Dr. Andy Galpin: How to Build Physical Endurance & Lose Fat | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[Music] 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 our professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine today's episode is the third in the sixth episode series on fitness exercise and performance today's episode is all about endurance and fat loss that is the specific protocols required to achieve the four different kinds of endurance and how to maximize fat loss Dr Andy Galpin great to be back today we're going to talk about endurance and I'm very interested in this conversation because I like many other people strive to get a certain amount of cardiovascular work in each week maybe a long-ish jog maybe a swim ride the bike Etc but when I think about the word endurance the idea that almost immediately comes to mind is about doing something for a long period of time repeatedly but I have a feeling that there are other ways to trigger this adaptation that we call the endurance adaptation so 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 is calling back to some of the things we talked about our previous conversations which are really people exercise for three reasons number one you want to feel better number two you want to look a certain way and then number three you want to be able to do that for a long time right so you need the way that we say it in sports is look good feel good play good right so I want some sort of functionality to be able to perform a certain way whatever that is for you you want to be able to look a certain way that whatever that matters for you and then you want to be able to do that for a long time so when it comes to endurance we have a bunch of misnomers here which is the same thing with the strength training and resistance exercise side where we wanted to dispel this myth that I lift weights only because I I want to gain muscle or play a sport and I want to do cardio because I want to leave their loose fat or for long Health sake and just like we smashed that myth from the strength training side I want to smash it from the endurance training side there are so many other reasons that you want to perform endurance training regardless of your goal right whether it is longevity whether it is performance or whether it is Aesthetics and so we're gonna I want to cover all those reasons uh exactly what to do Protocols of course and why those things are working that way in general though the quick answer is really endurance comes down to two independent factors Factor number one is fatigue management and then Factor number two is fueling and that's all it really comes down to so all the different types of training are going to reach a limitation which are either again your ability to deal with some sort of fatigue and that's generally a fatigue signal the other one is managing some sort of restriction of energy input and a lot of the spoiler here is a lot of the times people think it's a fueling issue and really it's a fatigue management issue or the opposite and to have a complete Health Spectrum regardless of whether you're a high performance athlete like I typically deal with or general public you need to be able to do both manage fatigue as well as understand fuel storage so that's really what we're going to get into today fantastic I can't wait before we dive in I'm going to ask you what I often ask people who are expert in their respective fields which is is there any non-obvious tool or mechanism or tool end mechanism that can allow people to access better endurance you know when I think about training for endurance again I think about trying to run longer and longer each week yeah or Swim further and further and so on but I do wonder whether or not there are other forms of training that can amplify the endurance adaptation that I or most people perhaps don't think of as endurance sure the way I want to answer this is if we look back and think about how we've answered that question with power and strength in 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 endurance really comes down to your ability to maintain proper mechanics that's going 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 the mechanical thing I would go after first is your breathing techniques your pattern your entire approach as well as your posture and then from there the third one would be your movement technique is it possible to describe the best way to breathe when doing an endurance training or is it far more complex than that and if it is far more complex than that then certainly we can get into it during today's episode yeah it is both of those I will give you a quick answer though a lot of the times you can kind of Hit the cheat code which is nasal breathing there's plenty of times when you don't want to nasal breathe you don't need your 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 in the right positions the second one would be simply looking at your posture right so whether you're on a bike or you're doing a lift or you're running if you're literally uh 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 um doing a Sprint and I asked Andy Dr Galpin to critique my form and anything else he wanted to critique so that I could improve and he did comment on my rather c-shaped posture correct um encouraging me to be more upright which I should probably do now as well and he also cued me to the fact that during a one minute Sprint there is something that is quote unquote magic that happens right about the 42nd Mark and I use that as a um as a milestone uh to look for and indeed something does happen at the 42nd it's into a one minute Sprint where all of a sudden it it does seem to get much easier for reasons I don't understand maybe you can to tell it that but it certainly had nothing to do with my posture my posture needs Improvement thank you well yeah so um breathing mechanics and breathing strategies uh people tend to be over breathing early on and this is going to lead to problems later so having a more strategic breathing pattern and approach is again a very quick solution I know that we're going to dive very deep into the mechanisms of Energy and Metabolism and endurance today but as long as we're having a discussion about these um briefs or tidbits of how to improve endurance are there any other ways to improve endurance that that are of relatively short time investment even if they require a lot of um energy sure the classic Paradigm you'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 misconceptions here the quick answer is you need to be doing both and there's probably a bunch of stuff in between that you should be practicing if you honestly want to maximize those three factories 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 the 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 the oh I'm going to do 30 or 45 minutes of steady state stuff that's it or I'm gonna do the opposite which I'm going to leave that stuff on the table not do it because I only want to do high intensity intervals because I can get it done in five minutes so there's Magic on both sides of the equation we want to get into all that but just to answer your question directly there's a whole bunch of of things you can do um 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 championed this idea that's called exercise snacks so there's a bunch of there's a series of studies that have been done here that are really interesting and they've looked at a couple of things that are noteworthy one of them is a 20-second bout of all out work and this is actually done in workers in an office and so what they have them do is run upstairs and I believe it was about 60 steps is what it took them something along the order of 20 seconds exactly and they repeated that about once every four hours so really it's you go to work you get you know put your coffee and your bag down whatever you run up a flight of stairs 20 seconds later then you go right back to work at lunch and before you go home you sort of repeat it there and if you repeat that that's multiple times a week you're going to do that I think they in one of the interventions it was three times a week for six weeks 18 total times you did that and what you'll see is a noticeable Improvement this is statistically significant improvements in cardiorespiratory Fitness specifically VO2 max 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 shower you don't have to do anything like that just find the stairs run up and down them a few times now you may have noticed um you actually sort of caught me yesterday I did that right here right I was just I we had a little bit of a break I was feeling an energy lull I ran up the stairs three or four times felt a lot better so that can actually also help they ran another study where they looked at that following a giant high glycemic index meal and what they saw and then they took insulin measures and a whole bunch of um other biological markers Associated that you want to pay attention to the high glycemic index meal and they looked at those immediately an hour three hours six hours as opposed and it was very clear that same intervention was able to improve post-planned yell glucose control insulin and a whole bunch of other factors in addition to that so if you are the sort of type who's like wow I'm in an office all day maybe also had a giant high glycemic index meal not the best approach but a little bit of mitigation there can just be running up a flight of stairs or doing something like that for as little as 20 seconds so there's a lot of magic and power and maximal exertion if one does not have access to a flight of stairs at work could they do jumping jacks absolutely I mean you could do anything you really wanted it's not the mode of exercise that matters here it is simply the exertion you just get up as hard as you can you could do burpees you could do any number of things you could Sprint down your road down the hallway back and forth the mode is is just uh something that was easy for the scientists to control and X number of steps people could do it you're not going to fall hurt yourself things like that just to remind me it's once every four hours one minute of all 20 seconds oh 20 seconds excuse me uh 20 seconds of essentially all out exertion yep while remaining safe not going so fast up the stairs or doing jumping jacks certainly not down the stairs up the stairs please um escalators don't count well I suppose they count if they're uh you know if you're if you're moving uh if you're not remaining on the same steps um in fact in an airport recently I saw somebody walking against the oh there you go the conveyor yeah while talking on the phone while waiting for their flight to take off and I thought it's genius right it looked a little awkward who cares yeah but it was I have looked awkward in every airport I've been in for the last 15 years for those exact reasons doing wild stuff like that yeah 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 the the other fit test the suitcase carrier yeah I'm in the airport I love this so once every four hours 20 seconds so maybe once when arriving to work once four hours in and then four hours most people probably work somewhere you know eight plus or minus two hours now one thing I actually really want to make clear because your audience is so incredible um they tend to be really excited about these protocols and they follow them exactly as written that's not exactly how science works so it doesn't necessarily have to be every four hours it's in half three three times a day it doesn't have to be 20 seconds they literally built that protocol because it was so they're trying to replicate a real life scenario maybe you're in an office building you're generally there for eight hours Let's see if you did one every sort of so if you want to do it four times a week great if you can do it only 10 seconds amazing you're probably going to get the same benefits those are not the details to pay attention to the detail to pay attention to is every so often multiple times a day try to get your heart rate up really quickly it 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 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 the airbike and I will just smash out 30 seconds as fast as I can and then walk right back in love it yeah I'm gonna start yeah just also you can just put one of those things which I do also just put one in your office and hop over right over there 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 galpin'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 momentous momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality the huberman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentous for several important reasons first of all as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient formulations you can devise the most logical and effective and cost-effective supplementation regimen for your goals in addition momentous supplement ship internationally and this is of course important because we realize that many of the huberman Lab podcast listeners reside outside the United States if you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the huberman Lab podcast in particular supplements for Hormone Health for Sleep optimization for Focus as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery you can go to live momentous spelled ous so that's livemomentis.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your blood glucose using a continuous glucose monitor many people 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whatever those may be work exercise enjoyment paying attention focus all that stuff great that's one thing another thing you want to ask your body to do is I want to be able to repeat some small effort in a muscle group and 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 10 flights of steps and my quads aren't burning at the end of it right or it even gives me energy another thing you'll want to ask your body to do is to be able to perform a tremendous amount of work for a longer period of time something in the realm of you know 20 to 80 seconds so this could be something like if you're surfing and you've got to paddle extremely hard for a minute to get on on top of a wave or you want to you 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 efforts for some small amount of time and then you'll get back up there we tend to call that maximum anaerobic capacity so that the max amount of work you can perform at a higher 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 5 to 15 minutes and this example would be run a mile right some some interval like that which is a longer distance right that is going to be your maximum aerobic capacity okay 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 whatever those shapes and positions need to be okay and then the last one is a maximum distance so you won't be able to go for a longer hike or have just a long day at Disneyland for whatever it needs to be and feel great at the end of it right so the goal with all of these things is not can you just do them but can you do them and then you feel good afterwards so we're back in a right position where they give you energy you feel good about it and it's not just something you had to do and you regretted and you felt awful so those are the factors I think about when someone says I want better endurance is I want to walk backwards and say okay when you say endurance what do you mean and that's generally the things I've come across 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 recovery is going to be excellent and your physical performance in the gym or in any of the sporting activities you do will be enhanced given what you told us a little bit earlier that endurance really reflects fatigue and management and energy production how do each and both of those things relate to endurance at a mechanistic level 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 in 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 failing because of energy production issues so if we walk through a little bit of how we make energy and how we handle fatigue then we're going to have a better understanding of exactly what to do for each one of these categories if you feel like one of them in particular is worse for you or lagging behind or if in general you just want to improve all of them all right now I want to make a little bit of a 90 degree turn here I'm going to do it with strategy though I promise and I want to ask you a very simple question how do you lose weight 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 then I burn then I'll gain weight sure that is the approach you would take what I'm asking really is how are 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 intra visceral fat and that we can also use protein as a fuel and then as I recall there's also a phosphocreatine system and I think 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 say decide because they don't have their own Consciousness but are um our flip signals are signaling in a way that registers that body fat would be the optimal fuel source given how long or into and 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 uh how is it actually leaving the body correct uh 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 does 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 queued up to when you take a breath in you're generally breathing in oxygen O2 that's some other things but we'll just stick to oxygen when you exhale you're breathing out CO2 the difference between those two is that carbon molecule well one of the things that's important to understand here is all of your carbohydrates which is that word itself is a carbon that has been hydrated so it is a carbon molecule attached to a water molecule it is a simple chain of carbons your fat molecules are also chains of 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 then floating around in free form which is bad news internally so we've got to figure out a way to get that carbon out of our system so all of energy production all of fatigue management really comes down to this core issue of how are we handling carbon and how are we moving it around the body and so what we do is we do this sneaky thing so another question I'd like to ask people is why do we breathe well for two reasons uh to bring oxygen into the system and to offload carbon dioxide but the neural trigger for breathing is when carbon dioxide hits a threshold level and the set of neurons in the brain stem and elsewhere uh activate the phrenic nerve or the gas 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 sort of changes right in general it's an elevation in CO2 that's going to stimulate breathing off the only reason you bring in O2 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 a fire to go and if you use quelch oxygen the fire will go out right that's about half of um how those like fire extinguishers work but we think then that means oxygen is the fuel it is not the fuel it is something entirely different it is a necessary Pro it 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 humans so a plant will breathe in CO2 and exhale O2 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 O2 CO2 balance in our atmosphere we do the opposite so we have this wonderful circle of life we breathe in O2 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 to understand that structure a little bit so if we think about triglycerides it is a three carbon backbone chain of glycerol so one two three 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 three in the back and then three chains coming off of it each of those chains are called fatty acids and each of those fatty acids are a length of carbon right or a number of carbons strung together however many carbons are there determines which type of fatty acid it is right so stearic acid linoleic acid like any different number of things it's also what determines whether or not it is a monounsaturated or polyunsaturated as if carbon requires a special thing called a double bond so if there's a double bond across every carbon and carbon then they're all fully saturated and you're 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 it 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 that it inhales and use the energy from the Sun to form a bond now in our prior discussion when we're going over hypertrophy we talked about the energy that was required to go through protein synthesis that's because forming a new atom or a new bond between atoms oftentimes takes energy in this cases 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 the basically think about it is that's what it eats it needs to get nitrogen from the ground in the soil just like we need to get nitrogen from our protein but fuel wise it needs to get carbon dioxide then it needs sun to give it energy so it can actually form that Bond right that's what it's getting its fuel from all right so if we think about um a classic uh 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 and 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'll convert it into the fruit and it's going to eventually transform that stuff into smaller carbon things called fructose and if we think about the fruit are the sugar in fruit it's often in the form of fructose or sucrose or a combination