Episode 380: Dr. Mike T. Nelson - Metabolic Flexibility

Dr. Mike T. Nelson has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, a BA in Natural Science, and an MS in Biomechanics. He’s an adjunct professor and a member of the American College of Sports Medicine with an interest in metabolic flexibility.

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Check Out My Endurance Series:

Episode 337: The Long Run Considering the Variables 

Episode 344: Endurance Training Simplified

Episode 346: Short Intervals Simplified   

Episode 348: Long Intervals Simplified   

Episode 352: Proper Aid Station Navigation

Episode 356: Easy Run - Simplified 

Episode 363: Mental Training For Endurance

Episode 366: Race Course Specific Training 

Episode 369: Speed Work Distribution & Double Threshold Sessions

Episode Transcript:

Mike, welcome to Austin. Yeah. Thank you. Welcome. How are you, sir? Good, good. It's, uh, fun to have you coming down this way. You made the long trip from Minnesota by car. We did. We loved the end of October. We went down to South Padre Island. So that's about from Minnesota, where we are about 1550 miles. Okay. We stopped along the way, so it wasn't wasn't too bad. And then I did a conference in Connecticut. So we left from down there, did that, and then we were down in South Padre for about four weeks after that. Yeah. Making our way back home now. Slowly, yeah. Slowly but surely. I remember when I lived in Wisconsin during the summer when I was teaching, I would drive out to California sometimes, and it was kind of a similar distance. But yeah, you get on I-80 and you just basically take that the entire way. Oh yeah. There's not a good spot to stop along the way. I think Colorado is probably the first, as if you really like outdoor stuff it is a pretty good spot. Um, Utah has some really good spots, but you get some pretty dry spots too, especially heading through like Nebraska and Nebraska is the world's longest state. Yeah, it is west of the Midwest. It's like I'm still in Nebraska. Are you kidding me? 1s Yeah, it's hard to imagine, but. Yeah. So you like to go kiteboarding down this way, right? Yeah. So how did that go? It went pretty well. Like I, my goal this time was just to. Try to hit like a close to a 20 foot jump more consistently. Didn't quite do that. Um, last time before I left, I got a 16 foot jump for probably 130ft or so, and, um, but yeah, it was super fun. Got a fair amount of riding. Um, both high winds, not so high winds. Attempted to learn how to wing foil a little bit and then attempted to learn how to kite foil. And. Yeah, just got my ass kicked by both of those entirely. So, yeah. Speaking of, uh, water, specifically cold water. One topic I wanted to talk to you about because I think last time you were on the show, we talked about it maybe a little bit or maybe online. Yeah. And, uh, it's just something where I think between then and now, ice baths have gone from something that was sort of like, this is a cool activity that some fringe people were doing that people were aware of to now it seems like everybody and their mom is doing ice baths. So I want to talk to you about this because it seems like it's it's like anything that gets popular, you have that big wave of just like everyone leaning into maybe 1 or 2 studies that say what they wanted to say, essentially, and then it'll eventually settle down into, like, where's the actual application for something like this? And, and then with that comes the arguing online that ice baths will prevent everything. Or ice baths are worthless. Never doing what, why , why bother kind of a thing. So, um. Yeah. What's your take on ice baths? I'm sure there's some nuance there in terms of, like, what you're trying to get out of it, but it'd be fun. Topic to jump into. Yeah, so I've followed it for a while and it was like right before Covid happened, I was like, okay, I'm going to like, you know, take my freezer I had purchased and seal everything and just make my own cold water immersion and just see what happens with it. And luckily I did that right before that happened. I had it for about three months before everything just got shut down, so I was able to do it every day. I wasn't traveling, wasn't teaching, or going anywhere. It was just at home. And what I realized was one, freezers aren't really meant to be converted to cold water tubs. They do work. Um, however, the inside of them is very thin. Um, so it's easy to scratch and they can leak a little bit. So mine now is more filled with silicone to stop that than anything else. And the other part that shocked me was. I thought after doing it for quite some time. Just like exercise and everything else, we know there's an adaptation. So my thought process being okay, day one is going to suck. You know, month two is probably going to suck. But a year later, two years later, you know, doing this consistently five, six days a week, it'll be pretty easy. Like, I may not be able to get a cold enough. I may, you know, have to change and get something else or have some water moving through it. And when I realized even after two years of doing it almost every day when I was home, I was traveling a little bit more at the end, right before you got in. There's still that hesitation of like, shit, what? What am I doing? This is stupid. I don't want to do this. Like, I thought that that would have just kind of completely disappeared. But it never did. It got easier, but there was still always that hesitation of this. This sucks. And that's not even going super cold. That's even like 42 degrees, 45 degrees, whatever. And it kind of makes sense because, you know, the little reptilian part of your brain is wired for survival, right? Your whole body is wired for survival. And we can kind of modify that with the, you know, the professor part, the new cortex, part of the brain. But intrinsically, you're still wired to think, if I stay in cold water, I could literally die. Which is true, but it does take quite a period of time in order for that to happen. So I U1 think there's still that hardwired portion. But what I found was that it can be positive too. So what I realized was we'll talk about some of the physiology stuff too. But my biggest takeaway was, I think the psychology side of it I've found with myself and with clients was, I think has more positive impact than even the physiology. Just because the fact that the main reason I started doing it is, okay, what's something that's very hard to do, I could do every day, but is not very time consuming because, you know, there's only so many wind gaits you can do per day or hard exercise without just being a worthless piece of crap for like two days after. But if you really wanted to test yourself, there's other things you can do. Like you do some crazy shit, but it takes a lot longer time domain in order to do that. You know, day in and day out. And I'm like, oh, I bet cold water, I bet, oh, that'll do it. And that's what I realized is that every day was still hard. But you make the decision of, oh, okay, this does still suck, but I'm going to go ahead and still do it. So you kind of have that optionality of choosing to do something hard each day, which I do think transfers to other aspects of your life, whether that's making a different nutrition Detroits going to bed early, taking the stairs, whatever. My guess is that I think that skill set does transfer to other aspects of your life. Hmm. Yeah, I love that explanation because I can relate to it. The way I describe it is, if you do like, like relatively short dips in the ice bath, like less than three minutes around that time frame, what I find is it's like it trains my mind the same way that I need to train it for like a short interval session. So if I'm doing a classic VO2 max, something like let's just say five by three minutes or six by three minutes or something like that, there is this like ebb and flow of a workout like that, where the first one is almost always worse than the second one, because you have to, like, just shock your body into it. Like, you know, it doesn't matter if you do strides. Well, it does, but it but it's like that first one is always got that like relative difficulty that you have to kind of like normalize and then you kind of get cruising and then it's like then it's just a balance of finding that spot where, okay, I've done enough of these now where I'm going to get an adaptation if I repeat this process enough. But I didn't go so far that I wrung myself dry and now I can't do another workout for a week. Yeah. So then it's just kind of finding that balance. But you can't do that many of those types of workouts. So it is something and you, you may just be dosing them at like certain points of your training cycle versus every week year round. But I can do the ice bath every day and get that same kind of mind process of like, this sucks, it sucks, it sucks. Oh, maybe it's not too bad. Okay, I'm settled in. I can do this. So that same kind of doubt. Overcome by confidence and then just focus. There's like that same repetition, and I find it to be very useful for those purposes. So yeah, it sounds like that's kind of what you were angling at with it though too. Yeah. And then I mean, I have of course the physiologic flexibility certification. So one of the aspects is how to make yourself more resilient and more robust. And so one of the four pillars is temperature. So with cold the little term I coined is a stress lesson. So listen. So when you get in can you take a known stressor because you know about how long you're going to be in. You know what. If you know the size of the tub, it's water and you know the temperature. So you can be very precise with the dosing. And then the goal then is not necessarily to get hyper aggressive with overload per se, but can you get in and can you lessen that stressor faster. Right. So like all the stuff everybody talks about, can you get control of your breathing. Can you try to get more parasympathetic? Can you get into a calm stay? Can you do all that stuff sooner and make that process easier? And then once you get good at that, then I think you can drop the temperature, go a little bit longer, that type of thing. So you're taking a known stressor, but you're not looking so much for overload. You're looking for can I make it more efficient for my body? Because that's, I think, a skill set, especially for things like what you do and a lot of other athletes do. I think that skill set is transferable, right. If you're going to go out and you have to run a certain pace, you have to do a certain thing. The weather is this and a lot of stuff is fixed. You're left with, okay, can I still hit that performance mark? But can I make it easier on my body? Can I look for those efficiency gains? And that's, I think, harder to get at with other aspects of training. I think that's something like an ice bath. You can practice very easily and you know, whether you're doing it or not, like if you get in and you're freaking the fuck out for like 30s. And then the next day you get in and you only freak out for 20s and then 10s like, you can see that progression very, very fast. Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. What about duration? I want to say when I go online, I just look at just kind of the back and forth in the research and stuff like that. It seems like the research points towards it being problematic. If someone says, say does like a, really like a, like a strength session, strength work, like, let's say you go to the gym and you do like squats or deadlifts and hop in the ice bath, it seems like there's evidence to suggest that's maybe not optimal. Versus what maybe the athlete anecdote would suggest, which is after a hard workout, I jump in the ice tub and I feel better. What is it? What do we know about that side of things? Yeah. So if you look at purely performance, then we'll talk a little bit about hypertrophy because it's a separate topic. Um. 2s I'd say the performance data on it is pretty damn split. Like, I spent a ton of time going through all the research for years trying to figure out like, okay, can we give some solid recommendations that are repeatable by the research? Are not really. The only thing I came up with is that if you are an athlete and you are in season, the sort of the paradigm that I use then is that the goal is not necessarily adaptation. It's more recovery. It's, you know, you have a game tomorrow or the next day or every Sunday or whatever your time frame is. You're just trying to make it through the season. And yes, you want to hold on to some adaptations by all means. But your biggest thing is I need to be recovered because it doesn't matter what happens if I'm in the NFL, I've got a game, let's say Sunday at noon, or I've got a big race coming up or whatever. So the goal then is just to get to the next thing. And I think in that context you will trade a little bit of lessening the adaptations or maybe even taking away from it a little bit. If you feel better and you can perform again the next time. Uh, most high level athletes, I would say, find it beneficial, even though that's anecdotal. Um, you go to a lot of, you know, professional places, like if you watch, um, the Netflix series, the quarterbacks obviously from Minnesota. So a big Kirk Cousins fan, right. This show I'm doing a lot of cold water, that kind of stuff. Um, but the research on it is very split. Like you'll find some stuff with mixed martial athletes, some soccer players showing that there were benefits. Um, but sometimes it was only in vertical jump and sometimes it was only in speed and power, and sometimes it was only one particular exercise. It's just really split. And the hard part too, is that there isn't. A standardized necessarily dosing procedure either. So they're all using potentially cold water immersion, maybe up to the neck, maybe just lower body. They may have water flowing or it may be static. They have different times. They have different temperatures. They have different timing. Was it done immediately after training or was it done maybe before training, or was it done in the evening or different times? That type of thing. What we do know from the research that is very reliable, we do see big changes in dopamine and norepinephrine. Uh, that's been pretty well confirmed, both anecdotal and actual research. So most people do feel a lot better once they're done. And even if that equates to them performing better for an in-season athlete, cool. I'll take that. Like all day. And the interventions like what, five minutes or something like that? Great. As long as you warm up again before you perform your task or your sport, you're probably fine. So I would say it's pretty, pretty split on the performance side, um, for strength, speed and power. If you look at more aerobic adaptations, it's even, I'd say more up in the air. And I would say, if anything, there's some meta analyses showing that for aerobic adaptations, it. Might be a benefit, although the effect size was pretty damn small. Um, the modulators of it, how that happens, we're not really sure. Um, and also the confounding, the big confounding factor in that two is if you read the studies, were they doing it outside in a hot environment? Um, because what I played with in Minnesota surprisingly does get pretty warm in the summer. I would do some aerobic stuff, and then I would use the cold water immersion as a way to just dump the heat load off my body, and then come back again and do another. If I'm doing some high intensity intervals on the rower. And what I found by doing that is I could sustain much higher levels of performance over time. Now, I'm not getting the key to adaptation. If I was going to have to perform in a hot climate, which I don't really necessarily have to. So there is a trade off with that. Um, so I wonder about some of the studies looking at endurance performance. If they did it outside and it's a warm environment, obviously your exercise and your heat is elevated is part of that. Just dumping that heat load so that you can get back to homeostasis faster. And maybe that's the mode of recovery. Maybe it's molecular. Maybe just PBC one alpha. I don't know, there's just even more variables. