minutes on the treadmill and I'm going to 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 will do things like put a very low load. I'm talking sub 50 percent of your max on a barbell and you're going to squat and you're going to do, you know, maybe a minute.
It, you're going to put that down and then you going to go over and do 50% of a bench press is 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 and any individual movement, the load is very very light and you can keep heart rate biscuit 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 give a 200.
£95 NFL player to run for 30 minutes, which is not going to be good.
I'm just chuckling because I love to run outdoors and I've enjoyed runs on all my travels and I find it to be a great way to see different places, but 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, corrector all but fat burning system. And yet I do have a question, which is, can you build enhanced micro capillary systems into the muscles by doing this long duration card?
Yeah, absolutely 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. Steady state endurance is very important,
Portent.
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 of position, where fatigue of the intercoastal starts to play so diaphragm. It fatigue starts to run an indication. 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.
Goes back to its 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 in you're squeezing, the contract, the 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 and aerobic glycolysis and clear out waste products so we don't really see pH being a problem with this type of exercise. You may start
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 stroke volume issue, but an intensity is not high enough to become a problem. You're more likely to break down posture lie or breathing mechanics then, 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 and 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, they finish
Shhhh that's generally because we saw a massive technical breakdown. You're done like you're over there, not always the case during all year round of training but this is something that really pay attention to. So if you're on that bike and you're 40 seconds in and all the sudden posture source for crunching over, I made stop the test. I may stop the training. It's like no, well, we decided failure was is when you lost your Technique.
To some sufficient level. 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.
Tell me if the protocol I'm about to describe would be a reasonable one for people to incorporate.
60 to 120 Minutes of long-duration work per week.
So, one way to accomplish that I often use is to head out for a weight vested hike. It's not a heavy weight vests, maybe I think it's eight or ten pounds, it's one of these thinner ones and if people don't have access to that, you can bring a backpack with sort of items in it. I mean, it can be as simple as an
external load can just be your body.
That's okay. Great. And and do some hiking at a fast enough clip that breathing harder than I would be if I just kind of shuffled along
Oh yeah, I might stop here. Their drink some water, no big deal but I can carry on a conversation if I need to. So it's and zone. Two ish. But probably pushing a little bit harder than that for that duration. Yeah, 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. Yeah but doing that all in one Long Afternoon typically.
Weekend or doing two shorter sessions throughout the week, maybe 45 minutes and 45 minutes and then working up the progression to longer longer duration. It seems like that would be something that most people should be able to do. Yep. 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. Okay, that's a fine version to do it. If you want to go shorter and
Ring up the intensity a little bit, so you want to keep it more to the 30 to 60 Minute range and go, you know, 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 with either one of the higher intensity stuff we talked about. So we can be roped into the same thing. It could be its own independent day, could be your sort of active recovery day tends to be fairly restorative 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 those if you're that type of person who like even on your off, that you have to do something physical, this is fine, right? If you want to do it on a lift,
Day, especially if it's a power strength day. It's probably fine if you want to do it before the workout or after it either way, you're probably okay, probably best. Dude, 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 find their, 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 go and so you could 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,
A minute
walk.
Nice. Slow nasal breathing for second inhale.
For second and a half. Maybe 50 play with the numbers a little bit, then maybe you don't even need to do the down-regulation breathing after jumping. 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.
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
Ten minutes of the of running or sprinting on the bike or rower once a week. We're talking about six minutes or so of the much higher intensity. But short bouts divided in two rounds of 20 to 20 seconds to a minute with, with rest in between, and then some longer duration work out 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 write out their front door or at home and as
Well, now you don't need any specialized equipment to do that. Oh, and I forgot the muscular endurance that wasn't trying to cheat their the 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 and 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 going to 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 in my 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 not leaving aside issues of strength and hypertrophy, which word covered in the previous episode. Will I be fit? I mean, to my mind, the ability to, you know, Sprint very fast if one needs to the ability to go longer.
If one needs to and the ability to do something in between as well as you know 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?
If we remember the target, which is, I want to have energy. I want to look a certain way and you wanna 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 when we 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.
Since 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, energies their fatigue is there. I'm not going to get tired or have to quit or stop or sit down doing any of these activities at one. At the same time, if you look at the literature on mortality, one of the strongest predictors of how
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.