and sometimes glucose so we have these smaller carbon six carbon chains generally in the form of glucose that are being made from this larger storage of uh carbohydrates that we call um starch right so it's packed in together your body does the exact same thing so if it's a potato and it has a whole bunch of glucose packed away we call that starch if it's in your quadricep and we pack about a whole bunch of glucose Away We Now call it glycogen if it's in your blood as that six carbon chain we call it glucose if it's in the tree and in the fruit we call it fructose right those are different molecules but that's effectively the same thing happens so the biology or the chemistry is almost identical it just runs in the reverse order and that's why again at tubers and potatoes and stuff tend to be starches and fruits tend to be glucose fructose of sucrose so we have this a wonderful Circle of Life 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 form of stored carbon to get that into our system we then pack that away we put the carbohydrates as you mentioned earlier either on our liver our blood or in our muscles we put the fat generally in adipose tissue we'll put a little bit in muscle cells as intramuscular triglycerides and then the protein will use as structure right to do different things we don't like to use protein as material or fuel it's better used as structure and what we have to do then is if all of a sudden we realize that storage is getting too much in our body in other words we're gaining too much weight we have to figure out how to get the carbons out of our body and that is metabolism right anytime we're trying to break a carbon bonds though we can get energy to make ATP that's going to release the carbon out of our tissue into the blood we have to bring in oxygen to bind that carbon molecule to make CO2 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 caloric state for instance has it ever been explored as to whether increasing the duration or intensity of exhales can accelerate fat loss I mean that's sort of The Logical extension of what you described and here I'm actually interested equally in whether or not the answer is yes as well as whether it could be no because I could imagine if the answer is yes well then there's some interesting protocols to emerge from that but that if it's no it will reveal to us some important bottlenecks about metabolism and energy utilization you ever seen those magicians who like show up and uh they can tell your mom's name or something like that before you because they can sort of hold you down 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 in an incredible magician a named um I think his name was Ozzy mind or something uh I think that's right had me write my 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 in my life I wasn't a a collaborator with him and to this day it still gives me chills because it well I 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 just like 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 right you landed perfectly so I look like a like a a magician over here I feel like I should look in my right shoe right now no I asked the question because it's the logical extension of what you laid out but I know biology to be um both uh 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 in physiology that's the saying no free passes the answer to your question is yes 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 in carbonate that's what a calorie is Right calories the amount of energy we get per breaking a carbon Bond so it's really Less in less more out less in is fairly obvious whether that comes in any form and by the way this is exactly why the percentage of your intake coming from fats or carbohydrate it doesn't really matter that much if you look at fat loss clinical trials you guys may have covered this when Lane was in here I'm sure like this is something he talks about a lot it doesn't matter it's irrelevant because it's not about that there's nothing magic in those things they are different they have different physiological responses everything is different right no duh but in general it's just simply about carbon intake turns out fat has a lot more carbons per mole than carbohydrates do so there's more calories per mole in there so if you the physical amount of fat needs to come in as a smaller amount physical amount of carbohydrates these are coming it will come in as a larger amount but you can play any number of very high carb low fat what matters total calories right again it's not like the only thing that matters but you know what I'm saying some percentages in the way can go fat loss Works fantastic high fat low carbohydrate why why do all these things work because that's not about that it's about total intake of carbon total Expo 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 airline bike when you did anything right the question is can you think of a scenario in which you could have a bunch of increased rates of exhalation that helps in Fat Loss sure I can think of a lot of things that will stimulate increased rates of exhalation one thing could be simply going right and so the question is like can I literally do some breath protocols where I force exhale and lose fat and the answer is yes but what happens what happens if you do hyperventilation training well my lab studies cyclic hyperventilation is one of our many uh 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 stressed and unless they are consciously trying to Anchor their thinking about what that means and the benefits that to persisting typically they abort the cyclic hyperventilation protocol really quickly within seconds right you will feel tingling sweating all kinds of things you're hyperventilating right and we could we could talk a nauseam about how that changes everything from adrenaline to focus to a whole bunch of things so unfortunately a strategy of sitting around just exhaling more than you inhale technically helps you lose more fat but it's not going to last very long so then the question is well how do I get 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 hypocapny and hypercapnia issues any idea of a situation in which you would have an enhanced rate of explanation without worrying about passing out sure 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 to that they have equal success in fat loss it doesn't matter theoretically where you're getting it from and so when we get into this idea of well what are the best training strategies for fat loss it doesn't matter which one of these tactics you pick as long as you maintain a consistent adherence over time because of this exact fact it doesn't matter if you're burning quote unquote fat in the exercise session or if you're burning carbohydrates in the exercise session it is totally irrelevant to your net fat loss over time okay now there's some significant misconceptions there about what I just talked and I would love to come back and walk through that in more detail but that's the main take-home message here it won't matter what's coming in and it won't matter what's coming out because in either case it is the same rate of oxygen in and CO2 out that's the key metric and hopefully this helps a lot of people have some relief because they're like man you're so tied up on what is the exact protocol for training for optimizing fat loss what's the exact nutritional intervention I need for fat loss and then you wonder why all these different diets can work effectively and wonder why all these different training protocols you know surely you know somebody who lost a bunch of weight and the only thing they did is they just started running there was no Advanced protocol they just started running and they ran five miles every day that works and then tons of people who tried that and like didn't lose anything and lots of people who went to I went to cardio kickboxing class lost weight oh I just started doing intervals on my law why why mysteriously you'll do all these things work they had you have something had some spidey sense have to has 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 the output over the course today is not going to change unless you increase the demand for energy and that's how you get into that negative state along these lines of exhaling carbons as the route for fat loss it makes me wonder whether or not increasing lung capacity is possible I'm guessing the answer is 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 a more efficient fat loss machine it's a wonderful thought and the answer would be no not something you 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 as Q for some odd reasons it's either seal or q and cardiac output is heart rate multiplied by stroke volume so it's how many beats per minute you're having as well as how much blood's coming out of it so cardiac output is actually very specific to energy needs if you try to work around that it's just going to adjust itself so what I mean by this is if you were able to increase your stroke volumes the amount of blood coming out per pump you would automatically adjust reduce your heart rate so that you keep cardiac output exact to energetic demands so you're sort of pushing one end of 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 and any type of endurance training a common thing people will understand is resting heart rate and so what that number is is just how many beats per minute you're having when you're sitting here doing nothing a very positive adaptation is a lowering of that resting rate over time as general numbers what you will hear is people will say things like a normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 80 beats per minute and you know if any of the things I've talked about um 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 to the next level whether this is professional athletes trying to to Peak for physical performance or uh the folks in our rapid Health optimization program that feel good again it's not disease stuff and they want to feel incredible one of the metrics we're going to pay attention to is this resting heart rate so here's what happens as you improve your endurance your resting heart rate will go down if I see somebody over 70 beats per minute um unless something's going on you're not physically fed regardless of whether or not that is quote unquote within the normative values I want to see everybody's sub 60 beats per minute or close right and 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 Alpha stays the same so what happens is stroke volume goes up so literally like we trained your quadriceps on the Legacy engine machine to get stronger so you can produce more Force per contraction the heart will do the exact same thing and so as you're able to get more of the blood out of your heart per pump the heart realizes I don't need to pump as often so that's the compensatory adaptation which is saying hey look I don't need to beat 60 times a minute I now need to beat 55 times a minute because I'm getting the same amount of Blood Out per pump chill and this is why your resting heart rate goes down your resting stroke volume goes up but your cardiac output is identical so that's not a good metric of Fitness it's going to stay the same cardiac output will only adjust for energetic changes all 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 air am I bringing in and putting out that's going to determine cardiac output and that's going to determine where we're at if you were to do like a sub maximal exercise test when you were unfit to when you're fit or when you're fit the way you're super fit at sub Max you're going to see the same thing cardiac output will be identical and you're like damn nothing happened what you're not realizing is your heart rate at that same workload is now lower and that's efficiency because your stroke volume is higher where it gets people tripped up is at Max because you may not see much of a change at Max because you won't really you don't really see an increase in maximum heart rate with Fitness that's not a thing right so maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for fit or unfit or anything like that stroke volume will get limited eventually by filling capacity of your heart it has to have so much time to fill up with blood before it can contract again and squeeze the blood out and when you have a heart rate of 200 beats per minute that just doesn't leave much time to fill and so it won't really push you past that so don't worry about trying to increase your maximum heart rate that's not necessarily a good thing and it won't really change but your cardiac health 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 foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012. so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast the reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it covers my vitamins my minerals and the probiotics are especially important to me athletic greens also contains adaptogens which are critical for recovering from stress from exercise from work or just general life if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin d3k2 again if you'd like to try athletic greens go to athleticreens.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 tissues and indeed out of the body through exhalation how do each of these different modes of energy utilization relate to different modes of movement and exercise yeah in my mind I'm starting to draw a bridge between okay when I walk for 60 minutes you know if I'm talking I'm breathing a bit more maybe I'm burning a little more fat after all speech is a modified exhale um and amazing if I'm sprinting um breathing differently and if I'm um 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 better Define modes of exercise or types of exercise that trigger specific adaptations I think this is where the the bridge will move from being a a mere line to a real structure yeah absolutely I want to lay one more foundational piece and then it's going to be much easier to understand the limitations I put on some of these training protocols 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 when we were exercising you're like training fasted right does training fasted enhance fat loss and the logic is sound if I don't have any fuel then I should be burning more fat therefore I should be losing more fat it's sound it's not true is this great idea it's one of these classic things in science and exercise physiology where like sounds good turns out it's not it's actually a pretty gross misunderstanding of metabolism so it's not to pick on that topic I don't really care about that topic but it is a it's a common question it also gives me an opportunity to just tell you more about metabolism so here's what happens you're breathing in O2 and breathing out CO2 however the ratio to that is what we call the either rer respiratory exchange ratio or RQ respiratory quotient and I'm not going to differentiate those two they're not the same thing but we're going to skip past that for now as you begin to increase exercise intensity the percentage of o2 to CO2 rises in the favor of CO2 so you start breathing out way more CO2 than you are breathing in O2 right and so if we were to look at that number you know once the relationship Echoes up so at rest most people have a of a value that we would typically call something like 0.6 okay and that's again the relationship between O2 and CO2 maybe 0.7 if you were to go for a walk that increases slightly because you're now expiring CO2 at a higher rate so now you've moved up to say 0.8 or something like that one of the ways that we Mark somebody of achieving an actual VO2 max on a test is if that value exceeds 1.1 now any of you who are paying attention are thinking wait a minute how the hell can a ratio between two things ever get past one well that's because you're getting in a place where you're actually offloading more CO2 than is actually necessary and this is what actually causes and explains a thing that people like to call Epoch which is excess exercise post oxygen consumption this is another way to think about it the only reason you're breathing is to bring in oxygen when offloads CO2 right if I'm no longer exercising why am I still breathing in other words once you stop the demand or the need for for energy you should stop ventilating but you don't right that's because in the case of low intensity exercise the second you stop you're right back down to resting ventilation no problem because you were able to match the need for energy with the offload of waste one to one during that exercise when you start creeping up the intensity you can't do that so you have to basically start stealing 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 specifically mean you have to bring in oxygen because you have a whole bunch of waste 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 got to be able to handle that so the reason that you sit there and go and continue to ventilate is because you're now trying to pay back that excess post exercise oxygen debt that's that oxygen debt we're specifically talking about all right so that being said as we start cruising up that RQ starts going up up up up up up up and if we get to one your 1.0 you're 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 yeah a window into Dr Annie galpin's mind now you really want to be a subject in his uh his laboratory study sure masochists swarm to Andy's lab absolutely all right so the idea that I will lose more fat by being in an exercise situation that is burning more fat it seems to make sense but it's a massive failure to understand the metabolism it's the exact same explanation to like 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 um just because we didn't eat breakfast that morning so that just doesn't make energetic sense we have a lot of backup supplies you're never out the trick here is this is there's a there's a concept here we call crossover concept so as we are starting to move up exercise intensity we start burning a higher percentage of our fuel from carbohydrates and a lower percentage of our fuel coming from fat I'm sleeping that's the highest percentage of your fuel that will be coming from fat of any activity you could ever do so if the theory that I'm going to stay at a lower intensity to burn more fat was true the optimal fat burning strategy would then be to sleep like that doesn't make sense of course it doesn't so why would then going at a slightly elevated rate somehow all of a sudden magically make you lose fat it doesn't actually make sense when you think about that where you're like oh yeah there's no way so it's a percentage trick it's a difference between absolute and relative this is what this confusion is so yes as you start doing lower intensity exercise whether you're faster than audit it's irrelevant but lower intensity exercise a greater percentage of your fuel is coming from fat however your total fuel expenditure is very low so that whole total carbon balance is not really being shifted much as you start exercising 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 you're sleeping you might be 70 but you'll never be in a position ever no matter what sort of thing you've heard on the internet you'll never be in a situation where fat is your only fuel source the highest I've probably ever seen is like 70 percent um you should probably beat about that that's a kind of a good number to think um honestly but people will understand a little bit about metabolism to be dangerous but not enough we'll we'll throw out these terms like fat adapted and fat adapted is a real thing but is a massive misunderstanding oftentimes right it is this idea thinking like I can get into 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 a lot of the confusion that's happening right so as we start moving up we can never get in a position where we're using fat only as a fuel again at best you're at 70 fat 30 carbohydrate for a lot of reasons we probably just don't have time to get into today however the opposite is possible when you get into true high intensity exercise you'll be basically 100 carbohydrate and zero percent fat all right that is very possible that in fact is 1.0 that's what our Q 1.1 is actually because your ventilation got so high you actually exceeded that number even though you're at 100 carbohydrate this is what people came up with the idea then it's like whoa I don't want to burn carbs I want to lose fat so my response to that is always like okay great so it makes sense burning fat losing fat burning carbs is losing what then like you think your liver shrunk like wait a minute what did you lose then where'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 phallus 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 there was that love handle sitting on the side of me how did that come out of me if I never burned that from my 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 burned some liver glycogen the body understands that it has expelled a lot of energy from that side of the equation it's going to do a couple of things now it's very difficult to go through this fancy situation where you convert carbohydrates into fat and back and forth like that's actually like fairly hard what'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 a lot 