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To play around with it. Just kind of a boring non-answer for people who are listening. Yeah. I mean, the debate continues. I guess the thing that you mentioned that I do find really interesting was, uh, just the intra interval dosing of it, because living here, we've been through two summers in Austin now coming from Phoenix. So like we came from a super hot place to another hot summer. Biggest difference is dry heat to very humid heat. So the thing that I sort of relearned because growing up in Wisconsin, we had humid summers, not quite as humid is here, but yeah, humid enough is if I'm doing an interval session, like usually like in a dry climate, even if it's relatively hot, I'll notice like, oh yeah, I get pretty good heart rate recovery between right in the humidity of evaporation. You can dump that heat load. Yeah. Yeah. You cannot dump it. No. So you're doing something like an interval session. I'm like, wow. My recovery heart rate is still at a threshold. Like it's pretty insane. But if I could just like yeah, dump that heat low like you mentioned in between interval sessions, I could probably get a little bit of higher quality or maybe eke out an extra interval without any extra cost. And then over the course of, say, an eight week speed work development phase, one extra interval, each one of those workouts is essentially a whole nother workout plus. So I think I didn't try it at all this summer, but I'm probably going to have a setup next summer where I can play around with that a little more specifically. So I may try to try to play around with that and just see what it shows up in my own kind of end of one date, I guess. But it is an interesting, interesting takeaway. Yeah. And obviously if you're curious what you find, I mean, again, I have very limited data on this, but how I would set up the plans is the session would repeat as much high quality work as you possibly can. Mhm. Um, which I think applies to both speed and power and endurance athletes. So I remember a side note, uh, doing some work with Cal Dietz, University of Minnesota, and I was helping him write an article and he has this huge whiteboard in his office. I've known Cal for like 15 years. It's 40 minutes of me just sitting there, him drawing all this stuff on this whiteboard, and I'm thinking, oh my God, like, how the hell am I going to write an article about this that makes sense? And so after he finishes all of this, I just look at him and I'm like, okay, so you're saying do higher quality work first and then add quantity. And he kind of pauses. He's like. Yeah. 2s So I think with the ability to dump a heat load, you can get higher quality work in. Like you said, you probably can get another round of intervals in which over time for, you know, intermediate to advanced athletes is beneficial. And then if you know, you have to perform in a hot and humid climate leading up to that, I would take at least probably about most the literature would say two weeks to actually do a specific heat acclimation at that point, because you're probably not going to eke out a lot of performance gains, you know, those 1 or 2 weeks before the race. However, you can definitely get a lot more heat adapted during that time. And as you know from experience, if you're not heat adapted and you go to those types of climates, it sucks even more than what it already sucks. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The nice thing about heat adaptation, it is pretty quick, and most of the protocols are like three 20 minute sessions per week after a workout for I think was like 3 or 4 weeks maybe. And then you're pretty much got all the, all the value you're going to get out of that. And the nice thing about ultramarathon running is I'll do a speed work development phase much earlier in the plan. Then I get to long run development or ultra specific long run development, in which case I'm not nearly as worried about, you know, controlling that variable. Right? And especially if it is a hot weather race. I just did a race in Phoenix in October and it was plenty hot, even though it was a cool year and was still well into the 80s. So it's like direct sunlight. So yeah. So this summer training in the humidity, like outside of speed work, I was actually kind of looking forward to it, to the, to the degree that it was like, okay, this is going to be what I'm dealing with, actually probably worse than what I'll be dealing with on race day. So let's normalize that a little bit. And since it's lower intensity for long run development, it's just not as much of a problem from an overheating standpoint where I'm losing quality of the workout session because I have to pull back due to overheating. Yeah. And the heat adaptation is one of those things that's been around forever, but it's surprising how some high level athletes I consult with, like they kind of forget about it. Yeah. Which to me is kind of shocking. Um, and again, it's one of those things that if you're not taking into account, it can definitely be to your detriment. And like you said, the research on it, you know, 1 to 2 weeks, you can get two weeks, you can get a lot of that attention if you're at elite level, 3 to 4, probably somewhere in there, you're probably going to be pretty good. So it's not something you have to spend years developing. It's something you can add in within a few weeks out and, you know, see some pretty good benefits from it. Yeah, the problem is I'm guessing you lose it pretty quick. Exactly. You lose it about as fast as you gained it. Yeah, that's the thing. So some athletes if they have. 1s So one of the authors I was working with, they have a big event coming up. I can't say what it is, but a big event is coming up and then three weeks later they have a bigger event after that. So it's a qualifying event. If they make it, then they've got a bigger race after that. Um, so we just said, okay, after that, you're gonna have to kind of take a little bit of a load. You need to qualify first. That's obviously the biggest thing. Hoping you make that. Then you can use things like saunas and other things that are more passive recovery to kind of hold some of those heat adaptations without having to train, you know, necessarily in the environment and add a ton of mileage and a ton of stress to your physiology. So you can kind of take some of those things and kind of prolong them for a period of time. But you're correct that if you don't have any exposure to heat at all, like, you know, 1 or 2 weeks, you're almost back, back to baseline again. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. So all summer long it just takes two cold winters. Winter fall weeks 2s is when you train in the heat in the summer it feels like that's not fair. It feels like you should earn a longer level of heat adaptation. Although if you're going to be training in the pool after that, you probably want to lose it as long as you're not competing in it because you don't want to be you, you probably have a reverse effect there where your tolerance to cold, I would imagine, is lower as your heat adaptation goes up. Or is that something that doesn't conflict? Yeah. So that's something I've been interested in for a while, and I tried to find research on it forever, because my thought was exactly similar to yours. If you're thinking along the lines of the said principle, like adaptation to cold and heat are probably on opposite ends of the spectrum, right? So my thought was, okay, do they conflict with each other? So if you have someone who, let's say, is getting ready for a huge race in Phoenix, should you not have them do a lot of cold water stuff because you're getting them to adapt more to a cold stimulus when they're going to compete in a hot environment. I can't find anything that says that's true. The mechanisms overlap a little bit, but not exactly. So what I do with athletes is I call it the barbell method. So just like you would for any other quality you want to develop, just take what you have access to first and let's do that. So if you're in Minnesota and you only have a cold water tub, like let's just do some cold adaptation first. Let's not worry about heat. If you're in a hot environment or you have access to a sauna, great. Do the opposite and do some heat adaptation first. Once you get pretty good at that, then kind of put that on hold. Maybe not do the same thing. Maybe you do it once or twice a week, and let's go to the other end of the spectrum. And let's say you're working on hot. Now let's go to the other end of the barbell and work on the cold. Once you get pretty good at that, then I would actually have them do a contrast therapy back and forth. Um, because I don't think contrast therapy is bad, but to me it's, it's much more advanced because you have a cold stressor, you have a hot stressor, and you have to switch back and forth extremely fast. Um, some of the literature shows that there are potentially some benefits to that. But what I've realized with athletes is it's virtually impossible to troubleshoot because I've seen multiple athletes now come in where their scores are all just completely screwed. And it's like, man, like, bro, what are you doing? Like, oh, I just got this cold tub the other day. They put the sauna in and I'm doing this crazy contrast therapy back and forth, you know? And so they went from like, nothing to, like, you know, balls out whatever protocol they got off the internet and their HRV scores are just, just dropping like a rock. But I don't know at that point. Was the sauna too hot? Re dehydrated. Was the cold too cold? Did you switch back and forth too much? Did you do too many rounds? There's so many variables to troubleshoot. You can scale them all down and just kind of go with it. Um, so usually I just have them pick. Okay. What do you have access to? What's more specific for your needs? Let's work on that. Cool. We can monitor that and make sure you're not overdoing it, because I have seen CrossFit athletes do a little too much on the Wim Hof and the cold water immersion and just completely tanked their HRV, and it took me three days to figure out what the hell they were doing, because none of the other parameters changed. And I said, you have to be doing something different, that this has happened three days in a row and they're like, oh yeah, I added cold water in like 20 minutes of Wim Hof in the morning. So yeah. Um, so yeah, just pick one, go that, make sure that's good, and then expand the other one. And then you can kind of, you know, go back and forth. And then the other trick I'll have people do is if you're doing contrast therapy, do it like on a usual program and on a Sunday where like Sunday is completely off, like just just walk, do some mobility, like just chill out. And that way I know if Monday is completely screwed and you're not back on track, I know kind of what did it. If you kind of toss it into your other training, unless you're pretty well documented of how you respond to that, it's harder to figure out. Um, and again, the goal is to try to increase your recovery, which to me is just getting back to baseline faster. Um, that way on Sunday, you'll be able to look at Monday, and then you'll obviously have your performance data on Monday to see how that's going. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it's cool stuff. I wanted to talk to you about, uh, ketogenic diet as well, because you're metabolic. And I want to say one last thing. Oh, yeah, go, go for it. People are gonna email and go. He said he's gonna talk about hypertrophy and you never know. Oh that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So there's about four really good studies looking at muscle hypertrophy in cold water immersion. So the studies showed that it was around 10 to 20 minutes at least 50°F. Uh, but the part that you worked on, which mostly was the lower body, is completely submerged. And it was done immediately after training. And in those studies, it is correct that they did not see as much, um, hypertrophy compared to the group that didn't do that at all. So if you go anywhere online, people are like, oh my God, don't do cold water. It's destroying all your gains. Um, like we talked about strength and power. It's much more of a mixed bag. Um, so for the first flex course, I spent forever with God forever. I went through all the studies, went through everything I could find because in my brain I'm like, okay, what in plain English does this actually mean? Right? Because you well know that you could see an effect size and you could see something that's statistically significant in a study, but it could be so small that it doesn't matter. And again, it depends on the context. If you're an elite level athlete, those small changes could actually be highly significant to you in terms of your performance, even though it was very small in the study or maybe even non-significant. So I was trying to figure out I'm like, okay, let's say you're just a crazy hyper responder to hypertrophy. And arbitrarily you can gain £1 lean body mass per month, right? Which is way on the high end. But it just makes simple math, right. So one year you would gain £12 okay. So if I'm a bro and I'm doing all my training and my goal is only hypertrophy and I'm doing cold water immersion after every single session, and I'm doing it exactly the way it was in the studies, which most people are not. But let's say they are. What does that cost me? Is that costing me three quarters of that pound? It cost me half a pound. Is it like half an ounce? And unfortunately I don't have the answer. Which annoys the crap out of me because some of the studies used muscle fiber changes so they could see on muscle fibers there was a difference in hypertrophy. Some of them did use Dexa, but it was probably below the limits of the Dexa. Again, if you pull all the people together, can you show there's a difference? Yes. Can you figure out exactly what that difference was with any reliable confidence? Unfortunately, no. Um, so it probably has an effect. I don't know what the actual number is. My guess is it's probably on the lower scale. And the other part is we don't know what happens after the study is done. Right. Does your body have an increased accelerated gain to try to make up for that? Um, we do see some of that in people who train really hard, who are on reduced calories. There's kind of these make up gains a little bit that accelerate after that period of time. Um, so we don't know any of that. We do know that the mechanism is it does appear to directly affect what's called muscle protein synthesis. And it appears to downturn that process directly. So that's how well your body takes incoming protein, takes the amino acids and shoves them into muscle tissue to make it bigger and stronger. So we do know that cold water immersion done immediately after does turn down that process. We don't. We're not quite as good about the changes in the chronic setting. There's only been a couple of studies that have been done on that. Uh, last part is in healthy individuals, I can't find any data for cold water immersion that it actually changes inflammation or is actually anti-inflammatory, which kind of goes against everything that's set online. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so one of the main studies from Van Loon's lab looked at TNF alpha, and looked at a whole bunch of different markers. They didn't see any difference. And they blasted them for like 20 minutes. I think of cold water like 50°F. Um, they did see muscle protein synthesis was reduced. They did see less, um, quote unquote gains in that study. Um, however, if you're looking at a pathological population, yeah, you may see some modification of inflammation. I don't know, in that case. Um, but the prevailing wisdom online was, oh, it's anti-inflammatory. And because it's anti-inflammatory, like some NSAIDs and some antioxidants, that's what's blunting the muscle hypertrophy effect, which does not appear to be true. There appears to be some regulatory mechanism directly on the muscle protein synthesis rate. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Because even if we look at it through the lens of anti-inflammatory, it's like that could either be good or bad, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's like what? What part of that process ah, is it acute after a workout where you actually want that or is it chronic inflammation that is giving people all sorts of issues, or the inflammation sort of has become kind of a catchall where the people use to describe any discomfort I find. Yeah. And a lot of it is biphasic too, like you said, like il6 you probably want that to spike after training, but then you want it to come back and normalize. You don't want to be running around with. Crazy high levels of il6 all the time either. Right. So a lot of these responses are acutely we probably want some inflammation like reactive oxygen species. We probably want some of those. Those are cellular markers that did some damage. And we want a positive adaptation. But you don't want him to be going like batshit crazy, like 24 over seven either. You know, cortisol is the same way. Like if you can't elevate cortisol, your training is going to suck. Yeah, but you don't want to be walking around all day trying to go to bed with cortisol levels that are sky high either, you know, so it's the interplay of you wanting that to be back to what is quote unquote more normal. Um, but that gets more complicated. People want to know, oh, cortisol, is it good or bad. Yeah. Right. Like, oh I heard it's bad. 1s Yeah. Interesting stuff. Yeah. So I was curious if you had any information or info on the more recent study that came out about low carbohydrate, actually. I mean, it's basically strict ketogenic diets because I think the keto arm in that study was 50g, which with endurance athletes is going to be a ketogenic diet. Oh yeah. No matter how you define it for the most part. And it was by, uh, Noakes Blues, I believe there was another another, another author included in it. But it was interesting because they ran a group of, I believe it was ten, ten participants. They were like, uh, they weren't like elite athletes, but they were top tier. Like, I guess you maybe call them age groupers or something like that. They're training in like the neighborhood of probably like 30, 40 miles a week, if I recall correctly. And they put them through a battery of more like, higher intensity, like speed work type stuff to try to tease out whether the ketogenic diet was going to be a performance deficit in, in the context that they had it. And I mean, they did the same group with a washout period. Um, it looked like it was a reasonably done study for the purposes that they were trying to explore. And they found no issues in terms of performance with that group. They also found that three out of the ten participants, when they went back and did the moderate to high carbohydrate diet, were actually pre-diabetic, which was resolved with the ketogenic diet. Yeah, which was suggesting because none of these individuals were gaining weight on that. And if anything, I think all participants lost weight throughout the study. So it was suggestive that it was something unique to carbohydrate endurance in relatively fit and healthy people, that there's a percentage of the population that that's just not a good combination for, if we're looking at blood glucose control anyway. So I was curious. I mean, I've got questions. I don't I'm not criticizing the study on this. Yeah. Yeah, I've got questions about the performance side of it because I don't think so. I don't think they probably had the ability to do a task that would actually answer the question that I have, which is like, how does that play out when it's actually being put in a training cycle of, I'm not just going to send you out for one random three minute VO2 max session or a one mile time trial. I think they were doing eight hundreds, if I remember correctly. I'm going to have you doing something like a short interval session, a threshold session, or a long run. I'm going to have you cycling for like three weeks before I give you a week. My question is always like, I understand that someone can go and execute a short interval session on ketogenic diet, but when can they replicate that relative to someone with more carbohydrate included in the in the mixture, whether that be just pivoting from strict keto to low and being kind of more strategic with the carbohydrate uses or just full on moderate to high carbohydrate. Because in my own personal experience, yeah, if I could, I could sit strictly keto 50g a day for weeks and then go out and just nail a 400 meter repeat workout. But if you asked me to do that workout again, I would need more time to do it again. Whereas if I introduce carbohydrates just around that workout and then go back to a lower carb diet after that, I'm going to be able to replicate sooner. So do you find if you had to do 400 meter repeats, that your performance in session or in repeat two, three, four, five, six kind of drops off faster? No, I don't actually find that any I mean, I'm sure I could get to a point where it would probably be a problem where, okay, now, now if I don't introduce some carbohydrate, my performance will suffer. And if I do, I'll be able to eke out a few more reps. Sure. The question I always have with that is are those extra reps necessary or are they detrimental because they are going to put you to. I like to describe short intervals as leaving a couple in the tank. Yeah, yeah, leave a couple in the tank. I'm repeating that session sooner, and that repeat session is going to be way more than the couple extra I do if I go too far. Yeah. So in some regard, I think you can look at carbohydrate as almost two potent to a degree where if it allows me to do a hero workout when I should have stopped, yeah, then it actually could potentially take more off down the road to um, in, in, in certain circumstances. But that's always kind of my, my, my second question when I see, like, you know, a good workout on a strict ketogenic diet relative to, you know, any sort of carbohydrate introduction with that, when we're talking about moderate to high intensities. Um, so I think I actually found the pre-diabetic part of that study way more interesting because most people are looking at endurance athletes. Primarily through health. They probably have performance goals, but unless you're an elite athlete, you probably don't want to drive diabetes in order to achieve your PR at the Boston Marathon. So if it is 30%, um, percent of the population, which I get, ten people, you know, obviously need to be replicated. We need more participants. We need to really fine tune that number. Assuming there is a signal there, we need to figure out more precisely what that number actually would be. And obviously ways to get people to figure out if they're in that group or not. But yeah, I was just curious, had you looked at that study at all? I just looked at it briefly. I haven't read it in detail yet. Um, my takeaways were similar to yours that I would have expected more of a speed and power kind of drop off. Um, but if I remember right, they were not. They were trained, but they were not like super high level people either. And this is the same thing with training for any speed and power. It's like, what is your baseline? You know, if your baseline is you haven't done a lot of speed and power training. So you're at a much lower level then. Nothing's probably going to make that much of a difference, right? If you're at a very high level now, you're one more sensitive to it, and a small drop off is going to be more, more present. Right. So some of the work I did with cyclists, we would put them on a ketogenic diet and even like speed and power, like ability to pass people, that kind of stuff. Like if they were an average, I'd say, okay, rider, it didn't really change a whole lot. Um, but as you scaled up to a handful of people who were higher level, I wouldn't say not necessarily elite, they became much, much more sensitive to it. Like a couple of them got super pissed. They're like, what'd you do? This is stupid. I went to pass this dude and I couldn't pass him. I was trying super hard. And most of them report. They just. They feel like they're missing that last gear. They feel like they're trying really hard for these sustained bouts, even within an endurance event. They just can't seem to replicate. Um, so I think it's the higher level athlete you scale up to, that's going to become more important. Um, and years ago, I never I guess I never believed that. I just thought, you know, if you're doing ultramarathons in ultra long events, then at some point, if the event's long enough, speed and power just won't matter. And I remember, uh, volunteering for the Ram race, and we were somewhere in the middle of freaking Nebraska or something like that. And as a four person team, we had a guy who was just bored. And so there's no drafting. And so he would ride up behind the guy and then he would just keep backing off. And so you'd see the guy in front get kind of nervous because he didn't want to get passed. Yeah. And then he would back off. And so we told him okay, like the fourth time just, you know, just just go by him. He's like, all right. And so we're in the car right outside him as he's passing them. And you see the other rider just trying to go as hard as he could because you could tell, like he just did not want to get passed. And he just blew by him. And the look on that guy's face was just morally just defeated. He just looked like he got crushed. And then I realized I'm like, oh my God. Like day three into a seven day race. Like speed and power still matters. Mhm. Um, so back to the study. 1s I think that if you're at a moderate to intermediate level, I think ketogenic can be beneficial. Um, as you've noticed, you probably a lot of people have issues with carbohydrates, whether it's GI intolerance, whether it's all these other things you have to kind of watch out for. Um, related to health, I've seen, uh, basically no crossover period or no crossover effect in some high level endurance athletes. So for listeners, as you would do a max test on a metabolic chart, you would see them start out using mostly fat, fat, and then over time they switch to using mostly carbohydrates. Um, I've seen a couple guys where they started out just burning through carbohydrates, and they never got down to 50% fat use at all, ever. Now their performance in races was pretty damn good. But then when you interview and you ask them, they're like, okay, what? Tell me about the races. That just didn't go well. It was always, oh, I had a problem with the fueling station, or I had GI upset like they couldn't keep that level of carbohydrate in to match their output. So they had like a really big engine, but it was only used for carbohydrates. And so I've wondered about that level of athlete. They may still perform well if they time carbohydrates and they get lucky and everything goes well. In the back of my head. I've always wondered. I'm like, I don't think they're doing their health. Any benefits? Um, and there are some studies looking at humans and rodents that show how well you can use fat as a fuel at lower to moderate intensity exercise does show up in longevity. It's not that it's hard to have a direct 1 to 1 relationship with that. Um, so for most athletes, I would encourage them, you know, to try to use more fat and then you still want to be able to switch to carbohydrates and you want to move that fat oxidation or fat max as high as you can. But the higher level you go. As an athlete, I still don't want to compromise that carbohydrate end, because I think that's still going to become important at some point. Mhm. Um, which again isn't the simple answer. Right. Because you've got as you well know, right. You've got the whole field saying ketogenic diet is the best thing ever for performance, for health, for everything. And then you've got the high carbohydrate people are saying, no, no, but it's bad for performance and, and everything else. And to me the reality is it's more metabolic flexibility. Right? At some point, should you be able to do a ketogenic diet, I think you should be able to down regulate and get to that phase. Should you be able