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.
To deal 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, Sprint's would be expected to improve their longer duration, work, and how perhaps they're longer duration, work can progress if they are careful to include
Dude, some planks in some wall sits and 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 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 to varying degrees or to get better at endurance, or to get better at everything over. All right, now, I'd really like to just focus on what you think is a nice Contour of a program for the
Some 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 happened to be their endurance
event. Okay, great. So let's just give an example. Maybe you want to run your first half marathon, something like that. Okay, maybe down a couple times before, but you want to get better at that time. I would probably put somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70% of your, you know, mileage in the moderate intensity.
City's own. 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 my late. Okay? So in addition, we talked about how even training in that 70 to 85 percent heart. Rate zone is quite effective at oxygen delivery fee.
Utilization capitalization, Etc. 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 in 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% of that in that like 22nd 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 22nd 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
I've so 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 can do a half marathon and maybe around two hours or so something like that. And so you want 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.
Same time. That's actually how you bump your mileage up. So instead of having to just 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. 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
Hop in 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, study State stuff and just sort of saying I'm going to run a 5-mile. This was we can do six miles next week and stamina said that might work for you is 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 sub optimal strategy so it could work but we
can do better. And in terms of the structure of our
I'm like this, I realize that those structures vary tremendously, different coaches and different books in 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% 30% divide where 70% is going toward the specific event, you doing the kind of work that you're going to do during the specific event that you're most interested in cultivating or improving teacher and the remaining 30% coming from other sorts of supporting work.
How should one thing about Distributing that other 30%? Should it be all geared towards maximizing recovery for the 70%? Or in other words, could I do all that 30% work on one day,
I probably was split into two days. That's the reality. So if you're thinking man, coach wants me to train six days a week, my schedule is tight, I can pull off for 250k great. What I might say is two of those days are just your
- what like a runner would call this like Temple training kind of in that space -
with Tempo. Training is justly disliked, the
imported 80 percent 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 on for sure work, but it's not absolutely the fastest you can Sprint and it's also not conversation.
So, this would be the, what?
Before we refer to, as the Ten Minutes of fast running or ten minutes of fast, ruined, this is lower.
Intensity than that, got it? This is. This is work. Accumulation got it. This is practiced up then one of the days a week. I would probably enter in that 20 second, 30, second bursts, 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 vo2max, something like that. So, that's probably how
Reagan 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 pretty good split.
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 cellar
The underpinnings of that and even sub seller, underpinnings of what endurance adaptations are and how to Foster those through specific protocols things. That not only I can do tomorrow, but it, I will do tomorrow and where I hid, my pain points, I'll understand what's happening and the adaptation that I'm triggering, when my legs are burning, or I'm sucking 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
thing 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 and you beautifully Illustrated, the relationship between energy utilization and breathing. And the fact that we literally exhale fat to some extent of course. So once again. Thank you. Thank you and thank you. I know I'm not alone in recognizing this information as incredibly, interesting and actionable. And indeed, I do plan to put it into action, as I hope many of our listeners will
As
well yet again, the pleasure is actually all mine and I actually really appreciate the fact that you let me go so far in the metabolism, my PhD is in human by one or Jetix so anytime I can go many hours in the metabolism. I get very excited and I don't typically get that leash in this format so I appreciate that. I know you understand your audience will love that. Hopefully.
Oh, They'll love it and I think that they will especially love it because they understand that. If one
Wrap their head around, even just a small fraction of the mechanisms that underlie given protocol, it gives both tremendous depth and meaning to that protocol and makes it so much more flexible for people that 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 here. We covered a lot of ground with speed development in strength and hypertrophy and now we walk through probably several hours here of of endurance.
It's 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
Must have this Evergreen sustainable, year-long period, ization structure, that covers all the nose I need to. If I want everything, we've talked about in these nine out up, tations in this short Series. So I would love to do that in our next
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Outcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost. You can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to huberman lab.com, go to the menu and click on newsletter you provide us your email. We do not share it with anybody and as I mentioned before it's completely zero cost by going to huberman lab.com. You can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example, newsletters from months passed. Thank you. Once again, for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with dr. Andy Galpin. And as always, thank you for your
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