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 carbohydrate storages as I'm hearing this uh 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'm also understanding that reducing one's body carbohydrate stores muscle glycogen liver glycogen Etc occurs during high intensity exercise yep as well as other ways but that is one very efficient way to tap into those stores which makes me wonder again this is one of these things that does it lead to a protocol makes me wonder whether or not doing high intensity let's say weight training for 45 to 60 Minutes 75 minutes of strength training power training hypertrophy training which we've covered in an episode about those topics and then doing some steady state cardiovascular exercise is there any benefit to that arrangement that would quote unquote enhance body fat loss from the body to be very specific now because unlike the idea that training fasted would shift the bias towards fat loss which it doesn't you've told us under those conditions muscle glycogen and maybe even liver glycogen is going to be depleted put simply can I enhance body fat loss by doing some cardio after a bout of weight training if you equate for total energy expenditure it won't matter now that you did bring up a very important point that I want to clarify if you look at the exercise modalities that we laid out in our previous uh 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 speed power and skill development have almost no benefit for fat loss because remember those are low weight a lot of rest and low volume they're not really 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 what you want to do you were close in my opinion is do a combination of something in the hypertrophy slash muscular endurance strength training realm okay so um six to Thirty 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 of uh hypertrophy type training if you're training hard with low responsibils and you really did an hour you would for sure get there but most people don't because the reason why I crave large bowls of oatmeal and rice after I do weight training yeah and replenish muscle glycogen totally right um then you maybe do a little bit of very high intensity maximum heart rate well overview to Max uh 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 replenishing 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 sort of last Last Resort yeah basic mechanics here which will which we'll actually get into as our like third segment here is energy production comes from the local exercising muscle first and foremost from phosphocreatine and carbohydrate stores right and so again and we store it in a muscle we call it glycogen right that's it'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 electrolyte 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 lose blood pressure it won't 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 going 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 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 you can play that game you can rob Peter to pay Paul for a long time and tell your liver runs out and that's what actually is a bonk in terms of like long duration endurance stuff you're talking 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 into a problem you can continue to train when your muscle glycogen levels are low in fact people say glycogen depletion and muscle but it's it's generally misnomer and you are going to have tremendous signals of fatigue when that number gets lower than 75 percent so people think that like their muscles are getting heavy you're probably still 75 full a lot of folks will quit around the 50 the highest I've ever seen is like 95 true depletion and that's an extremely high level cross-country skiers and like they're deltoid it's 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 depleted you're gonna 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 if you've ever been to like a marathon and you've seen people run like 25 and a half miles and then they just like Bonk they go into like baby deers walking stands 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 it ain't mentally weak it is if your liver is done it's gonna stop you because there's no more backup reserves muscle you can get away with you can 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 being depleted sends a neural signal to the brain or the brain must register some signal like I would like to be alive tomorrow thank you whatever is happening right now um stopping is going to be safer than continuing yeah and so that stop signal um is is one that I think a lot of people including myself are are intrigued by because we always think that it's uh 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 automaton type um you know not thinking just doing type uh Behavior you have override 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 then you realize really quickly 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're really only 10 percent depleted or 30 or 40 or something we're all operating 40 of what we could do of course any of those things are true because it is like a little bit of an override um 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 um you just you're going to break quickly because you basically learn to ignore that signal 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 you know 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 air dime bike and do a little Sprint yeah go for a jog maybe um 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 am I 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 uh you asked this because I did a very poor job on that last Point talking about earlier I'm realizing playing back in my head because that's so many really good questions you cannot turn fat into muscle can you turn muscle into fat no I'm so glad you said that because when I was 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 that I that myth has 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 uh undergraduate students from other faculty and such so um no like they're not the same structures they are very different um let me take you out on answering this better you're really really close so yeah if you were to do that type of exercise where you've burned a lot of muscle glycogen how is it I'm losing stored fat right that's really the Crux of the question and it doesn't even actually matter if you then went ahead and ingested carbohydrates or fat post exercise that's not really a thing you hit on a couple of key things number one this is all under the assumption that total caloric intake is still low right you have a total need it's below 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 all right so don't don't go nuts about that you have to be hypocaloric one way or the other if you burn a bunch of muscle glycogen and you are hyper caloric you're still going to add fat if you burn a muscle glycogen and you're hypochloric you're going to lose fat right think about it this way you're in a negative calorie state where are those calories going to come from are you going to reduce your muscle glycogen storages permanently no no are you going to reduce your glycogen storage in your liver no you want to reduce blood glucose no no way right so where is that extra energy coming from it's coming from your stored fat it is your backup Reserve Energy System um the way that I want to fly this here is people tend to think about it as like carbohydrates versus fat that's not it's more like a chain more like a bicycle where there's a front gear and a back gear you turn one gear it turns the other one these are complementary systems they are not and or systems right you're turning one and when we go through carbohydrate metabolism maybe here in a second you'll understand why you have to have an anaerobic and an aerobic component to that there is absolutely no way to complete carbohydrate metabolism without oxygen that has to happen the only way to engage in fat metabolism is aerobic and oxygen there's no anaerobic component to it there's a fundamental 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 meant to be Unlimited that's the basic point so you want flexibility over here and an unlimited capacity over there now I'm safeguarded against any energetic need okay I need to run up a hill for safety cool carbohydrates are there I need to then run for 17 hours cool fat is there we want both of these systems 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 up right get it into the brain get thinking better get thinking clearly fast so we want all these not just for exercise purposes for but for activities of daily living we want an optimal system here and when people use the terms like fat adapted they're generally hijacking that and they're thinking it used to be a thing we said all the time and like all of my undergraduate classes for years and that idea of metabolic flexibility is using optimal fuel sources and optimal types not maximizing fat usage the people have co-opted that term of metabolic flexibility to be like oh yeah yeah therefore learn how to maximize fat burning that's not what that term means that term means maximizing your ability to use whatever fuel is optimal in that time now I'll Grant you most people aren't fantastic and using fat as a fuel source relative to the other direction but nonetheless the the gold standard here should be maximizing both all right 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 in that hypochloric state is going to say hey look we have a lot of muscle glycogen we have to replenish so any carbohydrate that comes in needs to be biased towards storage it's got to go into those tissue any fat that comes in or doesn't even come in but any fat that we're using for fuel needs to be utilized for activity and that's where the caloric expenditure from fat comes in so you're basically saying you're General physiology the energy for that starts coming from fat and the energy that's coming in from carbohydrate needs to be simply stored and so what you see is your respiratory quotient changes right the rer is going is going off and so in the exercise moment it shot way up for carbohydrates and shot way down for fat as the compensatory response it goes the other direction because your body's saying we are low on carbohydrates don't use them for fuel unless we absolutely have to right so use them for storage get our fuel from the fat side of the equation and so what you're generally going to say is like oh I'm burning more fat 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 over time so um 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 and 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 um you know if is there a straightforward-ish equation you know if one adds one pound of of lean muscle tissue to their body even if it's distributed across multiple muscle groups does that equate to a caloric need of X number of calories per day and is that because of the muscle protein synthesis needs of that muscle or it's 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 your ffmi is 24 and you're 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 but fat is not inert so fat is still going to burn a small number of calories muscle burns more but it's not nearly what people think it is I'm a muscle guy I'm a muscle physiologist I would love to get people to have more muscle for any excuse I can it's not honest to say that though you're talking about when I was in undergraduate we would say numbers like 50 Cake House 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 um it's hard to know exactly what that number is but the more recent estimates are 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's super meaningful it just depends on time domain you want to put that out right so if you were to put on five pounds of muscle and your basal metabolic rate went up 30 or 40 calories a day well over the course of a thousand days like that actually adds up so you you could slice this any way you want um now maybe that number somewhere in between I don't really know it's not a field I paid that much attention to candidly because it's not a metric kind of like epoch um where it's like we used to really harp on it and now it's sort of 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 there are other consequences that are going to make fat loss hard and so you need to have sufficient muscle if the additional caloric expenditure is the carrot great if it's something else I don't really care there's just enough evidence that you need to have it or I should say there's enough evidence that it will really help you in your path um maybe 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 Choice a day well out kick almost any amount of coverage you got on adding muscle mass to you so like you're really stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime if you're worried about how many calories you're getting from adding muscle um fat loss is going to be about regulating that carbon intake above and beyond anything else I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test one issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors Etc but you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy they have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are of course but then also what sorts of Behavioral do's and don'ts what sorts of nutritional changes what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try inside tracker you can visit insidetracker.com huberman to get 20 off any of inside tracker's plans again that's insidetracker.com 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 glycolically dominated you don't want to be optimally metabolically flexible you don't want to be super quote unquote fat adapted you want to be biased towards the energy you're going to use the same could be true for the other end of the spectrum so in those particular cases it's not optimal to be equally effective because there are no free passes in physiology right your energy producing systems will up regulator down regulate accordingly so you will actually limit your ability to say maximally utilized 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 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 to emphasize not a single one of these tests that I'm about to walk you through automatically means you can't use fat as a fuel or the other case which is maybe you're poor using carbohydrate as a fuel 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 LED 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 why these are not specific Diagnostics but as a basic measure we talked about blood glucose levels um you know a lot of people will say again you want that to be something like between 80 and 90 um milligrams per deciliter is the blood glucose level and you can go look at the the cutoff points for what determines to be pre-diabetic and type 2 diabetic Etc um what I can actually recommend um this is there's a little bit of science here actually that I'll walk you through but a lot of this is my personal preference um 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 uh every single point increase above 85 increases your likelihood of developing type 2 diabetes by about 6 percent okay great so technically while maybe 90 or 95 or even up to 100 are you know in the quote-unquote normative values that's one clue again it's not definitive by itself doesn't mean anything you need to really pay attention to what increasing by six percent actually means but it's a data point where I'm looking at if I actually then see symptomology and we run you through maybe some questionnaires ask how you're feeling throughout the day and we see uncontrolled energy about so you're a lot of energy then get really really tired and swings okay another data point all right and we may patch a few of these things together that may give me some Clues um 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 um the only thing people should care about right it can be a thing that can also be unrelated there are reasons you could have blood glucose concentrations at this level or energy swings that are unrelated to carbohydrate ingestion at all all right so one test you can either run in addition to that if you're going to get blood glucose measured you can look at some markers we talked about earlier Richard AST and ALT what we talked about how you can kind of look at that AST to LT ratio before you can actually do the inverse which is look at alt and AST the kind of normative value there you're going to look at is like 0.8 I actually like to see it lower than that and that alone has been actually associated with blood glucose dysregulation and so if you've seen multiple of science again we're looking for patterns and patterns and patterns in both in our case biomarkers symptomology and performance and now you're if all three of those things are lining up you may have an issue so performance wise a couple of little tests you can run um ideally you have some sort of standard workout you do oh and hopefully it's it's pretty objective so in other words like uh I run the same 15 minute Loop every morning for my cardio okay great how long does it take you to run that Loop like you could pick whatever distance it doesn't really matter what's your heart rate during that thing and then what's your perceived exertion now you should be able to do that fasted with very little drop in performance okay if you can do that then that tells me you're fairly good at using a fat as a fuel source if however the one day you go to do your standard workout and you feel awful fasting that may be another clue that perhaps you're not very good at dialing in that system if your recovery afterwards in terms of heart rate recovery is very long it may be another clue that you have a poor utilization of fat as a fuel source the inverse can also be true so if I give you something in the neighborhood of like 50 or so grams of carbohydrate and 30 minutes later your face is falling off the table that's a good sign that you're in the opposite you're actually very very very poor utilizing carbohydrate as a fuel and the reason I bring that up is um that is equally a problem we send we hear people a lot make comments um like man I have to stay away from carbs I crash really hard if I do them that has a what that actually means is you're very poor at utilizing carbohydrates as fuel you're getting a your uh your sensitivity is way off we should be able to have carbohydrate at a reasonable dosage 50 grams and not fall asleep 30 minutes later or have to run to caffeine 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 uh for exercise the reason I ask is I think I fall into that category yep um I do consume some complex carbohydrates and fruit post resistance training and that tends to be when I'm hungriest for them but typically unless I'm I've just done some resistance training I keep most of my daytime meals relatively low carbohydrate and then in the evening I prefer slightly less protein and more carbohydrate because it has this effect of um sedating me a little bit yeah and I sleep well and I know this runs against what everyone was taught which is to not eat carbohydrates late in the day but I like it because then I tend to wake up in the morning with at least as far as I can tell my glycogen stores not necessarily topped off but but certainly filled yep um 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 um one little sneaky thing you threw in there is actually the use of caffeine so that's another sign if if you have to have caffeine to do your fasted training that's generally another sign you're not very good at using fuel so I use caffeine prior to resistance training workouts generally I don't need it for any kind of cardiovascular training yeah and when I say that it doesn't mean it's bad it's just like another clue that's like okay you should be able to do this without having to have caffeine to execute it now using caffeine to get a better result is sort of different as an ergogenic aid um we actually use a lot of high carbohydrate meals at the end of the day a lot of the times for our athletes who are cutting weight or trying to reduce weight so it is a fantastic way to handle a lot of things and that idea that if you eat carbs late at night that'll increase fat so like that's all is so old and so well destroyed scientifically that that's not a concern um there's just so much data showing in fact there's so much data on like eating timing is is uh generally poorly understood about when you can eat and what you can eat eating in the morning um versus eating at night like a lot of what we've heard in there is stuff in maybe we just saved that for sort of another day because we're going to get really far down that's about our weekend yeah but yes I think our plan is to cover that in an episode on nutrition um okay which is in this series the uh the only thing that would add to it is you know would you hear about ingesting carbohydrate late at night I should just say that uh at least in my case I'm eating the majority of my carbohydrate unless I trained yeah resistance trained early in the day and which guess I I post resistance training um in the last meal of the day but for me that's not really late at night that last meal is somewhere between 6 30 and 7 30 p.m so it's three or so hours or something like that before we