to start out using mostly fat? And should you be able to transition to use mostly carbohydrates? I think if you can do that, you get both a performance increase and I think overall you'll be more healthy, right? Because we know looking at a progression of, say, diabetes. So most people and they think type two diabetics, they think oh it's just a carbohydrate metabolism issue. And that's what I used to think too. And yeah, there's definitely some issues with carbohydrate metabolism. But the simplistic version of it is over time. The body's solution then is just to keep putting out more and more insulin. Right. It doesn't want to have a whole lot of blood glucose hanging around the bloodstream. So the solution is we'll just put out more insulin. If we put out more insulin, that'll drive the blood glucose out and just just get the hell out of the glucose in the blood. Put it in the liver as fat. If we have to put it in the muscle as fat, carb, you know, store it somewhere. If we can just get it the hell out of the bloodstream. So we know that's going to be bad. But then over time, as insulin levels, your baseline gets higher and higher. It impairs your body to down, regulate and use fat as a fuel. So your metabolic flexibility gets crushed from both ends of the spectrum where you can't really upregulate and use carbohydrates. All that well to where you should. And your insulin levels are so high it's harder to downshift to use fat all the time as a fuel too, so you kind of get crushed from both ends of the spectrum on it. Mhm. Yeah, it gets interesting. And it's one of those things where it's almost to the point where. Getting some tests done are probably going to be helpful in recognizing where you're at. So you're at least not just, you know, grasping for things in the dark, so to speak. But yeah, I'll be interested to see. I think, uh, you know, I had a doctor Dan plugs on to talk about that study. Yeah, I love his stuff. Yeah, no, he's got great stuff. And shout out to Dan, too. He just was. He broke the age group. Uh, Iron Man record. Oh, wow. Recently went under eight hours, I think. Oh 758 or something like that. Yeah. That's crazy. So yeah. So he's, he's proven it in himself a little bit because I know Dan is more of a low carb guy himself, but not strictly ketogenic to what I understand. Certainly not during the race either. He's definitely an advocate of the right fuel right time approach of there's going to be points where like when you're describing that Ram event where he's going to be taking some carbohydrates. So he's got that geared to punch. Um, but he's also leveraging those high fat oxidation rates. His lab actually has looked at a lot of cool stuff with kind of like where you'd want that or how you can maybe just the different levers you can pull to improve fat oxidation because, yeah, people sometimes just think, oh, it's a carbon fat thing. But in reality, like if you look at it across the board, it's like, if I change nothing about my diet and introduce endurance training, I'm going to improve my fat oxidation oh, 100% from that. Or maybe I just repartition the carbohydrate from like near the workout to later in the day. I might even get some improved fat oxidation from that. Uh, I mean, we see this from moderate carbohydrate athletes from time to time where they'll do a fast long run at an easy intensity, where it's likely not going to be problematic for them. And, you know, over time, they can improve their fat oxidation rates to some degree. Anyway, um, obviously you need a test to kind of pinpoint where those are, but the big lever is always going to be just a restriction at the end of the day. So then it becomes that balance of performance versus fat oxidation improvement. And I always tell people to look at that on a spectrum because you likely don't have to be as fat fat adapted if we're going to use that word as you could get. Yeah. Which would essentially just be the elimination of carbohydrates. Right. Uh, so if you don't need to be that fat adapted, that means you've got some flexibility with the carbohydrate side of the equation. So let's find where that spot is and then kind of end up in your world a little bit more, where you sort of are able to pull both those, both those levers a little bit more. Yeah. It's like any other training quality. Right. Like you could. So the data. Right. As you know looking at VO2 max. VO2 max is one of the indicators of high level performance, but it's not the single indicator. There's plenty of top level athletes who have a very high VO2 max, but it's not the highest. And they do fine, right? Otherwise we just go, what's your VO2 max in the lab? And we bet tons of money and be like, oh there's a winner. Yeah. Right. And you've got other people who have a much higher, you know, lactate threshold or whatever, you know, ventilatory threshold, whatever words you want to use for that. Or they can basically go at an elevated pace that is a higher percentage of their VO2 max. Um, so there's not just one thing. And what's fascinating is when you try to increase your VO2 max, you can. But it seems like the percentage you can use goes down then. And so then you try to increase the percentage a little bit and your absolute max goes down a little bit. So I think of this as a, a guy I know was one of the top coaches for track athletes in Europe, and they had a I think it was a 200 meter. I think it was a female race, and her top end was good, but her acceleration was not always the best. So I think they took, I think, a four year cycle to get her acceleration up to where it needed to be. She's already like an elite level human and her top end actually went down. So her time was about the same. And I think they flipped it the following year and they saw basically the exact. Similar results again where you could increase one of them, but you drop the other ones so much that your time didn't really get better. So there seems to be this kind of ceiling at the highest, highest, highest end that you're playing with. Where, yeah, you may increase this one variable a little bit, but the next one's going to go down to try to compensate a little bit. Yeah. But I think the variables like you mentioned that most people can play with, they don't think of is okay, how high can I get my fat oxidation? However, I don't want to inhibit my body's ability to use carbohydrates in the long term. I don't want to completely kill all my speed and power. Right. Because you could, you know, get completely, you know, fat out to fat, adapted and probably get those last few percentages higher. But I'd be willing to bet your race times are not going to get better. Where, like you said, if you're a little bit below whatever your capacity is. But now your carbohydrate metabolism is also higher, so your overall system is at a higher level, then you'll see an increase in performance. But again, people want to hear, oh, if I just get fat adapted, I'm going to win races or never use ketones or never worry about fat, just use carbohydrates only. And again, like most of what I've seen from, you know, very high level humans is that they're really good at using fat. They can use some ketones and they're still really good at using carbohydrates. Or if you get mixed up, they may look at certain parts. Even if this happens to you, I'm sure of your training. Where okay, my goal in my training here is to try to use fat more. So I'm going to, like you said, restrict carbohydrates and move timing around. I mean faster training. But they'll only look at that period of training and be like, oh bro, like this is what you do all the time. Like I heard Zach, he doesn't use carbohydrates. They're horrible for him. Look at his training over these, you know, six week periods. Yeah. But that's part of a you know, year long for your, you know, plan. It's just one portion of it. Yeah. It is funny. One of my favorite things to do if I have a good race is to see people argue about whether I'm maintaining carbohydrates or not having it at all. 2s Because, yeah, it's like you said, it's like you have to look at the whole picture, not just one segment, because you can cherry pick a section of my year where, oh yeah, you could say he's ketogenic. Yeah. By Graham even. And you can pick a portion of my year where the amount of carbohydrates I'm taking in would look like moderate carbohydrate, to someone who's not doing the output I'm doing. But, you know, you introduce a 20 hour training week into the equation. All of a sudden you have a situation where now we're looking at it as like, you just put fast forward on your metabolism. You know, for me, I might be two, sometimes three axing my resting metabolic rate in a day's time. So it's like what Graham actually produces, what level of blood ketones in that particular picture. So it gets really messy when you're making those sort of lifestyle decisions, I guess. Yeah. Do you find what training volume that as you increase the intensity at volume that you feel like you're benefiting more from carbohydrates at that point? Does that make sense? Yeah, I would say it's way more linear when I just do when I increase low intensity volume, it's a fairly linear amount. So if you looked at it like let's just say, for example, if I'm just going about my day without doing any training or any any real training, maybe three days at the gym or something like that, 50g, maybe even a little lower is probably going to need to get into like a routine ketogenic state. Now all of a sudden I introduce, say, 2 to 3 hours worth of exercise into each one of those days. Low intensity. It's going to be more linear in terms of what carbohydrate I can add into that. Sure. And to some degree there's a little bit of flexibility there within because you do have these like boluses of higher energy output. It's not just like a straight energy curve or a straight energy line. It is kind of like a big bump of energy and then kind of back to normal, a big bump of energy as you go do 2 or 3 sessions or something like that. So there is probably a little bit like I could get away. It's a little less linear if I'm partitioning the carbohydrate during those higher energy boluses versus having them kind of more evenly spread out or even away from those, I find, like in that scenario, it's a little more predictable. Now I have the same situation. Maybe I bring volume down even a little bit, um, because my peak volume is like long run development. So there's just I'm basically like crowding out any room for intensity at that point. Yeah. But if you go back a little bit earlier in the plan, my volume is still quite high and I am introducing that intensity variable for maybe 2 or 3 days during the week. I have a moderate or higher intensity workout session there. That's where I find I have to be a little more liberal with carbohydrates in total. And just like lean into that a little bit, it does tend to be something where at that point I'm way more precise about where I'm putting them. So say Tuesday, I'm doing short intervals. I might eat the meal before whatever workout that is during that workout. After that workout, I might have a pretty congested amount of carbohydrate that I will eat over the next 2430 six hours. Just more hyper located around that session. Um, and that's that tends to work a little so, so even if that whatever gram average that would work out to over the course of the week, it's not a rinse and repeat one day to the next. It's like one day might look aggressive on carbohydrate one, another day might look quite low because, you know, a big workout, high intensity or intensity workout is usually followed by something pretty light the following day and that is the training phase. So I tend to sometimes put in as I borrow carbohydrates from different days to kind of congest them around the workload. That is going to be more necessary for those. And I found that works pretty good in terms of replicating the kind of the workout-like targets that I'm trying to aim for. Kind of the framework I've used. I'd be curious about your feedback on what I call a stress model. So you have stress or distress. So your stress is stress that your body can more easily recover from. So distress would be stressed. It's much harder to recover from. So for most athletes, competition day is a distress that doesn't really matter what's going on. Performance is the only thing that matters. I could take all of next week off if I have just a big race and that type of thing. But if I do like Monday is like the world's biggest volume day, man, I might be crushed for five days. So now I can't train for five days. So now I'm missing out. On those other days where training I look as a used stress model. Can you get some good work in? Can you come back the next day? The next day? The next day? So with that, I have something I just called macro matching that the higher intensity work, more speed, you know, volume like the VO2 repeats. I would have people in general starting with more carbohydrates during those times, and then the lower intensity stuff, which is more fat based. Then I would just pull carbohydrates back. So you're trying to use the fuel that you're going to burn in the session. You're trying to load more of that fuel so that the intensity of that works. And then the progression over time is to actually get to a point where it's actually almost a distress training. Or now you may go into a session like you're talking about and purposely do higher intensity work, but not provide any carbohydrates, right? I'm not really looking at the performance per se of that session. I want some of these adaptations by not having carbohydrates present, and you can go even further and actually purposely deplete liver glycogen and try to deplete muscle glycogen and then do some heinous, you know, repeat type stuff where you will see an upregulation of all the enzymes that match that. But your performance is definitely lower. Your stress is astronomically crazy. The research on that is still split, probably 5050 if there's any big advancement in that or not. But that's kind of the framework that I use for people to kind of pick where they're starting and where to go. And what I find is most people kind of find what works best along that spectrum. But that's only, like you said, over time and doing their testing and seeing what works for them, which again, people want to know, well, I just want to do my long runs, fasted and then have carbs for high intensity. Great. That's you know, that's a good place to start. That doesn't mean you're going to stay with that simple model like your whole career either, right? Why get messy. Yeah for sure. Yeah. You want to kind of pay attention. And I mean, it's almost similar to diet strategy in general where someone picks a dietary practice and it's working great because they have a lot of weight to lose. They're like seeing a lot of success and all of a sudden, they plateau at that, like when they have that last bit to try to take care of and they just think, I need to do this harder. Yeah. And it's just trying harder, bro. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. We're in reality. It's like you may just be at a point where the strategy you were implementing was great from where you're at to where you got, but now it's time to adjust it to something else to get continued success. But they can't get past the fact that they had success with it in the early stages. And they keep kind of just driving the same thing, and they don't get to the end goal ever, ever. With that approach. Yeah, that's why coaching is so helpful. And obviously I know you coach a lot of people too, is that neurologically, your brain associates all those past successes with approach number one. And so for you to do, even when it stops working, you unconsciously are thinking, but this always worked in the past. But what people forget is that what you said is a little bit different now so that maybe they've evolved past that and they have to kind of do the next thing to get to the next level, which you see that a lot of athletes get very stuck in what they were doing. They'll reach a certain level of success. But then it's kind of a gamble the next one, because, okay, to get to that next level, you're probably going to have to do something that's a little bit different than what you've ever done before. And we don't have any history of that. There's no way to 100% predict how you're going to respond. So let's try a little bit. Let's see how you respond. Let's kind of slowly work you up in that direction. Um, so even when I write plans for athletes, I always think, okay, if this goes well, we'll be good. If it doesn't go well, did I set it up in a way that I know for sure what to do next? You know? So at least if they did three weeks and it wasn't progressing, I can be like, okay, cool. I thought that was going to work. It didn't. But I know we need to go in this direction now. So try to think like those two steps ahead, because there's nothing worse than having an athlete do a program for 3 to 6 weeks. They don't get the result and they go, hey, coach, what do I do now? And you're like, shit, I don't know, right? Yeah, yeah or not have the next step outlined to the degree where now you make another mistake in the next, the next thing you're just going backwards and it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not a good setup either. Um, I want as long as we're on the topic of kind of metabolic flexibility and kind of fat oxidation. So I did want to kind of pivot to the other direction. And uh, because last time we chatted, this hadn't really caught momentum yet, where I think last time we spoke, they were still working on the model of roughly 90g of carbohydrate per hour. And some of these like top tier, like high carbohydrate based approaches like tour de France. Now they're pushing that number up to like 120 and sometimes beyond grams per hour, which I think is just interesting for a number of reasons. One of them that I wanted to hear your take on is, from what I understand, they're not experiencing any sort of performance improvement acutely by doing that, by say, let's say someone normalizes 80 to 90g per hour for their carbohydrate based approach and now they go up to 120, they find a way to make that work, and they may not have a faster session by that extra carbohydrate, but there may be some application where they recover quicker because of that. So then the argument would be, if you can create a model where your workouts are able to tolerate 120g of carbohydrate per hour, maybe you can replicate those more frequently and therefore over the course of a training plan, potentially increase your training load capacity and therefore ultimately race faster. That's how I'm understanding the logic. I would like to hear if you feel one way or the other. Yeah, my guess is based on what I've seen, I would agree with you right now. Now I will say that I'd be curious if there are complete outliers who may be able to actually, quote unquote, use that amount of carbohydrates and would their performance be that much better? Probably. Um, and a lot of that I think we got at like, Jenkins is, you know, publishing some stuff showing that the gut is actually trainable in terms of how many carbohydrates you can take in. So I think that was one thing in the past that people felt like was very fixed. You know, they would test and be like, oh man, I only got to 50g per hour and I can't do anymore and play around maybe different types and timing. And I think the background assumption was okay for you. That's fixed. Well, now it appears to be trainable. But then the question like you asked is, well, how high can we go and what is the benefit. And you kind of see this curve where just kind of plateaus at the top, but they appear to get more high quality volume over the course of a training spectrum. And all things being equal, if you can get higher quality of volume in and you can recover, you're probably going to get a faster adaptation with, you know, whatever your baseline was, you're probably to get a better training response from the physiology. 2s Everybody probably at some point has a different limiter for performance. And I don't think we 100% understand what that is, whether it's heat dissipation, whether it's blood flow, whether it's muscle uptake, whether it's a bioenergetics thing, whether it's, you know, obviously Nokes with the central governor hypothesis, which is super cool. And I think that's probably true, but it's virtually impossible to test. Also, you know what I mean? Yeah. So on one hand I'm like, wow, that's so brilliant I love it. And that seems to just make sense with everything that I've read. But frustrating because how the fuck do we test that thing? We can't really test it. We can do these kinds of indirect tests where you move the finish line and, you know, all this other kind of stuff. And, um, 1s yeah. So all that to say, the last thing I think of too is like a tour de France rider or something, that just the amount of absolute punishment they have to go through, like day in and day out, because it's a multi day event or even, you know, longer races, that type of thing. I just in my brain, I just keep coming back to, okay, what is a medical model that would try to replicate that? And I just keep thinking about it. Like burn patients, like patients who are just so catabolic. I talked to Doctor David Church about this. It's like okay, in those patients what is most beneficial. And it's testosterone because it's so anti catabolic. You know, potentially maybe even insulin. You know, just because you can't really give them enough amino acids, it's almost impossible to give them enough fuel. Um and then you look at, you know, why people use other performance enhancing drugs like you think of like cycling. You're like, well, it just be EPO and everything that enhances performance. But you find people have been popped for testosterone many, many times, which again, I think gets back to the recovery aspect. So again, maybe if you're someone who can take in that many more calories, you can get that many carbohydrates per hour absorbed past the gut. Maybe that does hedge your bets a little bit more so you're not. So for lack of a better word, catabolic. You can get back to baseline, uh, faster. And therefore you can kind of get back in and recover the next day. Um, yeah. It is good to note that when we talk about these thresholds of grams per hour, we are dealing with averages. So 100% it makes sense that like if 90 is the average, that there are people who can do 120 and they're just on like that would be their probably performance advantage. Whereas like everyone has their set of strengths and weaknesses and likely, you know, that's mostly what I that on top of doing the work is what, you know, selects the gold medalists, so to speak. Yeah. So like maybe it's a selection supposedly at 120g per hour, I think Nike said, yeah, he was pretty high too. Yeah, he was pretty high. And yeah. And he would have definitely been. And this actually brings up my follow up question for you too is like, okay, let's say we know that to be true. Like everything we just discussed, all right, there is a path forward for optimal performance with this model of finding a way to get 120 in. And if you can't get 120 and you're just you're going to have to take that hit relative to your competition, who can and maybe find a different way to improve. That's going to add up to hopefully allow you to still compete with that person. If that's true, that's only really, I think, reasonably applicable for like the Kip jockeys of the world or the Tour de France athletes. This is the freaks of the freaks, right? Yeah. Cause like, even if it's true, it's going to come along with the gut training stuff that you were talking about. There's not. It's going to. Although I will share an example with you that maybe defies this a little bit, but my understanding would be if I ever wanted to be able to do 120g per hour, that's going to require me to do what Kipchoge did, which is be taking gels in during my easy run, be actually pushing that number and training for someone like myself. Reasonably speaking, I can probably find a caloric budget for some sort of like that. Whereas the average person, even a highly competitive person who's professional in a different area and is training for triathlon or something like that, they're likely not going to have the volume or the caloric budget to justify an approach that would require them to take in that much energy, and it probably wouldn't be a performance benefit to him either. Would be my guess. Yeah, because they're leaving bigger stones unturned. First, that they would be better off. They'd have to first get to the point where they're putting in the tour de France level type of training. They just don't have that level of output. Yeah, like if you just measure what output they're capable of, it's just it's just not at the same level. Mhm. Yeah that's true. They're not like if you even look at their caloric need per hour it's much lower because they don't have that right. You have to understand if you look at world record symptoms like the calories per hour he's burned. His weight is insane because he's moving so fast. Bonkers. Yeah. It's like most people are like all out 400 like continuously for. Yeah. Well even that I actually put a post up on Instagram. Um, right after he broke that record, I just suggested going to your track if you have one nearby, run a lap as fast as you can and then understand that Kingdom did that in 68 seconds for 105.5 of them. Yeah. So it's like people start wrapping their head around like, well, I can't do a 68 second quarter. So I had a follow up question. It is like if you had to jump in the Chicago Marathon with Kingdom, at what point would you be able to jump in and still keep up with them? And people are like that. 1s Uh 200m. Uh 100m. Uh, I'd be at the finish line, standing there waiting for him. You could be like a 100 meter pacer. Yeah. It's insane. And that's the type of perspective I think people. That's what. That's the type of perspective you need to really appreciate. Like what is going on with that sort of performance. And when you can appreciate that, I think then maybe you can start thinking about like, okay, now I see why these numbers are where they're at, because this, this guy may actually be outputting two x what I am for a given hour out there. And that's got to come from somewhere. Yeah. And someone like that. I mean they're undoubtedly using 100% carbohydrates the entire time. Mhm. Right. There's an old study I think was competitive for half marathon runners. They block the use of fat and their performance didn't drop at all because during the race they're almost 100% carbohydrate because they're running so damn fast. Yeah yeah yeah yeah. That doesn't mean the average person who just wants to finish a marathon should go and just pound all the carbohydrates they can find. And that's what I think is hard because you're back to context again. So whenever somebody asks me that question and I don't train a ton of endurance people, my question is, okay, what level of performance are you at? What is your goal? What do you want to do? You know, if you're like, I want to break a, you know, two hour marathon or hey, you know, I just want to finish A5K, okay, cool. Or I just want to finish a marathon. Great. You know, wherever you're at is where you're at. That's totally fine. But those are like universes apart in terms of what you're going to look at even try for performance. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. And the way I like to describe it people is like don't think of the distance of the event, think of the duration. Because if you're looking at Kingdom and the way he's trained himself, he's probably sitting at like 95, roughly percent of his second ventilatory threshold the entire two hours the entire time. Yeah. Whereas you take someone in the back of that pack, they're probably 95% of their first ventilatory threshold, which is a totally different energy like interchange there between the two of those. So yeah, it gets interesting when you look at it through duration, I think versus duration and intensity versus distance is definitely the way to think about it. So if you think the 120 is maybe an upper limit, could you then play with like exogenous ketones or could you start bringing in other fuel sources and where do you think? They go, or would there be a performance benefit to it? Because, as you know, you don't have to do a ketogenic diet to take in exogenous ketone esters for them to be quote unquote used immediately. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the other side of the I would I it seems like the research on like the over fueling and the exogenous ketones are sort of like kind of running alongside one another a little bit where it's like we're starting to see some stuff that would suggest, okay, there's something here. We just got to figure out exactly what it is. And then I think like this. I'd love to hear your opinion on this. My thought with exogenous ketones is that there's something likely there. At this point, it may be a little bit of threading the needle required in order to actually hit the spot where they see in the studies where the performance actually improves or the recovery improves or whatever, whichever study you're looking at. And the hardest part, I think, for people with that question is always going to be, what does that mean? And then even if, you know, once you know what that means, what does it mean in terms of usage? Because there's no limit of exogenous ketone supplements on the market. They're all different for the most part. So like how do you get, how do you like which ones actually have the research based off of. And how do you kind of tease that out before you go out and just start kind of throwing ketones at something and hoping you get the performance that the research showed? Yeah. And I mean, if you look at the mono ester, like for the Cox study, like at a high level, I think it was a cyclist. They still use carbohydrates at the same time. Oh yeah. Right. And so I think for people listening that's one of the mistakes I see people make is that oh well ketones I could just use these fast. And I'm like, yeah you definitely can. I think there are some benefits to lower intensity work. However, if you're looking at the higher intensity you're going to be combining them with carbohydrates at the same time. Um, my thought is I think there probably is some benefit there. Although do we know exactly what that is? Do we know what type? Oof! Nah, not really sure yet if I were to bet the butane dial versions. My bias right now is that I don't know how all those are going to pan out. Um, so the atrium has the butane dial version. Now they call it a ketone dial. It does get converted in the liver to ketones. But what I've noticed is it appears to be a little bit more variable. And if you take too much of it, you. I definitely don't feel like I want to go run or do anything performance wise. And yeah, it feels a little like maybe I had a couple of drinks. It says a little weird bass. Yeah, yeah. Um, compared to some of the other roasters that aren't using that, primarily that, um, is a component, but it's more of a BHB. So beta hides a hydroxybutyrate molecule that's bonded to, you know, something else. Yeah. Yeah. The, if I remember correctly, I want to say there's a couple studies on the, on the dial setup that don't necessarily suggest what you get when you look at the totality of the research. So then it's like you're, you're plugging something in and expecting the outcome from a different set of research studies, essentially with a lot of that. And who knows what they'll find out if they keep looking at it, maybe because I think there's probably an application for it. It may just not be from the performance realm, physical performance realm. Yeah. And I think that's probably true because it's a super interesting molecule. It's been around for a long time. Mhm. Um but then you look at some of the other molecules and you know full disclosure I do some work for Tekton. So they do have a ketone ester. Yeah. They're just right. Uh BHB bonded to a glycerol molecule. Um, and that based on some early work, shows that it may be more used by muscle, brain and other tissue. Um, they don't have a direct, uh, radioactively or labeled tracer study on that yet. Um, so I think even within the ketone esters, there's a debate about, um, like, where do they go? Um, so I think some of the assumptions are that muscle will pull it up, but there's some other studies showing that the cardiac tissue in the brain may be the preferred use of it. Um, and if you look at some branded vegan stuff, Dom Cassino stuff, where the ketones were exerting a cognitive performance effect under high levels of fatigue. And that's one area I think is super fascinating. I don't know what your experience with it is, but I've noticed that a lot of times my power didn't necessarily or. Hi, Frank. Uh, performance didn't always necessarily go up, but a lot of times, my RPE or how I felt, it just felt easier and it didn't feel as hard to hit that same level. If that makes sense. Yeah, yeah it does. I'm actually having, uh, Brandon Egan on the show. Oh. Pretty soon. So he'll be, uh, he'll be soon. And I've had Dominic D'Agostino on before. Maybe I should have him back on as well too. But yeah, my understanding is, uh, Brandon is kind of the guy right now to talk to, so. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be fun to hear what he has to say. Um, yeah. I mean, fascinating stuff. It's just one more thing that there's some answers there, I think, but they're specific to certain situations, scenarios. But then there's also probably, like most things, tons of questions yet to be discovered about it. So I've started using them. Uh, Esther's at the start of this year. Oh nice. And my, my one question with them going in or I mean, I had more than one question, but one of the big questions I had going in was like, okay, I can try these out and training and get an idea of kind of how I feel, what my, my experience is like. What is that at ten hours, 12 hours, 13 hours? Because I'm doing races that are not replicable in training. So I actually did a 100 miler in early February with my only goal really, there was to test it out, to see how I would fare with it, using it for 15 hours or roughly 15 hours versus just during like a single long run or something like that. And my thought was like, I didn't necessarily feel like I had. A whole lot of perceived effort variance, although I probably confounded that by training through that race. So who knows what was competing with perceived effort there relative to how I would if I was fully tapered. What I did feel like I noticed, though, was one of the harder things with Hunter. Meiling is the kind of hurdle to get over mentally where you want to be focused, but you don't want to be overthinking things, but you don't want to be making mistakes either. Right? And if you let a lot of unnecessary stuff, like stress, run up, just anxiety or adrenaline, it can work against you. And it's the way I described is you have this mental battery and if you're burning that mental battery on unnecessary things early on by letting non important things distract you, you pay for that at the back end because you just don't have the mental bandwidth reserve left to be able to like actually focus and and perform when you need to perform. And I felt like with that in there, it helped me kind of consolidate my thoughts more towards what I was trying to get them to do versus kind of distracting thoughts to some degree. So, um, I mean, it's interesting. I'm going to keep playing around with them, though, and see if, uh, see if I continue to, to find them valuable or not. And then hopefully the research will answer most of these questions in the years to come. Yeah. And we're trying to do more studies at Tecton. So if anyone's interested in doing a study, yeah, let me know. Um, because yeah, like you said, there's just so many unanswered questions. And then you've got different types of esters. You've got combinations with carbohydrates without carbohydrates, different levels of athletes. Are they runners? Are they cyclists or are they speed and power athletes? You know, there's just so many questions. And even like I mean, the tour de France riders have been using them for quite a while. Yeah, I don't know what you've heard, but I've heard everything from we didn't see much of a performance to was the greatest thing we've ever done for supplements too. We don't really use them for performance. We're afraid that if they have an accident and we're trying to mitigate the risk of potential concussion to riders, we feel like they could focus better, too. I mean, I've heard everything under the sun. Yeah. And part of that could just be. They don't really want to tell you what they're doing per se either. Another very they're not gonna just come out and tell me, well, here's exactly the formula we used and what we did. So it's yeah, it's even harder anecdotally to try to piece together all these different lines of evidence to say, okay, well, let's try to test in this area or that area too. Yeah. Triathlon and cyclists, they like to keep their secrets, it seems. Oh yeah. Yeah. They don't want to tell anyone. And it would not surprise me if they just, you know, bodybuilding was notorious for this, too, of people just making up shit so that they. No one would really know what they were doing and stuff and throw the banana peel on the road. Yeah, yeah, 1s yeah. So I'm sure there's a lot of that, some of that going on too, and we probably won't know for a while. And again, it could just be specific to what they're doing. Yeah, I saw a statistic that I never looked to check to see if it was accurate or not. So this could be wildly off. But someone has said if he's like 50% of two different athletes were using some sort of exogenous ketone, this last at least that amount or higher. Okay. Um, but. Again, that's always hard because if you're a ketone company, you know, if they're using it, that that's going to be to your advantage. And you may be trying to say that's how the supplement industry works, like we all know that. How much of that is marketing and how much of that is true? Again, it's always hard to point to studies, but some of the studies, like the Cox study, are pretty impressive. Like people would read that and be like, well, as a percentage, it wasn't a huge increase. But to take high level cyclists and to get even like a 3% increase, that's by adding a supplement and not changing training, not having to train with that supplement. And it's legal and it's not a stimulant like me, that's freaking huge. You know, if that can be, you know, replicated and we can figure out what's actually going on. Yeah. I mean, to that group of athletes that's freaking massive. Yeah. That's super true tech level improvement. Yeah, 100%. And it's legal, right? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there is probably going to be some sort of uh, or it's just going to be interesting to see what I've, what ends up getting what protocols I think end up getting used and shown to actually like, replicate any sort of improvement because, yeah, like, I mean, 3% if 3% is like the gold standard and you miss that and hit 1%, I'll take 1%, 1% all day long. Yeah. Oh yeah. That you didn't have to train harder. You didn't have to. I mean, it takes about five seconds to take the supplement, right? The cost to do it is so low that if you can get even a 1% gain from it, it's like a no-brainer. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah for sure. Yeah. And then the counter I guess argument would be like if you like messing it up doesn't necessitate a 3% to 1% improvement. It could necessitate a 2% deficit. Right. So if you do have an issue, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to practice it with the event I would eventually be peaking for, because I wanted to find out, well, what happens if it feels great through ten hours and I have a massive digestive issue which totally derails everything, because then it's like maybe I acquire a 3% advantage for ten hours, but if I take on such a deficit the remainder of the race because of that, then I just get lost. So yeah, it's kind of like baking soda and, you know, bicarbonate supplements. Is that around? Like they've been around forever. There's a lot of good data on it. I mean, I talked about in the first lecture and stuff, and I remember I had a high level Danish kayaker years ago. We had him, you know, follow the protocol, and started real light. And then he had like this huge PR doing it. And I was like great. And then we had a simulation trial before his big event and his numbers were just, just horrible. And I asked him, I said, you know, like what? What happened? He's like, oh man, I took that does like we recommended to the baking soda. And I was so afraid I was going to shit myself the whole time. He's like, I couldn't concentrate on anything else. And so like, he physiologically had huge PR, but he had enough of that kind of GI distress that it just freaked him out so bad that his performance just went in the absolute gutter. And so we, like, never used it again. The unforeseen consequence side of the equation is always interesting. One. Yeah. And some of the esters of ketones like you start scaling up doses like you, you know, especially with running, you can have some, some GI issues there, which again, we see at high levels of carbohydrates and everything else too. So yeah. Yep. Yeah, yeah, that's always the tricky one. I think when you're talking about ultra running you are going to have a lower input number than the cyclists just because of the act, because of the pounding. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's why you likely won't see 120g for most ultra runners. You do see 100g though I. Oh interesting. Yeah. There's a few people who have put that out there that that's what their targets had been the most I think an interesting scenario was Ultra Trail Mont Blanc uh, 100 mile. It's the most competitive trail mountain hunter miler in the world right now and not this last year. Um, although I'm sure there's stories like this from this year, I just haven't probably seen the data the year prior. That was, for whatever reason, um, Kilian Jornet decided to basically kind of publish more or less what he did. And they actually had some really cool stuff. They did some blood draws on him during the race. Really? During the race, yeah. He had a winning run in a 19 hour range, which is like, you know, world class performance on that course. So imagine being that phlebotomist. Yeah. No kidding. Right. Yeah. My first thought. Yeah. Yeah. So he, he they got some cool data from that one, which was uh, I mean there's like a thorough breakdown of this so people can get into the weeds with it if they want to. But I can just quickly summarize it like the interesting thing to me was one, he was hitting 100g per hour. Uh, the more interesting thing about it is that Tom Evans was third that year and also ran an amazing race. He was also 100g per hour. I suspect Tom is training his gut. Kilian is pretty open that he doesn't train, in fact he's doing. Yeah, his training is mostly low input, like maybe 20g an hour really for his big sessions. So, um, I mean, he's certainly on a moderate high carbohydrate diet in general, but it doesn't sound like he's out there, like practicing that hundred gram per hour repetition, but is doing it on race day and getting away with it. Um, you know, more crazy. Yeah. He also had, I think, relatively high fat oxidation rates, even in the presence of 100g of carbohydrates per hour, which just kind of shows like the body's going to find what it needs. And if 100g is still at a point where he could, he's still going to need some fat over the course of 19 hours at 100g per hour. So the body is finding ways to keep that elevated at the same time of him taking that in, do you think at some point you just need more calories, period, for that length of a race? Yeah, yeah, I would suspect so. And actually, the recommendations for single day ultra marathons is a 75% split between carbohydrates and then fat protein. So they're assuming that you're going to eat some solid foods. You're not just going to be doing performance products and stuff like that. So. You mean you're probably going to get some fat