go to sleep around 10 10 30 or so yeah so it's not you know midnight uh bowls of pasta I've done that too but um but typically it's not so I think that um people will be very interested uh myself included in how meal timing relates to all of this but um yeah let's so how do you improve fat utilization how do you improve carbohydrate organization let's Hammer both out really quickly um enhancing fat uh utilization is as simple as doing a little bit of work in a either pre-fat ingested state so anytime you ingest a nutrient prior to training you're going to bias towards that nutrient right which is almost what we were talking about earlier so if you want to guarantee you burn more fat eat more fat prior to a workout now you're not going to lose fat but what you're what you're effectively signaling is we have an overabundance of this fuel preferentially Target this fuel now the downside is that may actually hinder your performance that's typically only a concern for people at a very high level um fat is a slower fuel source so if you're relying more upon that your top end is going to come down a little bit and so you wouldn't want to use that strategy prior to race if it is a carbohydrate dependent race all right and in fact we actually see long-term adaptations that would suggest that so the enzymes responsible for carbohydrate metabolism will down regulate and so you'll get worse at that so not not a great strategy there 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 an appropriate eating strategy so the types of food the combinations of food all those things are going to make your post carbohydrate ingestion bunk 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 is if we see a scenario like that we're going to do a whole set of analyzes we're going to go full Labs right probably extensive blood panel urine saliva stool even and we're going to figure out where is that glucose dysregulation coming from so a lot of people think like oh it's a metabolism issue it might be it also might just be a flag that something else is happening in the body so we're going to actually work backwards a lot to try to figure out exactly why that's occurring it may be as simple as oh you're eating a lot of your carbohydrates without any fiber or protein and we know that that's important because those will actually blunt the glycemic index like the rise in blood glucose so it could be a simple thing of just like oh your combination of food is doing it it's not the total amount um it may be something again more endogenous to the actual system uh it could be um a heart rate issue it could be a breathing issue there could be a number of things so the way to get better at it is to Simply train it and specificity is King here so if you want to get better at managing your blood glucose throughout the day so you're not feeling those things it could be a fuel issue but it could be a number of other things and it's just hard to go into all of them with within our time constraint so the Practical tool that I would say here is if you want to get better at managing energy throughout the day make sure that number one your protein is stabilized making sure number two you're ingesting your food in the right combinations ideally with some Fiber and or some protein or both that alone will help stabilize a lot of the problems then you need to train at a high intensity you want to get better at using carbohydrates as a fuel train at a higher intensity and have carbohydrates right before the workout we'll do that a lot if um uh if our if we see folks who are I kind of walk you through the test of identifying if you're not very good at using fat as a fuel the tests for not being good at using carbohydrate is the fuel is both that eating test I talked about as well as performance if you're a very very very slow starter it's just like really hard to get going that generally indicates you might be in a situation where you're not very good at using carbohydrates as a fuel so we're going to practice that we're going to have a pre-carbohydrate pre-exercise carbohydrate meal then we're going to do higher intensity stuff not the point of making you sick and digestive issues all that stuff but we want to get better at using carbohydrates as a fuel faster if you want to get better at doing the opposite then you do that opposite starter either again using the fat prior to the workout knowing your Peak Performance is going to go down a little bit but you're you're investing in adaptation right so it's not about that workout it's about what's going to happen six eight ten weeks from now investment is what you want to think about it or you could bring in some fasted training and so I want to really make sure I clarify when we were talking about it earlier I'm not at all against fasted training it's not it works it's just isn't required for fat loss it isn't required for fat adaptation it is a great option though if you want um what I was hoping to do with that conversation and maybe I didn't articulate that well is to not restrict people but is to open you up and they'll say you have a lot of options if you like to do fasted cardio amazing it is great if you hate it you don't have to you can reach the same performance goals the same physique goals without ever doing it if you love long duration steady state stuff it is great if you hate it there are other options higher intensity stuff again if we're just talking about fat loss so I hope now that that's a little clearer in terms of the same thing with nutrition if you like higher carb great if you like lower carb 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 ingest carbohydrate we'll 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 be before um doing any kind of training the muscles still burn glycogen right or do they have some way to register the amount of circulating carbohydrate that would allow or available carbohydrate in the form of food stuffs uh that would allow them to not tap into their own muscle fiber stores with glycogen all right so the way 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 let's Hold You DNA the second one is the mitochondria and then everything outside of that you've got all these other organelle that do a bunch of things like ribosomes for protein synthesis etc etc all right now when you want to produce energy for exercise anytime you hear the word anaerobic you automatically understand we are meaning without oxygen all right great that all happens in the cytoplasm the cytoplasm is that space that is not the mitochondria not the nucleus so it's the space in between everything else this is like jelly-like substance that sounds there so anaerobic metabolism happens there every single aerobic metabolic process happens in the mitochondria all right why is that important if I go to create cellular energy and I need it the fastest possible I'm going to go for phospho creatine because it is stored directly in the cytoplasm the stoichiometric is one to one there which means for every mole of phosphocreatine I burn I can create one ATP it's one to one it is incredibly fast but it is very limited because think about how much of that could I possibly store in the small size of the cell that's it if I need energy past that point now I'll start using muscle glycogen because that is also stored in the cytoplasm so it is right there the Stoichiometry is not one to one it's a little bit higher probably like four to one so for every molecule of glycogen you burn you're going to get something like four ish some small number of ATP out of that which is great but again you're running into a storage problem how much can I possibly store inside a muscle cell it is very very fast much more effective than phosphor creatine but so there if I then want to metabolize any form of fat or if I want to complete the metabolization of carbohydrates I have to start transferring into the mitochondria now I start getting whole hosts of ATP if you were to fully run through this thing which I'll talk about in a second I'm called the TCA cycle or Krebs cycle you'll get now something like 28 or 30 or 35 kind of depending ATP per so the energetic output is much higher okay so here's exactly what happens then I'm going to walk you through this in the form of carbohydrate and then I'll come backwards and go through fat so remember carbohydrate it is one carbon molecule that has been hydrated so it is one to one so the actual chemistry here it is C H2O one carbon two H one o glucose is a six carbon chain so the chemistry here is C6 h12o6 six carbons six Waters very simple that's a carbohydrate all right so you can imagine if you're watching on the video here you'll you'll see my fingers going nuts I'll try to make sure I explain it to you all just listening in an easy fashion so you've got this chain of six carbons as in front of you and the very first step the 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've got a little bit of energy because you broke that one Bond but not a tremendous amount this is called glycolysis so lysis being the split and you know glycoping like you split glycogen up got a little bit of energy of them all right you formed this three color carbon chain called pyruvate or pyruvic acid okay there's differences there but don't don't kill me General audience friends all right I gotta gotta give this communicate this to everybody so you got a little bit of that now you can't do much past that besides rip one more carbon off of each of those three carbon chains so I've got two three carbon chains I'd have to be careful how I do this with my 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 two carbon chain I have two two concrete chains those are called acetyl-coa all right amazing I have now completed anaerobic glycolysis I've got really nothing left I can do here I made a little bit of ATP now wait a minute I have now freed two carbons because remember I started with six and I splited them apart but I didn't I had two three carbon chains I burned one each I've got two free floating carbons I have to now do 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 ATP for fuel that's called ATP hydrolysis right you have water that comes in you have a condensing 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 floating inorganic phosphate and an adenosine dye phosphate so two over there amazing that actually results because you use water for it results in a free-floating hydrogen ion okay just have to trust me hydrogen H2O any idea what a free floating hydrogen is um it's gonna that's acid yeah it says I was gonna say it's going to increase acidity that's what I said for anyone that's ever measured pH what you're really measuring is the the amount of hydrogen potential hydrogen that's what PH is Right 100 there's two definitions of pH but you get that's 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 um you've got the phosphates which are actually a problem two probably more of a problem Than People realize and that hydrogen what are you going to do with that hydrogen well one thing you can do is actually ship it over to pyruvate and bond it there we have a special name for that little molecule when you have pyruvate and you have a hydrogen attached to it you know what it's called uh hydrogen peroxide lactate lactate lactic acid this is that whole system right again I'm skipping some steps making a little bit of mistakes here intentionally folks just to make this assumed so what happens when you start running a bunch of anaerobic glycolysis you start seeing massive rises in lactate cool not lactic acid right right that's why we see associations between a lot of lactate and a lot of fatigue but the lactate is actually not causing the fatigue the lactate is 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 turned it right back into pyruvate you can run it through this whole cycle as fuel that I'm about to do you can actually actually ship it out of the exercising muscle and ship it into a non-exercising muscle and then go backwards and make glucose what actually liberates hydrogen from from lactate well you like chemically yeah so what what liberates uh what well 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 to or one of the major places that you ship likely to is your heart because it's what we call like the ultimate slow touch 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 the H2O can be used to form water and now we have a place to store the hydrogen got it right cool so as a result of anaerobic glycolysis we have made a little bit of ATP we've created a lot of waste and we don't have anywhere to to go with these end products so when you do anything of a higher intensity and it says I need energy fast you're going to go to this system first right right past ATP because it is the fastest place to get energy but you're not going to get much of it and you've got to deal with the waste products boom right back to the beginning of our conversation endurance is about two things energy production and waste management and we're right we're fatigue buffering this is it right how well can you handle the elevations in hydrogen right drop in PH and how and then what are you going to do with these products if you want to fully metabolize a carbohydrate you then have to take some do something with those pyruvates or those acetyl coase what you're going to do if oxygen is available you will take those things and ship them into the mitochondria they have to go through some cell walls and some other things like that but they're going to get inside there once they're in there that two carbon acetyl-coa runs through this entire cycle that we call the Krebs cycle that's this really interesting place that's where B6 and nmn people are like that's where that whole stuff starts to kick in all your B vitamins basically run that entire circle and you're going to start off the top you have a bunch of fun stuff going on but as a part of that Circle you're going to pull off some some of the hydrogen ions you're going to send these to What's called the electron transport chain that's where you're going to get a ton of ATP out of and as a result about halfway through the turn you're going to pull off one carbon and about halfway through the other almost the other way to the Finish you're going to pull off the second carbon so you're going to take the second acetyl-coa run that entire thing same through as well and so what we did is we started off with a six carbon glucose chain we split it in half we call those pyruvate made a little bit of energy because we broke that one Bond of those two carbons that are in the middle cool those two three carbon molecules we pulled one carbon off of each we brought in sorry we moved those into the mitochondria we brought one off we took a breath brought in some oxygen bonded that Brett took out two CO2 exhales we ran the acetyl-coa through the Krebs cycle one two carbons per turn coming out of CO2 so we had six carbons total as we started and we exited with zero carbons now we have fully metabolized a molecule of carbohydrate that required an anaerobic start and an aerobic finish if you don't have a lot of mitochondria large mitochondria high functioning mitochondria you're going to limit your anaerobic performance because you're going to get they're going to run that door full very very quickly you can't go past it because hydrogen will build up way too fast and one of the things that we know is both temperature and pH run enzyme function so they're going to stop you won't even be able to run through in fact that ATP hydrolysis phase even if I gave you a whole infinite supply of ATP if I put enough acid in there it would stop working because the ATP Ace enzyme needed to split it won't be able to run in a highly acidic environment or a hot environment yeah at some point perhaps today perhaps in a future discussion but still not too far from now we could talk about the role of temperature uh in the uh in pyruvate from in terms of its regulation muscle contraction but I want to make sure I understood something correctly you mentioned these these uh two parallel fuel systems right one is essentially anaerobic right and the other is aerobic you said that if we can't pull enough um if we can't break enough bonds then we limit our anaerobic capacity correct I would have thought given that uh the mitochondria or the site for essentially for aerobic metabolism that we would be limiting our aerobic capacity as well um perhaps you could just clarify for me how these two things are divided or is there not a clean division is it not an either No in fact again I think it's better to think of these things rather as two separate parallel things as one big cycle they're one gear turning the next being compromised in one will compromise the other that I should say reminds me of what you said earlier which is this the bicycle gear analogy that works uh great so if you if you short circuit one basically that the chain can't move that's yeah fantastic okay so um so indeed they they are running in parallel but they are um interdependent yeah well they're actually not even running in parallel because they're actually funneling 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's full it doesn't matter you can't run either system right so it is more of like a again if you're running the bike gears it doesn't really matter if the back one's larger or smaller because if either one is limited your toast because they're running on the same system you can you can you can sneak a little bit here and there but but not much you also really nicely highlighted how lactate this thing that we think of as a a limiting factor like the burn it gets in the way and it's the thing we need to stop and buffer and all all sorts of things sure it's actually really a fuel it's a tremendously effective fuel it is a strongly preferred fuel actually the is this interesting this is a very classic case of Association um correlation versus causation right so the original actually like there's a really cool history on lactate but it was originally found uh I think in Germany um part of my history there um somewhere in Europe in hunted Stags so one of the things is they sort of realized is like if we if we if we harvested a stag in a rest estate when it didn't know we were there versus if we chased it and it was ran down that these lactate concentrations were significantly higher in in the latter situation therefore lactate started immediately getting this association between High fatigue points and it is easy to measure if you were to do any sort of lactate test any sort of metabolic test you will see as fatigue increases lactate will also increase the Assumption there was then oh my gosh is the cause now we know like again it's not the thing it's in large part trying to buffer the negative consequences of ATP hydrolysis and and some other things so it is certainly playing a part in that role but it is not the core driver it's also why you don't need to worry about doing things to quote unquote um reduce lactate in the muscle after exercise or to clear lactate or any of those things you may still want to do those activities but not for that reason lactate's fine you're actually going to use it in 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 does that feel sore sorry you sound harder any number of sources you can also just kind of put it in circulation put a back in the muscle and once enough oxygen is there you can just kick it right back into either glucose or glycogen it's totally fine so it is obviously clear though once that number gets very very high other things are going to be happening they're going to be causing a lot of hurt and this is your managing waste right it 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 example if I do a very short bout 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 I've ingested those or protein for that matter and then as we transition to exercise that goes a little bit longer you know anywhere from you know three to five minutes how do those ratios change and as we transition to longer duration what most people think of as endurance exercise but long duration output of you know 20 minutes or more leading all the way up to a full Marathon how does that change the ratio of fuel sources that are used and I'd be particularly interested in distinguishing between carbohydrate fat and protein that's ingested so coming from food sources or carbohydrate fat and protein that are coming from Storage sites within the body okay great let's start at zero seconds and run all the way through Marathon and we'll we'll flag the distinctions where they start changing as soon as you want to create muscle contraction and power the very first source of energy is phosphoid creatine that's going to power you for zero to maybe say eight to Fifteen twenty seconds of maximal exertion and that's in coming from the muscle fibers themselves yeah that is actually stored in the What's called the cytoplasm so this is a little area of space in the muscle fiber that's sort of like in this jelly-like substance and it's nice because one molecule of phosphoid creatine 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 phospho-creatine 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 this 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 exercising muscle so it's very similar to phosphocreatine that way if you start running low on it you can actually start pulling blood glucose and if blood glucose gets low you'll have to start getting glycogen from the liver to keep that up and we've sort of covered that conversation all right so a little bit of chemistry here just give me a little bit of room here so now remember a carbohydrate is a carbon molecule that has been hydrated so one carbon attached to one water and remember water is H2O most of the time when we're talking about glucose it is in the six carbon chain so six carbons attached to six water molecules all right great when I go to split this up through anaerobic glycolysis it works a little bit like this so you've got this six carbon chain the first step is to snap that thing in half you're going to make two three carbon chains now we broke one Bond right there so we got a little bit of energy but not a tremendous amount at the end of anaerobic glycolysis you're going to net something like three or four ATP so more than you get from the phosphate 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 what actually one adaptation we get to training in this style is you'll increase your ability to store glycogen in your muscle which is great right we can actually biopsy you and measure the amount that you store in 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 and now you maybe can extend that to 100 or 115 seconds simply because you're storing more glycogen in the muscle before we have to and then go into the blood and get up in the form of glucose so that's great so we've got this six carbon molecule and we split this in half we got that little bit of ATP and now we're in this little tricky position because this three carbon molecule is what we call pyruvate pyruvic acid and again chemistry folks I'm 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 glycolysis is over you've got to make a choice right in order to make something out of those three carbon molecules you've got to ship them to the mitochondria as we said that is the only place of aerobic metabolism right we cannot do aerobic metabolism anywhere else until we enter the mitochondria so anytime we cross that barrier we know we've automatically switched from anaerobic to aerobic well here's the problem if you were to take one more carbon off that three carbon pyruvate you have to now do something with that carbon waste okay so before when we split the six carbon chain we didn't actually leave any carbons free floating we just split a two molecule in half when we go to split from pyruvate and make it into this two carbon molecule called acetyl-coa or seal COA now we've got a free-floating carbon we have to have a strategy for that because that's going to increase the acidity level any enzyme in our body that works to create fuel is very pH sensitive right so if 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 that's the only way we can actually form energy I guess remember to clarify anytime we're using phosphoid creatine or glucose or fat which we'll get to a second we're not actually getting energy for exercise by breaking those down or getting energy that we can use to then make ATP we break that ATP down that's what's actually powering muscle contraction um you can go back to our previous episode where we'll 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 O2 that O2 is going to combine with that free-floating carbon makes CO2 we're going to Exhale that thing out that's our Waste Management strategy but that has to happen in the mitochondria remember if we're using oxygen it has to be in the mitochondria so if we have the ability to ship pyruvate into the mitochondria or 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 buildup of pyruvate and so now we're having this giant backlog and this thing fills up fast we have a couple of strategies here well when you're going through ATP and you're splitting it's called hcp hydrolysis in of doing that remember ATP is a adenosine molecule and then the T part is triphosphate one two three which means you have three phosphates attached to the end when you break that phosphate off that's where you get your energy so now you have an inorganic phosphate and an ADP it doesn't diphosphate two that process requires water it's called hydrolysis as a result of that you then have a free floating hydrogen and as you well know that is acid right that's potential hydrogen that's what that means and so you've increased the acidity in the muscle by breaking up all this ATP and so oh we're building up acid we have building up pyruvate we don't have nowhere to go with it and we can't cleave off a carbon because now we're just going to exacerbate the acid increase so what we can do is we can take those hydrogens that we're building up and store them on the pyruvate a pyruvate that's holding an extra acid has a special name and we call that lactate all right so that's why we see this buildup of lactase so one of the downsides of anaerobic glycolysis is an incredibly High rate of waste production now lactate is not the cause of fatigue in fact if you think a little bit more carefully about what I just said it's actually stopping you it's what we call a acid buffer you can actually use it for a bunch of other things you can ship it to a neighboring muscle fiber in the same muscle that's not working you can ship it to the liver you can ship it to the heart and a bunch of other places and then you can actually just work backwards so if you ship it to for example the heart and it's got a bunch of mitochondria that are free you can bring in the oxygen attach it to that hydrogen make water and now you're right back to pyruvate you put two pyruvate back together and now you just make glucose so you can actually store it in the liver this is a process called gluconeogenesis through this fancy thing called the Corey cycle which is what the the proper cycle here is so you can use it as a very potent fuel source in fact a lactate is a tremendously valuable fuel source I'm not like for exercise but for cognition and a bunch of other things so lactase in fact this is why um if you've seen the research about pre-exam testing exercise uh you'll see a noticeable increase in exam scores if you do a 20 minute about of exercise prior to taking the exam and it's largely in part probably because of things like elevations and lactate how intense of exercise uh 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 going to see in fact there's an acute and chronic adaptation here so Folks at exercise have better memory memory retention scores and exams Etc but then also doing it prior to that exam make sure you recovered and rested back down the street but you'll generally perform better previous guests on the huberman Lab podcast 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 um 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 yeah um 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 gas we have to then ship it to the mitochondria and now we're going to enter what's called aerobic glycolysis and this is going to take us anywhere from again say that 90 seconds of all that work up to really 20 30 minutes in fact it really will take us to unlimited if you look at a highly competitive marathon runner even those that are running say your two hour marathon those folks are burning up to 80 carbohydrate it is a it 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 um 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 um like cycling where the races will be 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 um now in one respect you're not going to run out of carbohydrates until you're many hours in these folks are a unique case but the average individual who's doing an hour hour and a half cardio even you're not going to be limited by your carbohydrate stores you're going to be just fine you're gonna be limited by some other things which will maybe sort of break down here in a second but you're going to be fine there a lot of those folks will take carbohydrate they'll have very specific intervals you want to you do want to be careful though of ingesting too many fast carbohydrates prior to your exercise spout um we 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 and things like that well the same thing happens with exercise and so what happens is insulin 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 bolus 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 Corrals where there's like you know 100 people waiting to go and you're standing there for 45 minutes you may or may not want to slug down like three or four bananas in 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 literature to happen to some people so you want to just be a little bit careful um an easy way to combat that is just practice exactly what you're going to do in your race in your training that's like the simplest advice ever but you'd be stunned how many people do things uh during the race that they've actually never done in training I suggest people do exactly what you describe also for any kind of cognitive testing of course before a big exam is not the time to discover whether or not you can handle twice as much espresso or take a nootropic for the first time or no uh or change anything I mean if if indeed the the score on that exam is is Meaningful to you you keep keep things regular so to recap what we've done here is we started off in the cytoplasm with this glucose molecule that is six 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 we take each one of those we clear off one carbon each those carbons we take a breath in we attach 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 of carbohydrate and the end product of all of it is simply ATP 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 right that's what this whole thing is about any living 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 when thinking about aerobic exercise or long duration exercise in this case anything longer than five minutes for that matter five minutes all the way up to an 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 two hour mark or 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 lasts longer or building better asset buffering systems and there's a whole line of supplementation that are specifically acid buffers there's a whole line of training there's a whole line of breathing to manage this that so we have a lot of strategies where we can maximize endurance all we have to do is go back to the earlier part of our talk which is figure out what's the actual limiting step and then train according to that or do your strategy your nutrition your supplementation that defeats that limiting factor for an example if you're trying to maximize your performance in this 20 second maximal burst and your strategy for that was to make sure your muscle glycogen is saturated it's probably not going to help a ton because you're not going to be limited by total fuel you're going to be limited by your ability to buffer acid however storing more glycogen in your muscle in preparation for a marathon is a tremendously effective strategy because that will become a limiting factor so what we can do actually next if you'd like is we can just walk through these and look at the individual limitations where the failure Point happens and that 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 percent of your energy output now that will grow over time in terms of if you did a several hour lot of exercise when you started doing it you might be using five percent of your energy from protein 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 aerobic so it has to be oxidized those are the same thing when I say oxidized you use oxygen to burn something to make a fuel um so it's not a significant contributor to energy in that regard and unless you're talking ultramarathons 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 carbohydrate in the exercising muscle tissue eventually you can pull from blood and then you can pull from the liver with fat you have a tiny amount stored in the muscle intramuscular triglycerides but the overwhelming majority of fuel you get from fat comes systemically and so now we have a fundamental difference we actually literally have a Time problem I can get energy from carbohydrates faster because it is directly there if I go to pull it from fat I've got to pull it from the rest of the body which is why somebody who loses fat loses it from their entire body despite the fact that they may be only exercising a couple of parts so think about a runner someone who lost a lot of fat or running you don't see them just lose fat in their legs it comes from their face and their neck and everywhere why because what you're going to do is pull fat from the entire system you're going to break it down through a process called lipolysis which means you break it down from the stored form you put it in the blood as that glycerol backbone which is that three carbon backbone in the individual fatty acids it's going to float through the blood there's a seven step system here but we'll skip it for now it's going to have to get then uptaken into the muscle in the muscle then it has to get taken up and run into the mitochondria now that backbone that three carbon glycerol backbone is actually going to function almost exactly like the three carbon pyruvate just get it into the mitochondria cleave off one carbon run it as acetylch exact same thing super easy to metabolize small enough to go through the mitochondrial membrane the fatty acid chains become a problem so if you have a chain that's longer than or eight or so carbons it has to actually go through a special transporter on the cell wall to get in and that's going to be limited by a thing called carnitine and you're probably familiar with that as a supplement you may have talked about it there's a lot of places that make it that's going to be a limiting factor if it is a smaller what we call a short chain or even a medium chain triglyceride which a lot of folks have heard of MCT that's what we're talking about that can actually go directly through because it's small enough to pass through and you can use it immediately as an energy source in either case the way that you finally metabolize a fatty acid is a process where you would go through and cut off two carbons at a time why would you cut off too because you're trying to make that two carbon acetyl COA so you can run through that Krebs cycle again because you're cutting off two carbons at a time we have a special name for that oxidation process it's called beta oxidation that's exactly why we call it beta oxidation two carbons in you cut it off to make that acetalkoa so you can notice the oxidation pathway the electron transport pathway is identical whether you're talking about the carbohydrates or the fat in fact it doesn't even matter more to our point if we're talking about simply fat loss it really just is about running that electron transport chain whether it came from a carbohydrate or original Source or a fat original Source it ends up in the mitochondria as basically the exact same thing it then ends the end of metabolism as the same thing remember the final endpoint of carbohydrate metabolism is water ATP and CO2 do you want to guess the final endpoint of fat metabolism 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 will actually enjoy someone 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 10 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 eight minutes great go do some high intense intervals 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 um 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 happen to eat between 11 A.M and 8 PM naturally I'm not religious about it but um but I don't do it for any other reason except that that tends to be when I'm hungry and I exercise outside of that um in the morning typically in any case is there a way that people can determine what type of exercise might be better or worse for them based on its appetite stimulating or inhibiting effects because I also hear that you know some people will go for a long run and then they are quote unquote not hungry for several hours afterwards does that have anything to do with which fuels are being utilized during different forms of exercise that's actually a really good question I don't know the the mechanisms that can explain that answer what I can tell you is you hear the same comment for physical activity in other words people say man if I do this type of training then I just am exhausted and I lay around the rest of the day so my total caloric expenditure is actually compromised as an aggregate because I'm down um the data would suggest in general that doesn't happen so most of the time we don't see a reduction in physical activity um with either high intensity or steady state training in fact you generally see equal if not increased what's called need 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 to be 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 punt this down the road to our discussion about nutrition specifically and and weave back to it so we'll earmark it for that um meanwhile it sounds like if one is thinking purely in terms of uh burning calories yep and getting the health benefits of exercise to create a caloric deficit to create fat loss it doesn't matter whether or not they burn those calories using a form of exercise that relies predominantly on carbohydrate fat or protein correct it's not that it doesn't matter it's that either one will work because when we say things like that it's it doesn't mean they're actually identical there are some slight differences and maybe those differences are important for some people and not others ought to 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 um in the wilderness for a week okay and it's cold out there and you needed to make a fire uh and if I said look you can pick any of these things there are so there's some wood over there we brought some newspaper and then we brought a match and we need to create a fire we're gonna use that fire to energy and heat up okay I said great the very first place you would probably start to make that fire is the match you like the match in any match hey it's going to light immediately but it's probably going to last 5 to 20 seconds I don't know before it burns out that's fossil creatine real fast real Burns Out if you were smart you would take that match and then light the newspaper on fire right now if you were to burn a whole newspaper it is more energy then you get to the match but you still you know I don't know what's going to take a few minutes some number of minutes before an entire 65 burns up five I don't know right depends on then yeah which type of newspaper it is I guess right amazing that's carbohydrate right if you were really smart you would use that to then light a piece of wood on fire and a wood if you've been in the wilderness it could last hours days it's really quite unlimited your phospho creatine storage is very limited small glycogen is a lot higher because you can store it in muscle you can store it in other places so you have more but not a lot fat is unlimited the average person if you're around say 70 kilos up 170 pounds or so and you're moderately lean maybe 15 body fat nothing crazy you probably have enough stored fat to create enough energy to survive for more than 30 days right this would literally be if you ingested zero calories you have enough fuel in your stored fat to keep you alive for certainly 30 days you wouldn't feel good and all those things but energetically basically fat will never ever be your limiting factor to Performance so when we start talking about well what limits my performance in these areas you can just wipe fat off the list it will never be your limiting factor to any type of endurance performance you simply have way too much the only problem with fat is 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 go faster I will never be able to fully utilize fat which is why we talked about earlier you'll never see a situation in which somebody is a hundred percent burning fat as a fuel and no percent carbohydrate it's always going to be too slow highest you'll get maybe 70 so percent protein in this equation is none of that now you may notice how do you make paper what's fibrous you combine with water that you it gets pressed it gets compressed yeah yeah it's made from wood how do you make a match it's made from wood what's carbohydrate a chain of carbon what's fat a chain of carbon these are similar molecules right they're meant to give you pros and cons it's very difficult to just light a log on fire without a lot of work you'd have to burn burn burn burn burn so these are complementary systems that are really close to the same thing protein is none of those things protein is more like a piece of metal so if you were out in the woods with me and we were trying to make a fire and you're like hey look I found some old uh railroad over there let's throw that on there I would probably look at you like crazy now technically can you melt metal sure but you're gonna burn a lot of energy to try to get a little bit back out of the metal and now you've also cost yourself a very very valuable structure so protein is a fuel source for exercise or metabolism it's just an incredibly poor choice your body will do it again maybe