and protein no matter how hard you try if you start introducing solid foods anyway? But that's kind of what they recommend. I mean, they're recommending it on very little, like real evidence because there just isn't. Not their fault. There's enough to have a position paper probably. But um, I don't know that there's great research to suggest that that's something that's going to be overly accurate at the individual level. Uh, in terms of like, I guess the way to describe if someone's doing 75, 25 and then they do a race and end up 85, 15, are they really going to suffer any consequences? Probably not. But, um, it's probably a good like framework to build your, your program off of and then stress test it and find like where you want to what you want to kind of adjust within that. But yeah. So did they find anything weird in his bloods and stuff? I don't think so. And I have to look at it more closely. I read that I haven't read that one. Yeah, yeah. So it's it's interesting though just to hear the, the because the ultrarunning community is way more open about what they're doing for whatever reason. It's been more I think it's just kind of been like, uh, in its early days, it was kind of more since everything's anecdotes for the most part, you know, a lot of it anyway. It was just one of those things where it's like, hey, man, what are you doing? Oh, I tried this. It's like, oh, you got a cramp? Try pickle juice, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. So like, it's just been part of the sport for so long where you kind of just, like, share what you're doing. And my guess is some of that, it's probably. Kind of pulled back with certain athletes anyway, because if there is a financial consequence now, there is a like a professional career path with it. And just like cycling and just like tour de France, once there's money on the line, people start kind of keeping to themselves a little more. I find with what they're doing, like the smaller niches. At first it's, uh, and I've noticed, especially if there's not a path to make a firm out of money. Yeah, people realize we're not doing this to make a ton of money and like, oh, wow, you're a weirdo. Just like me. Great. Like, what do you do? You know, like, more of a bonding story, time exchange, war stories type thing? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So yeah. So there's some interesting stuff there, but, um. Yeah. And Brent Ruby has published some stuff looking at metabolic rate sustained in, uh, firefighters for how long you can have an elevated metabolic rate just due to work. And so there appears to be and I can't remember the numbers, but there seems to be an upper limit to just how much work capacity as a human you can do on a repeated day to day basis. Oh really? Yeah. Which kind of makes sense, right? There has to be some limits, like, do you think about racing like there's you do a 100 mile race. If you had to repeat that the next day, it's not going to be nearly as good, right? There's going to be some threshold there of how much you can actually do over short periods of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that would make sense. Yeah. It's interesting. Then when you look at some of these like long projects like fastest known time zone, like the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail or TransCon stuff, where there was just um, the, the women's, uh, transcon record just got broken. Oh, really? It was. I hope I remember this right. I think she hit like 66 miles a day, which is a big boost on the women's side because of the overall record 72.5. But before that, I think the women's record was maybe right at 60 or maybe a shade under. So she took a pretty good chunk out of that. Uh, but yeah. So it's like. Whatever that workload is, it's still pretty high, I guess. Do you? Do you think females have an advantage over time as races get longer? Because you do. I haven't looked at the exact stats, but it appears that you see more women winning at longer races compared to shorter races. But I don't know what your thoughts are. Yeah. Uh, the data would suggest at the moment that there's an equal gap, essentially, as you'd get with like the marathon and that stuff that roughly like kind of like eight to round 10%. Uh, you do get a few more, you get like kind of what I would consider these kind of outlier ones where that range gets tightened. But those are often events that are just like highly untested in the sense that like whether it's by numbers or by just like where the talent in the sport has focused their time and energy, it's just not like really good examples of what I would consider like a highly tested, uh, event to the degree where we're really probably pulling accurate data from it. So then if we would actually push everyone towards that one event, I'm my suspicion they would start to get closer to what it is with the other events. Um, I do think there's probably some potential there though, uh, especially when you get into. Some of the really long stuff, like weeks and that sort of thing where there's just less reason to believe that there would necessarily be a female biological like right deterrent there that, you know, who knows that. Well, and here's the argument against what I just said, especially in ultrarunning, there's a massive disparity in participant numbers, too. That's what I was wondering. Yeah. Because I think it's like something to the tune of 7030 or 8020 or something like that. Okay. So you also have the more males are just doing the. Yeah. So you just have a bigger, you know, bigger data pool to pull from or more and more attempts, essentially more reps in, in a sport where like. You have limited reps because there's only so many of these things you can do. That it does matter when you have more reps within your group. I guess, to kind of even just trial and error things and figure out where that or just set the standard to. And then there's the whole like just, you know, how it is, like someone breaks a record now all of a sudden that's the mark. And then people who otherwise would have never expected to go after that mark are now targeting that. And then they do it. I mean, we saw that with the Women's Olympic trials qualifying standard, I think where they moved it from 245 to 237. Wow. A pretty big drop. And the numbers suggested they needed a pretty healthy drop because it was getting skewed way heavy towards female qualifiers who were outpacing male qualifiers by a large margin, so there needed to be some adjustments. And I think when people first see that that's too big of an adjustment, you're going to totally stamp out the sport or the, you know, the whole like, well, what happens to that collegiate athlete who was like 245 in target? I'm going to keep going versus 27. I'm never going to hit that. Why bother trying a type of scenario that didn't seem to play out. It seemed like a lot of the women just said, all right, 237 is where I need to be. And they got to work. And we've seen. It's definitely dropped the qualifying numbers, but it's actually I think I'd have to double check this, but I think it's pretty balanced out now between the men and the women. So if that was what they were trying to do, then they accomplished it. And how much of that do you think is just you have a target, right. So to qualify, I have to be under 245. Now. I have to be under 237. So you just back up everything from there with the new target. And obviously at some point that's not going to work. If it's like everyone has to run a, you know, sub two hour marathon or whatever, you know, it's not gonna it's not gonna work. But if it's within that range where it's physiologically possible now all your training can be specific towards that new number. Yep. Mhm. And I think that's probably what it was. There were probably a lot of people who, well there's probably a healthy number of people who just saw it. Well 245 is the number. So why bother outperforming it. Right. You know because if your goal is to get to the Olympic trials and that gets you in, let's say you're someone who's going to run like a 243. You're not thinking about, all right, next steps to the Olympics. You're thinking about doing the trials. That is my Olympics. Right. But then they make that number 237. So yeah. Now maybe you start structuring your workouts around the 237 target and then see what happens. And then, you know, some do it and some don't. You get a lower, lower list. But I think I thought there would be less qualifiers than actually ended up occurring so far. So um, it's interesting though. So I guess maybe the thing to think about with ultrarunning then would be how do we sort of normalize higher expectations for the women's field to the degree where we can start potentially seeing if there is a different gap there? Because who knows, maybe it is. Or maybe it's not a closing of the gap, but it's like a 4% difference, which would be a lot tighter than what we're seeing in like the marathon or any of the Olympic distances. Yeah. And even within that, well, males and females, you're just gonna have freaky outlier people that come along and just destroy everyone. Yeah, well, and the sport is still growing to the degree of, like, different events are getting kind of popular or getting introduced to the sport in a much higher way. So you do have a scenario where you'll get someone like, say, Courtney DeWalt, who is the best female ultra marathoner in the world, decides, oh, that's a cool event. I'm going to try that out. Yeah. And it's there just like her level. The male equivalent of her isn't getting into that event yet. And then she goes and wins it outright and then it's, oh, you know she won the sport. Women are better than men at this 200 mile race because Courtney is a freak too. She is. I mean that in the best possible way. That's not like a dig at all. Yeah. She's crazy. She is like, like almost a whole level above the competition to the degree where. And we saw that this year at Western States, she ran 15.5 hours, which would have won the race in some years outright. Yeah. And it would be she was she. I think fifth or sixth overall. O in what is like fairly unarguably the second most competitive hunter in the world. So we are getting up to the top tier events then at that point, and, you know, she's only sitting behind a handful of guys on that day. Uh, so yeah. And well, she took over an hour off the prior course record. Um, yeah. Just insane. Like, I don't think anyone expected to see that. I think everyone was banking on her breaking the course record that year, but not by that margin. No, I was thinking I was thinking like she might take like 10 or 12 minutes off it or something like that. And it was. No, it was just an absolute like reckoning of it. So and then she went on to win two more big races after that in a, I think around eight week period of time, including the most competitive hunter miler in the world. So it was uh, just do that and to do that type of level performance and that sort of time to repeat it. Yeah, that's wild. It was interesting to follow because she had the hard rock hundred, which was the least competitive out of the three. She did. And the one that I think she could probably get away with, not really having a great day and still fairly easily win. Um, but it was like, I think it was 19 days after Western States. So now she goes out and just runs a world class performance, historic performance, which had to have taken a toll out of her. And now she's going to do this other 100 miler, which is a real, real mountain course. Western States is a mountain course, but it's kind of like an entry to Mountain course, in my opinion. Just a lot of runnable stuff on that. Whereas hard rock is an absolute mountain course. And yeah, so she had to completely change course profile then too. So it's like it's not like she's doing the five K and then replicating the five K, she's doing the five K, and now all of a sudden they're throwing her in the steeplechase. Like kind of a thing. Or cross-country would probably be a better example. Uh and then she had a bigger gap between Hardrock and uh, Utmb, but it was only, I think like six weeks or something like that. And that one is where she would have her staunchest competition and she won it. But she definitely wanted a lower capacity than what she's capable of based on her prior performance, because she has a course record there. So from other years. Yeah. So it's like we loaded her up with 200 mile races just to get her to kind of somewhat come back to the field, but she still won fairly handily. I don't think she was at the midway point. It was pretty certain unless she made a mistake she was going to win it. So yeah, I mean that that's I guess the question is what happens when the sport gets to a point where now we have like half a dozen Courtney De Walters. Right? All competing against one another around the world. And where do we see the sport go from there? So yeah, you see that with all sports like you've seen like with CrossFit. Like where CrossFit was originally? Yeah, yeah. It was never easy by any stretch of the imagination. But compared to what it is now, it's. It's crazy. You know, like, if you would have asked me ten years ago that you would see athletes lifting as heavy as they are for that many amount of repetitions and beacons and all that stuff, I would have been like, no, I don't think that's possible. And now it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, 1s yeah. You start, you just keep normalizing and then you get to like some really freakish numbers eventually. Yeah, it'll be fun to see, like when, when stuff starts to kind of because you can kind of base off trends like you see these big chunks. Like if you take Courtney's record at Western States, that was a huge chunk. So that suggests that, uh, that they're not at the limit. Right. Because you don't usually you don't see that type of progression. Right. So like let's say Courtney is just like a generation ahead of where she should be. And she just took a huge chunk. And now it'll just be like slivers off of that, like you maybe. Or it could be another couple big chunks and then slivers like. But yeah, it's getting to the point now where I think we start. We will start seeing maybe a little bit of a, um, a little less of a steep drop in terms of records for, for the men's side at some of these more tested courses. But it'll keep going down, I think. Especially when more talent comes in. So it's wild. Do you find that obviously the level of output is there, but do you find that the high level people can just, what I've noticed, is like their ability to recover just seems to be so much better. Yeah. Like they can just for the most part do higher volumes of quality work at a higher output. Um, yeah, sure, there's exceptions to that, but that's just something I've noticed