five to ten percent but you now you're burning a very valuable Supply in a situation in which you don't know where there's ever going to be anymore remember protein is fairly transient it's you're not very good at storing it you can store a ton of carbohydrate and an unlimited literally amount of fat so you just really need to disregard thinking about protein as a fuel source your body does not want to do it you're not good at it you can go through a process of gluconeogenesis from protein make glucose from it is just very poor you're not going to get much out of the exchange and you've burned your supply of metal which is going to be very difficult 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 um a certain level of adaptation you've just gotten extremely good at generating glucose from other Fashions right so you can bias heavily towards fat adaptation the downside is and we've seen this born in literature you're going to perform slower so if you don't care about maximizing performance especially over something where it is a maximal effort for a few minutes or something then maybe you're not concerned and that's absolutely great especially for people just don't exercise then hey geez very little concern here but if you're interested in your performance and you're wondering why you're just like slugging it down well what you've done is you've down regulated the ability literally the enzymes responsible for that entire anaerobic glycolysis portion they get down regulated which means there's not as much around anymore and so you get really bad and slow at using carbohydrates as a fuel source so it's a very poor strategy for people on an anaerobic based sport or who like that type of activity again if you don't care no problem if you don't exercise at all then you really have no problem there which is actually why a high fat low carbohydrate nutrition strategy for people who don't do much physical activity is probably like very well it's very effective it is a really good strategy for weight management for energy stabilization throughout the day and the research would very much support that 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 AKA ketogenic type diet they're not doing ketogenic diets for mental health reasons per se but indeed those people tend to do very limited exercise or they tend to do a lot of long endurance but low intensity long endurance these are the I walk to get my exercise types and they do indeed walk a lot and some of them manage to control their weight very readily and like that diet for that reason um when we had Lane Norton on the podcast he pointed out quite aptly that in order to lose weight you have to restrict something either of course time or macronutrients Etc to arrive at that sub caloric threshold get below the the sub maintenance threshold I guess one of the things I want to point out is this should be 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 four of course being largely largely unrelated to today's conversation but that we're covered in the episode that we did on strength speed and hypertrophy so just to remind people the nine adaptations are number one skill and technique two speed three power which is speed times Force four strength and five hypertrophy today we're talking about the remaining adaptations on that list starting with muscular endurance followed by anaerobic capacity followed by maximal aerobic output and finishing at number nine with long duration exercise so if we could start with muscular endurance this would be number six on the list of nine adaptations muscular endurance how do I build muscular endurance why should I build muscular endurance and just to remind me what fuel sources are predominating when I'm training for muscular endurance great so remember muscular endurance is something that's going to be generally in a local muscle it is not a cardiovascular or systemic issue and it tends to be something in the neighborhood of say five to maybe even up to 50 repetitions so this is the classic example we'll give here is how many push-ups can you do in a row most people are going to land somewhere in that range I just said how many sit-ups can you do in a minute how many pull-ups how long can you hang on a bar um as a dead hang things like that that's muscular endurance muscular endurance is not a mild run or a marathon or anything like that so uh 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 reason I 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 back to metabolism if I'm going to ask my triceps to do 50 push-ups in a row what's going to be my limiting factor am I going to run out of fat no chance am I going to run out of glycogen no chance that's way too few of repetitions you have a lot left there so what's going to be the thing that stops me from getting 51 repetitions either you're going to have too high of a pH rise so too much acid build up or you're going to have a problem clearing the waste so really this is two factors dealing with acid buildup and getting acid out of the muscle tissue and end of circulation because you have plenty of ability to handle that small amount of acid buildup in your entire body it's just you can't handle it in that tiny spot now I picked the tricep for a very specific reason you're gonna deal with more pain when you use a large muscle group like your quads or your glutes than you are with a small muscle group for example nobody ever threw up after arm day but a lot of people throw up after leg day why is that look at the total amount of waste that you're dumping into your system when you have quadrupled or 10x the muscle size small muscle groups are only really going to be challenged in that local area large ones will dump so much waste into the system that you'll want to avoid that as quickly as possible and that's one of the reasons why you throw up after Hard Exercise great so the reason I'm laughing because I don't think I've ever thrown up uh from a weight training session and so it's making me wonder if I've ever trained that hard I've received uh or obtained 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've wanted I have however vomited after a long run when I didn't hydrate well oh or if I drink too much water sure oh sure too much water yeah you'll you'll get that out quick right I just uh want to be clear because I think some people are getting the picture that if they're not vomiting then after their leg workout that they're not training according to uh your standards Again by the way um Dr Andy Galvin runs experiments in his lab he's recruiting subjects [Laughter] also known as my graduate students that's right in any event sorry to interrupt uh but I felt it was the necessary 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 have 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 it's not really going to get our performance here so what are strategies to increase acid buffering ability and then 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 take you through your process of increasing capitalization easy peasy specificity just to briefly interrupt I find it remarkable although not surprising giving how amazing the human body is that simply by doing some movement repeat like a wall set or a uh or push-ups or dips for that matter repeatedly over and over and over until you reach that failure Point yep or 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 the production or the um the trafficking of endothelial cells which make up the capillaries and allow basically more little pipes to feed the system with oxygen and remove waste products it's like irrigation right imagine you had a giant field and you had two big pipes running down the outside well in fact if you want to make sure water gets evenly dispersed across the entire field you'll have a bunch of offshooting little pipes and the more 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 um 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 results that we want yeah but we still don't know what the specific signal is um 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 lists now exercise Choice maybe a few options order volume and frequency great what should we be doing how often should we be doing it and you know for instance should I do wall sets to 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 at applying hold the plank you're going to do more push-ups two more push-ups you can do some other stuff that's complementary but really this is a high Precision game do the exact same thing for exercise Choice very simple there okay in terms of exercise order I suppose this dovetails with volume yeah can I combine um training let's say wall sets for my quads and real you know nearby muscle groups and then do push-ups to failure uh and then also do some sort of um pulling exercise to failure yep absolutely again pick the exercises you want the movement patterns you want to do and do them the order almost doesn't matter with the one caveat with larger muscle groups particularly again multiple leg activities that will induce 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 and you you know did lunges for a mile or something like that you might actually slightly compromise you might not but you might slightly compromise your ability to do as many pull-ups in a row or hold a bend over row or something like that so if you really cared about that level then you maybe want to do the one thing that's most important first in general my recommendation though is to 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 count is going to fall and you're no longer going to be training muscular endurance so you just need to stay right around that number that you want to work on so again if the target is doing more pull-ups and assuming that you have the strength to do it you check that box you simply need to practice the repetition range that you want to be in that's all it takes you can repeat that a number of times but because remember the volume is fairly low the load is very very low you can actually repeat these quite frequently so you won't get extremely sore from muscular endurance relative to traditional hypertrophy straining because the load is very very light so you can do these more frequently if you would like more frequently such as you could do it three or four times a week easy if you would like you don't necessarily need to three days a week per muscle group is probably fine here um 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 is to get to 30 push-ups just as an example you might say okay I'm gonna do sets of 17. and I'm going to do three sets of that I'm gonna do that three days a week that's going to build up quite a bit or you could say look I'm gonna do a set basically to failure I'm going to recover and do one or two sets that say 80 percent 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 um talking out of line here I do want to emphasize that because we mentioned pull-ups if you can't get 25 pull-ups then and you're doing 10 you're training for hypertrophy you're not training for muscular endurance personally remember there's a big cross over here so anytime we're talking past like 15 reps we're technically in hypertrophy and muscular endurance got it so here's the common mistake I don't want to get bulky so I'm I'm gonna go lighter and do more reps and then people grow and then you landed still right in the middle of hypertri rank right so like for people who are like oh my gosh like every time I lift weights I blow up I go lighter I do more reps and I you're still writing the hypertrophy song they'd actually be much better off training very very heavy in the one to three rep range they'd get really strong and they wouldn't grow much 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 is 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 uh high intensity workout here there some Sprints maybe some plyometrics some skill based training they're doing a bunch of different things to be all what I would call All Around fit yeah they're not training for any specific event or trying to maximize any one of the nine adaptations to the exclusion of the others that person decide okay after um they do their longer run they're gonna do uh Max time a plank to Max duration they're going to do a wall set to Max duration and they're going to do push-ups to Max duration and then also do that same workout before they do their high intensity interval training some other point during the week and then maybe even do it uh again um on their so-called rest day just a real quick five minutes of sure 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 tremendously sore if you keep the load light the only switch I'd make there is I would probably do them after your interval rather than before so you can make sure you keep quality there and you're not compromised by a local muscular endurance when you're actually trying to get a more systemic fatigue with something like a higher intensity interval training so that would work fantastic the only other variable we have in it on here is progression and this is very simple try to add a rep or two per week that's really all you have to go after so if you're up to 22 this week try to hit 23 next week or for wall sits and planks that would be added add time time yep and if and if you run into a wall there just like the same Concepts we talked about with strength or hypertrophy back it down to more like in the 80 or 85 range and accumulate a lot more practice that's going to help a lot with capitalization as well as asset buffering so you're going to continue to give yourself signals for up regulation of the processes needed for that and it's not always pushing you to the end failure just like we don't want to always go to failure with strength we don't want to always go to failure with high intensity intervals either same thing would be happening here 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 exerciser who is not interested in building more muscle speed or things that I typically associate with anaerobic capacity yeah so this is really really fun remember anaerobic capacity is the total amount of work you can do for something like seconds to a few minutes and this is extremely high levels of fatigue the highest you're really going to see and by fatigue here I mean acid buildup byproducts not fatigue is in like mentally I don't want to do this anymore so if we just think about the energetic for a second I'm gonna do say let's take a really easy example of people have done that thing where you uh you'll go to the track and you sprint the straightaways and you walk the corners remember that sort of thing yeah uh tabatas 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 no we've 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 my muscle glycogen in any of those cases though you're going to be running into an acid problem if you were to continue to do this multiple repetitions in addition to running low and muscle glycogen you're also going to start running into oxygen transportation problems because you're building up a lot of byproducts you've got to continue you will actually cruise into aerobic glycolysis this is exactly why the community that I have worked a lot with professional fighters very high level boxers world champions UFC fighters it is a five minute round that you're going to do five times this is for world championship fights you get one minute break in between so imagine going like 30 on 30 off for five minutes getting a one minute break and doing that five times 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 you got to get really high anaerobic you also have to have a lot of aerobic going on you have you're going to start running into limitations because 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 muscular 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 you're grappling with 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 it and I'm by clearance I now mean 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 walking 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 are effective and you actually probably want to do a little bit of all of them this is why none of our Fighters would ever 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 2 to zone four 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 Zone one two three four all the way up to five is a kind of uh back of the envelope uh type verbiage for some people and is more precisely followed by for other people meaning for me uh Zone one is simply walking uh easy walking zone two 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 then it would be difficult to hold that conversation then you'd be in zone three and then zone three four five 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 uh when we discuss Zone one through five uh and as I say all this I certainly um 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 um 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 one through five and how people might be able to assess whether or not they are in zone one two three or four or five great so zone five is that absolute top thing and we can flag ourselves there I liked how you flagged one and two the distinction between three four and five I'm less concerned with either uh we will do some heart rate stuff but not to identify what zone we're in um 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 and 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 100 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 there actual difference there's not right so it doesn't really matter in that regard um if you're a very highly trained particularly cyclist things like that then and you can control a lot of circumstances those things start to make a lot more sense um but when you're in an open environment like the athletes I deal with just not gonna it's not gonna matter that much so the way that I approach this is and I will use this word intentionally stolen directly from Brian McKenzie and his company shift adapt they use what's called a gear system and I absolutely love it it's what we've been using for a long time so with Brian with your permission I'm going to take it right now thank you Brian he gave me the permission to thank you Brian Brian's a good friend of of ours and I do think the breathing gear system is a terrific way to think about the zones and to get a good sense of what zone one happens to be yeah great so um the first gear is your ability to Simply breathe in and out through your nose at a set Cadence so basically regardless of how hard you're working can you restrict your breathing to like a two to three second inhale and then a two to three second exhale and this is really clever actually because a lot of folks will jump immediately into an over breathing strategy which means you'll be ventilating more than you need which actually sends that rer up higher than it needs to be which kicks you higher into carbohydrate utilization if you're supposed to be in quote unquote Zone one you're trying to be efficient not fast so using more carbohydrates than you need is not beneficial here you're walking for the day you're out on a longer hike you're enjoying the day you shouldn't be trying to ramp up carbohydrate metabolism it should be all right and so this would be getting into an argument with somebody while on a long walk you feel exhausted afterwards and over breathing yeah totally right okay yeah so you should be able to breathe at a specific Cadence and generally people are um doing that more frequently than they need right zone two uh rather gear two 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've shifted higher up you're burning more and more carbohydrate as the fuel source but you're still able to control that and restrict the nasal breathing now gear three and four which is our final ones there's no gear five gear uh three and four is like a subtle strength and I actually don't even care about the difference there I basically use gear one two and then S4 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 the mouth um again I really don't even care about distinction I basically jump from two to four Brian May do it differently I don't actually know um four 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 right we practice a lot trying to stay nasal only for as long as possible but that's going to eventually happen when you're doing your high intensity intervals and you're really going as hard as you can you're going to have to go to your mouth unless you're an absolute Freakazoid and you can say 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 um I know some people can get higher but that's the general distinction so we pay much more attention to those particular gears than we do heart rate zones and zone five would be just pure mouth breathing all out and then running into your life the gear system is just one to four there's no fifth gear got it so the gear four would again be mouth mouth breathing as much in as you can breathing as much as you can out got it and I I appreciate your description of of the gear system and how it um roughly relates to the zones we've been talking about also um I'm 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 is he'll say let's just hold our breath now until we hit that piling or that um uh lifeguard stand on the beach and within seconds you actually can start to panic absolutely also becomes very hard to coordinate your action after a little while again be really careful with this but but it will teach you in a moment in a very real world way how important it is to be able to offload carbon dioxide because you're probably not running out of oxygen at those lower intensities no questions You're simply building up carbon dioxide and that gas reflex is screaming to go off and you're actively suppressing it yeah so the interesting test here is your CO2 Tolerance 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 non-reactive can be responsive but non-reactive two elevations in CO2 so you should see them and feel them but you should be choosing how you respond rather than adding a reaction um there are interesting data looking at things like out of the blue panic attacks you can actually notice those in blood via rises in CO2 up to 45 minutes prior to the event happening so there are signals happening in your body that you may be sensitive or not sensitive to the more in tune you can get with that the better your life is going to be and even if we're specifically just talking about exercise performance so it's okay for CO2 to rise it's going to rise it's a byproduct of anaerobic anaerobic metabolism it's a byproduct of carbohydrate and fat metabolism as we've established it's going to get there you're going to feel that however if you immediately go into a panic because of a small increase in CO2 this is a problem so returning to anaerobic capacity this morning we were training not together I couldn't keep up with your workout but I uh but in the same uh General space and I did my once a week maximum heart rate uh one minute Sprint on the assault bike sometimes I'll do more minutes uh 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 um I have to assume that that was largely within the anaerobic capacity Realm the first 30 seconds or so were manageable we're getting more and more painful there was a quit signal going off in my head you said there's real magic that occurs around second 40 and indeed somewhere around second 40 for whatever reason it seemed easier but at the one minute Mark I was happy to stop because I was really at at least what fell to me uh 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've raised it um is important that is if I want to train uh anaerobic capacity for sprinting I probably should have been sprinting cycling I was I was on the assault bike um and so on how many of those one minute all out Sprints or 30 second all-out sprints on the on the bike could and should one perform per workout and per week so marching through exercise Choice yep let's do it um 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 um exercise Choice a couple of things you want to look for you want to pick something that you feel extremely confident in the movement with because you're going to forget your brain very quickly here because you're going to go into our pain cave okay so if you're not comfortable running don't go run here you're never going to get to the spot we need to get to it if you're not comfortable or if every time you you go on a rower your low back hurts the next day don't do it if you're not comfortable using kettlebell swings you get the point don't do an exercise you're not comfortable with you also secondarily want to be carefully cautious of heavy eccentric loads because you're going to be doing a lot of repetitions at a high intensity so this is where I love an assault bike this is why a rower is great swimming is amazing running uphill generally more favorable than running on normal ground especially if you're not Runner don't run downhill that's a lot of eccentric load I don't love things like box jumps here right because again a lot of eccentric loading if suppose you can jump up land on the box step down but now you're you're again you're too many things are going in your mind I don't want to slip and fall I don't want to smash my on the box what happens if I'm too many variables pick something that is safer where you can really focus on your breathing and your posture and the performance all right so that's exercise Choice and then within that if there's some specific thing you want to get better at go ahead do it okay how many different movements meaning should I do the assault bike and then uh some form of safe executable uh overhead pressing um it's a little hard it's a little harder to imagine um anaerobic capacity for the upper body unless you have access to a skier or one of these um what are those things called the climber machines yeah the reversal climber the Versa climber that's the one the Versa climber um you can tell how often I do that one uh it's a great exercise 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 since you're involving a lot of muscle groups typically that's a really distinction generally these are going to be total body movements so you can do something like a ski org if you want to really isolate your upper body great love that you can do lower body isolation like cycling right where everybody's not involved you can use weights here you can do some barbell movements and stuff like that they're just not my favorite choices for most people too many complexity things going on so uh I generally am going to pick total body movements uh 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 and the consequences of a technical breakdown are minimal it's more like you're gonna actually have a worse performance rather than an injury rate so there's just a wonderful invention uh because of that where other things the consequences like say if you're going to be doing a barbell or kettlebell activity the consequences of making a technical mistake you might actually get an acute injury right there so they're just a little bit higher in the risk scale how many sets or sometimes referred to as repeats so how many 30 to 60 second all out sprints again doesn't have to be running sprinting but all out effort would be the better way to phrase it should I perform let's say per week right and then decide whether or not we can divide those up across multiple workouts or whether or not it's better to do them in the same workout yeah 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're gonna do an air bike one day you're gonna do some Hill Sprints another day and then you can do some swimming another day for sake of example I'm going to say um same movement because I think most people are going to be most comfortable with one or two types of movements unless they are really coordinated or an excellent athlete I think most people can probably find a hill that they could run up yeah and uh an aerodyne or assault bike a rower things of that sort yep you're gonna have a pro and a con here so the pro of doing less sets is you can actually train much closer to truly 100 percent the downside is volume slow okay so a major mistake people make here is they'll do something like um I'll do 20 seconds on 10 seconds off and I'll do that for 40 rounds you're not really actually going that hard on those 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 neural training that assumes you are actually hitting very close to 100 percent 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 enhanced mitochondrial biogenesis and a little bit of capitalization but you didn't really justify only doing three rounds that's where the problem comes in so in terms of a couple of protocols I'll give you how many sets per week it's it's really hard to give a number unlike the strength training stuff where it was easy to kind of land some stuff on a typical thing you'll see is like a minimum dose 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 Airline bike for 60 seconds one to three rounds of that might be doing something useful for me but I should probably be doing that two or three times a week if you're gonna get to a max heart rate I generally like to say give me a minimum of one day a week two's better days per week how many rounds whatever it takes you to get to that maximum heart rate right so in your case you did one minute okay good if you're gonna extend past a minute or two one round might be enough so for example uh if you want to just do something where I'm going to run a mile as fast as I can that's all you need to do for the day you don't need to do multiple you can do mile repeats if you'd like but that is really really challenging I know we've extended the time duration here but I wanted to go there to show you the time domain matters here if you're doing something like a 20 second burst you're going to need more rounds if you're doing something longer like multiple minutes you don't need as many rounds to get there so in addition if you're really reaching past this um 90 seconds of of Hell window it's just going to do a lot more damage to the system not damaging than bad but as in there's a lot to recover here so we need more recovery time from that a 20 second burst doesn't really challenge you challenge you in that 20 seconds but you'll be recovered and fine a three minute thing is going to hurt and it's going to hurt for many many 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 would 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 six you may actually be causing some problems um there's just a little bit of excess fatigue that's going to happen there that you you maybe want to stay away from in fact you can see a lot of endocrinological problems and some other sleep issues and some other things kick in and we'll talk about more of those things as later but um that's the number to get with if you want to try something more like a 20 second burst I actually would recommend giving yourself more rest so you can actually do a higher rest than work ratio most people tend to think of this as doing like one to one 20 seconds on 20 seconds off or lower I love doing like 20 seconds on 40 seconds off the quality of that 20 seconds becomes extraordinarily high and it's also possible to now get like six to eight rounds so as I'm hearing this I'm going to wager a uh an offer uh to you and if you say Okay um then to to those listening based on what you're telling me about the relationship between intensity and quality and the need for sufficient duration of this anaerobic work yeah how is five to six minutes per week of all out work that's pretty good so what that means for me is I would do three all out one minute sprints on one workout separated by a minute or two maybe more and I would do that two or three times per week just trying to hit that five or six minute per week threshold yep actually I think uh one of the uh Marty gabala is the scientist a Canadian uh guy amazing work he was done a lot of the the research on high intensity interval stuff right and I think the number he actually threw out there is 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 and one of the classic studies was looking at VO2 max improvements and he saw equal if not greater improving civil to Max with that so I think actually the name of his book might be like the six minute workout or something and so you'd like may have nailed that directly on the head uh purely by law but actually but I also may be wrong with the numbers we should probably fact check that yeah 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 and you're doing more rounds or one minute all out so the way I'm going to think about this if it's okay with you is for five to six minutes a week I am sprinting yeah for my life correct but I'm sprinting for my life with good form in whatever movement I happen to be doing and I can do all of that in one workout but I'm separating out bouts of 20 seconds all the way up to one minute yep by the necessary rest in order to recover my breathing get back to Pure nasal breathing maybe Zone one zone totally totally and then hit it again if you're gonna do the one minute thing like you do I actually generally encourage one to three minutes of rest before you do the next round and probably up to four to six rounds that would be your six minute number there now the caveat there is we don't worry about heart rate recovery we worry about exactly what you mentioned which is nasal only recovery once you can get back to that give yourself another 30 seconds or so and then 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-up very low intensity each morning and then Sprint for a minute and then head off into my daily routine no okay that if you're going to do that though you need to give me three minutes of nasal only breathing before you go back to work we need to download and there are people in my life that would love for me to engage in more nasal breathing because it will have me speaking less so no problem chances are I'm going to use the um two or three workouts per week of a 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 um but I learned this from another mutual friend Kenny Kane this is a great little it's a little test a little a little game you can play with yourself and the only way to play this game is you're going to lose which is really really lovely so you can do this at any rate 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 no distance so this could be running cycling the the air bike is what I use the first two minutes you're going to cover as much distance as you can possibly cover in two minutes and you're going to note that so let's say you covered 400 meters right okay great you're going to rest for two minutes amazing that next round you're now going to go for distance so you're going to cover the exact same amount of distance you covered in round one which in this example is 400 meters and it doesn't matter how long it takes you it may take you two minutes and five seconds two minutes and 10 seconds because you're a little bit fatigued from round one round three you're gonna now come back and do that exact same time domain that you did in round two so if it took you two minutes and five seconds in round two now round three is going to last two minutes and five seconds and you want to see if you can cover a greater distance 405 meters 410 meters and 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 this I don't know if he came up with it he taught me this thing we both know Kenny and he's an incredibly nice and Incredibly skilled trainer um I'm gonna call it the sugar cane yeah it's so great because it sounds really painful and if you go out too hard in round one you're in such big trouble round two but if you go to Easy in round one you're going to get absolutely obliterated in round three so it's like a wonderful thing and you can pick that number as a standardization and then just try to improve that a little bit per week so progression is the last part of this whole thing that we haven't got to yet before we move on um and the way you want to progress all of these things is you can time stamp again how much work you can do and then just try to do a slightly higher amount of work five percent or so every week or you can add a round which is a really nice way so um uh in the in the research studies that have been done they're going to do things like week one you'll do three rounds week two you'll do four rounds three you'll go five rounds you'll like add a round until you get up to say six or seven or eight rounds at the end of the protocol so that's a really nice way to go about it or you can cap the rounds and just try to get more work done in that same amount of time meaning go more intensely correct get you know get further distance in your 30 seconds or your 45 seconds or whatever um I want to encourage people to go as low as 20 seconds that's going to allow you to go very very fast that's going to actually challenge that phospho creatine 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 22nd burst range and I will generally hedge towards a two to one rest to work ratio so I'm probably going to rest 40 to 60 seconds that's true that's to make sure that 20 second burst is extremely high quality cool I'm also going to do something in the 30 to 50 second range okay I might go one-to-one work rest ratio the quality of those 30 seconds is going to come down but the acid buffering is going to be extraordinarily challenged I also will do that with a triple or quadruple rest range so again 30 seconds on maybe two minutes off now I won't be able to be I won't be working on my ability to handle um the waste product build up there but I'll be working on my ability to produce more force over that time which is another skill set and then all the way up to say what you do a minute 70 seconds and you can go one to one there or up to three to one um you're gonna be working on a little bit of this different thing but that's exactly how we hit both sides of this equation working on dealing with waste as well as actually working on bringing in nutrients and getting that system a little bit more effective so you could set that up across your week and just it could be something like day one is that 20 second burst window day two is that maybe 60 second window and then day three is maybe one all-out effort and we're done there let's talk about the specific protocols and adaptations related to maximum aerobic output or maximum aerobic capacity as it's sometimes called sure now we're moving past like that couple of minute range into like the you know five to 15 minute range but at a maximum intensity so what's the highest you can go from there we're not talking about our last category of long duration here well the beautiful part is we've already explained a lot of it because it's very similar to what we just talked about with anaerobic capacity it is primarily going to be a problem 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 Fat's not going to be an issue but certainly more oxygen transportation is going to be an issue so we're just hedging a little bit more towards that side of the equation towards the end of that workout no doubt about it clearing out waste products is going to be a huge issue but really oxygen demand delivery is starting to take more of a prominent role because we have had more time to clear the waste and if we're not good at that we're going to be failing earlier than we need so the training for that needs to be a little bit at that exact same so a classic thing here is a one mile test right this is going to last for most people somewhere between five and 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 pick an exercise you're comfortable with that you can actually do and you can progressively increase in terms of the intensity um you're not going to be you don't have to stop and change your exercise you're not going to move around it's 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 gonna become a real Savage and you want to do repeats here you can um endurance folks will do that a lot one of my 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 one to twice a week of hitting this I think you'll be in a really really good spot frequency we sort of just covered we covered exercise Choice volume we 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 percent of your heart rate but higher than quote unquote zone two you got to be working here this is not I could have a conversation Pace this is higher than that it's in between conversation pace and the pace I need to be at to run my fastest mile I've ever done that's that middle 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 vo to Max could I use a uh accrued 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 in that 10 minutes love it probably not on the same day that I'm doing the anaerobic capacity work probably not if you're probably okay to do after a strength training or hypertrophy workout as long as I didn't train legs you could um 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 wanted to do something like speed or power then you could roll right into this and have no problem maybe a strength day a hypertrophy day I'm not sure um you would do there because again especially if you did any sort of lower body exercise you're going to be compromised here but remember these tend to be full body movements so even if you did arms that day your arms are going to be compromised and you don't want to fail this 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 a 60 second bout with sufficient rest and I'm going to give myself 10 minutes a week of in my case it'll probably be running as fast as I can because I do enjoy running and I can do it safely um maybe uphill and see how far I go yep if you want to combine the two so if you're just saying hey I'm bought in Andy like I want to do both of these things they are similar but they have independent benefits I'm convinced how would I build these into the same week um maybe do one of each that still gets you at quote unquote two days per week where you're going to hit a hot maximum heart rate so we already checked that box off so one day can be a shorter length interval repeat one and the other one can simply be a 5 to 15 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 rather should I go and here I'm gonna 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 uh overuse injuries um 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 and endurance for people who don't love running cycling or swimming is you can do a really cool workout any number of things where