overall. Yeah, yeah, I think that's in ultrarunning. That's going to be important. Yeah, yeah. It's important for everything. Yeah. Yeah yeah. So I mean I think we saw that to some degree with the most recent world record from the marathon with him. He was running like 300 kilometer training weeks, which is absurd to think about. But he was doing it and he did it. Yeah. It worked. And the case is, is he going to continue to work because he's 23 and you know, it's like, does he end up being retired or injured at 27. And then we wonder what would have kept him done if he had pulled back. And then it's the debate of maybe he burned hot enough that he overreached what he would ever would have gotten to because of that. Right? Um, versus like being a little more conservative, relatively speaking, like Kipchoge, who's going to, you know, obviously has a really long career, but is is it something where if Kipchoge had done what kept him did, would he have run faster but just had a shorter career, or is it a situation kept him could run faster if he was more conservative and didn't get too aggressive, and he would have got to that with just more lifetime volume versus it being consolidated in a handful of years. And it's just who knows, I guess. Yeah. And that's the hard part, is that you'll just never you'll never know. Yeah, yeah. You can't go back and redo it unfortunately. But it does seem like the sub two hour marathon on an official course is going to happen, though, in the not too distant future, which is wild to think about. Yeah. Did you ever think that is something that would be broken in your lifetime? Uh, I would say, like, as I better understood the shoe technology, it became something where I was like, yeah, this is a reality because basically, I don't know how much you followed this, but the shoe tech is. Super effective, especially when you get fast road marathoners. For all the things we've talked about now, you can train more if you're wearing those shoes because they allow it. It's sort of like, you know, how in triathlon and cycling and swimming, you can just do more volume because you remove the impact versus running. So the marathoner's challenge was always, how do I do in a volume that is specific to this race without overreaching to the degree where I break down the shoes, basically putting you in the exact mechanic. Still some of the impact, but um, enough of a reduction in the right spots, it seems, where now you can train more in them. So you're seeing the big thing with people now is like you see some people training nothing but those shoes, which is going to be probably problematic for their mechanics, right? But probably ideal for their pursuits. And yeah, so it's just like the age old thing, like the best in the world at any one discipline is not going to actually be a healthy individual. Oh, because they're gonna, it's gonna those people that elite level athletes are healthy right there. They have to be so good at that one thing. It comes at the expense of being able to do a whole lot of other things that even a pedestrian likes. Right. So like. Yeah. So I think with the shoe technology where it's at and the current regulations that have on it, I think I could wrap my head around it. I assumed it would happen in my lifetime. Now what I've expected to get down to two hours and 35 seconds this year. No, that was kind of surprising to me. I thought someone would go, you know, just barely under one first and then get. Maybe then it would start kind of getting worked down five seconds at a time. Uh, yeah. The regulations right now on the shoes is you can only have 40mm of that cushion, that foam, that midsole foam, which is where a lot of the efficiency comes from. And it's really the foam interacting with a plate that gives the plate its value there. The plate will return. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So and they, they had uh, they actually made Nike made a shoe for when Kipchoge did the, the sub two hour project. That was not a sanctioned event. It was just kind of an exhibition. You can do it and throw everything at it. Yeah. Windbreakers. Everything. Yeah, yeah. All the bells and whistles. The shoe he had on there never made it to market because it was a 52 millimeter stack. And I think it was illegal. Yeah. They had like I think there were like 2 or 3 carbon plates in there. So it was like literally a spring loaded shoe. 1s And now they have a regulation where you can't go above 40mm. You can only have one plate. So now like the it's a it's still an arms race but it's an arms race within that structure. So you're seeing all these different iterations of that 40mm one plate design. Uh, to where we're still seeing improvements in them though. So like Adidas just released a shoe recently that seems to be one of the first shoes that's really up to par with Nike's best. So Nike presumably has one that's maybe a step better than that, that, that that captain was using at Chicago. Uh, but yeah, it's pretty wild. Um, so I think. Yeah. With that and then, and then you have to just be thinking like, well, all right, where else are they going to find like a little bit of leverage that is, um, something that's independent of like our biological capabilities to help assist your time a little bit for 1 in 1 way or the other, outside of the shoes or within the shoe structure too. So yeah. And it always seems so arbitrary to that. Like. You can use technology and shoes, and you can have a play and you can have this amount, but you can't go over that amount. Yeah, yeah. Where before that wasn't really a thing. So it's just always like swimming. Right. They had the shark suits that people broke world records with and they said no they regulated that. That's too big of an increase. We can't have that. So the spirit of the sport is right. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know I wish at some point they would just just admit that it's all arbitrary and we're just making this up as we go. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's kind of what they're doing, you know. Yeah I understand why they do it, but it just seems so weird and arbitrary, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I would think that you would either eliminate it or just let it go. Yeah, yeah. One or the others. Uh, yeah. I don't really find it valuable to put parameters on it personally, other than maybe to keep. Here's the argument for that. In a sport like running, where you have Nike's budget versus everyone else's budget, you do have a situation where if you cap it, you sort of cap how much money Nike can actually just throw out the problem versus all the other brands, because the biggest issue with the super shoes has just been disparity. You know, you'd have like for a while there, it was like you basically were going to get to the Olympics if you were a Nike athlete, if you weren't, you didn't have a chance because you're going to take a two plus percent deficit to the Nike athletes. And even if you're better than them, it probably wasn't by 2%. Right? So, you know, you had that issue. Now other brands are starting to catch up. So it's less of an issue. Biggest problem now is they get to that roughly 4% number as an average of roughly 2 to 8%. So if your mechanics is closer to the eight versus the two, you know that's going to be the that's what's going to determine you're going to I think we'll start seeing like road and track athletes will be selected by their relative, uh, performance improvement from the shoe versus someone who maybe otherwise would have been good or, or the person is more to that lower end of the performance assist from that. So the best argument against that I've heard is like, well, that's just athletics, right? That's like, you know, take LeBron James for example. It's like um. He likes his competition and isn't complaining that he's just physically better than all of them. He just is. And that's what makes him the best. Whereas like, if someone's like biomechanics, put them in a position where the shoe is 8% more effective, well, that's just their that's just their, their, uh, their strength, I guess so, but now you can, like you said, use that as a selection criteria. It's almost like the old Bulgarian system where I, you know, if you can't handle 3 or 4 days of training for Olympic weightlifting it doesn't matter. Like you watch out. We've got a whole line of a thousand other people we can pick from and we'll just. Yeah, you know, period of just cycling through people, finding the people that can handle that high level of stress. Right. So now you can just find the freaks that you put them in this shoe like, oh wow. You get a greater return. Yeah. Boom. Okay. You're the man or woman now and let's go. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And in a situation with distance running where you have this, you have this really maybe somehow you like just probably not unique to running. This is probably pretty common in other sports. May just be different parts of geography where you go over parts of East Africa where a lot of the talent is, but a lot of the talent is still undiscovered. Yeah. If you're a brand like Nike, yeah, you could just put 30 pairs of shoes on 30 of them and find out which ones actually do and be like, okay, these are the three that are getting the contract. Like, yeah, 1s yeah. So it's uh, yeah, it gets pretty wild when you think about it, but. To me it seems a little backwards. Like, wouldn't you want to try to find who was best? Maybe it doesn't transfer. I was thinking maybe if you found, like, the best barefoot runner and then found a shoe that gives them the most unique technology to leverage their ability, could you see a greater net result as opposed to taking this arbitrary like, I think of, like, sprinting, right. Yeah. So it used to be like, you know, everyone was before Usain Bolt. Ah, there's biomechanics papers written like, oh, you can't be a sprinter. It's just impossible due to physics. And then a bolt comes out and basically destroys everyone. And now they're all like, oh, we got to find people that look like him, that have, you know, the same ladder lengths and all this other stuff. Yeah, yeah. My thought is basically like if someone's concerned about their health with the shoes they are still developing really strong lower legs like someone would do. Because the funny thing about the shoes is it really just reversed racing shoe because before your advantage would be, can I train my body to tolerate a really firm, responsive shoe so that on race day I can get a relative advantage over someone who has to have more cushion in their shoe because they can't sustain the impact. Whereas now it's like the more cushion you can get away with, the better. So I still think from a general health standpoint, you probably want the strong lower leg, strong feet and the proper mechanics and then take that stronger system and place it in the shoe with enough time to get comfortable in that kind of product. And then racing, it would probably mean, that goes counter to what I was saying before, where you can leverage increased training volume with the shoes. So there's probably a question about which one of those pieces of the equation outweighs the other. But it's um, one more thing to debate about, I guess. Yeah, it just feels like the whole cycle of shoes is repeating again. Right? Because as you know, if you go back to the original history of Nike, the Air Max getting this huge cushion is like convincing runners to kind of change their gait a little bit, to rely on the cushion to do more heel strike. Yeah. All that. Oh, we'll see all sorts of downstream issues from the shoes for certain if we haven't already. Uh, yeah. So yeah, it'll, it'll be, it'll be a, I think, I mean for elite athletes, it is what it is. They're making sacrifices like that all the time. But for the average person who's just trying to go from like, well, I ran out 330 in the marathon and this shoe is going to get me to a 320. Uh, it's like, yeah, you might not want to do that necessarily. Or if you do it on race day versus doing it all the time in training, because you do see people doing that too, or they just wear those shoes that they're not professionals. They're just it's cool to be faster kind of yeah. Mindset reminds me, a cyclist I consulted with in the past, too. One guy was pretty competitive, not ultra competitive, but he was spending. I don't know how much money I saved four grams on this component. Five $50,000. And I'm like, honestly, you could probably lose £10. And your efficiency is going to go way up because you're not close to learning at all, and you're doing pretty damn good with what you're doing. Yeah. Then he got mad and he fired me. Yeah, I guess you can't call your clients fat, right? And I was trying to do it in a nice way. I'm just trying to point out, bro. Like, if we work on body count, there's a better. There's a better way to go about this. And, you know, you could shave £10 off, like, you know, probably relatively easy, you know, and yeah. No, it's good to hear that. Yeah. It goes back to that. What we were talking about in the beginning, though, where it's like, take care of the big mover, right. Once you get that taken care of. Now let's talk about the forearms. Oh yeah. Yeah yeah. And go from there. But 2s awesome. Well what do you have coming up mike. Anything interesting on your end? Uh, not a whole lot. We'll have the flex diet shirt. We'll be out again in January, and then the fifth flex, it'll probably be out towards the end of quarter one again. So those are two main certifications. So the flex diet is more on the nutrition recovery side. And then the physiologic flexibility is on the four pillars to increase resilience uh which is primarily temperature pH uh breathing and then fuels. So the fuel for that is expanded into lactate and then ketones. And then the flex diet is more how to use fat, how to use carbohydrates most efficiently for performance and for body composition. Awesome. Uh, where can people find you online? Yeah. Best place is just the website which is Mike T nelson.com. And then most of the information I have goes out to the daily newsletter so they can sign up there for free. And then I do have some stuff once in a while on Instagram, which is just doctor Mike Nelson. Right on. I'll put that in the show notes as well as links to our previous episodes for those, yeah, for sure. Newer to the show and want to dive into some of those topics we talked about in the past. Yeah, well, thank you so much for this is always super fun. I always enjoy chatting with you and get to pick your brain about all sorts of crazy ideas I have too, so that's great. Yeah, no, it's so fun and it's great to do it in person now. Yeah, it's definitely nice to be here in Austin. Yeah. Awesome. Well take care. Cool. Thank you. Appreciate it.