you can put a little circuit together as long as there's not a lot of downtime between one circuit to the next time you can actually do something as simple as like maybe you're going to do Farmer's carries and you'll do that for say three minutes and you'll set those down and you'll go straight into a plank for a minute and you'll pick that up and you go straight into maybe body weight squats for two minutes then you go straight into another exercise and you 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 at Kenny Kane's gym plenty of times where you just maybe even pick three machines so you're gonna I'm gonna go 10 minutes on the rower then I'm gonna go 10 minutes on the treadmill and I'm gonna go 10 minutes on the bike you can actually knock a 30 minute quote-unquote steady state session out in and not feel those problems if those things happen so you can actually have a lot of fun there we will do a lot of times with our Fighters we'll do things like put a very low load I'm talking sub 50 of your max on a barbell and you're gonna Squat and you're gonna do you know maybe a minute you're gonna put that down and then you're gonna go over and do 50 of a bench press you're gonna put that down you're gonna go over and do 50 of uh of a crab walk and then you're gonna go over and do another one and you can actually run through this entire thing you don't hit that many reps in any individual movement the load is very very light and you can keep heart rate basically a steady state and do 15 or 20 or 30 different exercises and it's actually like fairly fun and engaging to do and it's a little bit more specific than trying to get a 275 pound NFL player to run for 30 minutes which is not going to be good so I'm just chuckling because I love 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 and I like moving through space but there are weather conditions and times when that's not an option so what you described is 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 correct overall but fat burning system and yet I do have a question which is can you build enhanced microcapillary systems into the muscles uh by doing this long duration cardio yeah absolutely can in fact depending on which paper you uh like more than the other papers you may even find evidence that this is a superior method than anything else a steady state endurance is very important I used to not like it as much there's just so much evidence now that suggests it's probably a really good thing for basically everybody maybe for some individuals it's not in all year of their training but if if you're not a high-level athlete or have a very specific goal that's right in front of you it's probably best to do at least 20 minutes as a minimum maybe 30 minutes of some steady state exercise once a week for basically any training goal outside of again a couple of really specific scenarios that are happening the other thing that kind of kicks in here that we haven't really talked about is now we're actually reaching a position where fatigue of the intercostal starts to play so diaphragmic 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's been stretched it goes back to it's resting when you get to a maximum heart rate inhalation and exhalation become active so you're squeezing as hard as you can to open up and you're squeezing to contract to blow air out you're going to get fatigued that system right over time you have contracted contracted open up if that system starts to get fatigued you start running into failure here so you need to practice that and this is when all kinds of things like breathing drills to just simply training in this fashion there's all kinds of exercise devices for your lungs and when we say that that's what we're really talking about the musculature around the lungs needs to not fatigue so that's the only other little component I wanted to throw in here if we're not talking about acid buffering which in this particular case is not a problem anymore the time domain is long and slower so we have plenty of time to use fat as a fuel we also have plenty of time to use anaerobic 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 running low on liver glycogen if you're going a very long time muscle glycogen may start getting low but not really these are huge issues you're going to run into maybe a little bit of stroke volume issue but and the intensity is not high enough to become a problem you're more likely to break down posturally or breathing mechanics than really anything else unless again that duration really gets generally past two hours for most people so those are the things that are going to limit us so how do we improve it what do we train we went through the exercise choices you also need to make sure you're training your intercostals we need to be training our diaphragm in some fashion again it can be the exercise itself can be your normal training the thing you need to be careful of here and this is actually true for all the things we just talked about when we think about fatigue and we think about failure 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 or they finish that's generally because we saw a massive technical breakdown you're done like you're over there it's not always the case during all year round of the training but this is something to really pay attention to so if you're on that bike and you're 40 seconds in and all of a sudden posture starts punching over I may 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 that I often use is to head out for a weight vested hike it's not a heavy weight vest it's maybe I think it's eight or ten pounds it's one of these thinner ones and if people don't have access to that you can bring a backpack with some items in it I mean it can be you don't even need external load it could just be your body okay great and and do some hiking at a at a fast enough clip that breathing harder than I would be if I just kind of shuffled along yeah I might stop here there drink some water no big deal but I can carry on a conversation if I need to so it's a Zone two-ish but probably pushing a little bit harder than that for that duration yeah not a lot of um 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 um kind of reminds me of how much I've been sitting but doing that all in one Long Afternoon um typically on a weekend or doing two shorter sessions throughout the week maybe 45 minutes and 45 minutes and then working up the progression to longer longer duration 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 uh anaerobic and aerobic output capacity work that we talked about just a moment ago great that's a fine version to do it if you want to go shorter and bring 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 um 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 it could be roped into the same thing it could be its own independent day it could be your sort of active recovery day it tends to be fairly restorative 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 day you have to do something physical this is fine right if you wanted to do it on a lifting day especially if it's a power or strength date it's probably fine if you wanted to do it before the workout or after it either way you're probably okay probably best to do it after if the primary goal is one of the strength training adaptations if it's not if this is a primary goal do it first amazing if you wanted to do it in the combination with the other interval stuff you could do it fine there you could do it before or you could do it afterwards I actually have no problem doing it afterwards because that in effect especially if you say nasal only during this training will help the down regulation 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 minute walk nice slow nasal breathing four second inhale four seconds and yeah maybe five even play with the numbers a little bit then maybe you don't even need to do the down regulation breathing afterwards you'll be in a good spot what 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 as I'm sure some of you out there are as well and we're really talking about 10 minutes of the of running or sprinting on the bike or rower once a week we're talking about six minutes or so of the much higher intensity but short bouts divided into rounds of 20 to 20 seconds to a minute with 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 right out their front door or at home and as we point out you don't need any specialized equipment to do that oh and I forgot the um muscular endurance that I wasn't trying to cheat there um some muscular endurance thrown in as well so that brings me to a question which is if I'm doing my training for muscular endurance each week for anaerobic capacity and for maximum aerobic output and long duration and given that all of that is going to 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 uh metabolic issues and uh enhancing your sleep and improving mood I mean there's so much data so much data pointing to all those positive benefits if I do all of these things and I'm fairly consistent about them am I going to be metabolically flexible am I going to have a well-developed fat burning carbohydrate burning system and will I be essentially fit I mean this is not leaving aside issues of strength and hypertrophy which were covered in the previous episode will I be fit I mean to my mind the ability to you know Sprint very fast if one needs to the ability to go longer duration if one needs to and the ability to do something in between as well as 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 want to be able to do that for the duration of your life for a very long life this style of training where you incorporate all of those areas of endurance gives you all of the necessary adaptations one would need to execute all of those things remember fat loss or Weight Management is not best done with any individual style of protocol so if you do a little bit of all three of these you've checked that fat loss box you don't need to go out and do anything separate for it you've done all the things then to cover Aesthetics from that side of the equation right you've done the things to both enhance mitochondria to enhance blood flow increase oxygenation and manage fatigue and waste development boom energy is there fatigue is there I'm not going to get tired or have to quit or stop or sit down doing any of these activities I want at the same time if you look at the literature on mortality one of the strongest predictors of how long you're going to live is your VO2 max so we've set up a scenario in which you're going to hit all three of those primary goals by doing a combination of this training you're not going to miss any plausible adaptation from endurance training and you should be set for regardless of your goal incredible and as I understand totally compatible with strength and hypertrophy training provided that your goal is to also be strong and also selectively hypertrophy or generally hypertrophy your muscles or maintain your muscles for many people that are listening to this I'm guessing that they have an interest in building more endurance but not just the ability to go further but the ability to go a given distance at a higher speed and to do it with better form and to breathe better and to feel better before during and after for those folks maybe you could spell out a program that combines these different elements of endurance and does so in a way that informs how for instance the higher intensity short duration Sprints would be expected to improve their longer duration work and how perhaps their longer duration work can progress if they are careful to include some planks and some wall sets and and things of that sort I asked this question specifically because I have to believe that while there probably are some folks out there they're looking to just maximize their plank from week to week to week typically it seems that people fall into these categories of either wanting to get stronger and get bigger muscles to varying degrees or to get better at endurance or to get better at everything overall right now I'd really like to just focus on what you think is a nice Contour of a program for the person that wants to get better at endurance but do it with more speed more stability and just feel like a strong endurance Runner cycle or 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 or maybe done 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 percent of your you know mileage in the moderate intensity Zone okay so you need to accumulate mileage and you need to be able to handle what we call the tissue tolerance so in this case your feet need to be able to handle 13 miles of pounding okay it doesn't matter how much high heart rate training you do or your fat deliverability none of that matters if your feet are blown up by mile eight Okay so in addition we talked about how even training in that 70 to 85 percent heart rate zone is quite effective at oxygen delivery fat 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 and that pounding okay in addition you need to be efficient with your Technique and you need a lot of repetitions for motor skill development so you want to spend most your time there it's easy to recover from it's not extremely demanding and challenging awesome that leaves you with another 30 or 40 percent of training I would spend 10 percent of that in that like 20 second burst area you're going to drive up fatigue extremely high and you're going to really maximize your ability to recover from waste production all right great I would spend the remaining amount of time either on a little bit of actually maximum speed stuff that could actually be in the 20 second burst if you're really trying to go as fast as you can at the beginning of that exercise and then the rest of it I would spend in that other Zone which is more of like the five to 15 minutes but you're probably going to want to repeat those and this is when things like 800 meter run rest for double the time and then repeat that two or three times you actually need that in this scenario because you're gonna need to be able to be running for two most people are gonna 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 time that's actually how you bump your mileage up so instead of having this do more of these long duration distance runs you can still get maybe five or six miles down in a day if you're going to do a one mile repeat or whatever number you're looking at so for a lot of people that's kind of how I would structure it um that's honestly it's very similar to what we laid out in the previous conversation which is getting to this idea that more than 50 percent should be basically practice a little bit of work at the very top end of the spectrum but not too much and then a little bit of work at the other end and you should be in a good spot a major mistake one would make here is only doing the long duration steady state stuff and just sort of saying I'm gonna run a five mile this was a week and then do six miles next week and seven I said that might work for you it's I think we have enough evidence at this point both in the scientific realm as well as most of the coaches I think in this space would agree with me is that's a sub-optimal strategy so it could work but we can do better and in terms of the structure of a program like this I realize that those structures vary tremendously different coaches and different books and different programs are going to say oh you should run Monday through Friday with weekends off or every other day but in terms of this 70 percent um thirty percent divide where seventy percent is going toward the specific event you know doing the kind of work that you're going to do during this specific event that you're most interested in cultivating or improving and the remaining 30 coming from other sorts of uh of supporting were work how should one thing about Distributing that other thirty percent should it be all geared towards maximizing recovery for the 70 or in other words um could I do all that 30 work on one day I probably would split it into two days um that's the reality is so if you're thinking man coach wants me to train six days a week my schedule is tight I can pull off four to five okay great what I might say is two of those days are just your your tempo right this is what like a runner would call this like Tempo training I'm kind of in that space remind us what tempo training is 80 effort range where you're like running at probably the same stride length and and rate that you're gonna 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 in for sure work but it's not absolutely the fastest you can Sprint it's also not conversation so this would be the um what before we refer to as the 10 minutes of of fast running or ten minutes of fast run this is lower intensity than that got it this is uh this is work accumulation got it this is practice stuff um then one of the days a week I would probably enter in that 22nd 30 second burst for a little bit of speed there and then one of the other days is when I would do that true high intensity as hard as I can for hitting a VO2 max something like that so that's probably how I'd break it up if I had like four days a week if you had five you can maybe add in another day where you do more of that volume accumulation practice work but that's that's a pretty good split well this is the point in the episode where I say thank you ever so much you provided an enormous amount of incredibly interesting clear information that's also actionable I do feel as if I far better understand endurance in its many forms and even the seller underpinnings of that and even 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 that I will do tomorrow and where I hit my pain points I'll understand what's happening and the adaptation that I'm triggering when my legs are burning or I'm 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 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 um 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 uh I actually really appreciate the fact that you let me go so far into metabolism my PhD is in human bioenergetics so anytime I can go many hours into metabolism I get very excited and I don't typically get that leash um in this format so I appreciate that I know you understand your audience will love that hopefully Oh They'll love it and I think that they'll especially love it because they understand that if one can wrap their head around even just a small fraction of the mechanisms that underlie a given protocol it gives both tremendous depth and meaning to that protocol and makes it so much more flexible for people they can really think about what's happening as they're engaging in a given protocol and know exactly what they can expect in terms of results Great we've been on a bit of a journey here we've covered a lot of ground with speed development and strength and hypertrophy and now we walk through you know probably several hours here of of endurance what I would love to do next is to just give you a more straightforward not as much background not as much metabolism none of the mechanisms right into protocols for someone who says look I want to hit those marks you keep talking about I want to look good I want to feel good and I want to do that across my lifespan how would I build all these things into a protocol that actually covers maybe the entire year and how would I would be able to repeat that year after year so I almost have this Evergreen sustainable year-long periodization structure that covers all the nodes I need to if I want everything we've talked about in these nine adaptations in this short Series so I would love to do that in our next conversation if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover or guess you'd like me to include on the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comments section on YouTube we do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast I'd also like to inform you about the huberman Lab podcast free newsletter it's called the neural network newsletter and each month the neural network newsletter is sent out and it contains summaries of podcast episodes specific protocols discussed on the human Lab podcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost you can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to hubermanlab.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 past 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 interest in science [Music]

Channel: Andrew Huberman

Views: 3,816,297

Keywords: andrew huberman, huberman lab podcast, huberman podcast, dr. andrew huberman, neuroscience, huberman lab, andrew huberman podcast, the huberman lab podcast, science podcast, Andy Galpin, physical endurance, burn fat, lose fat, physical exercise, Huberman Lab Guest Series

Id: oNkDA2F7CjM

Length: 228min 52sec (13732 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/mmiller9913]

Idk man this one is just so biochemistry heavy, 2 hours in and there’s only been a few actionable pieces of advice

[u/Gallerina1]

Huberman used to timestamp his episodes for different topics. Haven't tuned in for a while, but it seems he's given up on this practice.

Oh dear...

[u/[deleted]]

Seems like he’s saying to just breathe more… literally whatever you have to do. Control your diet and breath more (exercise)